Hannie Caulder

Robert Culp and Raquel Welch work on her draw in Hannie Caulder

Burt Kennedy's Hannie Caulder, from 1972, is one of the better Raquel Welch vehicles, but its virtues have little to do with Ms. Welch. The film was an English production shot in Spain. At least five writers worked on a script that was eventually credited to one Z.X. Jones, presumably a distant cousin of Alan Smithee. The film shows how a more traditional Western director was responding to the innovations of Peckinpah and Leone. The Spanish backdrop and the use of dubbed secondary players give Hannie Caulder a Spaghetti Western feel. The use of copious amounts of exploding red gel packs, as in The Wild Bunch, is a marked departure for Kennedy; compare this film to the relatively bloodless The War Wagon and Support Your Local Sheriff. Indeed, Kennedy show more visual bravado than usual in Hannie Caulder. There is nothing as visually audacious in his whole canon as the POV shot from Strother Martin's double barrel shotgun during the opening bank robbery sequence. 

Martin is accompanied during the course of the film by his two brothers played by Ernest Borgnine and Jack Elam. After robbing the bank, they happen upon the homestead of Ms. Welch and her husband whereupon they dispatch the husband with a shotgun blast and sequentially rape his missus. This establishes the narrative for the rest of the picture as the film cuts between the comic adventures of the miscreant sibling trio and Ms. Welch's quest for vengeance. She is aided by a guardedly humane bounty hunter named Thomas Luther Price played by Robert Culp. After dropping off a corpse for a reward and buying Ms. Welch a wash and some new duds, Culp takes her to Mexico to meet with a compadre and gunsmith charmingly played by Christopher Lee in his only appearance in a Western in a career that featured over 250 film appearances.

The sojourn in Mexico is necessary so that the gunsmith can make Hannie a bespoke gun and Price can tutor her until she become an expert gunfighter. These sequences inspired the training Uma Thurman undertakes in the Kill Bill films. Lee has a passel of children and a wife lurking somewhere, but we never see her. Perhaps this was one of the many cuts initiated to bring the film down to a very lean 85 minutes. The character of Price brings out the best in Culp who nails both the warm and wary impulses of a conflicted character. It is a pity that his career never really took off after Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice gave him a shot at stardom. Ms. Welch was fairly hopeless as an actress. She did not even have the vocal skills to project her voice, as her scenes with the polished Culp reveal. A lot of the time Kennedy has her remain mute and show off some animal grace. I'll leave Ms. Welch alone as the critics of her time had already ripped her to shreds. For example, Andrew Sarris wrote that Ms. Welch was a "singularly untalented creation of the gossip columns and publicity mills." ❤

Most of what is interesting in Hannie Caulder is on the sidelines of the film. Flamenco king Paco de Lucia, Stephen Boyd, and Diana Dors all have effective cameo appearances. Heck, was Diana Dors ever in another Western? Messrs. Borgnine, Elam, and Martin have a blast playing their trio of scuzzy stooges. The landscapes and emotional tenor of the Westerns Burt Kennedy wrote and directed are bleak, but glimmers of humor and humanity remain.

❤ Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice, July 6, 1972, pg.49