Tonight on Amazon: Gene Hackman in a large, far -known western that deserves a serious reassessment!

Provided you take a little time to immerse yourself in the meanders of the catalogs of streaming platforms, you can find beautiful nuggets, which algorithms unfortunately hardly go up. And, unless you know exactly what you are looking for, they are often condemned to stay at the bottom of the catalog … satisfaction, therefore, to find on a video premium a formidable western, far too little known, released in 1971: the scavengers.

History? Bandep and outlaw, Frank Calder takes off, in front of a school, Mélissa. Having seen her among children, he wrongly believes that she is a teacher, and he expects her to teach her to read, in the hope of escaping her condition. Bold and madness attempt, because Mélissa is married to a wealthy owner, Brandt Ruger.

This despicable individual despises his wife – that he had pleasure in torturing sexually and morally, – but, by cruelty, pride and revenge, he will nevertheless take the pretext of abduction to organize, with the support of the notables of the region, a hunting game …

Signed by Don Medford, an unknown craftsman from television, the scavengers is a baroque and very violent western, even bitter, featuring a formidable face to face between an absolutely perfect gene hackman in the role of the wealthy cruel owner at will, facing an Oliver Reed who plays the rustic and brutal proletarian bandit wishing to learn. Between the two, a sublime Candice Bergen, who already radiated a year earlier in a blue soldier, very large western who aroused a lively controversy because of his incredible violence.

Released 54 years ago, this large western escaped the X ranking!

If everything is not perfect in this perfectly sadistic man hunt orchestrated by Don Medford, it remains atypical and solid enough to largely deserve the look. If only because it almost never appears among the works openly cited in the fabulous filmography of the late Gene Hackman. We dare not imagine what these scavengers would have given under the auspices of a Sam Peckinpah, absolute master of the genre.