The Ruthless Four (1967)

Van Heflin plays Sam Cooper, who has spent most of his life searching for gold. Finally, he strikes it rich, only to discover that his partner is holding a gun on him, intending to take all the gold for himself, just as they’re about to head back to town.

Cooper escapes; the partner dies in a mine cave in. And so Cooper heads back to town determined to find a new partner, someone he knows he’ll be able to trust. He summons Manolo (George Hilton), a young man he helped raise.

Problem is, Manolo has a friend (Klaus Kinski) who refuses to be left behind.

Unsure of that friend’s motives, uncomfortable of his alliance with Manolo, Cooper decides he needs to take along a fourth partner (Gilbert Roland as Mason), even if that man holds a longtime grudge against him.

After all, there’s a fortune in gold in that caved-in mine, just waiting to be claimed.

Review:

Once you get past the fact that the destitute bandits who hold up Cooper early in the film make off with all his food but leave behind all his gold, this is a decent, if sometimes slow-moving film.

Instead of the usual focus on action and plot twists, director Capitani focuses on the characters who head back to the mine and their growing mistrust for one another. Kinski’s character is the most bizarre; he has a strange hold over Manolo.

And any film would benefit from the presence of Heflin, who’s convincing in the role of an aging man whose desire for gold is deeper than his love for the boy he raised.

Directed by:
Giorgio Capitani

Cast:
Van Heflin … Sam Cooper
Gilbert Roland … Mason
George Hilton … Manolo Sanchez
Klaus Kinski … Brent/Blonde
Sarah Ross … Annie
Federico Boido … Hal Brady
as Rick Boyd
Sergio Doria … Fred Brady

aka:
Ognuno per se
Sam Cooper’s Gold
Every Man for Himself
The Goldseekers
Each One for Himself

Score: Carlo Rustichelli

Runtime: 106 min.

Memorable lines:

Annie: “Pappy, you’re wasting your whole life. Why don’t you quit?”
Sam: “You quit when you find it. And maybe not even then.”

Blonde to Manolo: “You think too much. If I tell you to kill Cooper, you’ll kill Coooper.”

Trivia:

This marked one of Van Heflin’s final films and his only Spaghetti Western. He was 58 when it was released. He would died in 1971 at age 60 of a heart attack suffered while he was swimming. He had requested that no funeral be held.

According to IMDb, this quote is attributed to Van Heflin: “Louis B. Mayer once looked at me and said, ‘You will never get the girl at the end.’ So I worked on my acting.” By the end of his career, he had appeared in 66 films and won an Oscar.