Find A Place to Die
It is often easier to take what someone else has worked for than to work for yourself, particularly where the law is unlikely to intervene to protect the innocent; mining for gold, Paul and Lisa Martin are attacked by the henchmen of the bandit Chato, swiftly running out of ammunition and instead using dynamite to defend themselves, bringing down the rock face on Paul even as the last attackers are repelled.
Unable to free her husband alone, Lisa makes her way across the desert to the nearest settlement of Eagle’s Nest; there she finds Joe Collins, a former Confederate soldier who was court-martialled and now has a bounty on his head and a bottle in his hand, but with few other options she asks for his help, joined by a motley group of hangers-on whose eyes light up at the prospect of work as at the thought of gold…
Directed by Giuliano Carnimeo, credited as Anthony Ascott on the English language version, and Hugo Fregonese, Find a Place to Die (originally Joe… cercati un posto per morire!) was a 1968 Spaghetti Western remake of 1954’s Garden of Evil, starring Jeffrey Hunter, the original Captain Christopher Pike when The Cage was shot in 1964, as Joe Collins, struggling to maintain his dignity in trying circumstances, Pascale Petit as Lisa and, under his unfeasibly large hat and never far from violence or the possibility of profit, Mario Darnell as Chato.
The men who agree to accompany Joe and Lisa back to the mine predictably unreliable, Gomez, Paco, Fernando and the dubious Reverend Riley, that every one of them intends to betray their employers is made apparent perhaps a little too swiftly, liars and cheats who each want the gold, the woman or both, leaving much of the film a holding pattern waiting for the inevitable when portraying at least one of them as honourable might have created at least an attempt at a twist.
The earlier concerns over ammunition running low addressed by having the siege on Chato’s stronghold conveniently near Joe’s secret stash of arms which he had planned to sell to Gomez not realising he worked as a middle man for Chato, so close it’s somewhat surprising that it wasn’t already found and looted, if any of the men were better shots or took the trouble to aim before firing it might not have been such an issue in the first place.
Hunter struggling in the later stages of his career and making do with low-budget B-movies, Find a Place to Die was shot only a year before his death several months after an on-set accident left him with a severe concussion, the script by Carnimeo, Fregonese and Lamberto Benvenuti not offering much to challenge the former studio star though the action scenes at least have some energy and there is also the unexpected diversion of a musical number courtesy of barmaid Juanita (Daniela Giordano), Paco’s equally duplicitous girlfriend.
Find A Place to Die will be streaming on Arrow from Monday 24th July
