DVR Diary: THEY GAVE HIM A GUN (1937)

 

In 1936, someone at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer looked at their young contract player James Stewart and saw a homicidal maniac. You can see the results of such thinking in After the Thin Man, and you might have seen it here as well, in a project W. S. Van Dyke inherited in 1937 after the sudden death of Richard Boleslawski, had some other producer wanted Stewart for another picture. The gossip columnists reported that poor Stewart had badly wanted the role of Him to whom They Gave a Gun, but that now Metro would seek to cast an unknown. They ended up casting Franchot Tone, not exactly an unknown, and while They Gave Him a Gun might have been a game-changer for Stewart, following so closely after After, it probably made little difference in Tone's career. Still, Tone looks like a better fit for the part than Stewart would have been. He seems innately sicklier, which seems to be what the role of Jimmy Davis requires. Adapted from a novel by sometime writer-director William J. Cowen -- who at one point hoped to direct this himself -- the screenplay combines antiwar attitudes that would soon go out of fashion with pop psychology about crime. In our own time there's a temptation to think of gangsters romantically as warriors, even knights of a sort in their own feudal world, or as superpredators standing above us civilians on the food chain and thus superior in at least a practical way to the rest of us. By contrast, during the Thirties, when figures as diverse as Al Capone and John Dillinger changed the face of crime, it was asserted, as a matter of propaganda if not professional opinion, that the gangster was really a misfit, a loser, inferior mentally and or physically to bourgeois man and thus unsuited to bourgeois work habits. In short, the gangster was nothing without his guns. In its crudest form, this point is illustrated in early superhero comics when Robin the Boy Wonder can take out three or four crooks with his bare hands, after they've been challenged to take him on without their weapons.Gangsters were less than nothing, in fact, but actually outright cowards without their guns.

Jimmy Davis, as imagined by the screenwriters if not the novelist, demonstrates this thesis. A mild mannered draftee during the Great War, he faints at the prospect merely of sticking his bayonet into a practice dummy during basic training. Someone like this, the film says, has no business fighting a war, yet he was taken by conscription and sent to Europe, where his buddy the carny barker Fred Willis (Spencer Tracy, nearly typecast after Dante's Inferno) looks after him. Jimmy's war is part Full Metal Jacket, part Saving Private Ryan. Like Kubrick's Pvt. Pyle, Jimmy finds that marksmanship is the one thing he's good at, and he starts to feel fond of his weapon. He becomes a super sniper, but before his moment of grace undergoes an ordeal of cowardice. Stumbling upon a dead German while climbing a flight of stairs, Jimmy mistakes the corpse for a live soldier drawing a bead on him and instantly surrenders. Realizing his error, he ascends and finds he has a perfect nest to annihilate an enemy machine gun position. Gleefully he takes the Germans out one by one before his own position is blasted.

As Jimmy recovers, the romantic triangle plot kicks in. Jimmy and Fred are fond of the same nurse, the hard-boiled Rose Duffy (Gladys George). She prefers Fred despite giving him a lot of sass and a little physical abuse, but he goes missing during a big offensive while Jimmy's recovering. By the time Fred returns, having been a P.O.W., Jimmy and Rose are engaged. Fred can tell that Rose will dump Jimmy if he says so, but he also sees that Jimmy is too psychologically fragile to stand the loss. It's time for some pathos of renunciation as Fred lies to Rose about a wife and kids at home and earns her hatred for seemingly having strung her along.

According to one review I've read, Cowen's novel describes in detail Jimmy's troubles readjusting to civilian life, perhaps portraying him as a Forgotten Man driven to crime by the lack of other opportunities. The movie skips directly to Fred's rediscovery of Jimmy, who has an office in a building from which a sniper has just shot a gangster to death. The coincidence makes Fred, who now runs his own circus, suspicious, but Mrs. Rose Davis takes her husband as what he claims to be, a now-successful businessman. Inevitably, with Fred hanging around again, she grows suspicious of Jimmy, visits his office after hours and finds him plotting a St. Valentines style massacre with killers in cop uniforms. She rats him out and he goes to jail. He pleads guilty to keep his gang from whacking her and appears determined to go straight, but a fellow con goads him into a breakout. Jimmy tracks Rose to Fred's circus and demands that she go on the lam with him. She's willing as a matter of wifely duty but Fred's having none of it. He dares Jimmy to shoot him, asserting his own dominance by pretty much telling him he's nothing without a gun -- and Jimmy buys it, since Fred's always talked straight to him. He also figures out the score between Fred and Rose, which leaves him one honorable thing to do....

The film's final lines try to nail it down as an antiwar film. One of the cops hunting Jimmy is his and Fred's old drill instructor, to whom Fred says of Jimmy, "You oughta pin a medal on him. He was your prize pupil." This seems unfair, if only because the soldier/cop hasn't been a big enough character in the story. It may also muddle things, especially to more modern viewers for whom guns alone may suffice to explain Jimmy's tragic career, without bringing the military into it. Moreover, Cowen's original argument seems to have been that the system as a whole, in peace as well as war, deformed Jimmy by turning him into a killing machine only to kick him to the curb when it didn't need killers anymore. By leaving out Jimmy's pre-crime efforts to readjust, the movie makes it look like he made a beeline to crime and makes him look more like a villain than the victim it claims him to be at the end. The movie's real problem is that it needs to be Jimmy's story, but we mostly get Jimmy from Fred's point of view. The fact that Fred emerges from the war unscathed further undermines the closing argument that militarism mutated Jimmy into the monster Fred discovers in civilian life. Above all, the fait accompli that forces us to accept that misfit Jimmy has become a powerful gangster without seeing his ascent is deeply unconvincing, Franchot Tone being no more plausible in this respect than Jimmy Stewart might have been. In simplest terms the movie tries to explain too much and leaves too much unexplained. Since 1937 is still early in the "Code Enforcement" era, the filmmakers may have gone out of their way to steer clear of anything that might have looked like "glorifying" crime while portraying Jimmy's rise to power. Yet They Gave Him a Gun reminds us that the Code Enforcement (or "Classic") era was not a monolithic period of consistent rules. Not long after 1937 no one would have dared suggest that anyone's personality could be warped by the military giving him a gun. From the vantage point of World War II, 1937 looks like a period of relative freedom in movies, however it looks in comparison to Pre-Code Cinema. They Gave Him a Gun may be a failure, but Metro deserves some credit for taking a chance on an ambitious subject.

Lauren Bacall (1924-2014)

"Thanks."

This seems like another order of magnitude from yesterday's news. From Howard Hawks to Lars Von Trier -- put it that way and has anyone had such a career? As Bogart's consort, Bacall has been a legendary figure almost from her start in movies, seventy years ago. Arguably from the instant she appeared in To Have and Have Not she was the coolest woman on film. Her passing leaves us closer to the end of our live ties to Hollywood's classic era. She probably was the most iconic survivor of those days until now. Her filmography isn't huge or deep, but for a while you could believe that everyone knew her, and anyone who saw her and heard her will remember her. And for the hell of it, I suppose, she did a voice for Family Guy this year, so people who don't know her have heard her. Give a whistle in her honor if you know how.

Robin Williams (1951-2014)

Williams was doing lines with John Belushi the day Belushi overdosed in 1982, and said afterwards that Belushi's death helped scare him straight. Williams's proximity to that tragedy had a "there but for the grace ..." quality at a time when it seemed that any of the really funny men might go at any time. Williams's antics on the Mork and Mindy show only hinted at the mania to be seen in his standup act. The term "off the wall" seemed to have been coined for him, and it carried a sense of danger. His stream of consciousness always threatened to crest over the banks. But his greatest stardom in movies came after he had more or less sobered up. For most of the Eighties, starting with Robert Altman's Popeye, his work in film was hit or miss, the highlights including The World According to Garp and Moscow on the Hudson. For most of the Nineties he hit more consistently, really beginning with his inspirational-teacher turn in Dead Poets Society. By mid-decade he had reached the height of his stardom. Amid his massive, crowd-pleasing hits a more formidable character actor also emerged, a darker figure who projected genuine malice in small doses in the likes of Dead Again and The Secret Agent and then most prominently in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia. He won an Oscar by splitting the difference and lending gravitas to Good Will Hunting. The qualities he revealed in such roles kept him working when the masses suddenly decided, around the time of Bicentennial Man, that he was too desperate to entertain them. His filmography in the new millennium was far more modest, until finally he returned to series television last fall, only to have The Crazy Ones fail after one season. He apparently killed himself today, but he is no more gone yet than Philip Seymour Hoffman -- or for that matter, Mickey Rooney, who joins Williams in the forthcoming Night at the Museum sequel this Christmas, while Williams stars in something titled Merry Friggin' Christmas, which may now get a wider release than it would have otherwise. It's probably wrong to say that the demons of Williams's youth finally caught up with him, since he had been clinically depressed recently. Instead, there's actually something bittersweet in the fact that he survived and even thrived long enough that we're surprised to learn of his death. That in itself is some sort of success.

Pre-Code Parade: VIRTUE (1932)

In the Pre-Code era, you probably could have taken it for granted that a film called Virtue would be about a fallen woman. So it is in this Columbia release directed by Edward Buzzell and written by Frank Capra's frequent collaborator Robert Riskin. It's about the redemption of such a woman, a convicted prostitute played by Carole Lombard. I don't know if the picture is lost (while the soundtrack remains) or if Turner Classic Movies simply had a technical problem this morning, but the film opened in complete darkness as Mae (Lombard) gets a suspended sentence and is warned out of the state of New York. She gets a train ticket to Danbury but gets out in the big city, where she meets cute with cab driver Jimmy (Pat O'Brien), who boasts to roommate Frank (Ward Bond) that he's wise to women's ways. The joke is that he claims he can figure a female on sight but never guesses Mae's past until after he marries her. Jimmy simply isn't as hard-boiled as he pretends to be; his true sentiments come out when he confronts an unforgiving policeman: "The problem with you hard-boiled guys is when someone's on the level you can't see it." He assumes that Mae is on the level, and the film proves his instinct correct, until the cop sets him straight. Mae and Jimmy have come home from City Hall after an amusement-park honeymoon to find the cop sitting in Mae's apartment. What's Mae wanted for? Jimmy asks. "Same thing she's doing now," the cop answers, "Bringing guys up to her room at night." Jimmy is stunned and humiliated but steps up to admit his marriage, which saves Mae from being taken away for a parole violation. After the cop leaves, Mae pleads for understanding, but Jimmy slaps her and storms out the door. This scene is Pre-Code to the core.

Soon enough, Jimmy reconciles with Mae and they start a little household while he saves money to buy an interest in a gas station. He has an inexhaustible appetite for flapjacks and begrudges her purchase of new lace curtains, but he's still a good guy at heart and still, in his own mind, a candidate for World's Prize Sap. He gets suspicious again when Mae isn't home at night when he stops for something to eat. What he doesn't know yet is that Mae has been suckered by her fellow waitress Gert (Shirley Grey). Gert has fallen ill and needs emergency surgery, begging Mae to loan her the money for proper medical care. Mae and Jimmy have a bank account so he can save up to buy that gas station and Mae doesn't dare withdraw any money until Gert attempts suicide in desperation. Having come up with the dough, Mae goes home to hear that Jimmy plans to close on the gas station in two days, while Frank grumbles about how his girl suckered him out of $100 with a fake illness and suicide attempt. You can practically see the cartoon jackass head appear over Mae's face as she realizes she's been conned, too. It turns out that Gert is in on a grift with Toots (Jack La Rue, the villain from The Story of Temple Drake), the boyfriend of Mae's BFF Lil (Mayo Methot). Gert promptly quits her flat but Mae tracks her down to a hotel where women like them ply their old profession. She slaps Gert silly but has to take her word that she'll have the money the following day. Toots isn't cooperating, however, and when Gert tries to snatch the mazuma from his wallet he shoves her to the floor, but is shocked -- doesn't he watch movies? -- to find that she cracked her bean or broke her neck on the proverbial radiator. One way or the other, you get the idea. Meanwhile, Mae sneaks into another room and takes her money, but leaves a purse behind. Knowing the story about Mae, Toots figures he can frame her for Gert's death as long as Lil gives him an alibi. Meanwhile, a suspicious Jimmy has seen some of this, watching silhouettes in the window from his cab, and assumes that Mae, reverting to her old ways, is entertaining a paying customer while Toots is actually dragging Gert's corpse from one room to another. He confronts Mae, who gets defensive, accusing him of wanting to crucify her, so that the straight story never gets told. While Jimmy goes on a three-day drunk, Mae is arrested for murder....

This grim little story gets a happy ending, if only because Toots proves an even bigger sap than Jimmy as Lil saves Jimmy from a bullet and tricks Toots into putting himself in the law's hands by promising that alibi. They call it Virtue but it could just as easily have been Men Are Dumb. The stupidity of the male characters -- it's probably no accident that Ward Bond has one of his bigger roles of the period here -- edges the potential tragedy toward the farcical as Jimmy infers far too much from the shadow play in the window, while for some sort of gangster Toots seems to lack basic survival skills. I guess that makes this a women's picture, albeit one with that special Pre-Code emphasis on survival at all costs and little apology for Mae's past. Like many Columbia Pre-Codes it looks great in restored form, thanks much to Joe Walker's cinematography. His work reminds me of one difference between Pre-Code and film noir. The earlier films are often as dark as the later ones, but noir is about the play of shadows while Pre-Code is often just plain dark, with luminous figures briefly illuminating the default darkness. The scene with the silhouettes in the window is a little silly but the way Walker films it, with streams of rain running down the window, is almost magical. As for the actors, Carole Lombard didn't really come into her own until the screwball era, but she makes a compelling, sympathetic heroine, while Pat O'Brien definitely makes a convincing sap while remaining likable enough, barely, for us to forgive him. It's definitely the sort of film they weren't making anymore for a long time afterward, and it's good enough, if no classic, to help you appreciate what Hollywood sacrificed to save itself.

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, August 5, 1939

Having hit big by importing British author C. S. Forester and Horatio Hornblower to the U.S., Argosy gives its cover to another British author. At least it may be the first American publication of this author under this particular pseudonym. E. C. Vivian was a veteran author under several names; under the name Jack Mann he began publishing the occult adventures of one Gregory George Gordon Green -- nicknamed "Gees" and presumably pronounced "jeez," -- in 1936. The Ninth Life is the sixth Gees adventure but the first for Argosy. In it, Gees deals with a vamp (in the Theda Bara, not Bela Lugosi sense) who may well be an immortal priestess of Ancient Egypt. The new serial gets the royal treatment of a full-page illustration by someone other than the regular Argosy artist, and the editorial pitch makes it all sound enticingly exotic, but I confess to finding Mann's story and writing pretty dull.

 

Charles Rice McDonnell's The Ringer and Theodore Roscoe's Mother Damnation continue this week, but I found the stand-alone stories more entertaining. Best of the lot is the latest No-Shirt McGee story from Frank Richardson Pierce. In "McGee on Horseback" No-Shirt and his sidekick Bulldozer Craig capture a wild horse and our sourdough hero gets the wild idea of taking the animal down to California to run in big-money stakes races. The fun thing about the story is how it turns on a dime, No-Shirt and Bulldozer abandoning the racing idea to sell a herd of horses to stampeders rushing to the latest gold strike, yet ultimately racing their top animals against some hustlers working the gold camps with a ringer horse. As an added complication one of No-Shirt's cousins, a professional jockey, turns up but is working for the hustlers. Pierce's colloquial present-tense narrative style adds to a sense of spontaneity not often seen in the pulps.

Effective as an action story and interesting as a cultural artifact is E. Hoffman Price's "One Step From Hell." It's set in the American-ruled Philippines, where two years before the Japanese invasion and forty years after the U.S. takeover, American troops still have to deal with hostile Moro bandits (or insurgents) in the back country. The soldier protagonist reluctantly takes a mission to rescue a renegade American "sunshiner" from being tortured to death by the tribesmen. Gin Mike deserves whatever the Moros want to dish out, the soldiers understand, but they can't allow a white man to be killed by the natives, or else the Americans as a whole will lose face.

"Lieutenant, it is prestige, and nothing else, that makes it possible for a handful of white men to keep a semblance of order in the Islands. [a commander explains] Once we lose face, we're finished out here. You're not going out to save Gin Mike.You're going out to maintain a tradition."

Gin Mike "used to be white" in the hero's opinion, and he recovers some of his "whiteness" as he and the hero make their break. The grim irony of the story is that, as Mike seems to redeem himself, he's killed in cold blood by another white man with whom he'd been feuding. "I guess everybody's face is saved," the hero concludes cynically to close this tale from a forgotten period of American colonialism.

Robert Cochran's "Tonight We March" is more like what we'd expect from pulp a few years later, during World War II. A downed American mercenary flier in China is escorted to safety by a brave band of guerrilla fighters, whom he mistakes for bandits, led by a woman nicknamed "White Dove." There's a faint hint of interracial romance as she and he pretend to be husband and wife (he pays alimony to an ex in the States) to trick the Japanese. But the main point is that "China will never die," even though a little American help certainly won't hurt, either. Finally, Richard Sale contributes "Hear Them Whistles Blowing!" a throwaway weird tale of the railroad in which the protagonist, stuck on an out-of-control train with a dead conductor and a broken ankle, seems to see the ghost of Casey Jones coming to his rescue. Next week the serials continue and a crew of sailors battle seal poachers and a submarine in the Arctic Ocean.

TO BE CONTINUED

On the Big Screen: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (C'era una volta il West, 1968)

For some movie buffs, "Once upon a time" has come to denote a certain mode of cinematic narrative in which a scene is protracted through prosaic action and dialogue to maximize success by exploiting our expectation that something will or should happen in the scene. Yet for the original Italian audience for Sergio Leone's fourth western, C'era Una Volta would most likely have been a reminder of Francesco Rosi's unlikely fairy tale romance of that name, the Sophia Loren vehicle known in the U.S. as More Than a Miracle, that was released a year before C'era Una Volta il West. Call it that or Once Upon a Time, and audiences around the world would expect a kind of western fairy tale.

Appropriately, the film has a heroine. If not a princess, Jill (Claudia Cardinale) is the heir to an empire in the making. She is courted, so to speak, by three suitors. Of course, the film has no fairy tale ending; Jill may well live happily ever after as the matriarch of the Sweetwater station, but she has no consort. That's all for the best, since Leone's film could just as easily have been called Beauty and Three Beasts. None of the three becomes a prince because this is, after all, a western of the 1960s and the convergence of Leone's spaghetti style and the elegiac preoccupations of many American westerns. Not opening in the U.S. until 1969, it played against The Wild Bunch in some markets. Jill's suitors are of a doomed breed, the "ancient race" of men who live by force, by taking. These men objectify everything and everyone around them. That's true as much for the avenger "Harmonica" (Charles Bronson) as for his enemy Frank (Henry Fonda). They live by taking (even if Harmonica only takes revenge), not by buying, which is the way of the future that Frank flirts with and flinches from after getting burned when money turns his own men against him. More nearly human than the killer and the avenger is the bandit Cheyenne (Jason Robards). While Frank prefers to forget his past until the point of dying, driven forward by ambition, and Harmonica's past can be collapsed into a single moment that motivates his whole life, Cheyenne is capable of nostalgia, of sentiment in general. This makes him seem childish sometimes compared to his peers, but it also makes him the nearest thing to an ideal mate for Jill, with circumstance alone, arguably, preventing that happy ending. Cheyenne seems more self-aware and simultaneously more conscious of others than his peers; he can say of himself that he's not the right man for Jill, even as he warns that Harmonica isn't that man, either. Cheyenne isn't as bright as his peers, though he may have more cunning; he has a hard time grasping that the land of Sweetwater is the treasure rather than some hidden stash of gold until Harmonica spells it out for him.Yet Cheyenne seems to see what's coming, what the future will be like and what it requires of people, in a way beyond the comprehension of fanatics like Frank and Harmonica, who seem to see their successors as inferior beings. Cheyenne's advice to Jill has been condemned since his words were first heard on screen, but if we generalize beyond the character's sexist rhetoric we may get to the real point. Don't begrudge working men the occasional pat of your rear, he says; "pretend that it's nothing. They've earned it." We can dispute whether they've earned that, exactly, but what Cheyenne may be saying, what Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento are trying to say alongside Leone, and through the vehicle of Sergio Donati (in Italian) and Mickey Knox (in English), is that while the mighty men of Cheyenne's doomed generation lived by taking, the world Jill inherits will flourish not through buying, but through giving.

Well, I had to come up with something for the occasion of seeing Leone's epic on the big screen at the Madison Theater in Albany. I still like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly better, but it's very close between these giant films, and it's arguably a competition between an apple and an orange. Once Upon a Time in the West is more self-consciously a work of art on every level, and it's also the climax of an epic decade in which Italy mounted an almost plausible challenge to America's global cinematic dominance. The Italians cracked the American market on all levels, from the arthouse to the drive-in, with everything from Antonioni, at one extreme of pretension, to Hercules movies. Leone and his peers escalated the campaign by appropriating America's defining cinematic genre, and filming in Monument Valley Leone dramatically planted the Italian flag at the heart of American cinema. West is more of an all-out Italian effort than Leone's Dollars films. Conceived by that mind-blasting trinity of Leone, Bertolucci and Argento, it's a masterpiece of Cinecitta production design and probably the most eloquently versatile use of wood ever in movies. You can't fully appreciate that aspect of it until you see it at the right size. Throw a star Italian actress into the mix and it seems even more like the national epic of Italy's battle for cinematic mastery. Maybe Americans recognized this and were repelled by it after embracing the Dollars films.

Why West bombed here remains a mystery; Paramount's fatal excision of more than twenty minutes was a decision of panic while the film was already failing. Did people miss Clint Eastwood? I don't think that was the problem, and I honestly can't see Eastwood as Harmonica -- the Man With No Name never seems that zealous about anything. Pace rather than length seems to have been the main problem, since West was always shorter than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, yet always seems longer. West is simply more complex; while GB&U has to converge only two tracks, Angel Eyes on one, Blondie and Tuco on the other, West opens with two enigmatic bursts of violence, introducing one major character apiece, and then takes its sweet time linking these events to the destinies of four (or five, counting Gabriele Ferzetti's train magnate) major characters. It makes sense once all the pieces are in place, but there are moments when it seems as if Leone is having (or teasing) difficulty fitting them together. Some scenes in "once upon a time" mode, most notably the first scene at Lionel Stander's trading post, seem unjustified by the potential for action; Jill is only a bystander as Cheyenne and Harmonica first meet one another, and neither notices her, each meeting her in Sweetwater later as if for the first time, and while the scene reveals how Frank has tried to frame Cheyenne for his recent crimes, the revelation has a throwaway quality -- and it seems odd in retrospect that Frank and Cheyenne never actually meet each other. While GB&U is a fast engine on a meandering track, there are moments in West where the first-time viewer may legitimately wonder not just when the train will get where it's going, but where it's going in the first place. It's more of a loose baggy monster than GB&U, but on a frame-by-frame basis it's more spectacular, and cumulatively, prodded forward by Ennio Morricone's beloved score, it's a more emotionally moving experience. In ways intended and unintended it marks the end of an epic era, and it is hard not to feel sad to see it end, even if what you feel is that good kind of moviegoing sadness tinged with wonder. It may have been a fairy tale, but some of the magic was real.

On the Big Screen: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Il buono, il bruto, il cattivo, 1966)

In this world there are two kinds of antiwar movies: pacifist movies, and Sergio Leone's epic conclusion to his Clint Eastwood "Dollars" trilogy, which is no less antiwar for its reveling in man-to-man gunplay. There are moments in its three hours when each of the principal characters -- not just Eastwood's "Good" gunman and the late Eli Wallach's immortal Tuco, but also Lee Van Cleef's villain Angel Eyes -- registers dismay or disgust at the scale of destruction and carnage generated by the American Civil War. The U.S. advertising claimed that the War was just "practice" for these three, but the characters themselves might disagree. They are all violent, ruthless and greedy men, but war is beyond their comprehension. They see no point to it. Personal gain is the only justification for killing they can imagine. Tuco brags that he has a $3,000 price on his head and speculates that the Union Army "didn't even pay you a dollar" for a soldier's amputated arm. In this respect the Good (a con man who abandons his partner in the desert after calculating diminishing returns) isn't very different from the nearly amoral heroes of American westerns, not to mention some American war movies, but the typical American story has the hero redeem himself by making a larger cause his own. Joining the war completes a moral awakening in these cases. In the Leone film Tuco and Blondie (Eastwood) intervene in the war only to get it out of their way. If they can blow up a much fought-over bridge, the contending armies will disappear so they can cross the river unchallenged. On Blondie's part, if not on Tuco's, the gesture is also something of an act of compassion toward the drunken captain who had befriended them before getting mortally wounded and had fantasized about blowing the bridge despite orders to capture it intact. What makes Blondie the "Good," I suppose is this awakening of compassion, which extends to another mortally wounded soldier to whom he offers his coat and cheroot. Significantly, Blondie finds a serape near this victim and takes it for himself, transforming himself into the Man With No Name we remember from the previous Leone films. But Blondie's compassion extends only to those who have to fight for no good reason, as far as he can see. There is no sharing the treasure of the stolen payroll with Angel Eyes; Blondie will "earn" it by killing the Bad one -- who perhaps best displays his Badness through his easy infiltration of the Army as a prison officer waiting for the mysterious Bill Carson to fall into his lap. And while Blondie ultimately does share with Tuco, he can't resist teasing his sometime-partner in their typically vicious fashion, leaving him with only a wobbly tombstone standing between him and a hanging until the Good one reminds the Ugly of his marksmanship, shooting the rope apart in time for old time's sake. Maybe what makes the Good good is that he'll kill only with "good" reason -- the sort of reason a state can't have. The message to the rest of us might be: kill, or risk your life, only if you get something out of it.

This may be the ultimate statement of the amorality often thought to define spaghetti westerns. Leone himself would move on to a straightforward revenge story with an unambiguous hero, and then to a "Zapata" western with nearly the opposite message from GB&U, focusing on the radicalization of a Tuco-like bandit and his adoption of a higher cause. It may be significant that Duck You Sucker is easily Leone's worst western, that he was following the politicization of the genre (at least when set in Mexico) without really feeling it. He seems more comfortable with the scale of GB&U, in which the protagonists resist politicization and the petty feud between Blondie and Tuco so fascinates him that more than an hour goes by before the plot of the picture really gets going. This is where Leone begins messing with audiences by slowing things down. Angel Eyes's early visit with a doomed soldier, when he sits down to share the man's dinner and we see him devour every spoonful, is in the director's protracted "Once Upon a Time" mode. At other points, most notably Tuco's famous race through the cemetery, Leone seems to stretch the scene to suit Ennio Morricone's music. Either way, length creates atmosphere and manipulates mood. If there's an objective standard to apply, GB&U is really too long, especially with the restored scenes redubbed by an elderly Eastwood and Wallach and a bad Van Cleef impersonator. But maybe you can't cut footage (apart from what had been cut for the initial U.S. release) without cutting from the film's distinctive character.

More than Leone's masterpiece, this is Eli Wallach's monument. With Eastwood trapped in the Good role (and unable yet to act his way out of the trap) and Van Cleef much diminished from his star-making turn in Leone's previous film, GB&U is Tuco's show. What makes Tuco Ugly, apart from his obvious physical shortcomings? Why is he a Rat while Blondie is a Pig? It's hard to judge one man the moral superior of the other; they backstab one another with equal relish at every opportunity. We turn to Angel Eyes for some clarification: Tuco is no less tough, but less smart than Blondie. How smart is Tuco? On one hand, he can barely sound out the word "unknown" on a tombstone. Yet in the "Ecstasy of Gold" sequence he races through the cemetery at such speed that the audience registers the tombstones as a pure blur, yet Tuco is obviously processing all the names at some superhuman rate until he finds Arch Stanton. Both Blondie and Angel Eyes see Tuco as an idiot -- Angel sees both his antagonists that way, despite his compliment to Blondie's intelligence -- but Tuco has the film's most famous moment of common sense: "When you draw a gun, shoot, don't talk." Tuco bears the brunt of the film's slapstick, though he gets some revenge on Blondie in the desert, but he's also the nearest to a sympathetic character of the three principals, the one with the most backstory and a hint of pathos in his past. We can root for Blondie but Leone seems to want us to feel for Tuco. Yet Blondie is the character most capable of feeling for others, even if he's not very capable. Tuco lacks compassion; finding Blondie doing their old con with a new partner, he takes Blondie away at gunpoint and leaves Blondie's new partner to hang. Blondie himself doesn't seem too torn up about it, but he has his own problems at that moment and the partner was new. But Blondie seems to learn compassion along the way while Tuco doesn't. Even so, Blondie is probably always too cool (rather than good) for us to care much for, while to the end we empathize with Tuco and maybe echo his closing opinion that Blondie is still a no-good son of a AHHH-AHHHHH-AHHH!!! And maybe that's how Leone had come to feel about the Eastwood character after three films, and maybe Eastwood realized that and, seeing diminishing returns, abandoned Leone for Hollywood and ultimate auteurship in his own right. This may still be a "Man With No Name" movie, but above all it's the one with Tuco, and it was good to see it on a big screen at the Madison Theater in Albany this weekend, with Eli Wallach's performance appropriately larger than life.