HOLY GHOST AND THE FIVE MAGNIFICENT SCOUNDRELS (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This spaghetti western-- the third of three by director Roberto Mauri, apparently all copying from this Gianni Garko vehicle-- just barely qualifies for uncanny status. But this time the uncanny phenomenality stems not from the hero; whatever "Spirito Santo" might have been in the first two films, here he's just a standard ingenious cowpoke, and his spiritual name connotes his general goodness-- though he's not really much more noble than a dozen other Sabata-types.

Santo (Vassili Karis, playing the role in all three Mauri movies) is called upon to stop an elusive arms dealer, The Loner, who goes about in an all-black costume. The guy hiring Santo-- I didn't catch his name-- compares the Loner to the Scarlet Pimpernel, though the Pimpernel wasn't in print until the stage play came out in 1903. Santo also has a meet-cute with the official's cousin Elizabeth (Daria Norman), but she has so little to do with the main story that halfway through I suspected she was the Loner, who's on the small side. Anyway, Santo thinks he needs to engage the services of the five "scoundrels" of the title, all of whom had odd but not memorable idiosyncracies (one thinks he's a pirate, the other a priest-- that sort of thing). I have to admit that because these characters burn up a lot of screen time, that makes the original Italian title much more appropriate than the current streaming title, "Gunmen and the Holy Ghost."

So Santo gets involved with various side-characters, all tedious, and only toward the end does the film work back around to preventing the Loner's scheme, which to hijack some gold. Santo and his goons kill the Loner, who is unmasked as the town sheriff. In a "big reveal" scene that FIVE does nothing to set up, Santo figures out that his boss is behind the Loner's activities, and that the sheriff was just a pawn. The boss is also jealous of Santo's attentions to Elizabeth, who, the boss also reveals, is not really his cousin, and that he plans to marry her. Providentially, even though the big boss has Santo dead to rights, Elizabeth shoots him dead. However, then it's revealed that Elizabeth was also in the big scheme, and she gets killed in a shootout with a deputy. So why, if they both knew they weren't cousins, did they perpetuate the fiction? Because the screenwriter was drunk or ill or stupid, I guess. I've seen more boring spaghettis than this one, though whenever the "scoundrels" were on the screen I stopped paying attention. Oh, one exception-- one guy's a conman who claims that he got jailed because he was selling a miracle cream that enlarged women's breasts-- but which had a deleterious effect if the cream got rubbed off on a man's chest.