The Grand Duel

The Grand Duel (Italian: Il Grande duello), also known as Storm Rider and The Big Showdown, is a 1972 Italian-language spaghetti Western film directed by Giancarlo Santi, who had previously worked as Sergio Leone's assistant director on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West.

The film stars Lee Van Cleef as a sheriff who seeks justice for a man accused of murder.

Wermeer is holed up in Gila Bend by a swarm of bounty killers, who want his $3,000 reward, posted by Saxon's three sons David, Eli and Adam.

Wermeer makes the bounty hunters follow his horse, then hitches a ride with the stagecoach, where he finds Clayton among the passengers.

When the group stay the night at Silver Bells, Wermeer goes for a shotgun hanging on the wall, but Clayton stops him.

Clayton finds them beating and questioning Wermeer in a waterfall, asking where the silver of his father is and offering to let him go if he tells.

David Saxon, the oldest of the brothers and the one responsible of running the town, orders Adam to stop the people heading to the silver mine.

Wermeer replies that the Saxons made the offer because "dead people don't need a leader", and reveals the wagon in which he carries the bodies of those killed by Adam.

In his investigation of narrative structures in Spaghetti Western films, Fridlund writes that the relationship between Wermeer and Clayton before their arrival to Saxon City follows the stories of the (commercially more successful) Spaghetti Western films Death Rides a Horse and Day of Anger, about the relationship between an older gunfighter and a younger protagonist, and he further traces the root of this type of plot to the play between the younger and the older bounty killer in For a Few Dollars More.

[2] The film's music was composed by future Academy Award winner Luis Enríquez Bacalov.

Wild East released this alongside Beyond the Law under its American title, The Grand Duel, on an out-of-print limited edition R0 NTSC DVD in 2005.

In 2013 Blue Underground re-released the film, again under its American title, in a newly transferred and fully restored R0 NTSC DVD.

It was later released on Blu-ray by Mill Creek Entertainment as a double-feature with Keoma utilizing the same restored print.