Episode 809: Cemetery Without Crosses (1969)

Vengeance never ends — that's the warning Manuel issues early in Robert Hossein's 1969 Cemetery Without Crosses, and the film spends the next ninety minutes proving him right. When the widow Maria hires the black-gloved, spiritually exhausted gunslinger to avenge her husband's murder at the hands of the powerful Rogers family, she sets in motion a cycle of brutality that punishes the innocent alongside the guilty.

Mike talks with co-hosts Oren Shai and Professor Richard Edwards about this French-Italian-Spanish production, one of the most melancholy and formally rigorous Euro-Westerns ever made. Topics include Hossein's rejection by the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd and his debt to  fatalism, the Leone connection, Michèle Mercier's turn as one of the genre's strongest female leads, Scott Walker's haunting title song, and where the film belongs in the canon alongside The Great Silence and The Wild Bunch. 


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