DVR Diary: RINGO AND HIS GOLDEN PISTOL (Johnny Oro, 1966)

Sergio Corbucci's follow-up to Django feels more like a conventional American "adult" western than the more exotic product we think of as a spaghetti western. Its protagonist does have a sort of gimmick weapon or two -- in addition to the golden pistol he has a canteen he can convert into a grenade -- but the story is more character-driven and moralistic than Italian westerns in general are thought to be. Bolzoni and Rossetti's screenplay is less a celebration of the amorality of the bounty killer than an affirmation of the rule of law. Accordingly, it really has two protagonists: not just Johnny Ringo aka Johnny Oro (Mark Damon) but the sheriff of Coldstone (Ettore Manni), with whom Ringo, momentarily his prisoner, allies against lawless outsiders. Johnny Oro may seem not merely conventional but conservative in its treatment of Mexicans and especially Indians -- relatively rare figures in spaghetti westerns -- as pure villains. Matching the film's two heroes are two villains: the bandit heir Junaito Perez (Franco de Rosa), who seeks vengeance on Johnny for the deaths of his brothers, and the Apache chief Sebastian (Giovanni Cianfrigia), first seen getting thrown out of a Coldstone saloon by the sheriff. The crux of the story is Johnny's arrest by the sheriff for a petty crime that will keep him in jail for less than a week. During this time, Perez demands that Johnny be delivered to him for revenge, or else he and Sebastian's warriors will descend on the town. As a bounty killer, Johnny isn't especially popular with many of the townsfolk, some of whom, wanting to restore the modus vivendi that existed with Juanito's brothers, urge Norton to turn him over to Perez. They realize too late that it's no longer possible to negotiate with Perez. Having made his alliance with the Apaches, Juanito is committed to letting them sack the town, so long as he has his way with Johnny. This news provokes a mass exodus from Coldstone, while the remaning people, led by the sheriff and ultimately joined by Johnny, resolve to resist the invasion. Corbucci had what looks like a decent budget to work with here, so the flight and the subsequent attack are impressively if not excessively staged, the latter climaxing in some massive explosions before the final showdown between Johnny and Juanito. Johnny Oro doesn't appear to rank high in the Corbucci canon, perhaps because it's relatively square and maybe because Mark Damon lacks the badass charisma of Franco Nero or other Cobucci stars. But Damon is personable enough as a cynic who shows he has a conscience, or at least some compassion after all, and the screenplay boasts a nice range of well-defined, well-performed characters, including a saloon girl (Valeria Fabrizi) whose love-hate relationship with Johnny ends tragically without particularly embittering our hero. He keeps up his blithe front even at the ultimate moment, when he seems helpless before a gloating Juanito but for a convenient bit of reflective material. Johnny Oro -- or Johnny Ringo for those markets where the Ringo name had Django-like magnetism --  is a likable enough rogue who might have been worth following in later adventures had Corbucci not moved on to ultimately better things.

WHY GO ON KILLING? (Perche' uccidi ancora, 1965)

Like Fritz Lang's Hollywood western Rancho Notorious, Antonio de la Lona's Spanish-Italian western is about "hate, murder and revenge." It has a slightly tragic quality to it, along with a grim appreciation of how a vendetta can sustain itself by drawing in outsiders until until its originators become disposable. Steve McDougall (Anthony Steffen) returns to his home town to avenge his father, who has been executed by a longtime enemy, the ruthless rancher Lopez (Pepe Calvo). Like many a leader, Lopez, who has a personal score to settle with the McDougalls, makes sure to implicate all his men in the killing. He orders each to fire a bullet into the old man, though Rojo  (Carlos Hurtado) does so with obvious reluctance, if not outright revulsion. Rojo will end up one of the film's most tragic figures, constantly conscience-stricken and clearly wanting out of the situation yet obviously too weak to take a meaningful stand until it's too late. His qualms matter little to the surviving McDougalls, which include Steve's sister Judy (Evelyn Stewart) and her husband. Once Steve arrives, all who associate themselves with Lopez are targets, or at least enemies -- which is too bad for Lopez's daughter Pilar (Gemma Cuervo), who carries a torch for Steve until he guns down her brother (Hugo Blanco).

Lopez imports new gunmen to eliminate Steve, but the feud begins to escalate beyond his control when McDougall kills one of the gunmen while the gunman's brother Gringo (Aldo Berti) stayed on the ranch trying to hit on Pilar. Now Gringo has a vendetta of his own that will lead to the death of Steve's brother-in-law, the kidnapping and torture of Judy and the deaths of Lopez and Pilar. Gringo cares about nothing but killing Steve and can't care less about Lopez's larger strategy. The moment Lopez appears to be holding him back, Lopez is a dead man, and when Pilar, who still loves Steve and has shown compassion toward the captive Judy, tries to intervene, she's mowed down without a second thought. Rojo sees all this but can't keep himself from being carried with the tide as Gringo rides off with Judy to force Steve into a fatal showdown.

The writers' treatment of Rojo is one of the film's quiet strengths but also an ultimate weakness. A long chase through the wasteland leaves only Gringo, Rojo and Judy alive after Steve picks off the rest of the ranch gang that Gringo has taken over.  With a gun on Judy, Gringo forces Steve to disarm. He taunts McDougall by promising to kill Judy after Steve dies. Through all of this, Rojo has a gun, and you can see that he's finally reached the point where he can't stands no more. All of Gringo's attention is on Steve.  So what does Rojo do? He throws his gun to Steve -- who can't hold on to it. Steve can do nothing to stop Gringo from blowing poor Rojo away, and it's not until Judy hits Gringo with a rock that McDougall can dive for the gun and shoot his enemy down. It's not hard to imagine Rojo surviving had he shot Gringo himself, but despite how much the writers have highlighted his conscientious observation of events, they could not imagine him claiming real agency by taking out the final villain. I suppose you can argue that tossing the gun is Rojo's ultimate refusal of agency, of a piece with his overall failure to take responsibility for anything. But it's easier to assume that it simply wasn't this flunky's place to defeat the bad guy as far as the writers were concerned, so of course he has to do something suicidal instead.  The writers' decision undermines Hurtado's decent performance, which is mostly a matter of facial expressions that transcend the typical spaghetti-western dubbing. It also exposes the formulaic skeleton on which they tried to hang a more ambitious character-driven piece. For the most part, however, the film manages to find the mood it's looking for with the help of sometimes-wistful landscape cinematography by Hans Burmann and Vitaliano Natalucci and an occasionally-effective score by Felice Di Stefano. The ending may infuriate you a little, but overall Perche' uccidi ancora is a good try at a relatively mature western story.

BLACK KILLER (1971)

As far as I can tell, "Black Killer" is the original title of this Italian western, even in its country of origin. That probably explains why the title creates a false impression. Based on what actor-turned-director Carlo "Lucky Moore" Croccolo shows us, the title probably should have been "Killer in Black." As the presumptive title character, Klaus Kinski is a man in black befitting his dignity as an attorney-at-law. He rides into Tombstone (pre or post-Earp?) with heavy law books dangling from his saddle. The books are his most precious possessions, and he gets antsy when anyone else tries to handle them. We see enough of one volume which flips open, apparently hollowed out, to raise our suspicions about James Webb's true line of work.

In fact, Webb has one of the dumbest gunfighter gimmicks in spaghetti westerns. The books, or some of them at least, are hollowed out and carry guns inside. That's one way to conceal your firearms, I suppose, but Webb takes the gimmick too far. Although there seems to be no advantage at all to it, the lawyer keeps his weapons between their covers at all times, even when he's using them. He's so good a gunman, I guess, that he doesn't have to worry about aiming -- and for that matter, I'm not quite sure how he fires the things unless each volume has a hidden lever somewhere. At least Croccolo doesn't force us to worry about these practical matters until late in the picture. Until then, Webb is mostly a seemingly detached observer of the tribulations of the Collins brothers at the hands of the O'Hara gang that dominates the territory by stealing land from homesteaders. Peter Collins (Jerry Ross) keeps a modest but happy home with his Indian wife Sarah (Marina Malfatti), while brother Burt (Fred Robsham) has been made sheriff, at Webb's prompting, after killing several outlaws shortly after reaching town. In revenge, the O'Hara's attack Peter's home, killing him, injuring Burt and raping Sarah.  The murdered man's widow and brother become avengers, and say what else you will about this picture, it's a rare Italian western that gives us a fighting heroine, and a Native American at that. Sarah fights with bow and arrow (hitting her targets from sometimes impossible-seeming angles) and with guns, and even gets the drop on Webb when he acts suspiciously. She also provides some of the picture's gratuitous nudity, stripping to the buff so Burt can remove a bullet from her thigh. Most of the nudity is contributed by Consuelo the saloon girl (Tiziana Dini), who is as much an object of cinematic exploitation as Sarah is an exceptional heroine.

Alas, Sarah is made to sit out the final showdown pitting Webb and Burt against the remaining O'Haras, perhaps because "Lucky" realized that the Kinski character actually should accomplish something with his gimmicked lawbooks. I suppose you can read some kind of commentary into the gimmick on the inescapable violence at the heart of the rule of law, but I doubt anyone involved in this picture thought too much about it, and in any event Webb is not entirely a lawful character. He undoes the injustice of the land thefts, but keeps the gang's ill-gotten gains for himself, until Sheriff Burt demands a cut and gets it. At first this looked like one of those pictures Kinski would sleepwalk through, but Croccolo does a decent job exploiting the man's irrepressible presence as he glides desultorily through the proceedings. Webb isn't enough of a character to imagine a series of films about, and his gimmick really is dumb as a rock, but Kinski makes him fun to watch this one time without really doing much -- only just enough.

DAY OF ANGER (I giorni dell'ira, 1967)

 Few films identify themselves so blatantly as star vehicles in their opening titles , 
but the first-ever teaming of red-hot western stars Gemma and Van Cleef was one of this one's main attractions.

At first glance, Tonino Valerii's film appears to be based on an English-language novel, but on further review source author Ron Barker was really German scribe Rolf O. Becker, and in any event the filmmakers claim that the screenplay was more inspired by than adapted from Becker/Barker's Death Rode on Tuesdays. Nevertheless, Day of Anger is one of those spaghetti westerns that feels more like an American western in its focus on the main character's moral crisis. To be Germanic about it after all, it's a kind of western bildungsroman in which a naive youth learns what it means to be a gunman under the tutelage of rival mentors.

Scott (Giuliano Gemma) is the town pariah in the community of Clifton, for no better reason than his illegitimate birth. He's given the most disreputable tasks, particularly trash collection, and is despised by respectable townsfolk. His life changes when Frank Talby (Lee Van Cleef) rides through town on his way to Bowie. He seems to sympathize with Scott's outcast status and seems offended when Scott reveals that he has no last name. Since his mother's name was Mary, Frank dubs him Scott Mary and insists on treating him to drinks in the local saloon, where he kills one of Scott's tormentors. A court calls it self-defense, but everyone feels that the victim meant no real harm, so Frank is urged on his way, and Scott follows him, riding his faithful mule Sartana (!!)

On their journey together Talby takes it upon himself to teach Scott a number of valuable life lessons, most of which boil down to cynical pragmatism. It sometimes means treating Scott rough, but Frank seems sincere about wanting to toughen up his new protege. His efforts pay off as Scott saves him from a criminal gang, friends of the man he came to Bowie to meet. He and Wild Jack (Al Mulock) had been involved in a bank robbery in Clifton, for which Frank had served time in prison. Jack tells him that the town fathers of Clifton had had a hand in the robbery and had screwed him out of his (and Frank's) share -- about $50,000. Frank decides to assume Jack's claim on the city and after eliminating Jack and his gang with Scott's help he returns to Clifton for a reckoning.

 Cinematographer Enzo Serafin is fond of showing characters in mirrors  (left)

before they enter the frame proper

At this point it sounds like the Point Blank scenario, but Talby has more ambitious plans. After burning down the leading saloon and destroying those who plotted to destroy him, Frank opens his own opulent gambling joint and settles down. The realization that Talby is driven ultimately by greed rather than revenge hastens Scott's estrangement from him. The disillusionment continues as Scott's old friend and fellow stable bum Murph (Walter Rilla), who taught Scott a fast draw with a wooden gun, reveals himself as a former gunfighter who once drove Talby from another town. Recognizing Talby as an incorrigible bad man, Murph braces up and becomes the town marshal while advising Scott on tactical firearm modification. After Talby kills Murph, Scott finds a special gun the old man had tailored just for him, just to outdraw Talby....

 

Lee Van Cleef is The Master ... of ceremonies  

 Day of Anger stands out for some things the writers refuse to do. All the way through I waited for a shoe to drop and for Talby or someone else to identify himself as Scott Mary's father, but it never happens and it didn't need to. It observes Talby's mentorship of Scott without comment, except to perhaps endorse Murph's view that Frank simply wants a younger man as extra muscle. Another interesting detail is that, while Scott gradually turns against Talby, Frank never really does anything to betray his protege, apart perhaps from bringing in extra gunmen rather than rely on Scott exclusively. He may be vicious in general, but the people of Clifton and environs demonstrate constantly that he lives in a vicious world, as he tries to convey to Scott. There's an admirable ambivalence about Talby that allows you to conclude that, yes, he would resent a guilty town's mistreatment of an innocent boy and, yes, he could take advantage of that boy's resentment and ambition for his own ends. It helps greatly that Lee Van Cleef gives the part such gravitas. This film, among others, confirms what Sergio Leone saw in him that Hollywood had missed for so long. It's a tremendous showcase for Van Cleef's baleful charisma and perhaps his best performance in an Italian western outside of Leone's films. It's a shame you can't have a version of the film that allows Van Cleef to speak English while Gemma speaks Italian, for while screencaps convey nicely the Italian star's portrayal through facial expressions and body language of an ambitious naif increasingly horrified at the prospect of his own hardening, the English dub saddles him with a dumb yokel voice that makes it hard to take Scott seriously as consistently as we should.

As an obvious "A" spaghetti western Day of Anger has predictably good cinematography (by Enzo Serafin) and even better set design that makes Clifton one of the most fully realized fictional towns in the genre. The highlight, of course, is Frank Talby's saloon with its giant guns flanking the entrance, its unusual placement of the stage on an upper tier, and almost psychedelic design motifs -- the common influence seems to be Art Nouveau -- inside. Riz Ortolani does the music for this one and gives it a brassy swagger on top of the characteristic guitar sound. If anything, his score contributes to the film's slightly excessive length and occasionally dragging pace. There are numerous scenes of Van Cleef and Gemma riding through not exactly spectacular landscapes simply so Ortolani's music can play. It's not bad music at all, but moments like those make Day of Anger feel more like a modern soundtrack-padded American film than a contemporary western. For the most part, however, it looks and sounds like what it is: one of the best of the spaghetti westerns.

DVR Diary: THE SILENT STRANGER (1968-75)

If spaghetti westerns owed their global popularity to Sergio Leone imitating Akira Kurosawa, it probably was inevitable that the archetypal circle would close with a spaghetti cowboy visiting the land of samurai. This was accomplished by Tony Anthony, an American who started more obscurely than Clint Eastwood and scored a hit with A Stranger in Town, a film he co-produced with M-G-M money. "The Stranger" became Anthony's spaghetti persona, with the exception of his title character in Blindman, where he was upstaged by Ringo Starr. The Silent Stranger was the third Stranger movie made, but despite the character's apparent popularity it sat shelved for seven years, not appearing until near the tail end of the spaghetti era, and after other east-meets-westerns (Red Sun, The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe, etc.) had come and gone. Silent Stranger remained a novelty as a west-meets-eastern, and it's really more interesting as a samurai movie than as a transplanted spaghetti.

Why the film is called The Silent Stranger is beyond me, since Anthony offers a sporadic voice-over commentary on the action. The story opens in the Klondike, where The Stranger rescues a Japanese man from some ruthless northwestern types. The rescue comes just a little too late, since the Japanese man dies, but he's rescued enough to give Stranger a scroll, with instructions to deliver it to Osaka in return for $20,000. Crossing the Pacific, Stranger becomes the typical Ugly American visitor, expecting to be understood when he speaks pidgin English and drops names. Gradually a Red Harvest type situation emerges as two factions of samurai fight for control of a territory and Stranger, possessing the scroll everyone covets, ends up in the middle. Since this is a spaghetti samurai film, a machine gun factors in the conflict. The scenes showing the oppression of the common people are the best in the picture, particularly a sequence in which tax collectors compel peasants to come out of their houses one family at a time to pay up and rough up those who won't or can't pay, with one man nervously waiting for his turn while Stranger holds him captive. These moments of frantic cruelty feel authentically Japanese, at least in a generic sense, making me wonder whether there was an uncredited native second-unit man during the location shoot. Another highlight is a fight highlighting clashing national styles, as an unarmed Stranger tries to bludgeon a samurai with a hunk of bamboo, only to have the swordsman gradually whittle his weapon down to a nub. At its best, Silent Stranger benefits from an engaging grotesquerie that encompasses the smugly oafish Anthony himself and extends to a villain's dwarf sidekick. At its worst, it takes for granted what it should not, that Tony Anthony is a funny guy, or that anything can be made funny by playing a flute. Inevitably the film is an ego trip for Anthony, and that trips it up, since by a certain point The Stranger is the least interesting thing about the film. It's still an interesting and often entertaining picture, but I recommend it in spite of its star.

DVR Diary: CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37 (1978)

The film with a title like a football score -- it refers to a signpost at a fork in the road -- is a late mating of the Italian spaghetti western with the American revisionist western.  The Italians contributed the script, most of the crew and cast, including action star Fabio Testi, who was top billed on posters in many markets. The Americans contributed director Monte Hellman, whose cult westerns Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting were contemporary with the spaghettis' golden age a decade earlier; Warren Oates, who needs no introduction to western fans and is top-billed in the film itself; and sex. China 9 is a more adult film in its concern with the call of the flesh than most spaghettis, and for that reason, probably, it feels more like an American film. It feels especially like a revisionist film in its apparent repudiation of violence at the very end, though that comes about, in a part, in a positively archaic manner. It's less an "end of the west" film than an "end of the western," since there's a sense of exhaustion about it that overshadows its positive qualities.

We start with an archetypal spaghetti situation: gunfighter Clayton Drumm (Testi apparently speaks his own accented dialogue in the English version) gets a reprieve from hanging on the condition that he kill a former railroad enforcer whose land (and his stubborness) stands in the way of progress. Matt Sebanek (Oates) knows Drumm for what he is, and the mutual recognition forms the basis for mutual respect. If anything, the fact that Mrs. Sebanek (Jenny Agutter) has the hots for Drumm makes him more reluctant to kill Matt. But when he decides to leave Matt alive and leave the territory, she can't resist one more try, and finally he can't resist. Once Matt realizes what's happened he's ready to kill Drumm and slaps the shit out of Catherine, but she's a fighter, too. She stabs Matt in the shoulder with a kitchen knife and beans him with the housewife's archetypal weapon, the rolling pin. Convinced that she's killed the merely kayoed Matt, she runs off to join Drumm.

Somehow managing to extract the knife -- Hellman shows us his earlier futile effort but leaves the resolution offscreen, Matt gathers his brothers and hits the vengeance trail. Meanwhile, the railroad men send killers after Drumm, who failed to kill as ask, and Matt, whom they wanted dead in the first place. Matt's clan finally catches Catherine and wounds a fleeing Drumm, but as his brothers abuse his wife -- one tries to rape her -- Matt's own anger ebbs. All trails converge back at the Sebanek place, where Drumm and Matt team up to wipe out their pursuers before having their own showdown.

A brilliantly shot scene conveys how Drumm and Matt are men apart. Before everything goes bad, Matt's brothers come to his place for a party. The brothers set up some bottles for target shooting and are pretty bad at it. While we see them fire away ineptly, we see the two real gunmen quietly going about some business. Later, as the extended family sits at a picnic table for some music, we can see Drumm and Matt discussing the former's plans -- he has told Matt he's moving on -- in a far corner of the screen. Overall the film is nicely shot by Giuseppe Rotunno, who had The Leopard on his resume and would move on to All That Jazz between Fellini gigs. Pino Donaggio's score leaves something to be desired, sounding a little too contemporary for its own good. Hellman, who directed some of Oates's best performances in Two Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter, gets dependably good work from here, while Testi struggles for credibility between his accent and his designation as beefcake but manages somehow to project the right attitude of weary arrogance. In the end, there's something too good to be true about Clayton Drumm. In the climactic gunfight he actually shoots Matt's gun out of his hand like a Saturday matinee singing cowboy. Matt is chagrined and a little disgusted, telling him that soft-hearted gunfighters -- Drumm is sparing Matt's life, you see -- don't last long in this territory. The final twist to the story is that Matt takes his own advice to heart. He keeps his wife but quits everything else, burning his house down after they pack their goods on a wagon instead of holding out against the railroad. These end notes of reconciliation and renunciation seem like a betrayal of the hard-eyed realism of the revisionist westerns and the cynicism of the spaghettis. It's arguably valid on the film's own terms but it still looks like giving up, and it looks less like Matt giving up on his land than the filmmakers giving up on the western. Appropriately enough, this was just about the end of the line for the Italian western, while the American genre was in such a virtual dormancy that attempted revival films of the Eighties like Silverado would look like historic events. China 9, Liberty 37 signifies two directions a traveler can take, but the film itself, good as it often is, looks like a dead end.

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.

DVR Diary: THE FIVE MAN ARMY (1970)

Italo Zingarelli started producing spaghetti westerns all the way back in 1964, the year of Fistful of Dollars. His first try at the genre was Gunmen of Rio Grande; that its hero was Wyatt Earp suggests that Zingarelli was still trying to ape American films. He followed the Italian practice of recruiting American stars: Guy Madison for Gunmen; Mark Damon for Johnny Yuma; John Ireland for Hate for Hate. In between westerns he made Franco and Ciccio comedies. In 1968 Zingarelli got ambitious; he would cast two Americans in his next western, and hire an American director, Don Taylor. The lead would be Peter Graves, whose stock had risen considerably since joining the Mission:Impossible show in its second season. His co-star would be Dennis Weaver, late of Gunsmoke, later of McCloud. Production was to start early in 1969, but Mission:Impossible fell behind schedule and by the time Graves was available, Weaver was off the project. Taking his place was veteran TV character actor and recent Emmy winner James Daly. To fill out the cast, Zingarelli seems to have taken inspiration from the film Today It's Me, Tomorrow You, hiring Bud Spencer from that film's cast as the requisite lummox and hiring Japanese star Testuro "Tiger Tanaka" Tanba. While Today It's Me had cast Tatsuya Nakadai as a Mexican bandit, Zingarelli and Taylor were less daring. Tanba would play a Japanese man called "Samurai," and despite the actor's reputed skill with the English language his role would be mute. Nino Castelnuovo made it a five-man army.

Zingarelli and Taylor (and co-writer Dario Argento) made a caper picture, and the only thing missing in that respect is a scene of Graves, as "The Dutchman," in his lair studying daguerreotypes of his prospective partners before settling on the explosives expert (Daly), the blades master (Tanba) and the lummox. Castelnuovo's character is in on the plan from the start and brings the skills of a circus acrobat. While his resume was dispiriting to hear -- I'd rather do without acrobatics in my spaghettis, please -- I was relieved to learn that tumbling and flipping never really came into play. Instead, the character developed into a master of the slingshot.  Apart from that, however, The Five Man Army is almost completely disappointing. Taylor's direction is uninspired and Graves epitomizes uninspired acting. He hasn't a whiff of ruthlessness or roguishness about him, and the late twist that has him betray his four partners plays out unconvincingly even before it proves a tease. The Dutchman couldn't turn on his buddies because he's greedy or selfish, after all. Instead, he betrays them for the noblest of causes: the Revolution. He's brought them together to pull off an "impossible" train robbery and nab a Mexican government gold shipment, promising his partners even shares of the loot. Afterward, he thinks he can get away with leaving them a grand apiece while delivering the rest to the revolutionaries. But when government troops find their hideout and attack before he can get away, all five join in the fight, and when the revolutionaries arrive to mop things up, all five happily join the revolution. Joy!

Of our five stars, Daly makes the best impression as a grizzled, fatalistic cynic who gives the requisite talk about the old days being gone for good. Tanba is wasted by the failure to give him dialogue, even though Argento and co-writer Mark Richards give him the film's only romantic subplot, making him the object of a Mexican beauty's affections. Tanba also gets the spotlight in a brief moment of swordplay -- most of the time he throws knives -- and what was presumably intended as the film's action highlight. Having fallen off the train, Samurai must dash across the landscape, finding shortcuts so he can try to catch up and get back on board. The scene takes several crucial minutes that paralyze the picture. While Ennio Morricone labors frantically to make the moment dramatic, Taylor hasn't the pictorial instinct or even the sense of direction (in any sense of the word) necessary to make it all work. Meanwhile, Spencer stands out for his predictable feats of strength and gags about his appetite. In the American edition, his character talks with an unexpected accent -- that couldn't be Carlo Pedersoli's own voice, could it? Finally, I find that I have nothing to say about Castelnuovo, and perhaps it's best to be forgettable in as forgettable a film as this.

Before the film was released, Zingarelli tried to build confidence in it by announcing that he would use Peter Graves in his next picture, tentatively titled Deadly Legion. That film was never made. Instead, Zingarelli retained Bud Spencer for his next western, assigning him to director Enzo Barboni and teaming him with Terence Hill. The rest is history, specifically They Call Me Trinity and the triumph of the comic spaghetti western. ¿Quién sabe? Maybe if Five Man Army had been more successful we may have been spared that.

THE TRAMPLERS (Gli uomini dal passo pesante, 1965)

April 1865: the Confederacy has surrendered and Lon Cordeen (Gordon Scott) has come home to Texas. In his home town the war isn't over. He arrives to find his father Temple (Joseph Cotten) hanging an abolitionist. Abolition and reconstruction aren't what Temple fought for, so he refuses to recognize them. He hopes to use his extended family to enforce his will, but Lon has a different idea. He's internalized the idea that a new order should prevail. For him, that new order takes the form of rebellion against his father. This is a formula for Instant Santayana: by refusing to accept the consequences of the war, Temple Cordeen provokes a war within his own family. Taking Lon's side are his sisters, one of whom loves a man ("Frank" Nero) of whom Temple disapproves, as well as his impressionable, hotheaded brother Hoby (James Mitchum). Meanwhile, the daughter of the hanged abolitionist yearns for revenge on the Cordeen patriarch. She's a wild card who puts the possibility of reconciliation out of any Cordeen hands.

 

In The Tramplers, Gordon Scott comes home from war to find no peace.

The imminence of a new order is inscribed in the casting of Albert Band's film. Released in Italy four months before Django made Franco Nero a global star, it places the young actor in a subordinate role, but also leaves his character one of the last men standing as the Cordeens annihilate each other. The future of the west belongs to Nero, at least as far as Italian cinema is concerned, but Gli uomini dal passo pesante was a vehicle for Gordon Scott.

A lifeguard turned movie star, Scott may not have been the greatest Tarzan, but no one can dispute that he starred in Tarzan's Greatest Adventure. That 1959 is a legitimately fine action film, and the first since Edgar Rice Burroughs's own productions to let Tarzan speak with the fluency Burroughs gave him. Scott, who had acted Weissmuller style for several earlier films, rose to the occasion with forceful performances in Greatest Adventure and Tarzan the Magnificent before trying his luck in Italy in peplum films. By 1965 it was time to adapt to the new craze for westerns, and Tramplers was Scott's second stab at the genre after a film in which he played Buffalo Bill. Tramplers was also his last western -- he made two Eurospy movies before retiring -- and it must be admitted that Scott loses something the more clothes you put on him. He seems shrunken and doesn't really stand out the way he should in his western costume. However, his diminished appearance helps sell Lon Cordeen's war-weariness, while at the same time Scott invests the character with a dangerous sense of entitlement early. There's something unpleasantly arrogant yet riveting in the way Lon thrashes a poor relation he considers unworthy of sitting at the family table. We know it's payback for the man knocking Lon down in town on the day of the hanging, but we can also assume that the man's telling the truth when he says he didn't recognize Lon at that time. There's more to the beating, and Lon's insistence that the man pick Lon's hat off the floor and put it on Lon's head, than that. It's an obvious challenge to the patriarch's authority, as if Lon isn't merely appalled by Temple's renegade atrocities but also impatient to take the old man's place as head of the clan in a new society. It's probably no accident that Lon eventually hooks up with the abolitionist's daughter, even though the screenplay (adapted from Will Cook's novel Guns of North Texas) doesn't really build up any relationship between them until the end.

Scott is upstaged not just by a hammy Joseph Cotten (though not by the deferential Nero) but by James Mitchum's Hoby. Lon's hothead brother ends up more like a spaghetti western character after losing an arm; the injury only exacerbates the character's vicious streak, showing us how Lon has unleashed forces he can't really control, though Mitchum manages to keep the character sympathetic by having him struggle with his violent impulses. These actors' prominence in the picture marks Tramplers as a film from the period when the Italians were still trying to imitate the story and character arcs of American westerns (see also Sergio Corbucci's pre-Django Minnesota Clay). Director Band and co-adaptor Ugo Liberatore were smart (if not economical) to base their film on an American novel, since it's the story and the performances rather than any innovative visual style that will keep people interested in the picture. Tramplers is watchable but ultimately neither fish nor fowl, lacking both the thorough craftsmanship and conviction of the prime U.S. westerns and the stylistic daring of Band's Italian peers. Its juxtaposition of Scott and Nero illustrates a fork in the road for spaghetti westerns, although (with no offense to Gordon Scott) it also makes Tramplers look a little like a dead end.

NAVAJO JOE (1966)

Quentin Tarantino probably thinks more of this Sergio Corbucci western than anyone actually involved in making it. Burt Reynolds once described filming it and playing the title role as the worst experience in his life, and Navajo Joe definitely takes a position toward the rear of the Corbucci western filmography. Only Ennio Morricone emerges with honor, albeit under his "Leo Nichols" pseudonym. Tarantino used some of the Navajo Joe music in the Kill Bill films, and the gimmick of carving a symbol on a victim's forehead in Inglourious Basterds has roots in the Corbucci picture. It sounds good (the "Na-ha-vo Joe Na-ha-vo Johhh" chant is quite an earwig) and the locations often look terrific, but boy, the story is dumber than a bag of posts.

It's really just a by-the-numbers spaghetti story, the numbers all being well known already in 1966. Fernando di Leo, who wrote for Sergio Leone and assisted him in directing For a Few Dollars More, contributed to the script, but none of the three credited writers seems to have contributed much of interest. Navajo Joe is noteworthy only for having a Native American hero, when it was rare for Italian westerns to have Indians in them at all. Joe (usually called "the Indian") is really a spaghetti hybrid, a "bounty killer" and an avenger at once. His own grudge against the bandit leader Duncan (Aldo Sanbrell) leads him to defend an unwelcoming town against Duncan's private army. The town fathers distrust him because of his race. His only allies are an Indian woman (Nicoletta Machiavelli) and the saloon-folk refugees Joe rescued from Duncan's pillage of another town. Joe hardly needs allies, being practically a one-man army. Having allies only handicaps him -- or else giving him vulnerable allies was the only way Di Leo et al could arrange for Joe to suffer the hero's obligatory beating mid-picture.

 

The picturesque world of Navajo Joe.

This is where Navajo Joe jumps the shark for me. The translated screenplay was already pretty bad and the taciturn Joe is an utter waste of Reynolds. The energetic action sequences -- exceptionally for a spaghetti hero, Joe relies less on fast guns than on hand-to-hand attacks, fighting in what Tarantino calls a "blitzkrieg" style -- seemed likely to redeem the picture until Duncan manages to take the Machiavelli character hostage, compelling Joe to surrender when he'd been leisurely sniping bandits from a rooftop by threatening the lady. Joe does surrender and takes his beating before being hung upside down. Then we discover that Duncan, who has blithely massacred everything in his path to this point, has let Machiavelli go to wander about freely and rally the saloon folk to help Joe escape. He expects Joe to tell him where he and the townsfolk have hidden the bank's reserves, but he has given up the only thing that gave him leverage over our hero! That's too stupid to forgive, and at that moment the film lost me.

I can understand Reynolds's disappointment, though I hope he didn't simply resent all the running and jumping Corbucci required of him. His contempt for the pretty contemptible dialogue is apparent in every line he utters. You can see the logic of casting him; another young American making his name on a TV western could be the next Eastwood. The part seems all wrong in retrospect once Reynolds's movie-star persona evolved fully, but it should have seemed wrong to the filmmakers at the time, or maybe it would have had the Italians understood English better. As Joe, Reynolds is all physicality and no personality. He fared better in a more suitably roguish role in the Tom Gries-Clair Huffaker western 100 Rifles a few years later. Navajo Joe is probably a more impressive film than 100 Rifles visually, not counting Racquel Welch as a visual asset for the latter, but you'll really need to turn your brain off to enjoy this ride.

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.

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.

Sergio Corbucci's COMPANEROS (Vamos a matar..., 1970)

Companeros is a thematic remake of Sergio Corbucci's Il Mercenario, with Franco Nero in a similar role as an archetypal foreign expert -- Polish before, he's a Swede now -- and Jack Palance as an even more eccentric antagonist: a Scottish (I think) pot smoker and bird fancier with an artificial hand. Added to the mix in place of Mercenario's Tony Musante is Tomas Milian, as much a spaghetti-western stalwart as Nero, as the archetypal primitive bandit. Corbucci gives him a Che Guevara look, complete with beret, but Milian's Vasco is no ideologue, but the usual self-interested, ignorant brute who almost by accident becomes an officer in the insurgent army of the retroactively regrettably named General Mongo (Jose Modalo). Mongo wears a fiery red tunic but is no leftist. His is one of at least two rival forces battling the Porfirio Diaz government in Mexico circa 1910. His main rival, for this movie's purposes, is the intellectual Professor Xantos (Fernando Rey), who has built a mass movement despite his personal nonviolence. Xantos was naive enough to seek support in the U.S., where he remains an involuntary guest as the story opens. The Americans are willing to support him against Diaz and Mongo, but only if he agrees to grant oil concessions to U.S. firms. While the Americans work on him, Mongo has taken a town from his followers. Xantos's treasury is inside a safe, but only he knows the combination. If Mongo is to pay the Swede for his boxcar full of weapons and explosives (disguised as a quarantined car), he needs the Swede and Vasco to cross the border and break his rival out of captivity. Once he has the information he needs, Mongo plans to put Xantos on trial and execute him.

For his natty attire the Swede (Franco Nero, above) earns the nickname "Penguin" from Vasco (Tomas Milian, below) who's never been warned about drinking while shooting.

This is a more broadly comical and less pictorially ambitious film than Il Mercenario, but Corbucci and cinematographer Alexander Ulloa still put together an attractive picture. Like most of the foreign expert/primitive bandit buddy films from Italy, Companeros is still a consciousness-raising exercise, but it shows characters changing in different ways. In the most predictable scenario, Vasco evolves from one of Mongo's goons to a supporter of Xantos, taking the side of his sometime girlfriend (Iris Berben) whom he transforms from long-haired beauty to pixie revolutionary by hacking off most of her hair after finding her in bed with the Swede. The native usually gets the girl in these pictures, while the foreign expert either dies (sometimes deservingly) or gains revolutionary consciousness himself. Sometimes his new loyalty is just a matter of friendship, and that seems partly the case with Nero here, despite the impending duel with Vasco that serves as a framing device for the Italian edition of the film. Xantos himself evolves during the picture, finally abandoning his implausible insistence (given the situation) on non-violence when he's in a no-alternative position to rescue the good guys from Palance. Given the time and the likely audiences, non-violence was never going to get far in spaghetti westerns.

Xantos (Fernando Rey, above) hopes to convince you of the justice of his cause, while Mongo (Jose Modalo, below) would just as soon shoot you as look at you.

As the new element in the Corbucci scheme, Milian makes the best impression. Even playing an ignorant brute as he often does -- Vasco starts a gunfight when he mistakes the flash of a camera for an attack -- the Cuban actor always manages to convey that his character's mind is working on some level. Nero isn't exactly challenged by his role but at least he seems to enjoy it, while Palance is in his own special place as an almost superfluous and certainly gratuitous villain.

Let's leave Jack Palance (above) alone with his bird and his bliss while acknowledging Iris Berben (below) and her ambivalent band of rebels.

For a Corbucci film, Companeros has little obvious influence on Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's Corbucci homage, apart from a humorous tone that was also present, in a more moderate degree, in the more influential Mercenario. If anything, Companeros is Corbucci's homage to himself -- Vasco gets to drag a coffin around Django-style briefly -- or to Mercenario specifically. Its derivative nature keeps it from the top rank of Corbucci's westerns, but on its own terms it's an entertaining adventure that could be enjoyed easily enough by people who've never heard of the director or his earlier work.