played in Leone’s film by Lee Van Cleef, Clint Eastwood, and Eli Wallach—all three men pooling their resources, none too willingly, to reach a prom- ised fortune in gold buried in a cem- etery, each of them gaining (and abus- ing) the upper hand at least once, and hoping to ultimately cut the other two out of their shares. The Reverend, a Russian socialist (who turns out to be the greediest capitalist of them all) whose weapon of choice is dynamite, suggests an attentive familiarity with Leone’s then-current project, Giù la testa/A Fistful of Dynamite, which fea- tured James Coburn as a dynamite- chucking Marxist. Leone’s film was si- multaneously in production at Cinecittà but not released until October 29, 1971—more than a year after Roy Colt’s premiere. Therefore, some of the humor in Bava’s film is surprisingly pre- scient, even when it’s not particularly funny. To make a comedy rooted in one’s private feelings can be interpreted as yet another instance, conscious or unconscious, of Bava trying to sabo- tage his own career. Any viewer com- ing to Roy Colt & Winchester Jack thinking that they will see an ordi- nary Western, or even a comic West- ern in the style of the later Trinity films, has another think coming. This kind of farce involves a deliberate el- ement of grotesquerie, resulting in sometimes overbearing exaggerations of nature, overstated action and dis- torted performances that are all too easy to interpret unfavorably. Roy Colt contains more artless shots than any other Bava film, but for an artist of Bava’s caliber, we must assume this was a deliberate choice, and perhaps a statement in itself about the look of Leone’s Westerns, which took a more neorealistic approach than did Holly- wood Westerns, arriving at a style that was hot and dusty and as “natural” as manure. In the manner of a George Grosz sketch, Roy Colt exaggerates this aspect of Leone’s films and takes that exaggeration way over the top. A perfect example of this approach is a scene involving the Reverend, whose trembling face and beaded brow are photographed with a wide-angle lens (a modern device that no director