God’s Gun

• Also known as Diamante Lobo
• Directed by Gianfranco Parolini credited as Frank Kramer (LOL!)
• March 1977 (US)

A priest and then his twin brother defend a small Western town from a vicious outlaw gang.

Lee Van Cleef and Jack Palance together in a Western should be a kind of strange magic so that alone got me to watch. I was also curious since it was Lee Van Cleef’s next-to-last Western and chronologically the last Western he made during his lifetime. After he died I do not know how many Westerns he made. How did he cap off that part of his career?

Van Cleef heads the film first as local priest Father John, then as his semi-reformed brother Lewis. With a name like God’s Gun, I expected the story to be all about a priest with a gunslinger past which in hindsight would have worked much better than twins and neither getting much character development. We have two characters played by the same guy with no strong difference between the pair making the need for a twin brother who is exactly the same almost irrelevant. It is meant as plot twist but once Father John shows he can take takedown several outlaws (essentially the whole cast of baddies), there is nowhere else for the Lewis character to go in an awesome way.

As a person, Van Cleef was never a bulky guy, but the costuming choices of the film make him look like a stick figure. He still had the ‘go f-yourself’ look and badass delivery but believing him as a tough guy is hard when he disappears in the darkness of the doorway behind him or when mildly blocked by any object or character. The then teen heartthrob (and costar) Leif Garrett as the young Johnny has a bigger build!

I’m not sure why Lewis decides to impersonate his dead brother. At least when it comes to convincing/tricking the bad guys. Were they superstitious? Was it to make them believe holy vengeance was coming? Was it to justify the title?

Jack Palance plays outlaw gang leader Sam Clayton. There was something about Jack Palance’s delivery in just about everything he ever did, even hosting Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, where he spoke like he was giving a big middle finger with every word. It made for a near perfect villain in whatever he did. Combine that with an expressive face and you could get a bit of hypnotic evil. Yet the voice, like Van Cleef’s, is not entirely his if his at all.

For reasons that look like they had to do with actors running away from postproduction over the poor quality of the product, the voices of Lee Van Cleef, Jack Palance, and Richard Boone as a sheriff who disappears from the movie because Boone left the movie were all dubbed by other actors. They did a better-than-most job but you cannot miss that the voices never sound quite right or miss moving with the lips.

Sam Clayton is captured by Father John and escapes after which he promptly kills the priest and takes over the town which is home to his favorite prostitute Jenny (Sybil Danning) who is Johnny’s mother. I found it very coincidental that Johnny is Sam’s son. Worse, it did nothing to help or hurt the story. It’s not an exciting twist and it’s nothing that takes you out of things. It just created total indifference.

This was a Golan-Globus production shot in Israel with direction by an Italian director that appears to have known little about the Spaghetti Western or directing. Golan-Globus was never a place of high quality but were better than this. Production values are extremely cut-rate by even their standards. The story is ridiculous (not in a good way) and the direction is awkward. It is easy to believe Van Cleef as a gunfighter but so much harder as a priest though that does not matter since the switch affects nothing really in the story.

With a title like God’s Gun you would think the movie is about the priest going back to his gun fighting ways or even have some religious themes in it. Possibly a story from the Bible re-told as a Western. This is none of that. It’s a cool title certainly but a title that has no connection at all to the story or the movie.

Despite the presence of Lee Van Cleef and Palance, God’s Gun was a bit of a disappointment that failed to entertain.