The musician Scott Walker takes on the voice of the protagonist in Robert Hossein’s Cemetery Without Crosses (1969) for the film’s theme song, singing “I seek the man who killed my friend…. My life depends upon my gun.” The film takes on certain Western archetypes—rivalry among families, violence as an addiction, murderous class warfare, stoic masculinity—and lets them play out with an economical approach to narrative. Images, such as a woman chopping off a fish’s head following a shootout, establish the mood while characters remain laconic.
As a battle between powerful cattle rancher Will Rogers (Daniel Vargas) and her husband Ben’s (Benito Stefanelli) family rages, Maria (Michele Mercier) is forced to watch Ben lynched. The gold coins she receives, stolen from Rogers by Ben’s brothers, are no balm for her pain. Traveling to a ghost town, she reunites with her old lover Manuel (Hossein). Although he’s trying to leave violence behind, he accepts her payment for revenge and worms his way into the Rogers’ family home and kidnaps their patriarch’s daughter.
Manuel doesn’t have an introspective bone in his body and struggles with a destructive numbness throughout the film. Clad in black, Maria is his peer in this sadness. Mercier’s performance evokes the two characters’ common feelings, although she’s more expressive than Hossein. Her grief is made explicit, while his demons are never fully brought into the open. Romance threatens to re-ignite between them, but tension drowns it out. As Cemetery Without Crosses ends, Henri Persin’s color cinematography fades into black-and-white. Even before that point, Manuel rides through a gray desert, overshadowed by tall, distant mountains that are only leavened by spare patches of grass. Manuel and Maria’s depressive spirit is reflected in the muted look.
As an actor, Hossein frequently collaborated with popular directors like Claude Lelouch and Roger Vadim whose style differed from that of the incipient Nouvelle Vague. He started directing in 1955, often making genre films without the reflexive flourishes that made the Nouvelle Vague respectable internationally. Shot in Italy with a script co-written by Dario Argento, Cemetery Without Crosses takes inspiration from the period’s spaghetti Westerns—it even includes a dedication to Sergio Leone, not to mention the strong resemblance between Manuel and Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name.” Yet, its slow march into stark existential dread is all its own.
Cemetery Without Crosses screens tonight, August 9, and on August 14 and 15, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Experimental Westerns, Part 2: Acid + International Westerns.”
