Johnny Hamlet

Johnny Hamilton returns home from the Civil War after a dream in which his father's ghost tells him he was murdered and asks to be avenged. At the family ranch, Johnny finds his father dead and his mother Gertrude married to Claude, his late father's brother. Claude now controls the ranch and the estate, and a ruthless bandit is blamed for the killing, though suspicion points elsewhere as well. Enzo G. Castellari directed this Italian western, the earliest of the seven films of his listed here, working from a screenplay he wrote with Tito Carpi and Francesco Scardamaglia, with Ugo Guerra and Elio Scardamaglia producing. Andrea Giordana plays Johnny, alongside Horst Frank, Gilbert Roland, Ennio Girolami, Ignazio Spalla and Françoise Prévost.

Its ratings sit in modest territory: 6.4 out of 10 on IMDb from 728 votes and 6.5 out of 10 on TMDB from 24 votes, with the far larger IMDb sample suggesting a small but settled following rather than wide acclaim. The film runs 91 minutes.