Soleil rouge [Red Sun] (1971)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) There’s an admirable blend of influences at play in director Terence Young’s spaghetti western Soleil Rouge, bringing together a cast as diverse as Charles Bronson, Ursula Andress, Toshirō Mifune, Alain Delon and Capucine in a vision of the Wild West quite unlike another. Consider that the plot gets going when a ceremonial samurai sword intended for American President Grant is stolen aboard a train heading east. Mifune and Bronson team up to get it back from the perfidious Delon, with Capucine and Andress providing further entertainment. There are a lot of cool ideas in here, so maybe it’s not so much of a surprise when the execution ends up being just about average. Sure, seeing an American gunman team up with a Japanese samurai sounds like the kind of revisionist western that would be a natural fit for a multicultural genre-blending twenty-first century. But as executed à la Italian western, it’s perhaps a bit more serious than expected and certainly more laborious than it should be. I’m sure that my limited attraction for westerns is at play here, but still – beyond the premise, Soleil Rouge is a far more average western than you’d expect, and that’s just too bad.