Word: villainized
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Recently, comic westerns have assumed that Cat Ballon had nine lives. Waterhole #3 offers ample evidence that it did not. This latest imitative incarnation lacks Lee Marvin and much else besides. An arguably lovable villain (James Coburn) plugs an enemy with a long-distance rifle, then takes from the corpse a map indicating a cache of glommed Government gold. Before setting out on the treasure hunt, he finds time to rape the local sheriff's daughter. When confronted by the indignant father, he claims roguishly that the murder was self-defense, the rape merely "assault with a friendly weapon...
...being reclaimed from "sour" natural-gas pools in Canada and in France. Elcor Chemical Corp. of Midland, Texas, has hopes of gleaning sulfur from gypsum. And the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Monsanto Co. and others are hard at work to find ways of turning the old fire-and-brimstone villain into a new hero. Those pollutants that belch forth from factory smokestacks can, they insist, be scrubbed to yield a surprising amount of salable sulfur...
...changed his name to Bob Robertson and imported Clint Eastwood, a lanky, rawboned drover on TV's Rawhide. Eastwood's image was too clean-cut for an antihero, so Leone added the necessary smudges-slouch hat, black cheroot, stubble beard and a ratty-looking scrape. For the villain's role, he hired veteran horse-opera heavy Lee Van Cleef, and the shooting commenced...
...sooner have the lone stranger and his faithful Indian companion settled in than the villain appears. He is a pop-eyed homesteader (Nigel Green) who fears that the wild herd will spread disease among his prize cows. Accordingly, he releases Mills's new-found herds from their corrals. O'Brian fights back, and gets moral support from Adrienne Corri, a willowy nurse devoted, as all nurses in this kind of film, to everything cute and cuddly-baby animals, native children and the hero...
...Edie, and Herschel Bernardi, as Lieut. Jacoby, are gone, and by the finale, Mother's joint has become a discotheque. But the music is still by Mancini, and Craig Stevens retains his dry-ice delivery and his Gary Grant composure even in this preposterously plotted pursuit of a villain who killed one of Gunn's gangster friends...