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| If Pachuco's so squat, why does he look like Arturo de Cordova here? |
Manco is chasing after the two-bit outlaw Froggy Benson when he's basically run over by a hydrogen balloon and Benson makes off with his horse and gun.
The accident was caused by Professor Samson Garff, an aeoronaut and Lee Van Cleef lookalike, with Saginaw Kirp's "tawny, leonine eyes", who is Manco's only hope of recovering his possessions.
Among Garff's crew are Sally Simmons, the acrobat, and the dwarf Jigger. This circus troupe is different to the one in A Coffin Full of Dollars. A bit smaller and more ragtag. The blurb paints them as double-dealers and "treacherous" but they seem like okay people.
Froggy Benson, described as being "like one of nature's bad jokes", had worked under the bandit chief Pachuco, and had earned a large price on his head. He's the subject of a prophecy envisioned by an old Apache medicine man, Buffalo Going Away, and gets a shirt from him which they all believe to be magical but of course ultimately it's just a dud. And it doesn't help that Buffalo Going Away repeatedly overestimates Benson's power. When we see Benson kill someone, it is a literal misfire.
Meanwhile Pachuco is in prison waiting to be hanged, but escapes from the vast prison in a vividly written, death-defying stunt. Garff's balloon knocks him off the outer wall into the prison courtyard, but ends up on the right side of the wall when he clings to the grapnel rope. So Pachuco escapes not only with strength, but with luck, too.
To paraphrase Manco, Pachuco "is only half as smart as he thinks, but twice as smart as he talks and acts". His bloody murder of his cellmate shows him to be as vicious as El Indio from a Few Dollars More, but he's more comically impetuous.
Now free from prison, the outlaw makes his way to the hidden gold stash only he knows about.
Like Apachito and Bandera, Pachuco is described as "squat", "swarthy", "pudgy", "fat", etc, and little else. Neither he nor his other counterparts are given important facial details. Are their foreheads prominent or not? What are the shapes of their noses, or their lips? Pachuco's only other physical distinction is that he's shirtless for most of the story (which begs the question as to how he could have hidden a makeshift knife in his sleeve if he doesn't wear a shirt). Even though his name potentially means "flashily dressed".
Pachuco appears to be very little in the story, but he is the best written between himself, Apachito and Bandera, even though ultimately the three are virtually indistinguishable and interchangeable. The three are all classic bandidos out of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Nevertheless, Pachuco has the potential to be among the revisionist character types of the mid-Sixties onwards.
I've learned from this book that Manco can speak perfect Apache. That would have solved a problem or two in A Dollar to Die For (which was by a different author, but still.)
Speaking of Manco, he has the same problems as before. He talks too much and even raises his voice a couple of times. Talking that much had gotten him into trouble in A Coffin Full of Dollars and he would have known that.
I heard that when he got the script for A Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood crossed out most of his lines and told Leone that it was a better idea if he communicated through his expressions rather than through dialogue, and it worked.
Manco's constant yapping reminds me less of Clint Eastwood, and more of John Wayne. It's not his voice I want to be hearing when I'm reading these, it's Eastwood's.
True, Eastwood is just as dogmatic and self-righteous these days but that's beside the point.
Manco not only raises his voice this time around, he yells. That's something I can't imagine. His outburst is written as such "MY GUN AND MY HORSE!"
Professor Garff, like Pachuco, is virtually indistinguishable from his counterparts. He has a very similar personality, too: gruff, tough and intelligent. Like Shadrach, he is a bounty hunter, and like Kirp, he has had a past with the respective bandido of the novel; While Kirp knew Bandera from the Civil War, Garff made a deal to break Pachuco out of prison so he could fly over and get the gold from the bandit's hideaway. But the twist is, Garff wants the bounty on Pachuco as well as the gold because he feels like he needs to be rewarded by the Mexican government.
So, since they're both after the same thing, Manco and Garff are forced to work together, inevitably.
Sally Simmons is a pretty cool character. She's like all the Deever women in A Coffin Full of Dollars put together. Sure, she makes food and coffee for the men and sort of needs to be saved by Garff and Manco at one point, she does dare to shove Pachuco off his horse with her strong gymnast's arms (that's what I meant by "sort of") and escape from the outlaws, as well as save herself from Pachuco when he tries to abduct her a second time. She is not a groundbreaking character by today's standards but she is a very capable woman for the time the book was written.
She also has quite a standard love-hate relationship with Garff, who found her when she was homeless and hungry, and in the end decides to marry him. Manco secretly disapproves and decides she deserves someone better (not him, either, although his manners have been better around women ever since he put on that poncho.)
Until recently I thought that in the entire Dollars franchise, including novels, the only bandido whose life Manco/ Joe/ Blondie spared was Tuco Ramirez in both The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and A Dollar to Die For. There was another- Pachuco, whom the bounty hunter wanted to keep alive so he could lead him to his hidden gold stash. However, the situation is complicated when Apaches come after the outlaws, and the posse hunting Pachuco arrives, too. In the end, Manco could not protect Pachuco, who was killed by a stray bullet as he gunned down Froggy Benson.
So in the end the whole journey was pretty much pointless, just like both endings of The Good, the Bad, the Weird . In the International ending, Tae-goo is in the Pachuco role, but in the Korean ending, he's in the Manco role, and it wouldn't be the last time; In GBW 's Korean ending, Tae-goo pulled the same trick that Joe did in A Fistful of Dollars, and like Manco in this book who doesn't get the gold but collects the bounties on Pachuco and his lieutentant Much-Belly, though he never got the treasure, Tae-goo was able to escape with the diamonds that Chang-yi With him.
The novel goes along quickly, despite the padding of banter between Garff and Manco, and has some pretty good action scenes in it.
The story is basically just men's adventure, but it's fun.
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