The Great Silence

Sergio Corbucci produced one of the best Spaghetti Westerns with The Great Silence (1968). Notorious for its bleak ending (Christopher Frayling claims a contemporary viewer was so incensed he fired a pistol at the theater screen!), its stylishness and creativity elevate it above most Spaghettis.

Bounty killers led by the psychotic Loco (Klaus Kinski) ravage isolated Snowhill, Utah. Their only opposition is Silence (Jean-Louis Trintigant), a mute gunslinger with a Mauser Broomhandle who sides with Loco's victims - a band of starving outlaws holed up in the mountains. One outlaw's widow (Vonetta McGee) hires Silence to kill Loco. The Sheriff Barnett (Frank Wolff) arrives in Snowhill, determined to reestablish law and order. But Silence and the Sheriff find handling Loco a tough proposition. 

Corbucci shot most of Silence in Italy's Dolomite Mountains, using some Doctor Zhivago-esque trickery for the town scenes (reportedly shaving cream was employed!). He uses the setting to great effect: the snow storm isolates the town and helps drive the story, as when Barnett's uncovered pistol freezes. You can count the number of snow-covered Westerns on one hand (Day of the Outlaw? Jeremiah Johnson?), and photographer Silvano Ippoliti makes Silence a sight to behold. Helped by Ennio Morricone's somber score, it's a genuinely beautiful film.

Silence matches its unconventional setting with a devastating genre deconstruction. Silence himself pushes the Western hero to near-comic extremes: Clint Eastwood and Franco Nero barely speak, so why not make Silence mute? The character still maintains a kind of chivalry; he goads villains into drawing first, and won't shoot wounded men. Trying that on Loco, he gets roughed up for his trouble. Similarly, Sheriff Barnett is less Wyatt Earp than Old West General Gordon, sent by spineless politicians to "manage" an insolvable situation singlehanded. These conventional protagonists prove thoroughly inadequate to save Snowhill.

Similarly, Corbucci mocks the idea of frontier justice. For one, the outlaws are harmless tramps; the film implies they're persecuted Mormons. Loco receives sanction from crooked Judge Pollicutt (Luigi Pistilli), who runs Snowhill as a personal fiefdom. Utah's Governor (Carlo D'Angelo) is mainly interested in reelection; sounding a noble call for equality, he asks an aide to note it for his next speech! With capital and killers working hand in glove, "justice" becomes frontier feudalism.

In his inimitable fashion, Corbucci saturates Silence with grisly violence. Silence's favorite trick involves shooting the thumbs off bad guys so they can't shoot back. Barnett's welcomed into town when the hill outlaws kill and eat his horse. One villain gets his face scorched by burning coals. But it's all prelude to the finale, where Loco goads Silence into an impossible showdown. It's Silence's chivalry against Loco's monstrous pragmatism, the outcome preordained.

Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Conformist) is interesting casting, channeling his cerebral intensity into a wordless gunfighter. But Klaus Kinski steals the show; he makes Loco more cocky schemer than cackling lunatic, but no less frightening. Vonetta McGee gives a strong performance: unlike most Spaghetti women, she's a tough cookie whose actions drive the plot. Luigi Pistilli's (For a Few Dollars More) officious Pollicutt contrats with Kinski's amorality. Frank Wolff (Salvatore Giuliano) plays Barnett broadly, undercutting his tragic arc.

The Great Silence isn't a perfect movie. The plot's a little rough around the edges, with the outlaws' role never fully established and some passages unnecessary (the Silence-Pauline romance). But its aesthetic beauty, good acting and grim atmosphere make for an experience that's decidedly different from most Spaghetti Westerns.

Django

Django (1966) is probably the most famous - or infamous - Spaghetti Western not directed by Sergio Leone. Its massive gundowns and gory violence set the standard for '60s graphic violence, and its coffin-wielding protagonist spawned dozens of unofficial sequels and rip-offs. Reputation and influence aside, Django works as a bit of inspired madness, even if it lacks the craft and artistry of the best Spaghettis.

A mysterious drifter named Django (Franco Nero) rolls into a small border town dragging a coffin and sporting a Union army uniform. After rescuing half-breed hooker Maria (Loredana Nusciak) from some toughs, Django finds himself caught up in a private war between Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo), an ex-Confederate with a gang of red-hooded Klansmen, and General Rodriguez (Jose Badalo), an egomaniacal "revolutionary" with a private army. Django has his own motivation for being in town, but it takes a lot of blood, bullets and double-crosses to sort things out.

Django seems calculated specifically to one-up Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, with a nearly-identical plot and set-pieces carried to cartoonish extremes. Where Clint Eastwood can simultaneously gun down four heavies in Fistful, Django shoots down fifty or so bad guys with a machine gun. Where Fistful's bad guys machine gun a company of Mexican troops for gold, Django's villains square off against the entire Mexican army. Where Clint endures a brutal beating by the Rojos, Django gets his hands crushed beneath horse's hooves. For fun, throw in ear mutilation, mud-wrestling hookers, a quick-sand pit and red-hooded Klansmen.

On more substantial levels, Django features an extremely thin plot and cartoonish characters. Django's given a shallow revenge motivation that doesn't inspire much empathy, and his actions are incredibly inconsistent. Django leaves Major Jackson alive after his first showdown, then goes gallavanting off with Rodriguez to steal some gold? Call me a mission creep but what exactly does this achieve? Other set-pieces are headscratchers: Django's attempt to sneak a coffin full of gold away from the bad guys is pretty silly, and the mud-wrestling scene is neither erotic nor funny.

What saves Django from being relegated to the Spaghetti scrap heap is Sergio Corbucchi's stylish direction. Corbucchi's better-suited for lightweight shoot-'em-ups than his The Great Silence and Companeros, which interject half-baked "social commentary" to no effect. Here, Corbucchi handles his action scenes with aplomb: Django's machine gun ambush and Rodriguez's raid on the Mexican fort are staged with excitement and creativity. This film is easily the goriest Western prior to The Wild Bunch and Corbucchi handily one-ups Peckinpah in sheer sadism. Carlo Simi's creative setwork also deserves mention, with one of the muddiest, most unappealing Western towns in film history. Luis Bacalov's score is pretty generic, complete with a cheesy Frankie Laine-style ballad.

Franco Nero runs a close second to Clint Eastwood as the quintessential Spaghetti hero. He's a bit more talkative than Clint but no more emotive, and just as badass in the clutch. Jose Badalo is ridiculously over-the-top, but Eduardo Fajardo gives an intense performance as Jackson, a hateful though underdeveloped bad guy. There's also Loredana Nusciak as Maria, an appealingly feisty love interest, and Angel Alvarez in the Jose Calvo role of kindly bartender.

Overall, Django is a nice piece of gore-splattered pulp. High art it is not, but it's unquestionably entertaining in its own twisted way.

Spaghetti Western Double-Shot: A Professional Gun and Face to Face

I continue my perusal of the Spaghetti Western genre with a double feature of genre favorites: Sergio Corbucci's A Professional Gun (1968) and Sergio Sollima's Face to Face (1967). Both are high marks in the subgenre: the former a stylish, action-packed romp through Revolutionary Mexico, the latter a thoughtful, disturbing mediation on the affects of violence. One is a fine piece of entertainment, the other pretty close to a great film.

A Professional Gun



A Professional Gun (aka The Mercenary) is a fairly subdued film by Corbucci's usual standards; compared to the comic book grotesquery of Django (1966) and sadistic nihilism of The Great Silence (1968) it's downright subtle. It's a colorful, action-filled "Zapata Western" with little original in the way of plot or characterization, but the execution makes it an entertaining film.

Mexico is on the verge of revolution, and a group of silver miners revolt against their oppressive overseers. The desperate mine bosses hire Sergei Kowalski (Franco Nero), a Polish gun-for-hire, to transport silver north to America, but Kowalski finds himself reluctantly siding with the miners, led by Paco (Tony Musante). Local tough Curly (Jack Palance) and his gang of henchmen team up with Federales to try and kill Paco, who has gone from uneducated peasant to revolutionary hero; but even as the final showdown nears, Kowalski's loyalty is always in question.

Take an ignorant Mexican peon, a shady foreign mercenary with ulterior motives, throw them in the middle of the Mexican Revolution of 1913, let the sparks, bullets and double-crosses fly, and you've got the model for the so-called "Zapata Western". Damiano Damiani's atrocious A Bullet for the General (1966), inexplicably considered among the genre's best works, was the main basis for this subgenre; as most early Spaghettis shamelessly plagarized Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964), so filmmakers flocked to Damiani's banner, mixing bloody mayhem with sophomoric left-wing politics ("Divide the bread equally!") in a series of derivative films. Leone himself would critique this sub-subgenre pointedly in Duck, You Sucker!, mocking the sophomoric Marxism which pervaded these films with a nihilistic depiction of Revolution. In A Professional Gun, however, the politics aren't what matters; the movie's primary goal is blood-splattered, shoot-'em-up entertainment. On this level, Corbucci undoubtedly delivers.

The movie's plot is pretty much standard Zapata fare, but Corbucci executes it with breezy, stylish confidence. The movie has the usual broadly drawn characters, head-turning betrayals and paper-thin plot inimical to the genre. As usual, modern technology - machine-guns, airplanes, artillery - are used to ratchet up the body count to Sam Peckinpah levels. Such politics as the film displays aren't really worth discussion; it's crude Marxism at its most basic. One shouldn't come to this film for an insightful political polemic, but rather a lot of fast-paced shoot-'em-ups.

Corbucci handles the action scenes with his usual flare, and fills the film with his usual grotesque touches: people eating live lizards and a pair of dice, a pitchfork murder, a duel in a bullfighting arena, a carnation spurting blood. Ennio Morricone contributes a lively Mexican-flavored score - not his best work, but memorable nonetheless. The cast is pretty good: Franco Nero is at his stoic best, and Tony Musante does a nice job with the layered character of Paco. Jack Palance is flamboyantly over-the-top as the villainous Curly, though he suffers from relative lack of screen time. Giovanna Ralli is fiery and gorgeous as Paco's love interest.

A Professional Gun is an entertaining, colorful Western that's certainly worth a look. Like most Spaghettis though, it's lacking that special something to make it a truly great film.

Face to Face



Last Monday, I posited Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown (1966) as the best Spaghetti Western not directed by Sergio Leone. Just over a week later, Sollima trumps his own work with his second Western. In its thematic depth and rich characterization, Face to Face is on a whole other level from pretty much every Spaghetti, with a genuinely disquieting subject matter and a striking lead performance.

New England Professor Brad Fletcher (Gian Maria Volonte) embarks to Texas to recuperate from tuberculosis. Shortly after his arrival, Fletcher is kidnapped by "Beauregard" Bennett (Tomas Milan), a much-feared bandit. Fletcher is initially horrified by Bennett's violent amorality, but soon finds himself seduced by it and actively joins Bennett's gang. The balance of power quickly shifts to Fletcher, who balances his intelligence with newfound bloodlust and takes control of the gang. Further complications ensue when undercover Pinkerton agent Charlie Siringo (William Berger) joins the gang, causing a bank heist to turn into a bloodbath. Siringo and the powers-that-be recruit a huge posse to destroy Fletcher, who has set himself up as a warlord in a small local town - while Bennett arrives to settle his own account with Fletcher.

Sollima explores the affects and appeal of violence in a strikingly contemporary way. He shows Fletcher as an intellectual both fascinated and repulsed by Beauregard's amorality; a weak man with literally nothing to live for, suddenly he has an opportunity to be alive - but his own intellect warps into a private fascism, where killing, mayhem and power are their own reward. The film stages a community square dance a la Ford and brutally subverts it; it is here that Fletcher's nascent fascism begins to emerge, and where later, drunk with power, he will effectively create his own fiefdom, which he will drive to destruction. Beauregard's transformation to a civilized, moral man is a bit predictable (any chance a film character will ever change without a foil?) but equally convincing. Some of the movie's speeches on are a bit too on the nose, but for the most part the movie makes its points with a subtlety and thoughtfulness beyond most any other Spaghetti (and with a fine screenplay by Sollima and Sergio Donati, mercifully lacking the usual dubbing-induced awkwardness). While Corbucci uses politics for atmosphere and setting, Sollima uses it to make a point - and he makes it very well indeed.

There are many genuinely beautiful shots to rival Leone's work throughout the film; Sollima shows a beautiful eye, with gorgeous camera work capturing the beauty of the Almerian desert. The film is replete with brilliant set pieces: the recruiting of the posse, deliberately shot to resemble a Nazi rally, the botched bank heist, the near-surreal final showdown. Morricone again scores, with a fairly subdued soundtrack that makes great use of Edda dell'Orso's gorgeous soprano voice (used to her fullest in Morricone's Once Upon a Time in the West score).

Gian Maria Volonte (of Leone's Dollars films) gives a towering lead performance. He portrays Fletcher's chilling transformation from meek intellectual to bloodthirsty killer perfectly without overplaying the part. Tomas Milian gives a subdued, thoughtful performance miles away from his over-the-top clowning in The Big Gundown, and Spaghetti veteran William Berger (Sabata) is quite good as the third-wheel Siringo, given enough screen time to register as a character rather than a plot device.

Face to Face is something else entirely in the Spaghetti subgenre; it's pretty close to a masterpiece. I can only hope Sollima's other efforts are as good as these two; he may then establish himself as Leone's legitimate rival.