Episode 812: Cut-Throats Nine (1972)

A gold-plated chain gang, a snowbound death march, and a father hunting a killer who's already survived the trip: Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent closed out his western career with Cut-Throats Nine (1972), still cited as the goriest Spanish western ever made. Mike White talks with Nick Schlegel and Heather Drain about how Sergeant Brown (Robert Hundar) and daughter Cathy (Emma Cohen) end up stranded with seven condemned convicts after a botched bandit ambush, and how gold hidden in their chains curdles cooperation into betrayal, torture, and a murder mystery Brown never gets to solve. They trace Romero Marchent's late-career demolition of heroic western conventions, the film's kinship with (and possible one-upping of) The Great Silence, Luis Cuadrado's snowbound cinematography, and whether the film's notorious gore implicates the audience or just splatters it. Masterpiece, curiosity, or endurance test: is this the most nihilistic western ever made?

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