It's fair to say that no one connected to The Deadly Trackers had any love for the final product, a violent western that was given a quick release by Warner Brothers in late 1973. Initially, however, the project had held much promise. The original screenplay, entitled Riata, was written in the mid-1960s by maverick filmmaker Sam Fuller, who felt it was "one of the best scripts I ever wrote. It hit on all the themes I loved telling stories about. Father-son relationships. Outlaws and lawmen. Revenge and forgiveness. Fidelity and betrayal. Violence and peace. Love and rancor. Sacrifice and satisfaction."

Fuller's yarn concerned a Texas sheriff named Riata whose wife and son are killed by an outlaw, Brubeck. Riata chases Brubeck to Mexico, where a local lawman, Paco, is hot on Brubeck's tail himself. Riata and Paco team up, but Paco, sensing Riata's lust for revenge, makes Riata promise he'll capture Brubeck alive rather than kill him.

MGM agreed to produce the film, but that deal fell through and Warner Bros. picked the project up. After gently turning down Doors rocker Jim Morrison for the part of Riata, who strangely enough had expressed interest, Fuller cast Richard Harris in that part, with Mexican actor Alfonso Arau coming aboard as Paco. Warners insisted on Bo Hopkins as Brubeck, and Fuller rewrote the character to accommodate him. Meanwhile, a producer of the film went to France looking for an actress to play Brubeck's French lover; he returned with a woman who had no acting experience. (What she did have, said Fuller, were "oversized breasts and [a] willingness to sleep with whomever would help her 'career.'") Fuller and Richard Harris complained, but the studio insisted that production get underway, which it did, in Spain, in October 1972.

The shoot was disastrous. Film editor John Glen, who worked on this first incarnation of the film, recounted that Fuller was spending far too much time shooting and reshooting the same sequences, and that most of the footage was not cutting together properly. He finally took Fuller aside and showed him the footage; Fuller, he wrote, "was visibly shaken and became very emotional, apologizing profusely and trying to explain that he was suffering a lot of pressure." Soon thereafter, Warner Bros. demanded to know why the film had fallen so far behind schedule; Glen showed the footage to the studio executives, who promptly shut the entire production down after five weeks and $1 million. (In his memoir, Fuller blamed the shutdown on the inexperienced French actress, writing that her involvement and performance "triggered a violent reaction from the studio executives.")

Warner Bros. re-started the picture with a new script by Lukas Heller (The Dirty Dozen, 1967), a new director in television veteran Barry Shear, new producer Fouad Said, and the new title The Deadly Trackers. The crewmembers were all replaced as well. Richard Harris kept his role, which like the rest of the characters was re-named, but the other parts were re-cast, with Rod Taylor now on board as the villain and Al Lettieri as the Mexican lawman. Filming resumed in Mexico in May 1973.

The result kept Fuller's name on screen with a story credit, but Fuller declared "they completely lobotomized my story." Writer Lukas Heller wasn't pleased either, complaining in a Variety article that his characterizations had been drastically changed, that the film's ending contained twenty "arbitrary and ludicrous" pages that were written after he left the Mexican set, and that in the entire film, there was "not a single line in its entirety that I recognized as my own." He asked for his name to be removed, but the studio refused.

Composer Fred Steiner also asked for his name to be removed, and in that case, the studio agreed. He had composed a full, original score, but the film ended up using only bits and pieces of it, in scenes not originally intended by Steiner, with the bulk of the final music coming from Jerry Fielding's score from The Wild Bunch (1969)--without credit to Fielding. This led to a bill from the American Federation of Musicians and to even more unwanted negative publicity in the trades. When The Deadly Trackers was finally released, Variety deemed it "a b.o. turkey for Thanksgiving" and the Los Angeles Times called it "the worst film released this year."

By Jeremy Arnold

SOURCES:
Samuel Fuller, A Third Face
John Glen, For My Eyes Only
Stephen Vagg, Rod Taylor: An Aussie in Hollywood