SHALAKO - Bond & BB Go West
Shalako - Bond & BB Go West S halako was a change of pace for Sean '007' Connery; he was tired of being James Bond and had always been a fan of westerns, so when he was offered a part in a Louis L’Amour adaptation, he quickly said yes. For the producers, Connery was a ‘big fish’, so it instantly became ‘his movie’: He received over $1 million out of the $5 million budget and brought two Bond collaborators with him, director of photography Ted Moore and stunt coordinator Bob Simmons. Honor Blackman also had a history in the Bond franchise: she had played the infamous Pussy Galore in Goldfinger . The film was shot in the Almeria surroundings, the homeland of the spaghetti westerns, but doesn’t look or feel like any of them. I saw the film in cinema in 1968, when I was still a kid, so it must have had a '14 rating', which is a bit surprising given the level of violence: most spaghetti western almost automatically got an '18 rating', while Shalako is more v...
