Death Rides a Horse

Bill Meceita was a child when a gang attacked his family's ranch, leaving him alive but robbing him of everyone he had. Fifteen years on, now grown, he sets out to find the men responsible. Three of them have prospered, living as respectable citizens in the settled, increasingly civilized part of the West. The fourth, Ryan, went to prison after being framed by his former partners, and when he is released he is hunting them for the same reasons. Bill attaches himself to Ryan, hoping the older gunman will lead him to the others, and the two travel together through the harsher reaches of the frontier. Their arrangement is uneasy, since Ryan withholds what he knows about the massacre, and each man's purpose keeps pulling against the other's.

Giulio Petroni directed this 1967 Italian western, the third of the five features he made and the one that followed Always on Sunday. Luciano Vincenzoni wrote the screenplay, and the cast is led by Lee Van Cleef as Ryan and John Phillip Law as Bill, with Mario Brega, Luigi Pistilli, Anthony Dawson and José Torres in supporting roles. Fifty performers are credited.

Audience responses are consistently positive: the film holds 7 out of 10 on IMDb from around 11,000 votes and the same score on TMDB, though from a much smaller pool of 236. A critics' rating of 4.6 out of 10 from six reviews places professional opinion well below that of viewers.