scottmwade-1 Don't waste your time on this one. Basically there really isn't much of a plot at all so it's just a big bunch of shooting and killing for no readily apparent reason. This film just meanders around and not much of a plot is evident at all, although there is a train robbery at the beginning with the bandits robbing the train to raise funds for a political movement. At the end the main character is killed but it doesn't really matter because this film is so horrible you don't even care and probably won't make it that far anyway. Do not recommend this one at all unless you have insomnia and can't fall asleep...

merklekranz "A Bullet For the General", exceeded my expectations, and is the best of five DVDs in the "Once Upon a Time in Italy" set. There is no mistaking that this is Gian Maria Volonte's movie. He has way more screen time than in either "A Fistful of Dollars" or "For a Few Dollars More". Klaus Kinski admirers might be disappointed as his screen time is limited in a supporting role. Lou Castel's character seems to barely be breathing in what can only be described as the lowest key performance ever. Martine Bestwick is somewhat livelier, but her appearance is flawed by a Mexican makeup job that can only be described as dreadful. The Ennio Morricone score is above average. Though not quite as good as "The Big Gundown", "A Bullet For the General" must be considered one of the better non-Leone "spaghetti westerns". - MERK

jaibo Wham-bam spaghetti Western set during the Mexican civil war. A morally ambiguous gun-runner finds assistance from a mysterious American, who is rather too keen to get the cache and one particular bullet to the rebel general. Gian Maria Volonte is astounding as the outlaw, torn between commitment to the cause of the peasants and his own immense appetites; Kinski is his barmy apocalyptic preacher of a brother. Lou Cassel is properly cold as the internally dead gringo American.The narrative leaps forwards in great bounds, with each sequence establishing it's progression from the next with punchy visual clarity, and there's a plenty of memorable encounters and images along the way. The radical and committed script is by Pontecorvo-collaborator Franco Solinas, and the portrait of the morally decrepit white man bears a lot of similarity with Brando's character in Burn! The final sequence, with Volonte realising just how much of his soul he has sold, is one of the greatest denouements around.

funkyfry Pretty amusing spag western actually... Gian Maria Volontè is at his absolute best, and Klaus Kinski also does some great character work as a revolutionary religious man who does the Lord's killing for Him. Lou Castel's performance as "Nino" was relatively underwhelming – it's one of those cases where the director apparently thought less is more. I just find the character somewhat one-dimensional and Castel didn't do anything to make it hold up. Martine Beswick gave some good performances in other films I've seen (particularly "Dr. Jeckyll and Sister Hyde") but was nothing special here, just eye- candy with a lot of rogue.The story is an interesting one, although even without the revealing American title its path might have been fairly predictable. I did think it was interesting that the film gradually shifted our sympathies from the Yankee Nino – who obviously has ulterior motives that we more and more suspect are not motivated by morality – to the initially stereotyped "bandito" El Chucho, played by Volonte. Basically this shift in our sympathies, if it works, represents the film's main political statement. The film plays with our expectations that the white man with a hidden agenda will turn out to be the good guy. I think after he accomplishes his task we're supposed to begin hating him, but I for one found the portrayal of the General to be overly static, as if the director wanted to present him as a kind of god-like figure. So in the end I wouldn't have had a problem with El Chucho going to America with El Nino, which means in some respects the film just did not work for me. I thought Kinski's priest character was twisted and I couldn't get upset about what happened to him either. So while my sympathies definitely shifted towards El Chucho, I didn't buy into the revolution he was supposed to be rejoining and I wish he had simply decided to go off on his own path, with or without El Chucho, instead of returning to that tarnished idealism.The directing is solid but unexceptional, reaching its peak during the action sequences early in the film. I've heard the film compared to Leone's films or the best of Corbucci's Westerns. Although it bears some comparison to Leone's "Duck, You Sucker" and Corbucci's "The Mercenary", I personally didn't feel the action was quite as intense, nor the characters as interesting as in those films. For one thing, this film really only has one convincing or intriguing character, El Chucho. Kinski's priest "El Santo" is fun to watch but utterly without dimension, and Castel's Nino was neither fun to watch nor interesting. In contrast "The Mercenary" and "Duck, You Sucker" each have at least 2 compelling characters, and the relationship between the American and the Mexican isn't nearly as interesting as what Leone did with the Irishman and the Mexican in his film about the Mexican Revolution.Still, if you forget about perhaps superior Westerns or superior Spag-westerns that you've seen, and just take the movie on its own merits, it's at least a reasonably entertaining picture and has some interesting surprises if you don't sit and think about it too much while you're watching it.