Producer: Jacques Bar, Ernesto Enr'quez (associate producer) Most of his career was spent in France where he specialized in light comedies ( The Cow and I, 1959) and crime dramas like The Sicilian Clan (1969) with Alain Delon and The Night Caller (1975) starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. For director Henri Verneuil, a native of Turkey whose birth name was Achod Malakian, Guns For San Sebastian was a rare foray into the spaghetti Western genre. He goes on to supervise the building of a dam and helps the villagers acquire guns to fight off marauding Indians from the hinterlands.īased on the novel A Wall for San Sebastian by William Barby Faherty, this film owes a great debt to movies like The Seven Samurai (1954) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) in its story of an outlaw coming to the defense of a village. Mistaken for a real priest by Teclo (Charles Bronson), a local half-breed, Quinn is reluctantly set up as the town padre by the local villagers. Father Joseph is soon killed by a sniper and Alastray disguises himself as a monk to evade detection. Anthony Quinn plays Alastray, a rebel in l746 Mexico, on the run across the countryside when he's taken in by Father Joseph (Sam Jaffe). The so-called spaghetti Western was in full swing by l968, and Guns For San Sebastian (1968), a French/Spanish/Mexican production, is a sterling example of the genre. Then, when an escort of government troops arrives with a real priest for San Sebastián, the grateful villagers help Alastray and Kinita escape. After Alastray has killed Teclo in hand-to-hand combat, Kinita convinces him that he must say mass for the peasants. When the Indians finally raid the village, they are routed by the bravely defiant peasants and Alastray's dynamiting of the dam.
Alastray helps the peasants build a dam to ensure irrigation for their crops and, knowing the Yaquis will attack again, uses his influence with the governor's wife, Felicia, who was once Alastray's mistress, to obtain guns and ammunition.
Though aware that Alastray is not a priest, a village girl, Kinita, saves him from being hanged and persuades him to become the spiritual leader of the village. Teclo, a halfbreed who rides for the Yaquis, demands that the villagers give up their Christian faith or risk further Indian attacks.
After Father Joseph has been killed by a bandit, the returning villagers mistake Alastray for a priest. Disguised in a friar's robes, Alastray joins Father Joseph in the long desert trek at the end of which they find the village deserted following a raid by marauding Yaqui Indians. When Father Joseph refuses to turn Alastray over to the authorities, the old priest is sent to the remote village of San Sebastián as punishment. In mid-18th-century Mexico, rebel bandit León Alastray escapes from government troops by taking sanctuary in an old Franciscan church.
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