Cowboys & Indians
By Joe Leydon
September 5, 2025
Raquel Welch appeared in only three big-screen westerns during her decades-long career. But she rode tall in each of them. Indeed, when she earned her spurs in Bandolero! just two years after her breakthrough performance in Fantastic Voyage (1966), no less a Hollywood veteran than James Stewart was suitably impressed: “I think she’s going to stack up all right,” he predicted of his bold and beautiful costar. He was right.
Welch went on to make to so called Spaghetti or Euro-westerns:
100 Rifles (1969)
The Pitch: Arizona lawman Lyedecker (Jim Brown) crosses the Tex-Mex border in 1912 to arrest roguish Yaqui Joe (Burt Reynolds) for bank robbery, only to get caught in the crossfire between forces led by the sadistic General Verdugo (Fernando Lamas) and downtrodden peasants who bought the weapons of the title with loot from Yaqui Joe’s heist. Welch plays Sarita, a Yaqui Indian revolutionary who knows what boys like.
The Rundown: Welch relies upon a dubious Mexican accent more than she did in Bandolero! — and plays into her sex symbol image much more, most notably when Sarita distracts an entire trainload of Verdugo’s troops by taking a shower under a water tower. (Mind you, she’s not naked — but, well, wet clothes do tend to cling.) Even so, she remains persuasively formidable when push comes to shove, especially during often-violent battle scenes where director Tom Gries (Will Penny, Breakheart Pass) has Sarita shooting just as straight as her male costars. And while she and Brown reportedly did not get along well off-camera during production, you’d never guess that from their steamy close encounter in a lovemaking scene that was borderline scandalous back in the day.
The Pitch: After she is raped and her husband is killed by three loutish outlaws (Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, Strother Martin), frontierswoman Hannie Caulder prepares to mete out rough justice with training and armaments from a notorious bounty hunter (Robert Culp), a legendary gunsmith (Christopher Lee), and a mysterious man in black (unbilled Stephen Boyd).
The Rundown: It may have opened to mixed reviews
and unimpressive box-office numbers, but this spaghetti western-flavored
shoot-’em-up from director Burt Kennedy (The War Wagon, Support Your Local
Sheriff!) has developed a loyal cult following over the years with its
self-assured mashup of revenge melodrama, darkly comical bickering — perfectly
cast as squabbling siblings, Borgnine, Elam, and Martin rank among the most
cantankerously inept bandits in movie history — and the slow-burning,
arrestingly understated student-mentor relationship between Welch as a woman
determined to turn herself into a relentless avenger and Culp as the man who
worries whether she’s too good a person to be as bad as she wants to be.
Quentin Tarantino has claimed that Hannie Caulder in general and Welch’s Hannie
in particular were major inspirations for his Kill Bill films. No doubt.
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