The smile that kills...


Ace High (Italian: I quattro dell'Ave Maria, literally translated as "The Four of the Hail Mary") is an Italian spaghetti Western by Giuseppe Colizzi from 1968. The film is the second in a trilogy started with God Forgives... I Don't! and ended with Boot Hill.

In his investigation of narrative structures in Spaghetti Western films, Fridlund writes that all the Colizzi westerns present clever variations on several different kinds of partnerships encountered in other films inspired by For a Few Dollars More. Also, the pervading protagonists Cat and Hutch are differentiated by a set of physical and personal characteristics that reappear in the even more commercially successful They Call Me Trinity and Trinity Is Still My Name

There isn't much disagreement as to whether this spaghetti western is styled after the Director Sergio Leone's Clint Eastwood blockbuster, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Ace High, directed by Giuseppe Colizzi, and filmed in Almeria, Spain, is missing at least two ingredients that could possibly lift it up to its predecessor, and they're Eastwood and Colizzi. The plot fits: An outlaw Cat Stevens (Terence Hill) is saved from the noose and is then hunted by his saviors when he goes back to crime. But Stevens is on a hunt of his own, pursuing three roamers who'd sent him to prison years before.

Release Date: September 3, 1969

Distrib: Paramount