Diagonaldi Very well executed

CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

TeenzTen An action-packed slog

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

ramsfan The Deadly Trackers is a standard Western with a mundane plot: A peace loving sheriff (well played by Richard Harris) in a small Texas town sees his wife and son killed by a gang of marauders who have robbed the local bank. He vows revenge and travels through Mexican territory- where he has no official jurisdiction- to hunt down and kill each gang member. It is a plot that though mildly entertaining has been done to death both before and since.With a very good cast on hand, "The Deadly Trackers" should have been better. Perennial good guy Rod Taylor is cast against type as the sadistic leader of the gang. He does a good, credible job as does Al Lettieri, also in the unfamiliar good-guy role as a by-the-book Mexican lawman who clashes with the Harris character throughout the movie. While supporting villain Neville Brand (Choo Choo)gets good screen time, the same cannot be said for classic bad guy William Smith, who is given the role of a mentally challenged member of the gang and then unceremoniously killed within 20 minutes of the film. With his large canon of work in both film and TV, one can't help but wonder what Smith could have done with a more fleshed-out character.Paul Benjamin, the most intelligent and well spoken member of this motley crew, inexplicably chooses to ride with these guys and be subjected to ridicule and frequent use of the "n" word. Why? His character does not mesh with the rest of these guys and it plays very flat.The biggest problem lies in the ending. We are expected to believe that lawman Lettieri- a man who has insisted on taking the high road throughout the entire movie in bringing in a killer to face justice- would just shoot a lawman in the back as he rides out of town.Not a bad movie for its time, but hardly the polished gem it could have been with a little more attention to detail and character development.

classicsoncall I find it interesting how I can reconcile my feelings about this film. On the one hand, it's a boldly intense revenge Western, while on the other, there's so much nonsense going on that with any serious scrutiny one might dismiss it as gross caricature. Take the character of Choo-Choo (Neville Beand) for instance - how exactly did 1880's medical technology manage to graft a chunk of railroad track to his right arm? Then there's Gutierrez (Al Lettieiri), the Mexican Federale - you mean to tell me that he gets shot off his horse, does a forty foot swan dive over a cliff, and some time later manages to get up and walk away? I had him a goner, but if he could have survived, how so without a broken back? Then there's the main character himself, Sheriff Kilpatrick, ably portrayed by Richard Harris. Now I know it doesn't take much of a stretch to go from pacifist to hell bent avenger after seeing your family wiped out, but how about some discretion. Kilpatrick just jumps right in without thought of consequences, like jumping that big lug Schoolboy (William Smith). OK, I know that had to work out to keep the story going, but gee, the guy looked like he just finished a workout at World Gym.There's something else about Kilpatrick - did you notice that after every one of his bloody encounters (that first one with Schoolboy was the worst), he appears in the next scene with a clean set of duds. I didn't notice any Chinese laundries along the way, so it left me wondering how he might have managed that. Maybe I'm being picky, but didn't anybody else think about that?Here's something neat though - I liked the idea that Kilpatrick had the town of Santa Rosa so organized that they were able to back him up at a moment's notice with all hands on deck. If these were the citizens of Lago, there would have been no rest of the story in "High Plains Drifter". Something to think about.As for the finale, I'm not buying it. After all that Kilpatrick and Gutierrez had gone through to catch up with Brand (Rod Taylor), the Mexican lawman would just shoot him in the back as he rode away? Where's the code of honor among lawmen? Even if Gutierrez wanted to be hard core by the book with Kilpatrick, by the final showdown with Brand it was going to be self defense any way you slice it. So I have to ask, was that really necessary?

rhinocerosfive-1 A very simple, old-fashioned Western about a man of peace destroyed on a trail of vengeance, with no particular nuance or grace and nothing to mark it as a product of the early 70s except lots of blood squibs. Still, DEADLY TRACKERS reminds us that in Hollywood, anything can happen. Even a Richard Harris-Al Lettieri buddy movie.Rod Taylor is a happy surprise as a brutal killer, unregenerate and nasty, unrecognizable from the pretty Englishman in GIANT who goes fishing for Elizabeth Taylor and ends up hooking - do you remember? - Carolyn Craig. William Smith's vicious idiot, Schoolboy, is perhaps his best acting work outside that monologue as Conan's father, and his fellow war hero Neville Brand is weird and big enough to wear a piece of train track instead of a hand, which is at least interesting, if unlikely. But Harris pretty much walks through this one, apparently numbed by all those underperforming Westerns that preceded it (though he can't make it all the way through this one without his MAN CALLED HORSE headband); maybe he saw that his career was headed for the rickety CASSANDRA CROSSING. And the wonderful Al Lettieri is handcuffed by a nice-guy role that disallows his greatest strengths: sadism, menace, barbarity.Gabriel Torres' photography is okay, but the story (by original director Sam Fuller and Lukas Heller) moves along in fits and starts, probably because its multiple other directors were fired by Harris, who manages not to appear drunk through most of the picture. TV director Barry Shear does a decent job with the final product; I'm not a big fan of Sam Fuller anyway and am not certain that the movie would have been better if he had been allowed to finish it. But Shear's (perhaps unwilling) choice of opening with a terrible, unnecessary V.O. scroll and dialog over "still" photos of town life, is a bizarre and not very good one. Then the action starts, and it's true 70s violence, with children's heads stomped by horses and women shot in the face so close to camera that blood spatters the lens. This is the kind of movie that made the MPAA rethink some of its decisions and reduce the violence quotient in PG pictures.The best thing about this movie is the music it appropriates from THE WILD BUNCH (a choice likely made by Warner Brothers due to budgetary concerns after the numerous headaches associated with its difficult star), and this great music isn't even appropriate - Jerry Fielding's epic score, itself reminiscent of Elmer Bernstein's work on MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, is ill-suited to an intimate, low-end quickie that would have been better served by a dirge.

Clarke-2 This is one of those films that lovers of the Western genre ought to rent on video. They will discover a treasure of the past that is well worth a watch. Like most Westerns, this film is set in the 1870s American southwest. The story of vengence is common in Western films, and this particular tale is extremely brutal. The post civil war Southwest was a violent place full of vigilantism and crime. Men of the West with morals and a sense of social responsibility always served as easy prey for bushwackers.The Deadly Trackers is focused on two men who share an over-developed sense of justice. They are both sheriffs, and they both embraced the importance of the law. One of the sheriffs loses his family, however, and his ideals die with them. The best part of this film is the relationship that builds between the two sheriffs as they hunt a small band of bushwackers. Richard Harris's character is the embittered sheriff bent on vengence. His character sinks into being as cruel and violent as the men he hunts. The Mexican sheriff, who lacks personal loss, maintains an ideal sense of keeping law and order. In the end, Harris's character regains his values for upholding the law only to see justice slip out of his grasp. The Mexican sheriff remains constant in his efforts to enforce the law only to provide for a lack of justice. The result is a dark tale about the nature of mankind on the frontier.