A PLACE CALLED GLORY is a European western, produced by Spanish and German companies, starring an American and a Frenchman, with Germans, Spaniards and Italians in the cast, under the direction of an American director working with a largely Spanish-Italian crew. It played theatrically in America in 1966 some months before Sergio Leone's groundbreaking A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, starring Clint Eastwood, became the first "spaghetti western" to get wide release in the U.S. (In New York City, A PLACE CALLED GLORY opened at a 42nd Street theater on a double bill with MINNESOTA CLAY, an earlier Italian western which starred Cameron Mitchell.)
As Euro-westerns go, A PLACE CALLED GLORY is fair to middling entertainment, offering a simple plot, two appealing heroes, some rough-edged villains, and just enough confrontations, shootouts and fistfights to keep the audience's attention until the cop-out ending. The plot comes in two distinct parts. The title town, Glory, sponsors an annual gunfight between two top gunslingers. A mysterious Frenchman (Pierre Brice) shows up to tell the Mayor that he has recently killed one of the scheduled gunfighters and now intends to take his place in the contest. The action then shifts to another town, Powder City, where the Frenchman goes to bide his time. He befriends one Clint Brenner (Lex Barker) without knowing that Clint is the other contestant in the gunfight. The two gunfighters are reluctantly enlisted in the cause of rancher Seth Grande, who has opened up his land to homesteaders and now faces the wrath of rival landowner Joe Vallone, who has hired killers and thugs to push the homesteaders away. Clint had once romanced Seth's daughter, Jade (Marianne Koch), who is now involved with Vallone. Eventually, Clint and the Frenchman take on Vallone and his gang. During all this time, the upcoming gunfight is never mentioned and seems to have been forgotten about entirely.
At about the 65-minute mark, the situation in Powder City is resolved and the action shifts back to Glory and the impending showdown, staged amidst thousands of bloodthirsty spectators. There is some clever staging on display in scenes of the townspeople scrambling for prime viewing spots as the two gunmen slowly stride down the town streets until they turn around the corners from which they'll face each other, presumably for the first time, building up to a contrived, unsatisfying ending. The fact that such a public gladiatorial event, a battle to the death, has absolutely no precedent in western history did not deter the filmmakers. In fact, the idea was later picked up by Hollywood for a western entitled A GUNFIGHT (1971), starring Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash.
The film gets by largely on the charms of its two rugged stars, Lex Barker and Pierre Brice. Curiously, Barker walks around for the entire film without a hat, something no other self-respecting western star ever did. Brice, clad in black, has handsome continental looks and bears a passing resemblance to Dean Martin. Barker, a former Hollywood Tarzan, had by this time become a top star in Germany and had co-starred with Brice in a popular series of German westerns based on the novels of Karl May in which Barker played pioneer Old Shatterhand while Brice played his Indian sidekick, Winnetou.
Among the other cast members of A PLACE CALLED GLORY are a few performers who were also in Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (which was filmed in 1964, but not released in the U.S. until 1967). Marianne Koch, who plays Jade here, was the female lead, Marisol, in Leone's film. Wolfgang Lukschy had played the patriarch, Baxter, in FISTFUL and plays the watchful bartender here. Another FISTFUL alumnus, Italian western regular Aldo Sambrell, is on hand as one of Vallone's ill-fated gang. Veteran Eurocult actors Jorge Rigaud and Gerard Tichy appear as the rival ranchers, Grande and Vallone, respectively.
