One of the most unusual films in this collection, Victor Iliu’s La ‘Moara cu noroc’ (US: The Mill of Good Luck) begins with men on horseback against the distant Transylvanian sun and proceeds to deliver countless features of the American western genre, including a 19th-century period setting. Like most westerns, by the end the moral lesson is clear, liberating, and often Christian in origin (in this case, greed is a corrupting force, not unexpected from a production under communist rule), but, unlike most westerns, the film combines gritty realism with at times astonishing atmospherics (the placement of shadows, the use of deep focus). The horseback visitors are a gang of bandits led by Lica Samadaul (Geo Barton) who have come to extort money from new innkeeper Ghita (Constantin Codrescu), who’s recently arrived in town with his beautiful wife Ana (Ioana Bulca). The possibility of enormous profits — not to mention Lica’s intimidating manner — compels Ghita to join forces with the gang but in the process lose his self-respect, not to mention his wife, who gives in to Lica’s sexual advances with her husband’s permission. When Ghita finally wakes up from his materialist haze, he’s out for revenge, but it may be too late.