Minnesota Clay

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Minnesota Clay
Directed by	Sergio Corbucci
Written by	Adriano Bolzoni (screenplay)
Starring	Cameron Mitchell Fernando Sancho Ethel Rojo Georges Rivière Diana Martin
Music by	Piero Piccioni
Cinematography	Jose Fernandez Aguayo
Distributed by	Franco London Films
Release date(s)	1965
Running time	90 mins
Country	Italy
Language	Italian
Preceded by	Sons of the Leopard
Followed by	Django
IMDb profile

Minnesota Clay (aka Le Justicier du Minnesota) is a 1965 spaghetti western directed by Sergio Corbucci.

Tagline: The Sightless Gunman...Who Killed By Sound!

[edit] Plot

1883. Clay, a gunfighter going blind, escapes from Drunner Labor Camp determined to prove his innocence - he has been framed by Fox, now his successor as sheriff of Mesa Encantada. Fox has susbsequently been hired by the townspeople to protect them from Ortiz' bandits; instead, he now runs a protection racket. The town continues to be terrorized by Ortiz, who tries to hire Clay to kill Fox.

But Ortiz's mistress Estella turns him against Clay and enables Fox to ambush the pair of them. Fox kills Ortiz, plans to ditch Estella. She helps Clay escape and, despite losing his sight, manages to decimate Fox's gang. He kills Fox, and saves his own daughter, Nancy.

(Various VHS and DVD versions end with Clay lying apparently dead in the street, with Nancy at his side. This is a more pessimistic ending, in the style of Corbucci's later masterpieces, Django and The Great Silence. But in the Italian version, there is an afterword in which the Cavalry, having presumably dealt with any surviving malefactors, ride off, and Clay - now wearing glasses - bids goodbye to Nancy and her beau (who are to be wed). He then rides off.

Corbucci (who isn't afraid to play a longish scene in a master or to hold a wide shot of the town or a landscape for a couple of minutes) lets Clay reach the horizon, then cuts to a medium shot of Clay taking off his glasses, throwing them in the air, and shooting holes in both lenses. His sight, miraculously, has been completely restored.

(You'd think he might have kept them in case he had another attack, but instead he rides off toward the horizon once again, leaving his broken glasses in the bottom of the frame.)

[edit] Themes

Many of Corbucci's characteristic themes are here: physical disability (pretty mild in that all Clay suffers from for most of the film is intermittently blurry vision), violent mutilations (Clay shoots the earring - and earlobe - off an aggressive bandit; when he is down the gringo bandits stamp on his head), the director's enjoyment of the villainous gang, hanging out in their costumes, looking mean, the two warring outlaw factions both of which want to employ the hero (a la Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars). All are refined in Django, and re-used in Corbucci's great Westerns thereafter - where the hero is always crippled, doomed, and dedicated: as in this instance the near-blind and bloodstained Clay, asking for a gun to confront Fox and his five henchmen.