Its central character is so lacking in any redeeming qualities that it is impossible to connect with him on any level. John il Bastardo suffers from a major problem. A summary sentence which could be used for the film as a whole.
His final come uppance is inevitable if a little bizarre and it appears obvious that the writers were struggling to shoe horn in the stone statue element that is central to the traditional denouement to the tale. Along the way, he deflowers a couple of Mormon lasses, a daliance which has lasting repercussions as their hired assassin Danite (Gordon Mitchell) pursues him as a result, and generally behaves in an arrogant and abhorent manner at every turn. A bastard in both senses of the word, it turns out John is the illegitimate son of Don Diego Tenorio (Claudio Gora), a wealthy Mexican landownwer and he sets out on a journey south of the border intending to usurp his half brother Francisco (Claudio Camaso) and take possession of his inheritance.
In Crispino's western adaptation, Juan (John Richardson), or in this case John, is given a tortured past which provides him with both a source for the bitterness he feels towards society and a revenge motif to hang some of his nastiness on. In particular it highlighted the ephemeral nature of the honour code which dominated 'polite' society in Spain at this time and the character of Don Juan, with his refusal to acknowledge the value of anything beyond his own base desires and pleasures, was used both as an illumination of an amoral society and its sacrificial scapegoat paying for the sins he committed openly but which others were also guilty of in a more complicit sense. Tirso was a priest as well as a playwright and his play was both a morality tale and an expose of the hypocrisy in contemporary Spanish society. The most famous versions are probably Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni, and Byron's epic poem but the story was first told by the Spanish 17th century dramatist, Tirso de Molina, in his play El Burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville), and it is around this story that all others (including John il Bastardo) are based.
So it is no surprise that someone should adapt Don Juan, the quintessential anti hero tale into a western setting and John il Bastardo is the result.ĭon Juan has become a character as synonomous with incorrigable philandering as Casanova and his story has been told and retold for generations. These classic tales provided ready made dramas and heroes to a genre with a voracious appetite for new material. There were a number of reworkings of classic literature and mythology during the Italian Western cycle, from Odysseus to Orestes to Hamlet.
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