Plot
1883. Clay, a gunfighter going blind, escapes from Drunner Labor Camp determined to prove his innocence - he has been framed by Fox, now his successor as sheriff of Mesa Encantada. Fox has susbsequently been hired by the townspeople to protect them from Ortiz' bandits; instead, he now runs a protection racket. The town continues to be terrorized by Ortiz, who tries to hire Clay to kill Fox.
But Ortiz's mistress Estella turns him against Clay and enables Fox to ambush the pair of them. Fox kills Ortiz, plans to ditch Estella. She helps Clay escape and, despite losing his sight, manages to decimate Fox's gang. He kills Fox, and saves his own daughter, Nancy.
(Various VHS and DVD versions end with Clay lying apparently dead in the street, with Nancy at his side. This is a more pessimistic ending, in the style of Corbucci's later masterpieces, Django and The Great Silence. But in the Italian version, there is an afterword in which the Cavalry, having presumably dealt with any surviving malefactors, ride off, and Clay - now wearing glasses - bids goodbye to Nancy and her beau (who are to be wed). He then rides off.
Corbucci lets Clay reach the horizon, then cuts to a medium shot of Clay taking off his glasses, throwing them in the air, and shooting holes in both lenses. His sight, miraculously, has been completely restored.
Read more about this topic: Minnesota Clay
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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