
User Score
3 votes
“He Was Number One - THE BEST...And He Died That Way!”
Eight years in the making, Boetticher’s portrait of his longtime friend, the famous bullfighter Carlos Arruza, was a labor of love that the renowned director of westerns pursued despite contending with illnesses, bankruptcy, jail time, and lucrative offers from Hollywood. The result is an astonishing work of poetry, immediacy, and violence that fearlessly wrestles with the filmmaker’s own ambivalence about the titular matador’s triumphs prior to his death by automobile accident at the age of 46.
Director
Writer
Status
Released
Original Language
EN

The movie takes place in four periods: the first, a group of female Christians are raped and crucified in 18th century Japan. The second deals with a man who beats his cheating wife and her lover. The third, is set in WW2 where inquisition soldiers torture, rape and abuse female traitors, and the fourth story deals with soldiers raping and abusing suspected female spies.

Shadrach Jones, ex-Texas State Policeman, has the ruthless determination to find and kill the man who shot his brother in the back and stole the money with which he was to buy a ranch for the two of them. At the saloon-hotel run by Adelaide, Shadrach is convinced that one of the cowhands on the Captain McKellar cattle drive to Montana is his man. He takes the job of trail-herd boss to find the killer. McKellar preaches to Jones that he should forget revenge and let the law of retribution take care of the killer. Shadrach's hard driving of the men and his hunt for the killer makes him bitterly hated, and his retribution quest ends in a manner he did not anticipated.