Hannie Caulder

I find it wonderfully ironic that I would write a review of this movie for Helium and weeks later Entertainment Weekly would issue a brief review of their own on the updated release of a new DVD of that film. Even better, the reviewer echoes what I wrote for Helium. So, my friends, I post my review here:

For a long time, those who decide such things determined that Raquel Welch could not act. After “One Million B.C.” (1966), this is an understandable conclusion, but far from accurate. In a movie in which she was required to run around in a furry bikini and grunt emotionally as cave men battled dinosaurs and each other, her skills weren’t stretched. She looked good. She looked great. That was all that was required. It sold tickets. As silly as the film was, we remember Raquel -- endangered by hungry animals and sex hungry men.

The poster from that film was so iconic that it became a prop in “The Shawshank Redemption,” one of the posters Tim Robbins used to cover up the hole in his cell wall that eventually became his escape route. No one ever questioned Robbins’ placement of the poster.

But Raquel can act. In “Hannie Caulder,” an existentially influenced British produced contribution to the Western genre directed by veteran TV and movie Western director Burt Kennedy, she plays a woman who takes on the role usually reserved for a wronged man and hits the Vengeance Trail with all the determination of a Clint Eastwood. Unlike the females in Clint’s Wild West, Hannie Caulder does not sit around and wait for her knight in a shining white Stetson to avenge her. She learns how to do it herself.

The plot is simple. After a badly botched attempted bank robbery, three inept but very violent criminals, the Clemens brothers, played by Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin and Jack Elam, escape from the Mexican army and make their way to a Pony Express station. They kill the tender and take turns raping his wife, Hannie. They burn down the station and leave her for dead. Hannie survives, and enlists the reluctant help of bounty hunter Thomas Price (Robert Culp), not to track down the trio for her but to show her how to shoot and kill. Price helps, going as far as bringing Hannie down into Mexico to have a special gun made by an expert gunsmith (Christopher Lee), one that will carry all the fire power she needs but be easier for her to handle.

Meanwhile, a mysterious man in black (Stephen Boyd, unbilled), lurks on the horizons, watching. Is he some sort of protector? Or is he some sort of menacing figure waiting for his chance at Hannie?

Price finds himself falling in love with Hannie and attempts to convince her to let it go, move on, hopefully with him. But when he stumbles onto the trio, they kill him, leaving Hannie alone to face them down. Which she does.

“Hannie Caulder” is largely a revenge film, in the tradition of older Westerns, with the clear moral that the bad guys will get their comeuppance in the end, even if they manage to inflict more damage on the way. As such, the film is clever and centered, even if the often comic performances by the Clemens brothers seem wholly at odds with their violent behaviors. That juxtaposition is jarring, and intentionally so because it makes the viewer uncertain and uneasy and puts the main character, who has already lost so much, further in jeopardy. These men may be fools, but they are also cold hearted killers and rapists who have no second thoughts or doubts. They are sociopaths.

As to Hannie’s soul, as she seeks that revenge, there is less of an issue there. What she seeks is righteous, and we root for her. We want the bad guys dead. There seems to be no other possible outcome.

This is not a great Western, but an interesting and original one. The actors all are in fine form, from Culp’s strong support to the veteran character actors Borgnine, Martin and Elam exuding, in equal measures, sleaze, menace and ineptitude. Raquel Welch is stunningly plain, a woman of unquestioned beauty beaten down by the country and the events that befell her, trying to get back up. She is strong, determined, single-minded. But the poncho? Who wears a poncho to a gunfight? Well, Clint, maybe . . .

The film’s originality comes from allowing Hannie to be a strong and ultimately deadly force. She is a woman who is trying to take back the control and self esteem that were literally stripped away from her. That she needed the help of a man to learn how to shoot a gun at the start is realistic. That she became self-reliant afterwards is empowering not just for women but for anyone who ever was a victim.

You go, girl.