Review of A Man Called Sledge (1970) by Duncan F — 12 Apr 2014

Always been a Garner fan, and used to enjoy The Rockford Files. I read that this movie was contrived to cash in on the spaghetti western craze of the times, albeit too little too late to be a contender.

Yes, Garner is miscast as a baddie. Like Selleck he is too inherently likeable to be the villain. He's a man's man and anything less than heroism and noble deeds from him don't ring true. Nonetheless, in the role of Sledge, Garner plays a man whose moral compass veers from middle of the road to mean, murderous and muddle-headed. Not entirely evil through and through, Sledge combines natural leadership (his willing gang members keen to do his bidding), with callous disregard (as long standing saddle buddies get shot in card games or bite the dust) with the traits of fanatical greed (for more gold than you and your horse can ride off with) and being entirely loveable (according to the one and only beautiful woman in the whole wild west who has eyes only for him and waits patiently for his uncertain return).

Perhaps Morrow was going for the same inscrutability of Eastwood's nameless stogie-puffing sharpshooter who more or less redeems himself along the way in the Leone series, but Sledge comes across as an implausible mix of personal traits inside a character who is such a bad guy that everyone for miles around knows him, fears him, or wants to turn him in for the price on his head.

Stylistically, this movie lingers at the wrong moments on plot elements that don't warrant the airtime. An almost psychedelic cross-dissolving shot sequence conjures a crazy hot desert sun card game (apparently unquenched with either water or whiskey) which goes on long enough for one of the players to lose all his gold. All the while, a repetitive vocal soundtrack harps on about the perils of greed, the weakness of men and the allure of gold. This is a tortuous stretch of footage that makes you want to press fast forward or even eject. I held on, because even with second-rate westerns, I like to give a movie the benefit of the doubt until the bitter end.

And what about the end? I would not wish to spoil it for anyone, but I think there may be some kind of morality lesson in this tale along with some personal redemption stuff, but there aren't enough other reviews to corroborate that. And it was all so very long ago now.