Nagisa Oshima (1932-2003)

Retired by illness since the 1999 film Gohatto, Nagisa Oshima will be remembered following his death from pneumonia as one of Japan's greatest and most controversial film directors. A key figure of Japan's own "New Wave" of Sixties cinema, Oshima gained global notoriety for his 1976 sex film In the Realm of the Senses, but probably received his widest exposure with American audiences with his 1983 David Bowie POW drama Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Follow this link to read my reviews of some less familiar Oshima pictures, with The Christian Revolt and Sing a Song of Sex standing out as favorites worthy of greater attention.

DJANGO'S CUT PRICE CORPSES (Anche per Django le carogne hanno un prezzo, 1971)

Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is just the latest picture to invoke the global success of Sergio Corbucci's original Django movie. Almost innumerable Djangosploitation westerns followed that 1965 release, taking advantage of the fact that the name "Django" was not or could not be copyrighted to tell tales of countless cowboys who all happened to share the magical gypsy name. Inevitably, the appearance of Tarantino's Django movie has drawn some of the past Djangos to American video stores, though not as many as might have been expected had Unchained come out just a few years earlier. Taking the lead in home-video Djangosploitation is Timeless Media Group, a company that's carved a niche for itself putting TV westerns on video while releasing a decent spaghetti western collection back in 2011. Timeless has put out two double-feature DVDs which could be had dirt cheap at some chains last month. The film reviewed here, directed by Luigi Batzella under the alias of Paolo Solvay, is enjoying its official American DVD debut thanks to Timeless and Tarantino. It's a good example of how low Djangosploitation could go by the time spaghetti westerns as a whole had become increasingly silly and childish.

 

Filmed in incongruously grassy and fertile locations for a story set on the U.S.-Mexico border, Django's Cut Price Corpses seems most influenced by the comic Trinity films. Hence the prominence given John Desmont (in his only known movie role) playing Pickwick, a big, burly, Bud Spencer-like brawler introduced punching and tossing people about in a cantina as the film's Django (Jeff Cameron, who also did two Sartana movies) arrives. Clad in a shaggy vest that looks more Euro than American, Pickwick has an inane catch phrase ("By the great bull of Bashan!") and just about nothing else going for him. His nonlethal antics instantly reduce the show to the slapstick level, whether he's brawling interminably in the cantina or else holding a gang of gunmen on horseback at bay by shoving his saddle into their horses's flanks. He has a grudge against the Cortez brothers, who cheated him at cards, and so is willing to join Django in his pursuit of their band. To establish his badass credentials, Django orders four coffins from the town's dwarf undertaker. But bank agent Fulton (Gengher Gatti) doesn't want Django to kill the Cortezes right away; he's hoping that the bandits will somehow show him where the loot from their last big bank job is hidden so he can reclaim it... if Fulton himself is what he claims.

 

Batzella/Solvay, on this evidence, lacks any of the pictorial flair that so often redeems an otherwise uninspired spaghetti western. He seems incapable of establishing or maintaining any kind of dramatic momentum, as he proves immediately with Pickwick's endless cantina fight. The most that can be said for Cut Price Corpses visually is that the locations certainly look different. Perhaps the most different element of the story is the fact that the Cortez Brothers actually include a Cortez Sister. Pilar (Esmeralda Barros) wears a bandana under her sombrero and is mistaken for a boy by everyone until someone shakes her hair loose late, but the dubbed English voice, not to mention Barros's face, makes her gender pretty obvious. You don't usually get female outlaws in spaghetti westerns; usually women handle weapons only when they're revolutionaries in the "zapata" subgenre of Mexico-set stories. Pilar isn't a progressive figure, however. She isn't much of a gunfighter, and during the climactic battle Django is too chivalrous to shoot her. She ends up getting shot down by one of her own gang by mistake.

Django's chivalry typifies this picture's ultimate betrayal of the spaghetti ethos. It closes with a number of plot reversals designed to leave the heroes looking as goody-good as possible. So Fulton isn't a potentially ambiguous bank agent but a lawman who happens to have the bounty money for the Cortez brood to hand to Django. And Django isn't a bounty hunter at all, but only pursued the Cortezes, and tried to call their attention to him with his purchase of the coffins, because they had kidnapped his fiancee. He gives the bounty money to Pickwick, at which point you might well see the whole film as a great bull. That's Djangosploitation, folks: use the magic name and people would watch just about anything. Count me as one of the suckers if you must, but I write it off as a learning experience, and anyway the disc was on sale.

On the Big Screen: ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)

The Academy gets to nominate up to ten movies for Best Picture under its new rules, but there are still only five Best Director nominees. For that reason, the Best Picture nominees are divided by many Oscar-watchers into two tiers, with only those whose directors were nominated assumed to have a real chance for the big prize. Not since 1989's Driving Miss Daisy has the director of the Academy's Best Picture not even been nominated in his own category. Kathryn Bieglow's Zero Dark Thirty was considered one of the Best Picture front runners until the Oscar nominations were announced on January 10. The film received a Best Picture nomination but Bigelow herself, whose previous effort, 2009's The Hurt Locker, earned her the first Best Director award won by a woman, did not get nominated in her own right. It's been rumored that Bigelow was being punished personally, just as Paul Thomas Anderson was presumably punished for offending Scientology, for appearing to endorse torture in her new film about the pursuit and killing of Osama bin Laden. The way I saw it, Zero Dark Thirty portrays torture as an arguably necessary but certainly not sufficient ingredient in bagging the world's most wanted terrorist. The torture shown in the movie was not enough to nail Osama's location in Pakistan, and it should be borne in mind that Mark Boal's screenplay was first written while bin Laden was still at large. Were he still at large now, many viewers might well assume from a different version of Zero Dark Thirty that torture accomplishes nothing. Now that Boal and Bigelow have caught up with events, many people can't help inferring that writer and director consider torture to be necessary, effective and right. Bigelow's tone makes the film a rorschach blot that draws out each viewer's preconceptions. The director herself aims for a naturalistically neutral tone, neither handwringing nor triumphant. We may still be too close to events for some people to tolerate or even understand such a presentation. Many of us still want to know what side Bigelow's on, and many of those can't accept that she may not choose to take a side. A case might be made that she had to take a side, and that if torture isn't explicitly condemned the film has endorsed it. Whether that case would convince everyone is unlikely, but enough people are angered by what they see -- or fail to see -- that Zero Dark Thirty may not be appraised in purely cinematic terms for some time.

It's possible that the film's political critics focus so much on what Boal and Bigelow say or don't say about torture that they miss what the creators seem to be saying about their overall subject, the hunt for bin Laden. The broader view, however, is less neutral than deeply ambivalent. This is not a cheerleading movie unless the viewer assumes that Maya, Jessica Chastain's composite character at the film's center, is meant as an unconditional hero. Chastain gives a heroic performance, climaxing both 2012 as a year of aggressive female characters in cinema and her own meteoric rise since first earning notice in Terence Malick's Tree of Life a year earlier. But the heroism seems exaggerated in a deliberate way, as if writer, director and actress all want us to think twice about the way Maya curses and blusters and vows to "kill" bin Laden or "smoke" other terrorists, or is called a "killer" by colleagues. Unlike her cinematic peers of 2012, Maya is not an action heroine. She never fires a shot in the picture; when terrorists fire on her car in Pakistan she can do nothing than crouch below her bulletproof windshield and reverse the vehicle back into her compound. She may be the mastermind, but it takes the muscle of Navy SEALS, who may as well be her puppets, to actually kill her target, though she gets to declare victory by identifying Osama's corpse. Interestingly, we never get a full shot of the man; all we see is a beard and a nose, as if we as well as the whole world has to take Maya's word that the SEALS have hit what they call the "jackpot." I don't mean that Bigelow is somehow implying that the dead man isn't bin Laden, but she is reinforcing the way this has become Maya's personal quest and vendetta, at a potential expense invoked by the sort of character we're usually programmed to dislike, a male superior who questions Maya's priorities. This character asks a fair question: with new threats to the "homeland" from apparent freelance terrorists, how important was it by 2010 -- how much was it worth in resources -- to get the apparently isolated bin Laden? It would be easy to say that Maya must be right because she's the protagonist, but we know what a film where Maya is unambiguously right would look and sound like, and Zero Dark Thirty doesn't look or sound like that. This questioning attitude toward the hunt for Osama persists as a theme even after it could no longer be underscored by his survival despite all efforts. But some observers clearly believe that the film doesn't do enough questioning about the overall War on Terror, and their attitude is best expressed by one of the movie's own interrogators: an incomplete truth will be treated as a lie. That could be said about any film allegedly based on fact, but some facts will always matter more, and their omission offend more, than others, depending on the observer. Eventually these things will matter less and the film will be judged on something closer to its own terms.

Zero Dark Thirty is an epic procedural told in a restrained pictorial style that might strike some aesthetic critics as cold if not for Chastain's fervor. The procedural format takes us away from the film's early focus on torture as Maya and her colleagues must weigh clues and make guesses that bring them closer to the compound in Abbotabad. Even early on trickery seems to matter more than torture; the prisoner whose torture is portrayed most extensively finally opens up after the interrogators tell him (untruthfully) that he had already begun talking the day before but can't remember because he'd suffered from sleep deprivation. "Tradecraft" rather than torture is the film's real subject, the latter shown as part of the former. The dry procedural material is supplemented by some pure suspense scenes -- the kind when you can tell something bad is going to happen but you're not sure what. We also get short snippets of the Khobar Towers and London terror attacks to remind us that the bad guys remain an active threat. Some will feel that such scenes stack the deck in favor of Maya and her way of doing things, especially after it becomes a matter of personal revenge for her, but the questions Boal and Bigelow mean to raise about whether Maya's mission really solves the problem should persist for anyone who watches the film thoughtfully. Zero Dark Thirty respects its audiences' intelligence -- whether it respects history remains subject to fierce debate -- and the response to it suggests that many viewers aren't used to such a film. It'd be a shame if such a response cost Bigelow a chance at another Oscar, but while this is a compelling picture it may not endure as memorably as some of her previous films, apart from Chastain's performance, because of its relative lack of the action that had been her strong suit. It's neither Bigelow's best film nor the best film I've seen from 2012, but it's a strong picture just the same, and history rather than contemporary perceptions or prejudices will determine its ultimate worth.

Now Playing: JAN. 12-13, 1933

The Palace in Milwaukee proves, or attempts to, that documentaries can draw the crowds as well as fiction features.

The second feature is fiction, however: an independent picture about a country girl who falls for a big-city politician only to sue him for -- you guessed it -- breach of promise. TCM reports that there's a happy ending despite everything, or at least we can expect one after the heroine does some jail time. So don't say that people can get away with everything in Pre-Code cinema!

Friday is the big day for new releases in Milwaukee and here's a page full of Friday the 13th attractions from the Sentinel:



Let's take a closer look at some of these pictures. This one is probably the most familiar to modern movie buffs:

Cantor was a Ziegfeld Follies star from Broadway who hit big in movies starting with 1930's Whoopee! and was Samuel Goldwyn's star comedian until 1936. His films are peculiar for the contrivances arranged so he could perform at least one number in blackface, but Cantor's default mode is wimpy but quick-witted, and his films remain entertaining despite their occasionally offensive eccentricities.

Jim Tully was a writer who rose to fame after years as a tramp with tales of his tough past and the milieu he moved through as well as gossipy celebrity profiles. Laughter in Hell is a Universal picture directed by the prolific Edward L. Cahn, best known now for his poverty-row sci-fi pictures from the 1950s, some of which prefigure George Romero's films with their visions of mindless hordes on the march. Pat O'Brien kills his wife and her lover and ends up on a chain gang run by the dead man's vengeful brother. He ends up a fugitive from the chain gang but has a happier ending than others in that predicament.

In some theaters the movie takes second place to the stage show. Here's the Riverside, for example:

From the TCM synopsis, Carole Lombard isn't such a bad girl in this Columbia picture as the ad copy suggests, but that's par for the Pre-Code course. No More Orchids is available on DVD as part of a Lombard box set you can order online.

At the Wisconsin:

One of the things that makes the Pre-Code era an exceptional one is that Ralph Bellamy, doomed to play an archetypal loser not much later, could often get the girl in pictures like this Fox film. Director Hamilton Macfadden helmed some of Warner Oland's early Charlie Chan pictures and acted in some of Sidney Toler's. Of the vaudevillians I know nothing.

Pre-Code Parade: LIFE BEGINS (1932)

Over a beatific close up of Loretta Young, the words "Life Begins" appear where we expect to see "The End." There's irony, one part grim and one part devout, to the way co-directors James Flood and Elliott Nugent end this Warner Bros. picture. Irony reaches deep with this one: Life Begins is a maternity-ward (or "laying-in hospital) ensemble piece adapted from a play written by Mary McDougal Axelson. Forty-one years later, Axelson would be beaten to death in her hospital bed by her own daughter. I don't think we'll top that for irony all year.

The irony hits particularly hard because Life Begins is all about mother love and the sacrifices mothers are willing to make for their newborn or unborn children. While it's clearly an ensemble piece once you see it, Loretta Young gets top billing in what proves to be one of the most thankless starring roles in her career. She plays a convicted murderess (we're to understand that she was justified but lacked a proper legal team) sent to the laying-in hospital to give birth before resuming her 20-year sentence. Young doesn't show up until the film is about a third over. By that time Frank McHugh has just about wrapped up his character turn as a nervous expectant dad. His wife has a successful birth after their last try ended with a stillborn baby. McHugh credits this to his lucky rabbit's foot, which he hands off to Young's husband (Eric Linden). Combine that detail with the information that the wing of the hospital to which Young's assigned is for those cases expected to be difficult and dangerous for the mothers, and you can begin to see where the film is headed. Worse for Young from a professional standpoint, by the time her character has been installed in the ward, Glenda Farrell has already marked her territory. Farrell is an alcoholic showgirl preparing to deliver twins, whom she hopes to sell immediately, regardless of state law, having no interest whatsoever in motherhood. To compete with Farrell in this picture is like competing for oxygen with fire. The scenery goes up in flames as she parades through the ward drunkenly improvising verses to the tune of "Frankie and Johnny" satirizing her fellow mothers before she collapses with labor pains.

The ward collects a range of maternal types, from an immigrant mother who lost her baby but nurses Farrell's to (the horror!) a single mother -- her introduction as a Miss rather than a Mrs. draws gasps from some patients. Also wandering in occasionally is a crazy woman from one of the upper floors who claims to have been pregnant for years -- she blames the doctors' lack of faith for her failing to deliver the child -- and later steals a newborn from the display window where the brats were shown off in those days. Talking her down and otherwise keeping the other mothers in line is Aline MacMahon's gently no-nonsense head nurse. Underplaying with authority, MacMahon is the one actress who withstands Farrell's rampage to make a really memorable impression.

The theme of the picture and the source play has to do with a maternal instinct that overcomes all other character traits. The single mother who vowed not to get emotional over her baby violates her vow pretty quickly. Farrell, learning that potential foster parents don't want both twins and that one of the pair is sickly, takes the side of the underdog and decides to keep her babies. Her mother love appears to cure the sick twin on the spot. Young is faced with a medical if not an ethical crisis. She's having a difficult labor, as foreshadowed; her options are to endure a natural labor that will kill the baby or undergo a C-section that could kill her. Her husband resists what he takes as the doctors' insistence on the Caesarian, resenting the inference that jailbound Young might be better off dead. He demands that his wife be saved at all costs, but Loretta makes a different call....

 Life Begins was an adults-only attraction in some theaters, which tells you what Pre-Code cinema was up against in its time. It's hard to imagine anything about it being deemed inappropriate to children now, though some younger viewers may find Farrell a little frightening. 1932 was a more reticent time, and the times would get still more reticent soon enough. The overall sensibility here is less Pre-Code (despite Pre-C avatar Farrell) than Pathos of Renunciation from the previous generation. That actually works in the film's favor somewhat, since it probably was more daring, even in Pre-Code times, to have an unhappy ending, however transcendent the movie tries to make it, than to discuss the complications of childbirth. Combining those two elements makes Life Begins definitely worth seeing for Pre-Code fans, and pop-culture historians can certainly have a field day with it. Despite what I say jokingly about Farrell, she makes this fun to watch for general-interest film fans, too.

DVR Diary: LIFE OF OHARU (1952)

By coincidence, Turner Classic Movies is showing William Wellman's Heroes For Sale as I write this review. It's a coincidence because Heroes For Sale is the movie Kenji Mizoguchi's 1952 film most reminds me of. Just as Heroes chronicles the ups and downs of one of society's victims, with an emphasis on the downs, Life of Oharu treats the fortunes and misfortunes of a promising young woman (Kinuyo Tanaka) whose life is cursed by one understandable mistake. She seems all the more accursed because the mistake is only in the eyes of her repressive society and culture in 17th century Japan. The mistake, to be specific, is that she fell for a humble retainer, a man beneath her class station. That the man is Toshiro Mifune, albeit almost unrecognizably clean-cut and romantic, matters not. Such a romance across class lines is a crime in the Tokugawa era. Oharu, along with her parents (for failing to raise her right, I guess) are exiled from court, while the Mifune character is decapitated, though not before dictating a last request that Oharu manage to find happiness with someone else someday.

For Oharu, the punishment must be like being sent back to live with your parents, only to have them evicted because of you. Her father certainly resents it and looks for every opportunity to exploit her in order to regain some of his former position or prestige. He hires her out to the local daimyo as a concubine who'll bear a child before being discarded. Dad expects at least 300 ryo for this, but only gets five. Too bad that he'd already bought some textiles on credit, expecting the bigger payoff. To help pay off dad's debts, Oharu is put to work as a courtesan. It looks like she'll find a sugar daddy in the form of a rich bumpkin who's been saving his coins for twenty years waiting to blow it all in town. Oharu intrigues him because she haughtily refuses to scramble like the other courtesans for the coins he scatters about the place. He offers to buy her off her employers while boasting to her that he'll find her price. Before he can leave with her, however, his money is revealed as counterfeit. A better man finally shows up: an expert fan maker who opens his own shop with Oharu as his salesperson, but this relative idyll ends abruptly when this rare good guy is mugged and murdered. From there the descent is swift, and before long Oharu is an aging street prostitute, as we found her at the start of the picture, all of the above being her flashback.

One more humiliation awaits. Rescued from her plight by her elderly mother, she's told that her son by the daimyo, now the daimyo himself, has invited Oharu to live with him in the palace. It turns out to be a set-up: Oharu is too much an embarrassment to everyone to be allowed to wander the world free. But before the authorities lock her up for life they allow her a Stella Dallas like look at her boy, whom she's never really known, as he takes his daily walk without acknowledging her existence. Somehow she manages to escape the grim fate planned for her, but the future she escapes to is hardly less grim. Just as Heroes For Sale ends with the hero's future still uncertain as he's driven out of town with a band of unemployed men, Oharu wraps with the heroine a Buddhist beggar going door to door as the soundtrack sings of vows to overcome the snares of earthly life. Mizoguchi toes the line between pessimism and philosophy. While Heroes still pays lip service to the American Dream, Oharu's close suggests that all dreams, like all desires, are hopeless, the only real hope being transcendence of desire. That's harsh for a movie that started with Oharu as a martyr for romantic love, but the song itself strikes an almost hopeful note with its beauty, even if the argument seems paradoxical: our only hope is to abandon hope, or at least one kind of hope in favor of another.

If anything, Mizoguchi's film may make you more indignant than the often furious Heroes, since at least some of the hero's misfortunes in the Wellman film can be written off to bad breaks, while Oharu is more consistently the victim of a vicious social system. In both cases, directorial craftsmanship softens the blow while making a point. Mizoguchi directs elegantly, relying often on fluid camera movements; his films that I've seen have always been enjoyable to watch regardless of the content. Oharu is a vehicle for Kinuyo Tanaka, regarded by many as Japan's greatest film actress, and while it may be stretching things for the 43 year old to play the young woman in the early scenes -- Mifune, more than a decade her junior, throws himself quite eagerly at a cougar's feet -- she hardly makes a false move thereafter. Oharu may seem like a thankless role, with one damn thing after another befalling her -- but Tanaka's poise and presence master the material and make Life of Oharu as much a tribute to female resilience as it is a protest against female victimization.

DEATH RIDES A HORSE (Da uomo a uomo, 1967)

Quentin Tarantino talks today about how much Sergio Corbucci's spaghetti westerns influenced him and inspired Tarantino's own western Django Unchained, but no Corbucci film has as obvious an influence on the new film as Giulio Petroni's Da uomo a uomo had on Tarantino's Kill Bill. That film borrows Petroni's device of the red flashbacks, zooming into the observer's eyes, whenever the hero encounters a past tormentor. It samples Ennio Morricone's hellish chorus when The Bride invades the House of Blue Leaves. If anything, the absence of any obvious echoes of Death Rides a Horse may explain why Django Unchained seems relatively uninspired. It's as if Tarantino had already milked spaghetti westerns for all he could get out of them, so that by the time he did the closest thing to his own spaghetti western he was down to second or third choices in his head for the music or the visual motifs. As one of the greatest spaghetti westerns in the revenge category, Petroni's film shows up Tarantino's western for its lack of passion.

It opens with an atrocity, a gang descending upon a modest home and massacring a family. The masked men shoot down the father and rape the mother and daughter before blowing them away. In their fury they neglect the youngest child, a son, who sees the nightmare unfold in fragments from under a table. He catches random details that'll prove crucial later: a tattoo; a scar; a spur for an earring. But he might have died in the house when the gang set it afire except for a faceless figure wearing a skull pendant who takes him out and sets him under a wagon.

 

The boy, Bill, grows into a self-trained gunfighter (John Phillip Law), but before he even begins his mission we're introduced to a rival avenger. Ryan (Lee Van Cleef) rode with the same gang but was cheated out of his share of a job and framed for it. We see him released after 15 years on the rockpile, his gun implausibly in perfect working order after sitting in the wardern's desk drawer the entire time. The gang is waiting for him, but he eludes an ambush. Petroni cleverly avoids violence here, having Ryan cut the men's saddles so they can't ride after him, delaying the moment when hell breaks loose. As well, he and co-writer Luciano Vincenzoni immediately get us thinking that whatever else Ryan is, he could be one of the men who killed Bill's family.

The ingenious idea of Death Rides a Horse is its concept of rival avengers. Bill and Ryan fall into "Good" and "Ugly" columns, Bill fueled by years of rage, Ryan more of a Parker type (as in Point Blank) concerned with getting what was rightly his. Their paths cross repeatedly, beginning with Ryan's visit to the graves of Bill's family. Each wants first crack at the old gang members and finds ways to trick the other or leave him behind without a horse. As long as Bill doesn't suspect Ryan of being one of the killers and Ryan doesn't think Bill's after his money, theirs is an almost friendly competition, Ryan at times acting as Bill's mentor or backup in gunfights. But as long as they remain rivals they're at a disadvantage against a gang whose members, some of whom have settled into respectable or semi-respectable occupations, are not entirely stupid. In turn, their enemies will get the upper hand on each man, framing Ryan for a new robbery until Bill breaks him out of jail, simply overwhelming Bill and burying him to his neck to torture him. If the antagonists are stupid, it's because they don't see fit to kill either of their pursuers outright. But as plenty of people will tell you, spaghetti westerns are about cruelty, not common sense.

Petroni takes a final turn into Magnificent Seven territory as Ryan, while rescuing Bill from that last predicament, liberates an oppressed village the gang had made their territory, and the two men lead the villagers' defense against the returning remainder of the gang. Only at the brink of the final assault does Bill learn the truth about Ryan -- but whatever his responsibility for the past, can Bill indulge his rage when he and the village needs Ryan's gun? And will Ryan live up to his promise not to run from a final accounting afterward?

Death Rides a Horse was Van Cleef's first film after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and while he shares the show with Law the veteran character actor proves himself a star capable of commanding a film. He gives the film the gravitas his Col. Mortimer lent to Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More while portraying a quite different personality. In his best Italian westerns, Van Cleef infuses the sometimes superficial subgenre with the sterner spirit of the classic American "adult" or "psychological" westerns of the 1950s where he so often toiled as a minion. At his side, John Phillip Law is appropriately earnest above all, though Bill isn't entirely humorless. Part of the film's suspense is the way Bill gets caught up in the game he's playing with Ryan, tempting us to forget that he could find cause to kill the older man -- if he can -- at any random moment. Law has moments of almost childish rage that remind us of how emotionally dangerous he is; a standout moment is when he slaps a suddenly-drawn derringer out of an enemy's hand with a kind of infantile fury and a grunt expressing something between dismay and disgust, as if the man had shown him a dead bird or a severed finger as a joke. Law's volatilty counterbalances Van Cleef's stoic self-interest throughout, making them one of the better spaghetti teams for this one joint outing.

Carlo Carlini's cinematography is tremendous, from the horrific opening in a nighttime rainstorm to gigantic outdoor vistas. Morricone's main chorus is awe-inspiring: you can understand how that music would inspire fantasies in a creatively impressionable mind like Tarantino's. Petroni and Carlini had impressed me visually with their follow-up western, A Sky Full of Stars For a Roof, but the story here has the latter film beat by a mile. Death Rides a Horse is readily available on public-domain discs, and is sometimes shown in pan-and-scan form on the Encore Westerns channel, but definitely see it on a proper widescreen disc or on the Netflix stream if you can. Watch this spaghetti western and you'll understand why people make homages to the genre.