Good For Nothing is billed as the first Western shot in New Zealand, but that tourist-brochure distinction pales besides its more pungent claim to fame as the first Western whose hero spends the entire film attempting to overcome a bout of erectile dysfunction. Cohen Holloway’s dusty outlaw is a man with no name and precious little to say. He guns down a bar full of men, including the one escorting petticoat-swaddled Englishwoman Inge Rademeyer to her uncle’s ranch, without speaking so much as a word. He keeps mum as he spirits her away and tries to rape her. But at the crucial moment, as the oddly upbeat score thrums in the background, his resolve goes soft. As he tells the first doctor he finds: “My dick’s broke.”
