The “garbage” 1967 movie so bad Roger Ebert walked out of it twice: “I was literally unable”
If you get paid to watch movies for a living, then the least you can do is stick around until the end. Roger Ebert tried, but there were still a few films he abandoned before the end credits, although there can’t have been too many he walked out of twice. However, there was at least one.
Usually, it took something depraved to convince Ebert that he’d be better off doing anything else with his time. Tinto Brass’ infamous Caligula ticked all of those boxes and more, with the critic so disgusted with what he’d witnessed that it remained seared in his memory as one of the worst things he’d ever seen.
On the odd occasion, though, it was simply a really, really, really bad picture. We’ve all been there, sitting through the opening moments of a feature that you can instantly tell is going to stink to high heaven, and the simplest option is to switch it off. It would be unprofessional of Ebert to do that every time he saw something awful, but he definitely had his breaking point.
He gave Stewart Wade’s Tru Loved an entire eight minutes before he fucked off, but he did at least write a review based on the eight minutes he’d seen, which wasn’t glowing, obviously, and then subsequently apologised for causing such a stir, even if it was the most publicity the forgettable flick had ever seen.
25 whole minutes elapsed before he packed his things and departed a showing of Cannibal Holocaust director Ruggero Deodato’s first flesh-eating foray, Ultimo mondo cannibale, but it was exponentially more rare for Ebert to pluck up the courage, swallow his pride, and have a second bite at the apple.
For whatever reason, a 1967 spaghetti western did it. Director Luigi Vanzi’s A Stranger in Town, which was released in some international markets as For a Dollar in the Teeth, to absolutely not capitalise on Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone’s seminal trilogy in any way, shape, or form, of course, was far from the worst thing he’d ever laid his eyes on.
It even got one star, so it was nowhere near being at the bottom of the barrel, based on Ebert’s own metrics. And yet, he went zero-for-two in trying to survive its brisk 86-minute running time. “I was literally unable to sit through it in two attempts,” he confessed. “There is a market for this sort of garbage. Why, I cannot say.”
We can say why, with great certainty: it was all Eastwood and Leone’s fault. The first of four westerns to star Tony Anthony as ‘The Stranger’, again, definitely not a rip-off of the ‘Man with No Name’, it was rubbish but successful at the box office, and Ebert’s review read more like an existential crisis than an assessment of its merits, or lack thereof, because he went into the third person.
“The movie critic lay in the dark, listening to the silkworms,” he pondered. “He could not sleep. He had behaved badly the night before. Very badly. He had not been able to sit through the movie. Only 20 minutes after the movie began, he had left. He had wanted to stay. But he could not bear to look into the swamp. He tried to drive the fear from his mind.” How did the second time go? He walked out of that one, too.
