direct following his successful feature debut with Will Penny. Gries wrote two further drafts of the script himself. "He says he's not a carpenter", reported the Los Angeles Times. "He says he can't work with a script that he doesn't believe in himself." Huffaker later requested his name be taken off the credits and replaced with a pseudonym, "Cecil Hanson", because "the finished product... bears absolutely no resemblance to my original script." However, Huffaker's name does appear in the film's credits. Casting The leads were given to Raquel Welch (Gries: "in some situations, this woman is just a piece of candy but I think she will prove in this film that she can act as well"), Jim Brown ("he's a great actor with a lot of appeal", said Gries), and Burt Reynolds. "I'd like to bring a style to the screen that means something to the cats out on the street", said Brown. "It's an image I want to portray of a strong black man in breaking down social taboos. In 100 Rifles... it's a different thing for a black man to be a lawman, get the woman and ride away into the sunset." It was the fifth film Burt Reynolds had made in a row. The first four – Shark!, Fade In, Impasse and Whiskey Renegades – had not been released when 100 Rifles was being shot. Shooting "I was playing Yaqui Joe, supposedly an Indian with a moustache", said Reynolds. "Raquel had a Spanish accent that sounded like a cross between Carmen Miranda and ZaSu Pitts. Jimmy Brown was afraid of only two things in the entire world: one was heights, the other was horses. And he was on a horse fighting me on a cliff. It just didn't work." The film was shot in Almería, Spain, in order to save money. "It's a tough, physical picture", says Gries, who was hospitalised for three days during the shoot when he came down with typhus. "I play a half breed but... I send it up", said Reynolds. "I make it seem like the other 'half' of the guy is from Alabama. I play it nasty, dirty, funky. I look like a Christmas tree – wrist bands, arm bands. At the beginning I even wore these funky spurs. But every time I walked I couldn't hear dialog." There were a number of press reports that Brown and Welch clashed during