A single stranger named Hud comes to Blackstone, a town where his brother has been hanged after being falsely accused of robbing a bank. After tangling with the local sheriff and a nearby Mexican bandit turn revolutionary, Hud finds out one of the town's most dignified citizens swapped the real money out with counterfeit bills. After several gunfights and backing down a group of young toughs, Hud rides off after saving a local girl and burning the stolen money.
Sergio Corbucci originally developed The Specialists as a starring vehicle for actor Lee Van Cleef; the original draft of the script, credited to both men, bore the title of Lo specialiste a mano armata ("The specialist with the armed hand"), but a later draft was titled Il ritorno del mercenario ("The return of the mercenary"), linking the project with Corbucci's earlier Western The Mercenary (1968).[6] The project was initially abandoned after Corbucci and Van Cleef had a falling out, but it was retooled when French producer Edmond Tenoudji asked Corbucci to write and direct a film for singer Johnny Hallyday;[2] the resulting film uses only a small amount of material from the Corbucci/Van Cleef drafts, such as the hero wearing a bulletproof chainmail vest.[6]
Principal photography on The Specialists took place entirely in Italy; most of the exteriors were shot in the Venetian Prealps and the Dolomites. Other sequences were filmed on the outskirts of Rome: the scenes taking place in El Diablo's lair were shot in Canale Monterano; Diablo's riverside ambush of Pollicut was filmed at Mazzano Romano, and the Western town set at Elios Films, which Corbucci had previously used in many of his films, stood in for Blackstone City.[8] Morale among the cast and crew during the early stages of the shoot was positive, but tensions eventually rose between the Italian and French crew members, and Françoise Fabian argued with Corbucci against his intentions to include a rape scene for her character, prompting Corbucci's wife Nori to defend her husband's position. Because the Blackstone scenes were shot during a heatwave that had struck Rome, at one point Mario Adorf nearly suffocated under his heavy costume.[6]
Themes
Like most of Corbucci's Westerns, The Specialists features prominent left-wing, anti-authoritarian themes and messages; in the documentary Sergio Corbucci: L'uomo che ride, the director stated that it "was a film about how the wealthy are oppressors".[8] Unusually, the film also presents an anti-hippie stance in the portrayal of several of its antagonists; in a 1971 interview with the French magazine Image et Son, Corbucci stated:[4]
The idea was to show that I was against the hippies. Listen, at this time the Manson business hadn't happened... but there are too many real problems in the world for me to accept the disinterested passivity of these people. Yesterday, Jimi Hendrix died shooting up in London. I am against drugs and hippies. I wanted to denounce them in The Specialists... I'm really violently against their attitude, and I hate Easy Rider.
Release
The Specialists premiered in Italy on November 26, 1969,[9] where it grossed 309,936,000 Italian lira, making it the 17th highest-grossing Spaghetti Western of that year[10] and making only marginally more money than Corbucci's earlier The Great Silence.[11] It was released in West Germany on 10 April 1970 as Fahrt zur Hölle, ihr Halunken ("Go to Hell, you scoundrels") and in France as Le Spécialiste (highlighting Hallyday's appeal over Gastone Moschin and Adorf in the Italian version's plural title) on 22 April 1970.[1][12] The film was Corbucci's most successful Western in the French market, garnering 1,252,173 cinema admissions and becoming the 30th most popular film released there in 1970.[9] Most of the differences between the Italian and French versions of the film concern the climax: while dying, El Diablo orders his biographer Chico to falsify the outcome of his duel with Hud in the former version and tells him to write the truth in the latter, and the Italian prints feature a montage of close-ups of the townspeople's reaction to Hud burning the stolen money; these are missing from the French prints.[13]
In the UK, the film was released in June 1973 by Golden Era Film Distributors in an English-dubbed version titled Drop Them or I'll Shoot. This version, given an X-rating by the BBFC, ran 92 minutes compared to the 104 minute runtime of uncut European prints and deleted several scenes, such as the entire pre-credits sequence.[14]
The Specialists was screened as part of the Cinéma de la Plage program during the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Presented by TF1 and Carlotta Films, the film had undergone a 4K restoration of the original Technicolor-Techniscope camera negative and the French and Italian-language magnetic tapes, which was carried out by the laboratories L'Image Retrouvée, Paris, and L'Immagine Ritrovata, Bologna.[15]
Home media
The 4K restoration of The Specialists was released on DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray by TF1 on June 5, 2018, featuring both the French and Italian audio tracks (with French subtitles for the latter), with accompanying special features consisting of the French and Italian theatrical trailers, an interview about the film with Cinémathèque Française director of programming Jean-François Rauger, and a 32-page booklet containing a reprinting of the Pilote comic Le Guitariste ("The Guitarist"), a parody of the film created by Pascal Guichard and Jean–Claude Morchoisne.[16]
In 2020, the restoration saw two further releases: the first, released on January 7, was distributed by Kino Lorber Studio Classics on DVD and Blu-ray for the US market, featuring English subtitles for the Italian track, an audio commentary by filmmaker Alex Cox, and the Italian trailer.[17] The second, released on May 18, was handled in the UK by Eureka Entertainment for Blu-ray. Aside from the French and Italian tracks (for which English subtitles are provided for each), the disc also presents what is known to exist of the film's English dub track, which was found to have suffered irreparable damage and large segments missing (which play in subtitled French on the disc). The disc's special features include the French and Italian trailers, Cox's commentary, an interview with Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western author Austin Fisher about the film and its historical context, the complete script of the English dub (presented as both a slideshow and a PDF file on the disc), and a booklet containing essays about the film and French-produced Westerns by Once Upon a Time in the Italian West author Howard Hughes.[18]
Reception
From contemporary reviews, Tony Rayns reviewed the Drop Them or I'll Shoot version of the film in the Monthly Film Bulletin.[19] Rayns described the film as Corbucci "dourly going through the motions of the Continental revenge Western."[19] Rayns commented that Corbucci's film did have "a splendid finale-after the excellently shot and edited massacre of El Diablo's gang" while concluding that otherwise, all "the film offers are the stereotyped bickering cowards, the stoic Sheriff, the secretly scheming villainess and the cheroot-chewing avenger: all precisedly stage-managed by Corbucci, but without much enthusiasm and to little point."[19]
