Cemetery Without Crosses

Robert Hossein directs and stars as a solitary gunman who pulls on a single black glove before every job, hired by a widow (Michele Mercier) to avenge her husband's lynching, in a revenge that poisons everyone who touches it. It is slower and stranger than its Italian cousins, closer to a funeral than a shootout, scored by the director's own father Andre and dedicated to Sergio Leone, who is said to have staged one dinner scene himself. The ghost-town setting is nearly empty, the violence ritualised, the mood pure elegy. Not much fun, and not trying to be. One of the most beautiful and least seen westerns of the whole cycle.