When Satana Grabs Rafael Romero's Colt [Manos Torpes] Walk

Nights of the Movie Hunter

By Fatum

5/6/2012

As was the case for Tire, Django, tire, the French title of Manos torpes (i.e., the clumsy hands) is most fanciful since there is not a shadow of a Sa(r)tana that holds. Bad jokes aside, Rafael Romero Marchent's film turns out to be an excellent discovery.

The owner of these famous left hands is called Peter. A charming young man, well-made and very kind, Peter is a handyman on a ranch lost in the middle of nowhere and knows how to talk to the ears of hair as well as melt the coveted local maiden, Dorothy (the spicy Pilar Velázquez). This shy man is occasionally called little names when he says in front of a few jealous macho people that he doesn't understand the need to carry a weapon.

[The young Peter Lee Lawrence in “When Satan Grips the Colt” by Rafael Romero Marchent]

Peter has a dark secret — when he was a kid, his father was shot dead in front of his eyes by a bounty hunter — that gives him nightmares. Every night, in torrential rain, a huge man dressed entirely in black asks him if he remembers what he did last summer, shooting him in the head without warning. Like a foretaste of a future that has been mapped out.

How Peter ended up in this poor corner, no one knows. But he doesn't have a chance to marry his beloved. Because the owner of the place does not intend to part with such a good card that can bring him a lot of money. In other words, the eternal irrigation of his land, dependent on the mood of the owner of the surrounding estates, the very stinking Johnny (Manuel de Blas, perfect in cynical unctuousness), the evil offspring of his now deceased best friend. That's good. Johnny, who doesn't carry weapons — so as not to distort his pretty clothes — but who is not insulted unless he is looking for trouble with his henchmen, seeks at all costs to marry the lady who resists him strongly.

Patatras! When the cooing is discovered, Peter is whipped (with his shirt), then fired without compensation, and the parents are very happy and make their virginal child understand that he will have to pay with his person by marrying the unprincipled rascal. Love being the strongest — and the girls very stubborn — here are our lovebirds who run away while swearing fidelity to each other and the father cursing their union because Johnny the plumber has turned off the water in retaliation. Peter's second flogging (without a shirt this time, he will learn from it) who would certainly end up getting a taste for punishment if he were not abandoned in the desert to die. While the deceitful Johnny waits for payment in kind from the beautiful Dorothy whom the parents do not hesitate for a second to sacrifice on the altar of their survival.

When you've been in the desert for too long, you don't ask yourself anything anymore, you just hallucinate, and loudly. And Peter is no exception. Except that the man in black who suddenly stands in front of him is neither a nightmare — although he takes his job a little too much to heart — nor a chimera. But a bounty hunter named Latimore (the brilliant Alberto de Mendoza, who died last December and had a prolific career in Spain and Italy, where he played a great supporting role — often treacherously — with Lucio Fulci and Sergio Martino) on the trail of four villains from the families, including the ineffable Aldo Sambrell which, as usual, will not survive the first reel and will be ignoble until death, since the facetious Latimore will tie his body to that of one of his accomplices, very much alive, whom he will abandon to his fate.

Developing a strange affection for the naïve boy, Latimore — who may or may not have shot his father — sends him to a summer camp in a modest monastery to be treated body and soul by Chang, a strange teacher...

There is a lot of talk about hands, skill and disaster in Manos torpes. Dorothy's father lost a fortune in poker on a bad hand. If Peter is good at training horses, he will have to learn to strengthen his paluches before using a weapon (to do himself justice). Finally, a rare (voluntary) humorous contribution of the film, a bar pillar feeds his cirrhosis by dexterously stealing his empty glasses for full ones that he tirelessly unlocks.

Notwithstanding, a story about the loss of illusions and the corruption of innocents, Manos torpes is a strange hybrid of a trying melodrama pure and hard (after offering herself in exchange for a watering hole, poor Dorothy becomes a prostitute), a western shrouded in perversity (one punishes with impunity at ease), a tale of initiation (the episode Kung Fu from which Peter "the little beetle" will emerge dressed as an undertaker — giggles guaranteed — just like his "savior" who once came to intern at Chang) and flirts happily with fantasy, even zombie movies, when Aldo and his cretins of acolytes take control of a ghost town ravaged by the plague, where Latimore (Terminator?) — presented as invincible — will not hesitate to come and flush them out.

The screenplay by Santiago Moncada perfectly follows the winding roads it takes and the acting is excellent (at least that's what we can judge, since — as with Bruno Corbucci's film — the print presented is in French and has suffered the ravages of time, showing here and there a few snags and a certain fading of colors).

We have often seen these rough-hewn learn to become gunslingers, but there is a deliberately funereal atmosphere in this story and Peter Lee Lawrence strolls throughout the film a sad air of perpetual existential anguish as if, cursed from birth, he could not escape his cruel fate. Vengeance is his,

Certainly, but the abrupt and implacably dark end testifies to a frenzied nihilism. History repeats itself tirelessly and there is no salvation for pure souls condemned to pay for the sins of their fathers.

When Satana Grabs the Colt/Manos Torpes by Rafael Romero Marchent_1970

with Peter Lee Lawrence, Alberto De Mendoza, Pilar Velázquez, Antonio Pica, Manuel de Blas, Antonio Casas, Aldo Sambrell, Luis Induni and Frank Braña.