by C. Courtney Joyner
A blade cuts into a wide belly, followed by an eruption of blood. Muscle and flesh hang on the knife as it’s pulled out and plunged in again. A woman’s hysterical scream carries over the image, echoing, and staying with us well into the next shots of director Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent’s Cut Throats Nine.
It’s one of many vivid, savage, revolting moments from a Spanish import that was first perceived as having no artistic, and slight commercial, purpose. Released in 1973 with a pure trash ad campaign, Cut Throats Nine entered the American marketplace as less than a bill-filler, but exploited as a gore-fest it secured some box office dollars.
In the years since, Cut Throats has become, because of Marchent’s own dramatic truths, a respected cult film that just happens to be the ultimate western-horror movie.
The first time I experienced it, my head was left swimming. I knew I kind of liked it, but wasn’t sure why. It made me drink, and think. The sadistic violence splattered across me with a different kind of impact than the outlaw shoot-outs and slow motion death-ballets I loved, so Cut Throats was definitely a western, but with the bleakest view of the human condition I’d seen outside of a documentary.
The film struck a chord, and I couldn’t escape it. Cut Throats Nine was surely a western, but it was also genuine horror. Human horror. The poster promised something that the movie delivered, but the film has more brains in its intent than are blown all over the screen.
Much has been made of the film’s combination of Fulci-like violence amid a frontier story of escaped convicts, but this comparison is faulty. The savagery of the Spanish-produced Cut Throats pre-dates the Euro zombie craze by years and it was the influence of American westerns, rather than Euro horror, that inspired Marchent.
The history behind that inspiration and Marchent’s achievement goes back to a time before movies talked.
The trappings of the western and horror first collided on film in silent serials and quickies, like 1926’s The Haunted Range. By the 1930s, Gower Gulch westerns regularly gave us masked phantoms that haunted gold mines and old train yards before being debunked by a young John Wayne or an aging Hoot Gibson.
The mixture was an easy one to exploit since producers saw the genres as coexisting, appealing to the same audience: youngsters and yokels. When Universal released their last monster rally, House of Dracula, in 1945, they paired it with The Daltons Ride Again, both starring Lon Chaney.
Monsters ’n cowboys on the same bill, what kid wouldn’t love that?
But movies began to change.
Post World War II America was a brightly lit place of victory and home. It was also a shadowed and venomous pit, where the American psyche was twisting in on itself, and movies were our mirror.
The safe haven of old-fashioned monster-horror was now fodder for Abbott and Costello, and the stalwart western hero now seemed quaint. As the gangster film became film noir, so the western had moved in darker directions since the war.
Directors Raoul Walsh (Pursued), Henry Hathaway (Rawhide), and William Wellman (Yellow Sky), tackled stories with a cynical, tougher view of the frontier. It was no longer a land of unending promise, but, like the city streets, a harsh landscape populated by troubled heroes and bad men who could be dangerously unbalanced.
Even the One-Eyed Titan’s approach was becoming less romantic, less hopeful and, finally, beautifully acid, as John Ford let his personal darkness pour out of him in My Darling Clementine and Wagonmaster. Ford’s villains weren’t old-school “side-winders,” but slobbering, in-bred psychopaths that could only be controlled by a whip and a .12 gauge. No horror movie torture chamber ever housed anything worse than these creatures.
The band of desperate fugitives in Marchent’s Cut Throats could rightfully be the cinematic grandchildren of the Clantons and Cleggs in Ford’s two masterful films, with Cut Throat’s tone as bleak as Ford’s darkest moods.
Without realizing it, Ford brought the horror and western genres together in a mature, visual way by turning his west into a shadowed, gothic trap, and his villains into subhumans, waiting for the chance to rape and kill.
We can imagine the impact this new approach had on the young Marchent, a true western devotee who was preparing to direct his first feature. Having grown up under the clamp of the Franco regime, Marchent treasured every rare chance to see American movies, always returning to see the great, “traditional” westerns.
He worked in studios in Madrid as an assistant director before striking out on his own in 1953 with the crime drama, Juzgado Permanente (Court of Justice). When he directed El Coyote and a sequel in 1955, starring Abel Salazar, Marchent was now working in his beloved genre, making a western with a masked hero modeled after Zorro.
El Coyote made Marchent perfect to helm new Zorro adventures and in 1962, after two sly comedies, he made Zorro, The Avenger and Shades of Zorro, both written by his frequent collaborator, Jess Franco, and starring Frank Lattimore.
The Zorro films were well made and sold directly to American television with little regard or respect. But they’d found a place in the U.S. Market, which meant success for the Spanish productions, giving Marchent the chance to make more westerns.
During the 50s, the genre had exploded, with John Wayne riding herd on the box office well into the next decade, followed by Stewart, Cooper, Lancaster, and company. But in 1964, the international market was about to change it all with the atomic success of TV star Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone’s collaboration, signaling the dominance of the Euro-western. The world took notice, turning star and director into icons.
But Jose Marchent had gotten there first, making a pair of Spanish-German productions a full year before Fistful of Dollars that are now considered the first true Euro-westerns.
Starring muscleman Richard Harrison, Gunfight at High Noon (El Sabor de la Vengaza) is the story of three brothers who follow separate paths to track down the man who killed their father twenty years before.
Marchent wrote and directed with an eye on the contrast of the brothers who consider all options before violence against the one who is a blood-in-the-eye gunman, killing all who get in his way. This theme would carry into Cut Throats Nine, by examining the men who hunger for violence, equating revenge with justice, and those who don’t.
In Gunfight, that moral difference sets the brothers at each other, not just the man they’re hunting. As in Cut Throats, even the good die bloody; there’s no escape from violent death in Marchent’s west.
Made the same year, Hour of Death (Antes Llega la Muerte) has been cited as Marchent’s masterpiece. Others find its story of the frontier settlers too slow; its concentration on character instead of violence off-putting. The film actually has a high body count, but Marchent is clearly influenced by Ford’s Wagonmaster, and this was his attempt at that classical style and pace, with bursts of violence that aren’t nearly as shocking as in Ford’s film. Hour of Death is certainly sentimental as it shows the pioneer struggle against the elements and the Indians. It’s a triumph of atmosphere and feeling, and displays another side of the director’s talents. But like Gunfight, the film was hurried off to American television and quickly forgotten while Fistful and Corbucci’s Django launched hundreds of new productions and new fortunes.
But the Spanish master of the form wasn’t included in the gold rush. Marchent continued making quality westerns with Spanish content, but the films were shuffled a lot, with flashes of action, but no fanfare. He was now just another working director, making films for an international marketplace that was already stuffed with western movies.
Joaquin Marchent hadn’t directed a film in four years (1968’s I Do Not Forgive — I Kill!) when he began production on Condenados a Vivir, with locations in the Pyrenees Mountains and interiors in Madrid. An all-Spanish production made for a small budget, Marchent was working from a brutal screenplay he’d fashioned with Mario Bava collaborator Santiago Moncada (Hatchet for the Honeymoon) that emphasized the human emotion of horrific violence instead of straight western action.
The genre had become a violent playground since Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in 1969 and taken a savage turn in films like Ralph Nelson’s 1970 Soldier Blue, showing the brutalization of Native Americans by the Army. But Marchent wasn’t interested in an epic exaggeration, something he couldn’t afford anyway, or the politics of violence. In Cut Throats violence is indifferent; a bullet or knife has no allegiance.
The scenario of Cut Throats is deceptively simple: an army sergeant is transporting a group of dangerous prisoners to a fort when their wagon is attacked, and the prisoners escape, taking the sergeant and his daughter hostage. What the condemned men don’t know is the trip’s other purpose — carrying a fortune in gold that’s been forged into the chains shackling them together.
The psychotic band kills the sergeant, rapes the daughter, and turn on each other for the gold, leaving a pile of corpses. The mentally destroyed daughter kills the rest, and herself, with dynamite.
“Fin.”
Using a classic journey structure for its story, like Ford or Hawks’s Red River, Marchent’s structure allows him to hang his moments of horror on the story’s spine. The characters are in motion, trying to reach their goals of the fort, and then freedom, and, finally, riches. And we are always moving with them, watching as they actually take their steps toward bloody death.
Marchent chose his frequent star Robert Hundar (a.k.a. Claudio Undari) as the good sergeant. Hundar’s presence is solid and sincere, and he brings authority to the part, even if seeming a tad too young. Undari had first worked with Marchent on Zorro in 1962. Emma Cohen has the most difficult part, in that it’s hard to justify her character being along on this mission with her father, except that she has nowhere to go after the death of her mother at the hands of one of the cut throats — a fact she never discovers.
Cohen bundles herself and her body together, eyes cast down, trying to distance herself from the prisoners before she is brutally raped by them, and her father slaughtered. Then she is numb, stumbling along with the men as their prisoner, until she takes her own life and theirs. This is a fine performance, with complicated layers that she plays very well, even when implausible.
But the daughter is the feminine voice of the film and, ultimately, the angel of death. We have seen astonishing violence against women by the film’s final scenes and it’s only fitting that Cohen destroy the destroyers.
Cohen had already been seen in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula, and after Cut Throats would make Horror Rises from the Tomb, one of the Spanish horrors from the period mostly widely seen on television.
Unlike the typical Euro-western at the time, where multiple money sources often dictated international casting, the Spanish production money behind Cut Throats meant drawing exclusively on Spanish talent. This could have been a handicap, but Marchent’s cast has an expansive background. These were the familiar, pockmarked faces from Spanish western, gangster, and horror movies, providing one more link between Cut Throats and other genres.
And that link is as strong as the chain that binds the prisoners. Marchent creates a classic western story framework, feeding into typical audience expectations, and then blows a bloody hole right through it with the scenes of violence for which the film is now infamous.
The first moment, after outlaws attack the prison wagon, is a bloodless sniping of a soldier, followed by a rifle butt smashing open another’s skull and, moments later, a throat being slit.
Marchent takes each moment of violence further than the one before it. Corpse burnings, stabbings, shootings, disemboweling, and savage beatings come one atop the other, each more startling than the last, as Marchent bloodies the snow along the mountain trails.
But his camera never wavers. The scene of a wagon tumbling over a hillside startles us, not because of flashy stunt work, but because it’s presented as plainly as news footage of a car accident.
Marchent and cameraman Luis Cuadrado (Spirit of the Bee Hive) maintain a focused, naturalistic eye on the action, allowing the bloody violence to impact us on its own, as if we were standing next to it, without flourish. The background is frozen and blue, with all of the horrible actions of the characters in contrast to its cold and stillness.
When director and cameraman do allow warm colors and soft focus, it’s in the film’s flashbacks. As in Leone’s Duck, You Sucker, these are romantic, hazy images of life before prison, when each man had his freedom or was happy with his family. But we’re fools to be lulled into enjoyment. The flashbacks ultimately contain some of the movie’s nastiest moments, including the back of a woman’s head being blown off and the death of the sergeant’s wife. Visually, the soft flashbacks allow us a breather, but there’s no escape from Marchent’s vision and in a heartbeat he’s rubbing our noses in the horror. Again.
And all of this builds to the rape scene.
This is Cut Throats’s most horrifying moment, because it is real, violent, and ugly. This isn’t a hot babe being mauled by a guy in a suit; this is a defenseless woman being treated like an animal. Again, Marchent goes for real horror, real emotion. And it leaves us, like Emma Cohen’s character, numb.
The journey of the group continues, with the sergeant dead, his daughter lost in her mind, and the bunch turning on each other. When the prisoners decide to free themselves of their shackles by letting a train run over the chains, it brings home the reality of what Marchent was dealing with as a filmmaker: there is no train, only shadows and a blurred impression of wheels, because there was no money. It’s a damn clever sequence, but it points up the film’s low budget, and the struggles of its director, who should have had access to more money, more time, and more prestige.
Cut Throats’s final moments are the boiling point. More death, as what’s left of the gang savages itself and the one outlaw that Emma Cohen has found solace with is brutally taken out. When he is killed, she has no idea who he really was.
In the final irony, she uses dynamite to revenge a man who murdered her mother, finally wiping the bloody, chilled landscape clean. She has killed herself, destroyed the gold, and the last of the cut throats in a blast and fireball. And the image freezes, the cabin blown to smithereens, the snow-covered mountains behind it. Nothing man-made remains.
Marchent’s statement is over, and we’re left battered by the journey, just as he intended, but distributors saw something else. Something to bring in some quick bucks.
“An adventure in violence that will rip your heart out!” was how American International trumpeted the film when they gave it its spotty release. Looking at it strictly as a gore flick, they gave out “Terror Masks” for patrons who were too chicken-hearted to see all that Joaquin Marchent had wrought.
It played out its week and then it was gone, washed away with the last of the Euro-westerns. Joaquin Marchent continued working in Spain, primarily on television, with no marked success in the United States. He died in Madrid in 2012 at the age of 92, knowing that his most notorious movie now had a cult reputation, not just for horror fans, but western fans who finally gave him rightful credit for his achievements.
Is his most famous film a western? Yes, with a style crafted by someone who loved and understood the genre. Horror? Absolutely, but drawing on different sources than old genre crossovers like Curse of the Undead.
Cut Throats is a brutal and real experience, with more impact than Adrian Hoven’s Mark of the Devil or other “gore notorious” films from the time that used the background of satanic worship of witch-finding atrocities as an excuse for naked girls and tons of blood.
There’s nothing supernatural here, no dramatic “out.” The horror of Cut Throats is the lengths people will go to for riches or revenge. And we’re chained right along with them, marching through the snow, ready for bloody death.
Cut Throats Nine has been announced for remaking, starring Harvey Keitel, which may be the ultimate testament to the movie’s reputation.
Joaquin Marchent was a fine director who, later in a career that hadn’t brought him worldwide success, made the trek into the mountains, with little money, to make the most brutal western ever.
With limited resources he did this and more, creating the ultimate western-horror film that at its heart isn’t exploitation, but an exploration of the darkest side of the human experience.
Using the westerns that he loved as inspiration, Marchent succeeded in creating true horror.