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Best movie of this year hands down!

Just perfect...

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

When a man is partially buried in an avalanche, his younger wife rides to the nearest town, bringing back a handful of dubious characters to the couple's gold mine, which happens to be in the middle of land controlled by a very dangerous bandit known as Chato.No doubt inspired in part by Henry Hathaway's classic Garden Of Evil, Find A Place To Die stands apart from other Italian westerns in that it's dark and very atmospheric, without any of the flamboyant flourishes typical of the genre.Set south of the border, this looks great with lots of rugged mountainous terrain, thick wooded areas, and crumbling Spanish architecture. They all add a lot to the movie's afore mentioned atmosphere.Sadly, Jeffrey Hunter (who died the following year) is remembered by most people these days only as the predecessor to Captain Kirk in the original pilot episode of "Star Trek". Western fans though, know him as one of the great unsung anti-heroes in such films as The Proud Ones and The Searchers.

This entry into the spaghetti western genre of the 1960's could have used a little more sauce. A married pioneer couple who have struck gold in their mining endeavors, is attacked by bandits. When the husband is pinned under a wagon, the wife (Petit) must ride for help to a nearby settlement. (Oddly, though Petit will be gone for roughly four days, the husband only asks for a gun and a jug of whiskey to sustain him!) Arriving at the settlement, Petit comes across dour ex-Confederate soldier Hunter and a passel of shady types. After a scuffle, and for a fee, Hunter and a few other men agree to go back to rescue Petit's husband even though the territory is teeming with bandits. Along the way, naturally, one of the men makes a play for Petit while she's bathing. It all comes to a head in an abandoned (apparently real) ruin before settling on a moderately happy ending. Hunter, a gifted and handsome actor, is slumming here. He has the distinction of missing out on two of the most beloved and iconic TV shows of the 1960's. He starred in the pilot for "Star Trek", but his wife at the time made him demand a salary that took him out of the running for the series. She preferred to be married to a movie star versus a TV star (even if the movies were like this one??) He was later denied the chance to play Mike Brady on "The Brady Bunch" because the producers didn't believe an architect would be that handsome! So he wound up in some really sub-par features until an accident led to his eventual death. He is okay here, his glorious eyes still sparkling, but the film gives him little or nothing to work with. Petit, an actress with an extensive foreign resume, is adequate, but poorly dubbed. Her brief semi-nude scene is tame by today's standards. Lastretti has his screen debut heralded in the credits, though he provides no particular interest as a reverend of questionable virtue. He did go on to a dozen or so years of film work, however. It's one of dozens and dozens of spaghetti westerns and has very little of distinction to recommend it, save some occasionally interesting settings. The familiar (and grating) type of music score is quite distracting at times.

I was not sure at first, but I hate this movie. It looks like it was a drag, and even the music sounds forced. Everyone looks sweaty, hot, and like their costumes don't fit them very well. Jeffery Hunter appears OLD, fat and tired. He looks as desperate and at the end of his rope as his character was supposed to be, but I don't think it's an act. For one or two scenes the film sort of springs into motion, and it has some nice use of location and architecture (the shot of that large, squarish building in the background of a couple of scenes is impressive).But the film does not have the spunky cartoonish zest of a traditional Giuliano Carmineo film. I've acquired it as a widescreen print that Diamond Ent. appropriated from VCI when their DVD went Out of Print. It looks as though VCI's people attempted a digital enhancement to re-color an old, intact but color rotted print, and the result is this bizarre palette shift in places where everyone's face is beet red, rocks are orange and the skies are green. It has a Cowboy Movie mentality where guys pop up from behind rocks, squeeze off a shot, duck, pop back up, then pretend to be shot by throwing their arms up in the air and dramatically spinning around before flopping on the ground. Yawn.The frame compositions are interesting, the female leads are attractive and I like the ambiguous character who turns out to be the villain at the end. But I don't know. Jeff Hunter keeps getting his ass kicked, and doesn't really have any specialized skills that I can see which would set him apart from just another lout with a Winchester and an ax to grind. He looks uncomfortable in the role, either like he felt that the material was beneath him, or his pants were too tight. And don't get me started on that shirt he is wearing: Were they trying to make him look washed up & about to die of some horrible terminal disease? He sort of waddles around rather than sauntering like a Clint, Gianni Garko or even a John Phillip Law. Perhaps that is the point -- To humanize the Gringo, ala MINNESOTA CLAY, rather than having a cartoon character like Eastwood's Joe or Garko's Sartana.The problem is that like Sergio Corbucci's MINNESOTA CLAY, the movie simply SUCKS. It's a slog: I've watched it three times in vain attempts to find something about the film that I genuinely enjoy, and all I get is that big, square building in the background of a couple shots. It is an intriguing structure that looks so huge I wonder what it was really built for, where it is, and if it's still standing today. Gives you something better to think about than the movie anyway, and Carmineo cleaned up his routine by the time he inherited the Sartana legacy and made some wonderful films right through 1988's RATMAN. He had a nice comic book touch, and his movies are usually more interesting & fun than they had to be.But this isn't one of them, and whatever camp fun factor is to be had by watching a former Captain of the USS Enterprise in a Pasghetti Western is quickly blown clear by the first sight of Jeff Hunter in his little shirt there, pot belly pushing at the fabric and sweat popping out on his face with effort from being constrained by such tight pants. Just awful.

Though somewhat standard "gang hunts for gold" spaghetti western fare, it is well-directed and has solid performances. The score is also well-done, one of the better non-Morricone ones I've heard. Fast-paced with several nice action scenes, with a couple of great, cold-blooded sudden shootings. The VCI DVD is ok, letterboxed but the transfer is soft and rather noisy throughout, with a lot of grain in dark scenes. The mono sound, though, is rich and well-recorded. The film is definitely worth a look for anyone looking for an entertaining, obscure western.