Near the beginning of Antonio Margheriti’s And God Said to Cain, a man is suddenly told that he is free from a decade-long sentence in a murderously oppressive prison camp. The camera zooms in, a blinding light taking over his face. Freedom comes like a gift from God, but also a profound opacity. His life has been restored, but we sense that he can’t determine what that even means. He can only see manna from Heaven as an excuse to become Biblical Wrath, or to enact his own.

The man is Klaus Kinski, whose face was like an Expressionistic abyss, a tormented canvas that resonated inner anguish better than any before or since. When the light blinds this face, it also binds it. This is freedom overtaking a human void, but it is also the creation of a darkness incarnate, one laminated in divine vengeance. Kinski, a man who would soon create his most famous roles with Werner Herzog as, among others, an inhuman hell-spawn (Nosferatu) and a pitiful human who fashioned himself as an arbiter of the divine (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), conjures one of his cruelest cinematic creatures here.

In Aguirre, Kinski’s titular character framed himself as a benevolent light for those he understood to be in darkness, but he was really just obfuscating his own blindness, unable to see his idiom of natural mastery as a fallacious Western construct born in an imperialist fantasy. Margheriti’s Western offers no such pretense: Kinski is an angel of darkness, a movie creation born within the contours of the film and set loose by the film to send others to hell, but there is very little sense that anyone in this world is or could be “correct,” or even think of themselves as such.

Kinski plays Gary Hamilton, arrested a decade ago for a robbery committed by his ex-partner Acombar (Peter Carsten), who intentionally framed Hamilton for the crime. When Hamilton arrives back in town, he self-consciously refashions himself as a “a ghost returning,” a specter who takes up a kind of residence in a cave system underneath the town Acombar has turned into a fiefdom. Acombar plays a different sort of blinding God, a false idol, and Hamilton has no interest in offering a different one. His interest is in doing the devil’s work: using cunning, contingency, and tricksterism, he blots everything out like a gathering darkness.

Italian Westerns were always among the most willing to treat the American West as a transparently metaphysical contrast, a poesis of raw imagination with little tangible historical reality. Their interest was not in replacing the myth with a construction of “the real” but in mutating the mythology in increasingly exploratory, and often self-critical, dimensions. If the Wild West in American mythology is a canvas on which to enact escape into the future, Margheriti infuses it with a Gothic texture, where figurations of freedom are haunted by a not-so-dormant past. In exacting his revenge, Hamilton turns himself into a wraith undoing the town from below, a phantasm hunting the present from the caverns of the past. He takes up residence in a literal underground cave system, and in a particularly pregnant maneuver, And God Said to Cain allows him to peer up through the house of God, mocking the pretension of heaven in such a hellish place, and the idea that anything he will do throughout the film could meaningfully be called “redemptive.” 

Margheriti’s film also figures Hamilton as a distinctly cinematic revenant, though, a man-become-cinema. He seems able to appear anywhere, to evaporate at will and teleport wherever he needs to, to edit himself into any frame via a filmic underground to manipulate to his liking. When his antagonists demand to “stop him, once and for all,” Acombar is backed by a many-sided mirror, a perversion of the cinematic Western hero as a noble pillar of transparent certainty via a many-sided mirror that refracts him to himself, that makes him the victim of his own ego. When Acombar accidentally shoots his son Dick (Antonio Cantafora), who is sympathetic to Hamilton’s cause but not enough to turn on his father, and then willingly kills his wife Maria (Marcella Michelangeli), Hamilton has turned Acombar into a light so blind he can’t even see himself, molded his mirrored vision into an insular, paranoid prison. A prison that Hamilton, late in the film, will finally turn into a conduit for his own metastasizing body, more a force than a human. This is a vanity project turned into a horror hall of mirrors turned into a cinematic shattered glass.

When one character, then, jokingly tells another to be afraid of “raspberry syrup,” it actually becomes a clandestine cinematic mission statement: artifice has become a weapon. This congealed liquid, so easily a fake blood for a classic film, can hurt perhaps more-so than the real thing. Art, and Hamilton’s capacity to weaponize a chthonic art of subterfuge against Acombar’s pretensions of order, strategically mobilizes his artificial illusions – Hollywood’s illusions of grandeur and moral righteousness – to undo them. When a preacher, freshly shot for hiding Hamilton, decides with his last breath to play an organ from hell that resonates all over the extra-diegesis, echoing throughout the world of the cinema, he seems to be becoming-cinema himself, turning his moral vision into raw art. As Hamilton leaves at the film’s end, he says that there is enough gold beneath the wreckage he has wrought to “find more than enough to rebuild your town.” This is, of course, blood money, in every sense of the term. He leaves a cinematic gift and a moral void, the detritus of a cinematic ground-clearing. He leaves not as a force for good but as, simply, a force, an emanation from the desert designed to return unnatural edifices to the ashes from whence they came.

Score: 8/10