“Fedra West” film review

 La Abadia de Berzano

By Santiago Aguilar

October 12, 2023

Original title: Fedra West / Io non perdono... Year: 1968 (Spain, Italy)

Director: Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent Production Manager: José Luis Jerez

Screenwriters: Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, Giovanni Simonelli, Víctor Aúz, Bautista Lacasa and José Luis Hernández Marcos

Photography: Fulvio Testi

Music: Piero Piccioni

 

Performers:

Norma Bengell (Fedra), Simón Andreu (Stuart), James Philbrook (Don Ramón), Emilio Gutiérrez Caba (José), María Silva (Isabel Álvarez), Alfonso Rojas (Julio Álvarez), Luis Induni (Fedra's brother), Maria Cumani (Mariathe mistress), Joaquín Solís, Antonio Padilla, Rafael Hernández, Álvaro de Luna, Alfonso de la Vega, Ángel Ortiz, Javier Maiza, Alicia Altabella

Synopsis: After a few years studying in a northern town, Stuart returns to his father's ranch on the border. He has remarried to a woman who only wanted to get out of misery with this marriage of interest and who feels an irresistible attraction for her stepson.

From “El sabor de la venganza” / “I tre spietati” / “Gunfight at High Noon” (1963), Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent starts a series of dramatic and even tragic stories in the mold of the western. In addition, the director will leave Eduardo Manzanos and will create his own brand, Centauro Films, which allows him to take on his own projects with total conviction. The result is three co-productions with Italy, in which we find the best of Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent as a director, and one in which Germany also participates, “Aventuras del Oeste” / “Sette ore di fuoco” / “Die letzte Kugel traf den Besten” / “Seven Hours of Gunfire” (1965), less convincing. After his time in adventure cinema with “El aventurero de Guaynas” / “Gringo, getta il fucile!” (1966), the filmmaker returns to familiar territory with “Fedra West” / “Io non perdono... Uccido” / “I Do Not Forgive... I Kill!” (1968). As its Spanish title indicates, it is a translation of the Greek myth. The large list of accreditetestimoniesers —Romero Marchent himself, Giovanni Simonelli, Víctor Aúz, Bautista Lacasa and José Luis Hernández Marcos—, together with the absence of direct testimonies, prevents us from holding anyone specifically responsible for the idea and its development.

Stripped of divine litter, the story, as it has come down to us in the version of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, tells how Theseus kidnaps the Cretan princess Phaedra and makes her his wife, but she desires Hippolytus, the son of Theseus. When Hippolytus rejects her, Phaedra commits suicide, accusing Hippolytus of having seduced her. Theseus then causes the sea to take revenge on his son, although in some versions he survives to tell his father the truth.

Previously, Manuel Mur Oti had made an adaptation in the key of the Mediterranean tragedy in 1956 and Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent assumes the commission of the Trébol Films Film Cooperative to take it to a terrain he knows well: that of the Mediterranean western. It's not too strange, considering the increasingly violent parent-child relationships he presents in his genre films. In addition, it places the action on the border of the United States with Mexico and once again uses this environment to generate conflicts. Stuart has been studying medicine in an American city. His father, the landowner Don Ramón, sent him there when he remarried Phaedra. Civilization has turned Stuart into a timid boy, who does not share with his father the tyrannical way in which he disposes of the lives of his employees; like the Jeff Walker of “The Taste of Revenge”, Stuart doesn't believe in taking the law into his own hands. The relations between the young man and his stepmother are heating up until they consummate their passion in a pre-Hispanic temple, on a stormy night. At the same time, Stuart realizes that his father's way of exercising justice is the only one possible in this wild territory and is ashamed of having betrayed him. He decides to leave the hacienda and return to the city to practice medicine. But Fedra cannot stand it and confesses to Don Ramón that if she married him it was only to get out of misery and that she hates him as much as she loves her son.

In Italy, where the classic reference is dispensed with – the female character is called Maia – the film is banned for children under fourteen for its "scenes of violence, ostentation of corpses and murders in general [...] in the context of a dramatic family conflict whose images and dialogues show a rocky relationship between stepmother and stepson"[1]. The subplots of the theft of horses and the brother of Phaedra, planted in the first act, will have an important role in the outcome. Here too, once again, women will have an active and decisive role in the development of the drama, even if the protagonists are men.

Phaedra West follows in the wake of tragedies in western disguise in which the landscape has a determining weight. If anything, the theme this time is apparently more ambitious due to the classical reference, although it is true that, Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent prefers to ignore at this point the references of Euripides and Lucio Anneo Séneca to recycle the iconography of the end of “Duel in the Sun” (King Vidor, 1946). The protagonist of the tragedy of Seneca committed suicide when she found that she had caused the death of Hippolytus, her stepson, by the will of Theseus, her husband. In the context of the western this is solved by shooting and not by divine intervention, of course. A dozen years earlier, Mur Oti had been forced to disguise Phaedra's suicide as an accident. Romero Marchent does not need such tricks because she will die in one of those violent, dry and forceful outcomes that she has already explored in “El sabor de la venganza” “Gunfight at High Noon” and “Antes llega la Muerte” / “I sette del Texas” / “Seven from Texas” (1964).

Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, a declared devotee of classicism, had already demonstrated his interest in formalism, even in films that were not conducive to it, such as in the treatment of shadows used in “El Coyote” (The Coyote) (1954). But in Phaedra West the scene of seduction in the temple stands out as an autonomous piece of assembly of attractions in the manner of the old Soviet school, bordering on mannerism. Fedra West thus becomes a bridge film between the classicism of her previous works and the ascription to the new codes of modernity that she will carry out in her next (and last) foray into the genre with “Condenados a vivir” / “Cut-Throats Nine” (1972).

 

[1] Report on censorship in Italy Taglia: https://www.italiataglia.it/