Cementary Without Crosses

Maria Caine wants revenge. Why? Well the Rogers just killed her husband Thomas and now they want to banish his brothers from the sleepy town they call home. Yes they did rob them of gold but when you have no other way of making ends meet they had to steal the money. You really have to do whatever you can to get along in this town and the brothers learnt this the hard way. So Maria does just this and pays her former lover and her husband’s best friend Manuel to seek revenge on the Rogers and avenge the Caine family. Manuel is not happy to do this but he is in love with Maria and now a deadly battle will commence.

It is not often that you find a western that can bring together great talent and great ideas in one place. Yes we do see cult films from this era that have the luxury of having familiar faces in them but they are often simply filling the coffers, as the usual route of Hollywood had run dry. In this films case we have Robert Hossein, a French film actor and director extraordinaire. He wanted to make this film as homage to the superb Sergio Leone. The Leone films that had enraptured many across the world at this point, had afforded many westerns from Europe. Hossein wanted to return a little to the world of cross and double cross, anti-hero and villainous rogues. So he set about making this tense and darkly shifting film about motives and morals, which is superb and very well executed.

The most remarkable thing about it is that it works much like a story from the classics. The two families sit astride this town, one occupying the ruins of the past and the other the opulence of the future. Both are decaying and live on borrowed time. Just like the sets, which reflect the ever crumbling place the genre had moved into. The skill of the film to tell its story comes from its very subtle direction and its well-crafted score. Father and son seem to have worked well and it really pulls the film along. The sound is so critical that it plays a major part in the key set pieces. I also have to highlight the only flaw with the piece, the transfer. This is a weak transfer that on Blu Ray really shouts out to be sourced better. Arrow had done so much good for neglected cult cinema. This will sadly go against them as a weak version of a superb film.


High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
Original Italian and English soundtracks in uncompressed PCM mono audio
Newly translated English subtitles for the Italian soundtrack
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the English soundtrack
Remembering Sergio – an all-new interview with star and director Robert Hossein, filmed exclusively for this release
French television news report on the film’s making, containing interviews with Hossein, and actors Michèle Mercier and Serge Marquand
Archive interview with Hossein
Original theatrical trailer
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork
Illustrated collector’s booklet containing new writing by Ginette Vincendeau and Rob Young