RIP Luciano Vincenzoni

Italian screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni passed away Sunday at age 87. He's best-remembered for his contentious collaboration with Sergio Leone, writing or co-writing the scripts for For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Duck, You Sucker! He also penned the scripts for A Professional Gun and Death Rides a Horse, the Oscar-nominated The Great War (1959) and a variety of other films - including that timeless masterpiece Orca.

Leone fans are keenly encouraged to check out Cenk Kiral's old interview with Vincenzoni here. He's very frank about his relationship with Sergio, and just a bit arrogant. Of course, if you co-wrote The Good, the Bad and the Ugly you're entitled to a slight ego.

Bicycle Thieves

Of all the neorealist movies made in postwar Italy, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) remains the most iconic. Alternately warm and despairing, its simple story of characters surviving poverty strikes a universal chord.

Poor Roman Antonio (Lamberto Maggioriani) is hired as a painter and buys his bicycle back from a pawn shop. On his first day of work, Antonio's bike is stolen. The police aren't any help, so Antonio, his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) and a few friends canvas Rome's streets looking for the bike. Even when Antonio finds his suspect (Vittorio Antonucci), he's unable to make any headway, growing increasingly desperate.

It's common wisdom that neorealism provides a dispassionate, documentary view of Italian life. Yet Bicycle Thieves should dispel that dogma: it's as sentimental as any Hollywood melodrama. Its power lies not in strict realism but down-to-earth craftsmanship. Bicycle Thieves makes few political points, beyond Bruno staring covetously at rich restaurant patrons and Antonio plastering American movie posters all over town. It's a richer portrait of people living through hard times.

De Sica captures the melancholy of Italians still recovering from war. Things are so bad a bicycle means the difference between work and the poor house. The police aren't any help, the Superintendent outright telling Antonio he'd better investigate himself. People grow desperate enough to waste money asking a blind "seer" for advice. When Antonio finally tracks the thief he's mobbed by the suspect's friends and family. The movie's sole glimmer of life comes through its father-son bond: Antonio will do anything to support his family.

De Sica uses nonprofessional actors, though several used the movie as a springboard to full-time acting. Lamberto Maggioriani gives a powerful performance, his anguished, beaten-down expression belying a hopeful exterior. Enzo Staiola's Bruno is likeable, avoiding silly kid schtick, while Lianella Carell is affecting in her brief scenes. Assistant director Sergio Leone cameos as a German seminary student.

Bicycle Thieves is a gem. While not as hopelessly bleak as Rossellini's War Trilogy, its palpable cry of despair will tug at the stoutest of heart strings.

A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe

After the success of My Name is Nobody (1973), producer Sergio Leone rejoined Terence Hill for another Western spoof. A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (1975) isn't as bad as its reputation suggests, but neither is it especially good.

Joe Thanks (Terence Hill) is a gunslinger-conman roaming the American West. Along with sometime partners Steam Engine Bill (Robert Charlebois) and Lucy (Miou-Miou), Joe stumbles onto Major Cabot's (Patrick McGoohan) evil scheme. Cabot discovers a gold mine on Navajo Indian land, and hopes to procure it by provoking a war with the Indians. Joe, Bill and Lucy stage an elaborate con with Bill impersonating a Cavalry Colonel (Jean Martin) to swindle Cabot and save the Navajo.

Genius started as a Western riff on Going Places (1974), a French sex farce also featuring Miou-Miou. Though packaged as a Nobody sequel (an alternate title is Nobody's the Greatest) Genius has no connection to Tonino Valeri's movie. Like the earlier film, it's full of nods to classic American Westerns and Leone's own work. But there's even more emphasis on Hill's slapstick and athletic prowess, more closely recalling his Trinity films. At first it's fun watching Joe outwit opponents with card tricks and climbing skills, but eventually gets old.

Directed by Damiano Damiani, best-known for the politically charged Bullet for the General, Genius has several inspired scenes. Leone himself directed the opening, a darkly humorous riff on Once Upon a Time in the West's family massacre. Another highlight has Joe stage a phony duel with a glowering Klaus Kinski, complete with self-firing Colt! Damiani helms elaborate action scenes, including a chase where one character recreates Yakima Canutt's legendary Stagecoach stunt. The gorgeous Monument Valley scenery ensures a pleasant-looking film, with Ennio Morricone providing a boisterous comedy score.

Genius provides plenty of laughs but ultimately bogs down in plot. The gang's elaborate con plays like a second-rate The Sting, a convoluted series of double-crosses with a lame payoff. Bill and Lucy prove annoying sidekicks, while the villains are silly featherweights. Marxist as he is, Damiani insists on inserting political commentary ("We're not ordinary people - we're Americans!") that feels singularly inappropriate. The movie ends with a literal bang but still feels empty, with a cheesy moral out of an after-school special.

Terence Hill provides his usual amiability: few stars are so effortlessly likeable. Co-stars Robert Charlebois and Miou-Miou don't fare so well: Charlebois's grumpy griping gets old fast, while Miou-Miou's sunk by a hideous dubbing job. Patrick McGoohan seems as surprised as viewers that he's slumming in a Spaghetti Western. Pietro Vida plays a shifty go-between, playing Cabot and Joe against each other. Klaus Kinski gets a show-stealing cameo before an ignoble exit.

A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe won't be high on too many Spaghetti fans' lists. It's amusing but disposable, a fairly routine parody Western.

Finding Noodles

Several users on the Sergio Leone Web Board have been undertaking an intriguing project. Going off Harry Goldberg's novel The Hoods, which inspired Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, users "Chris" and "Harry Goldberg" painstakingly research the identities of the gangsters portrayed in the book. Their efforts are well worth checking out; link here. On another note, our friend Tim at Just Hit Play recently penned his 1,000th review! Congratulations Captain!

Once Upon a Time in America Restoration

Last week a new, restored version of Sergio Leone's gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America premiered at Cannes. Sanctioned by Leone's surviving family, it adds nearly half-an-hour of deleted scenes. But is it worth watching?

Mat Viola's article at Notes of a Film Film Fanatic, detailing the restored scenes, makes a more informed argument than I could. His comments roughly echo my own, comparatively uneducated thoughts on the matter.

Restoring Leone's films has been a hit or miss proposition. Undoubtedly the initial theatrical cuts of Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck You Sucker! and the 144 minute version of America are deficient. The 144 minute West pointlessly deletes key scenes (the whole trading post sequence, Cheyenne's death), making the film incomprehensible. Sucker!'s 138 minute version (I haven't seen the even shorter 121 minute) is a rushed, unfocused mess. I've never seen the shorter America but by all accounts it's an atrocity.

Apparently under the same principle that gave us Apocalypse Now: Redux and various Star Wars revisions, some have decided ALL of Leone's movies deserve tweaking. John Kirk's 2003 "restoration" of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly met with mixed reactions: fans still debate the necessity of the added scenes, and especially the soundtrack remix. And yet it's this version that's most readily available on DVD and Blu-Ray. A marginally longer version of West, which does little more than augment a few existing scenes, has also cropped up recently.

My big objection (concededly without seeing the whole cut) is its superfluity. Leone's films are elipitical and the lack of exculpatory detail rarely hurts them. Before the new cut of Good, who ever cared how Angel Eyes got to the Union prison camp? How many people watch West wishing Leone had filmed the shootout between Cheyenne and Morton? Indeed, their absence adds to the films' mythic atmosphere more than literal explanation could. Papering over minor plotholes that never bothered 99% of viewers isn't justification for a "restoration." Certainly, I'd argue leaving some things to the viewer's imagination isn't a bad thing.

The scene with Louise Fletcher as a cemetery caretaker can be viewed here. Judge for yourself, but I find it a bald piece of exposition that tells us nothing of import. Noodles' poetic, wordless visit to the gang's crypt becomes a talky dialogue that benefits no one except Louise Fletcher fans. Not to mention it raises other issues: explaining the crypt's use of Cockeye's song, a nice touch in the shorter scene, makes it ridiculously unlikely.

In any case, my biggest problem with America - as enumerated in my review - isn't any plot holes, real or imagined. Rather, the deficiency and awkard pacing of the 1968 scenes. It's possible the added bits flesh them out, making them more functional. Or they could could just add to the tedium. Certainly I have no great desire to see a long bit with Elizabeth McGovern performing Antony and Cleopatra.

One final point is that, as the article above indicates, Leone was more than happy with the existing cut. True, he'd originally planned for a six-hour super epic, and only reluctantly trimmed it to 229 minutes. Well, what director wants their work edited? What matters is whether they're satisfied with the finished version. Given Leone's acceptance of the older cut as "my version," this marks the new America as a curio rather than a director's cut.

But hey, maybe I'm wrong. For those who like every conceivable detail explained, I'm sure there will be a future version of America complete with epilogue explaining the garbage truck, and a caption on whether or not the film's a dream. No need to leave anything ambiguous, am I right?

Baaaah

For the first time in awhile, I went a whole week without seeing a single film, though not for want of trying. A combination of lots and lots of school work (an academic conference and term project, most notably) and buggy technology conspired to prevent my watching anything. I got through half of Gunga Din before the hideously-scratched DVD (thanks Carnegie Library!) froze up.

Still, there are a few things to crow about.

For one, I'm the newest member of the Large Association of Movie Blogs (LAMB), a really great network of film bloggers. Many of my subscribers are members; why not you?

Interested in the upcoming Once Upon a Time in America restoration? An associate from the Leone Board gives us an idea of what might be restored. Here is a link to a list of deleted scenes with script excerpts. And if you have a few hours to kill, here is the complete, 321-page shooting script.

Also, I'm a bit dismayed to see my Howard the Duck review is my most popular post. Are there really that many Howard fans out there?



Hopefully there'll be a review or two (or maybe even a rant) this coming week.

Once Upon a Time... a Restoration

In last week's news, it looks like Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America is going to be re-released with an additional forty minutes of footage restored.

I'm not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, I love the movie, I'm interested in seeing these scenes, and this seems to be Leone's approved cut. On the other, I think the film is good - and long - enough as it is, and the few problems I do have with it wouldn't be fixed with additional scenes.

Christopher Frayling's Leone biography, Something to Do With Death, has a rather detailed outline of the original screenplay, including scenes not present in the existing version. So far as I can remember, major scenes missing from the current 229-minute cut include:

- A flashback to Noodles's childhood during Noodles's first visit to the opium den.

- Young Noodles coming home to his parents and arguing with them over prayer.

- Bugsy's gang getting arrested by the cops, presumably tipped off by Noodles and Max.

- A scene with Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) as the caretaker of the cemetery Noodles visits in 1968.

- Several scenes with Darlanne Fluegel's Eve, first meeting a drunk Noodles in a bar and later revealing she wears "falsies."

- A scene in 1968 between "Secretary Bailey" and Jimmy O'Donnell arguing over the pension fund scandal.

There are a few other bits (especially scenes with Danny Aiello and Treat Williams) that probably weren't filmed, since they'd clash with the existing narrative.

Contrary to popular belief, there appear to be no further scenes with Joe Pesci's character; the enigmatic moment of him eyeing Noodles and Max in the hospital isn't part of a longer scene.

Will this additional footage make a great film even better, or will it just make a long film even longer? You be the judge. I'd be interested in seeing it, but frankly I'm fine with the 229-minute Cannes cut.

My Name is Nobody

My Name is Nobody (1971) is a bizarre, uneven comedy Western. Produced by Sergio Leone but directed by Tonino Valerii (Day of Anger), it's a not-entirely successful spoof of Leone's own films, with some interesting material crowded out by excess goofiness.

Aging gunfighter Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda) wants to retire and move to Europe, hoping to escape his reputation. Unfortunately, Beauregard runs into trouble when his brother (Leo Gordon) is gunned down by henchmen of crooked businessman Sullivan (Jean Martin), who is operating a phony mine for the Wild Bunch, a huge outlaw gang. Things are complicated further when a stranger calling himself Nobody (Terence Hill) shows up, goading Beauregard into an epic showdown with the Wild Bunch.

My Name is Nobody offers plenty of material for analysis. Leone and Valerii cheekily send-up their own Spaghetti Westerns and their American counterparts. It's hard not to consider Nobody, the cocksure youngster who worships Jack's legend, as an avatar for Leone and his peers' adoration and emulation of classic American Westerns, and casting Henry Fonda as Jack certainly helps this interpretation. Innumerable Western homages litter the film, from Nobody's Magnificent Seven-inspired fishing trick to Sam Peckinpah's name turning up on a tombstone, while the film re-stages entire scenes from earlier Leone films - a lengthy opening spoof of Once Upon a Time in the West, the hat-shooting from For a Few Dollars More. The movie's funniest gag has a photographer "directing" the climactic duel while peering through a camera lens.

Unfortunately, My Name is Nobody is problematic. The film awkardly shifts between off-the-wall, Three Stooges slapstick and reflective melancholy. Besides the usual end of the West stuff, we get a story that lurches from scene to scene with little flow or drive. The Wild Bunch subplot and Beauregard's vendetta are badly handled, while Nobody's clowning takes up far too much of the film. It seems like a serious Spaghetti Western mixed with a goofy spoof, and the two halves don't properly mesh. Perhaps this is intentional - the American Jack and the Italian Nobody inhabit two different worlds, after all - but it's not very satisfying. Moment to moment Nobody is amusing, but it doesn't amount to much of a whole.

Exactly who was in charge of the film - Leone, the domineering, first-time producer, or Valerii, a veteran director in his own right - is in dispute, with sources claiming Leone directed a few scenes or virtually all of it. Regardless, Nobody is a well-shot film, with lots of expensive-looking sets and locations, and creative set-pieces - especially the self-parodic opening and a creative carnival gunfight. Ennio Morricone's quirky score is arguably the film's highpoint, sending up his own work: the bouncy, laid-back Main Title, the duel music aping Once Upon a Time in the West's Harmonica theme, and of course, the Wild Bunch's theme with Ride of the Valkyries blaring on car horns and ocarina.

Terence Hill (March or Die) plays a variation on his lovable scamp from They Call Me Trinity. His gags are hit-and-miss but Hill's laid-back, effortless charm easily wins over the audience. Henry Fonda coasts through his part, and one figures he's paying Leone back for his great villain in Once Upon a Time in the West. Jean Martin (The Battle of Algiers) is oddly cast as a colorless bad guy. Supporting roles are an interesting mix of Spaghetti Western favorites like Mario Brega (Death Rides a Horse) and Antoine Saint-John (Duck, You Sucker!), and American actors Geoffrey Lewis (Dillinger), Neil Summers (The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean), R.G. Armstrong (Ride the High Country) and Steve Kanaly (The Wind and the Lion).

Ultimately, how much you like My Name is Nobody depends on how much you like cartoon slapstick and wackiness. There's enough action and grace notes to keep others interested, but overall it's underwhelming.

Once Upon a Time in America

Sergio Leone’s final film is a flawed masterpiece. Sixteen years in gestation and subject to extensive cutting (even the 229-minute version is an hour shorter than Leone’s preferred length), Once Upon a Time in America (1984) is at turns fascinating and frustrating. It took this viewer three viewings before I was ready to declare it a great film, and even now I have serious reservations. If you’re able to make it through though, it’s a beautiful, poignant and richly rewarding film.

1933: Jewish gangster David “Noodles” Aaronson (Robert De Niro) narrowly escapes Syndicate hitmen who want to kill him for betraying his friends. Thirty-five years later, Noodles returns to New York, having been summoned by a wealthy and mysterious client. As Noodles tries to find his benefactor, he flashes back to earlier days: first his youth (Scott Tiler), growing up in a Brooklyn ghetto, where he pined after the pretty Deborah (Jennifer Connelly), met buddy Max (Rusty Jacobs) and ran a small gang that ran favors for a local crime boss (Clem Caserta). After killing rival gangster Bugsy (James Russo), Noodles spends a decade in jail, emerging to find Max (James Woods), Patsy (James Hayden) and Cockeye (William Forsythe) running a successful speakeasy.

Noodles is ambivalent as Max gets the gang tied up with Frankie Minaldi’s (Joe Pesci) national Syndicate, rubbing out rivals and supporting a union strike led by Jimmy O’Donnell (Treat Williams). He tries to reconnect with Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern), now a successful actress, but things go horribly wrong. Max’s ambitions drive Noodles further away, as his embarks on a suicidal plan to rob the Federal Reserve. Noodles is convinced by Max’s squeeze Carol (Tuesday Weld) to betray him, leading to an ambush and three decades of regret.

Once Upon a Time in America seems designed to aggravate viewers. Its near four-hour length alone will turn off many: throw in a non-linear narrative, slow pace, graphic violence, rape scenes and an ambiguous ending and you have one exhausting movie. Despite the disjointed chronology, the story is pretty straightforward but many key plot threads remain ambiguous – perhaps by design, perhaps due to cutting. It’s certainly worth the effort if you have the patience, but I will not judge anyone who does not.

Comparisons with The Godfather are inevitable (not the least since Leone was first offered to direct that film), but for all its grandeur and scope, Once Upon a Time in America has more to do with an earlier crop of gangster flicks: The Public Enemy, Scarface, White Heat, Little Caesar. Noodles and Co. are mad-dog street thugs: hit-men, thieves and union muscle manipulated by Frankie Minaldi’s Syndicate. They seem out-of-place and uncomfortable in their oft-opulent surroundings; their only virtue is loyalty to each other, and even that proves questionable. The stylized slayings of Coppola’s films are replaced with brutally direct violence that doesn’t sanitize the underworld: few people are likely to come away from this film thinking Noodles and Co. as heroes, as so many do with The Godfather and Goodfellas.

Leone goes a step further than ‘30s gangster pics in characterizing its protagonists as perennial adolescents: violent, greedy, misogynistic, and obsessed with sex, power and money. Lacking the moralizing tone of the earlier films, Leone simply presents the gang as the product of a rough time and place, their reversion to crime not a tragedy but inevitable. Noodles’ raping Carol during a robbery and a baby-switching scene are bits of cruelty played for laughs. Max’s plan to rob the Federal Reserve is either insane or childishly naïve. Even Noodles, portrayed mostly as a smart, sensitive guy, is given to fits of volcanic rage that destroy his chance at normality: his rape of Deborah is a truly appalling sequence, an act of childish defiance towards a friend who won’t play along anymore. James Cagney and Paul Muni were saints compared to these guys.

The film most successfully conveys wonderful atmosphere and emotion. Leone’s sumptuous period detail (and Ennio Morricone’s score) makes the film physically beautiful, and it has an air of poignancy and dreamy nostalgia achieved by few other films. Many scenes are incredibly beautiful: the whimsical scene of young Patsy preferring a cake to a date with a prostitute, and Noodles’s fantasy date with Deborah (shades of The Great Gatsby?) are particularly transcendent bits. These scenes make the violence all the more shocking and pertinent, rupturing the nostalgic atmosphere. Happiness quickly turns to tragedy, shattering the idyll: a younger member of the gang is killed immediately after they hit it big, and Noodles ends his night out with Deborah by raping her. No wonder Noodles’ final flashback is restricted to his comparatively-innocent childhood.

The movie does have one major flaw. The flashbacks are realized with vividness and dramatic force, but the 1968 sequences seem almost an afterthought. Sketched-in, drawn-out, and very talky, they just sit there, and serve as distractions from the really interesting bits. The twist is fairly obvious and undermines the power of what came before. Noodles’ confrontation with Secretary Bailey has some poignancy, but his reunion with Deborah is a complete dud. Oft-questionable make-up jobs (especially Elizabeth McGovern) don’t help and the weird ending has its own problems. Perhaps all this justifies the infamous “Dream Theory,” that the whole movie is just Noodles’ dope-induced hallucination, but that seems a cop-out to cover up weaknesses in plot. Leone made a great film, not a perfect one.

Leone’s direction is flawless; he transcends his straight-jacketing as a Western director and proves himself a true artist. Using New York locations, Cinecitta sets and other locales, along with astonishing costumes and opulent art direction, Leone recreates Prohibition-era New York to a T. His usual slow, ritualistic tempo mixes with a stunning visual style to forge one of the most beautiful films ever made. Ennio Morricone’s elegiac, operatic score may well be his best work: from the wistful main title, to Edda dell’Orso’s sweeping soprano and Zamphir’s dreamy panpipes, the score is truly astonishing.

Robert De Niro is good in an unusually restrained performance; Noodles is a brooding character with fits of explosive anger that are powerful when they come. James Woods gives an electrifying performance, completely stealing the film. Tuesday Weld does excellent work but Elizabeth McGovern struggles with a one-note character. The child actors are pitch-perfect, with special honors to Scott Tiler (Three O’Clock High) and a fourteen year old, already-stunning Jennifer Connelly.

The rest of the cast is reduced to colorful bit parts, with varying degrees of effectiveness. William Forsythe (Dick Tracy) and James Hayden are marginalized compared to De Niro and Woods, though each has their moments. Veteran character actors Danny Aiello (The Godfather Part II), Richard Bright (The Getaway), James Russo (Public Enemies) and Burt Young (The Killer Elite) make the most of their screen time, but Joe Pesci (JFK) and Treat Williams (The Eagle Has Landed) seem adrift in peripheral roles. A very pretty Darlanne Flugel (To Live and Die in LA) shines in her small part.

Once Upon a Time in America is not going to appeal to everyone, and is likely to alienate a great many viewers. Those who have the patience and stamina to see it through, however, are in for a treat.

For a Few Dollars More

The Man With No Name returns in For a Few Dollars More (1965), the second of Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy." Much more ambitious and large-scale than the modest, cheaply-budgeted A Fistful of Dollars, it shows signs of the Leone who would soon produce some of the greatest Westerns ever.

Psychotic outlaw El Indio (Gian Maria Volonte) is sprung from jail by his gang. Indio plots the robbery of the heavily-guarded bank at El Paso. Two bounty hunters - the amoral, quick-drawing Monco (Clint Eastwood), the coolly professional sharpshooter Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) find themselves on Indio's trail. They form an uneasy alliance to take the bandit down, with Monco infiltrating his gang, but Indio's own crazy scheming threatens to foil the bounty hunters' well-laid plans.

For a Few Dollars More is more purely "Spaghetti Western" than most of Leone's work. It is full of laconic heroes, exaggerated, sadistic violence (21 people die in the first twenty minutes), an earthy sense of humor (Mortimer bursting in on a bathing woman, Blondie flirting with a slutty hotel clerk (Mara Krup)), nods to American Westerns (a key scene from The Tin Star is restaged comically), a simple yet convoluted plot, and cheapjack dubbing. Leone manages to make all this work, creating a movie that is incredibly enjoyable, deliciously convoluted and wickedly funny.

Leone's amoral, cynical take on the West is in full flower. "Life has no value," says the opening caption, and our amoral, coldly professional gunslingers are in place. Mortimer does have a motive for tracking down Indio, but the main motivation for both him and Monco is greed. Our two "heroes" are parodies of machismo, scuffing each other's boots and shooting each other's hats like children, each trying to out-scheme the other and come out on top. The only Sheriff we see is corrupt and cowardly, and very few townspeople are seen at all. Cynicism about progress is humorously expressed by the Old Prophet (Joseph Eggert) in a scene out of a Looney Tunes short; in a more serious, pointed form it would return in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Moving beyond the set-bound necessities of Fistful, Leone shows an ambitious, keen camera eye. The Almerian countryside is beautifully captured by Massimo Dallmano, the harsh, alien desert a perfect arena for the story. Carlo Simi also provides a wonderfully rustic and memorable set-design. Ennio Morricone provides an excellent score, as usual: the music runs the gamut from the jaunty, almost comic main theme (with whistles and Jew's harp) to the stately, oboe-and-choral "Goodbye, Colonel" track, and musical chime and organ for a church showdown.

Clint Eastwood plays the Man With No Name with more humor and self-awareness than before. Lee Van Cleef propels himself from a career as a bit-part Hollywood bad guy (High Noon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) to Spaghetti superstar (The Big Gundown, Day of Anger); his Mortimer is a simple character beautifully rendered. Gian Maria Volonte (Face to Face) provides an excellent counterpart to Eastwood and Van Cleef's stoicism, cackling, chewing scenery and smoking reefer as one of the hammiest villains ever. Luigi Pistilli (Death Rides a Horse) and Klaus Kinski (Doctor Zhivago) show up as two of Indio's more colorful henchmen.

For a Few Dollars More is no masterpiece, but it's fun and extremely enjoyable.

A Fistful of Dollars

Perhaps it was the budding snob in me, but my last few viewings of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) left me somewhat cold. Although a passable little film, I found it lacking in any real style or quality and dismissed it as Leone's weakest effort - not having seen The Colossus of Rhodes, in all fairness.

Well, I rewatched the film the other day and am willing to revise my opinion. Certainly A Fistful of Dollars isn't a work of cinematic art like, say, Once Upon a Time in the West indisputably is, but it's a damn well-made entertainment, with Leone's talents already on display despite the low budget, recycled story and dingy atmosphere. And Clint Eastwood, fresh off his success as TV star, creates an instant superstar icon here as the cool, deadly Man With No Name.

A poncho-wearing stranger known only as Joe (Clint Eastwood) rides into the Mexican border town of San Miguel, which is ruled by two feuding families: Sheriff John Baxter (Wolfgang Luckhsky), and the Rojos, led by the psychotic Ramon (Gian Maria Volonte), each selling guns and liquor and keeping private armies of gunfighters. With the reluctant help of bartender Silvanito (Jose Calvo), Joe plays both sides against each other, gaining a huge wad of cash in the process. But when Joe helps Ramon's lover Marisol (Marianne Koch) and her family escape San Miguel, Joe is repaid for his treachery with brutal torture. After the Rojos slaughter the Baxters, Joe rides back into town for the final showdown with Ramon.

Fistful was not the first Spaghetti Western, but it was unquestionably the most important. Early films, like the German Winnetou adaptations and Gunfight at Red Sands, attempted to ape the look and feel of American Westerns, with generally negative results; they looked like the cheap pastiches they were. Leone's film, along with Sergio Corbucci's over-the-top Django, revolutionized the subgenre, infusing it with a mix of exaggerated violence, gleeful amorality and a dark cynicism completely distinct from classic American Westerns. If American Westerns like My Darling Clementine and The Wild Bunch are cinematic novels rich in characters and thematic material, Fistful and most of its successors are comic books; over-the-top and outlandish, style over substance, but a distinct form of art in their own right.

The success of Leone's film started a stampede of imitators. By the mid-70s, over 400 Spaghettis had been produced, ranging from the good (Face to Face, Death Rides a Horse) to the cheap and cheesy to some truly bizarre, hyperviolent and outlandish films like Django Kill! and Cut-throats Nine. The films equally influenced Hollywood, whose depictions of the Old West grew increasingly darker and more violent through the late '60s and beyond. All of these films find their genesis with Leone's first Western, and it would be important if only for the baggage it carries. Fortunately, Fistful is a good enough film in its own right.

Fistful blatantly recycles the plot of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, seamlessly transposing it into the Old West. The film lacks the graceful artistry and construction of Kurosawa's film, replacing it with dingy minimalism, crude wooden. It's not an issue of realism, as many of Leone's fans claim - certainly not when Joe guns down four opponets with a single burst of pistol fire - low budget is largely to blame or credit here. Nonetheless, the movie has a bleak, desolate and violent atmosphere distinct from American Westerns, and its story of violence and treachery is sparse enough to justify this simplicity. The story is simple and well-told; characterization and thematic depth are not to be found, but violent, well-made entertainment is abundant, and that's all that's required here.

Leone already showed a great cineamtic eye in Colossus of Rhodes, which for all its faults is certainly a well-directed film. Working on a budget of $200,000, his production is fairly economical, but Leone still films the action scenes with style, his trademark use of extreme close-ups and eye for landscape already in evidence. He would hone his style on his later films, catapulting the Spaghetti Western in genuine art, but the embryo of these films is certainly here. Ennio Morricone's score is, needless to say, invaluable to the film; his score is typically eclectic, using whistles, chants, bells and whip-cracks alongside blaring trumpets and mournful strings. It's a far cry from the soaring arias and orchestrations of Morricone's later work, but it's certainly brilliant in its own right.

Clint Eastwood instantly went from the meek Rowdy Yates of TV's Rawhide to international super-stardom, reteaming with Leone on For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly before returning to the US and even bigger stardom. He's already got the squint, the poncho, the cigarillo and the smartass quips down pat in his first big scene facing off against the Baxters, and he would only grow in stature from here, from future Man With No Name adventures to Dirty Harry to his own directoral efforts. The heavily dubbed supporting cast is adequate: Gian Maria Volonte rehearses the psychopath he would create even more memorably in For a Few Dollars More, Jose Calvo (Day of Anger) provides the film with a conscience, and Leone's usual Italian thugs - Benito Stefanelli, Antonio Molino Rojo, Lorenzo Robledo, the hulking Mario Brega - provide bench support.

A Fistful of Dollars is by no means a masterpiece, but it's a solid, gritty bit of entertainment, and a fine first Western for Sergio Leone. Both Leone and Eastwood would go on to bigger and better things, but this is a fine place for each to start.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Now I will finally review Sergio Leone's magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). It's not a task I take lightly. The film is a quantum leap from Leone's Dollars trilogy in quality and richness, and stands on its own as an unparalleled work of art. In short, it is pure cinema.

Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) is a New Orleans prostitute coming West to join her husband Brett (Frank Wolff) at his Sweetwater Ranch to start a new life. Unfortunately, Jill arrives only to discover that her husband and his family have been brutally massacred. Evidence points towards Cheyenne (Jason Robards), a Mexican bandit whose men wear dusters "like a signature", but a mysterious, harmonica-playing stranger (Charles Bronson) knows better; it was the work of Frank (Henry Fonda), a ruthless hired gun working for dying railroad magnate Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), who wants to appropriate McBain's land for his railroad. Harmonica and Cheyenne form a shaky alliance to protect Jill and defeat Frank's men - while Harmonica has a score of his own to settle with Frank.

So much has been written about Once Upon a Time in the West (even I have written several reviews and essays on the film already) that it's hard to know from what angle to approach the film. Certainly, in terms of plot and themes, it's hardly original, but in presentation, it something else entirely.

The movie is an affectionate patchwork of homages to American Western; every scene a distillation of dozens of Hollywood Westerns gone before, providing both an affectionate homage and a pointed, cynical commentary. The film's opening is an extended High Noon parody, with gunslingers Woody Strode (Spartacus), Jack Elam (innumerable Westerns) and Al Muloch (the one-armed bounty hunter in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) menacing the station master, shooing flies and waiting for Harmonica to arrive on a train. Such references, from major set-pieces (the massacre borrowed from The Searchers, the Shane-inspired funeral) to minor details (Cheyenne sliding a gun to Harmonica a la Ward Bond to Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine), permeate the entire film. Besides the usual Almerian landscapes and elaborate, rough-hewn sets, Leone also sets several key scenes - Jill's ride to Flagstone and the film's climactic flashback - in Ford's Monument Valley, returning the Western to its home. Unlike many modern directors, Leone uses such homages to brilliant effect, making them an essential part of the film; Leone takes everything old and worn out about the American Western and turn them into something grand, creating his own iconography in the process.

The most effective "homage" by far is Henry Fonda's casting as Frank. Fonda had played morally dubious characters several times - the martinet Colonel Thursday in Ford's Fort Apache, a guilt-ridden gunslinger in Warlock, a bad guy in Firecreek - but they were by far the exception. He was the iconic Wyatt Earp, cleaning up Tombstone with a few well-placed shots; John Ford's pious Young Mr. Lincoln; the righteous Tom Joad; the grimly determined Juror Number 8; and innumerable Presidents, generals and statesmen. Fonda is at times almost unrecognizable under a sun-burned face and scraggly beard-stubble (and he bears a full beard in his flashback sequences), but all it takes is one close-up of Fonda's ice blue eyes and sinister half-smile to remind us who he is. The scene where Fonda casually guns down a ten year old child caused shocks when the film was released; it has less impact today, but it still works a transcendent moment in its own right.



The movie's plot (a straight re-working of Nicholas Ray's wacky Johnny Guitar), characters (all archetypes out of the hoariest B-Western), and primary theme (the death of the West) are hardly novel, but the way Leone handles them transcends the cliched material. The film treats its gunfighter-protagonists like Gods of old mythology, embodying everything the Western genre has stood for in the past. Like John Ford's larger-than-life heroes, Harmonica, Cheyenne, and even Frank have their place in the settling of the West - but ultimately they must die, or else fade away into the sunset, to make way for progress they have no part of - progress personified both by Jill the reluctant Earth mother, bringing water to rail workers and birthing the town of Sweetwater, and the malevolent Morton, whose terminal illness, sacks of money and "beautiful, shiny rails" show a darker side. Progress brings prosperity to those who survive, but also destroys everything already in existence - the film's cast of characters martyrs to the inevitable taming of the Old West.

Upon repeat viewings, the film's weakest aspect is Cheyenne, the "romantic bandit" who falls for Jill and reluctantly ends up on the right side. He's far too eloquent and verbose to be a convincing tough guy, and casting Jason Robards in the part certainly doesn't help matters. The pistoleer introduced shooting his way out of a sizeable prison escort (albeit off-screen) and later rescues Harmonica from a slew of Frank's henchmen seems an entirely different character from the half-baked philosopher musing about the life of an outlaw and warning Jill about the propensity of cowboys to pat her behind (one of the film's most awkward moments). Frank and Harmonica's brief exchange before the final duel says far more about the subject of the dying breed of gunslingers than any of Cheyenne's long-winded stem-winders. Robards gives a fine performance with what he has, but the character just seems out of place, and his lengthy death scene makes the movie a beat too long.

Leone's direction has never been better. The entire movie is one long, dream-like ritual, with blatantly theatrical devices (a train "revealing" Harmonica like a curtain, a swinging lantern illuminating and shadowing his face, characters constantly framed by doors and windows) that are made transcendent; even trivial incidents like Cheyenne's forcing a trading-post patron to shoot his manacles turn into bravura set-pieces. The lengthy opening scene makes brilliant use of time and sound; no music, just the creaking of the windmill, the dripping of a water tower, the buzzing of a pesky fly, and the shriek of a locomotive. The final duel between Frank and Harmonica, interrupted by a lengthy flashback, is one of the most astonishing sequences in film history; with the plot all but over, Leone allows the film to become pure ritual, with brilliant use of Tonino Delli Colli's cinematography, Ennio Morricone's operatic score and of course, the epochal close-ups. Such scenes are beyond brilliant, and the movie as a whole is perhaps the ultimate argument for Film as Art.



Special note must be paid to Ennio Morricone's extraordinary score, up there with Maurice Jarre's Doctor Zhivago as one of the best of all time. Morricone's work on Leone's Dollars films is excellent in its own right, but his score for Once Upon a Time is something on a whole other level. His whacky, off-the-wall themes of previous films make way for a series of stately themes: Jill's sweeping soprano and orchestra, Harmonica's wailing mouth organ and electric guitar, Frank's blaring trumpets, Cheyenne's lazy whistle-and-banjo theme, Morton's simple yet tragic piano and oboe piece. Even the incidental music is better than most of its type, and the music adds immeasuribly to every scene, driving even some of the movie's more banal moments and making them grand.

The cast is top-notch. Claudia Cardinale is stunningly gorgeous as Jill, creating easily the strongest female character in a Leone film; haughty, sexy and acid-tongued, but with a soft, decidedly feminine side. Henry Fonda is pitch-perfect as Frank, subverting an entire career's iconography with one evil grin. Charles Bronson gives arguably a career-best performance; Jason Robards does good work with a rather weak part. Gabriele Ferzetti steals all of his scenes with a poignant, layered performance as Morton. The supporting cast includes Woody Strode and Jack Elam as two of Frank's henchmen, Italian star Paolo Stoppa (The Leopard) as a crabby coach driver, and American expatriates Lionel Stander and Frank Wolff.

Once Upon a Time in the West is by far the greatest Western of all time, with only The Wild Bunch in serious competition, and it's up there in my top three films of all time. Whatever its minor flaws, the movie embodies everything grand that cinema can achieve, and is ultimately a masterpiece.

Rating: 10/10 - Must-See

The Colossus of Rhodes

So, thanks to Netflix I've finally gotten around to seeing Sergio Leone's debut film, the 1961 peplum The Colossus of Rhodes. Despite a handful of neat directorial touches and an interesting story, Colossus is pretty typical of its genre and its studio, with only sporadic hints of a future master at the helm.

Dario (Rory Calhoun) is a celebrated Greek warrior vacationing on the island of Rhodes, ruled by the tyrannical King Serses (Robert Carmadiel), which has just completed building the great Colossus as a monument to the King's glory. Before long, Dario finds himself involved in a complicated web of political intrigues: a group of slave rebels recruit an unwitting Dario to help overthrow the King, and Serses' greedy advisor Thar (Conrado San Martin) is importing Phoenician mercenaries for an attempt coup d'etat of his own, with the help of his duplicitous lover Diala (Lea Massari). Dario sides with the rebels and sets out to defeat both evil parties and make things right on Rhodes.

My experience with the peplum genre is pretty much limited to the atrocious, laughably bad Hercules films with Steve Reeves. Like the Spaghetti Westerns Leone would later make his name (and legend) with, the peplums were largely an off-shoot of a popular Hollywood genre, in this case the sword-and-sandal historical epic that dominated Hollywood in the late '50s and early '60s: Quo Vadis?, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, The Fall of the Roman Empire. (It's certainly no coincidence that Leone worked as an assistant director on the former two films.) Colossus is fairly unremarkable, hampered by a limited budget, with a few neat directoral flairs and story ideas interspersed throughout; certainly it lacks the skill, quality and depth of a Spartacus or Ben-Hur, with the usual genre cliches in abundance - gladiator fights, executions, sultry maidens, crooked kings, ruthless schemers, and rebellious slaves.

The movie's plot certainly has a lot going on. The movie's multifaceted storyline and tangled intrigues are comparable to an average Hollywood sword-and-sandal film, at least in theory. Leone and Christopher Frayling have argued that the movie is a parody of Alfred Hitchcock's spy films - Dario as Cary Grant in North By Northwest, the hollow Colossus itself standing in for Saboteur's empty Statue of Liberty - and while it's difficult to dismiss this idea, given Leone's well-noted cinephilia, it may be an attempt to add gloss to an unremarkable film. Whatever the case, the interesting-on-paper story is inevitably let down by the lagging budget and production values. The acting is adequate, with the expected atrocious dubbing, the screenplay clunkily written, Angelo Lavagino's score banal and bombastic - in these regards, Colossus is nothing special. The film moves at a snail's pace, with lots of poorly-dubbed talking scenes, interspersed with some nice cinematography and an occasional battle scene.

The best part, unsurprisingly, is the film's direction and design. The movie's art direction is wonderful, with lots of well-designed, ornamented and foreboding sets - Diala's home, Serses' palace, and the mechanical, empty Colossus itself - and Leone's trademark camera eye and visual sense are already clearly developed. Action scenes are handled adequately, with a handful of standout moments in the film (the final battle in the Colossus a standout). However, the movie is only fitfully exciting, and while auteurists may spot some visual cues that will point the way to Leone's later films, that's not reason enough to watch it in and of itself.

Colossus of Rhodes isn't by any means a bad film, merely an unremarkable one. The few flashes of Leone flair are a very small piece of the whole, and not reason enough to watch. This film is recommended to non-discerning sword-and-sandal fans and Leone die-hards only; for anyone else, it's at best a curio. At the very least, it's no worse than A Fistful of Dollars.

Rating: - 5/10 - Mediocre

The Nun's Story (and Golden Globe acknowledgement)

The Golden Globeswere tonight, though I didn't watch as I was celebrating (in my own way, by printing out homework) the Steelers' epochal victory over San Diego. I'm a mite surprised by some of the results - namely Slumdog Millionaire winning Best Picture. (Dammit, there's one more I need to see!) I'm a bit disappointed that Frank Langella and Amy Adams didn't win, but at least John Adams swept all of its categories - I still uphold Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney as the most wonderful couple in screen history! Hopefully I'll be able to see some more of the major nominees in the coming weeks, so I won't be completely unprepared come Oscar-time. (Hopefully I'll have seen enough 2008 films by then to make a meaningful "retrospective" post, too.)

In the meantime, I plan to pick up some of the slack in this blog by cross-posting some of my old IMDB user comments. As an appropriate follow-up to Doubt, here is my review of The Nun's Story, which I will rewatch ASAP. I hope none of you mind, and this one's one of my better ones I think. But anyway...

The Nun's Story

Gabriele Van Der Maal (Audrey Hepburn) is a head-strong Belgian girl who decides to become a Nun, despite the protests of her surgeon father (Dean Jagger). Gabriele finds her work challenging in the extreme; in order to be successful, she must suppress her individuality, all of her thoughts, memories and desires, and sublimate herself to a collective worship and service of God. As Sister Luke, she works in an insane asylum, a hospital in the Congo, and in a military hospital during World War II. Despite her best efforts, Gabriele struggles to sublimate her personality and pride, but finds herself increasingly unable to do so. Although she becomes acclaimed as a selfless, hard-working nurse, she realizes the truth of her Mother Superior (Edith Evans)' dictum: "You can cheat your sisters, but you can't cheat yourself - or God!"

The Nun's Story is a profound, deep and intelligent film. It deals thoughtfully with a difficult subject: What does it mean to become a Nun, to sacrifice your life to religion? Fred Zinneman's handsome, thoughtful film addresses this question in a forthright, honest manner, without passing any judgment on the Catholic Church or the lead character. It also contains the greatest performance of Audrey Hepburn's career, by far.

Nuns haven't had a very good track record on film. The most egregious are films like, say, Sister Act or The Sound of Music, which depict Nuns as clownish figures, repressed women who just want to have a good time, ride motorcycles, sing, dance or, God help us, fly. Even more serious explorations of the theme (Black Narcissus, The Bells of St. Mary's) are largely tainted with an outsider view of Catholicism, and tend to idealize or damn it. Even worse, a seemingly never-ending chain of Hollywood films and TV shows seems grimly determined to convince us that religion is a sham, and religious people are inherently evil - murderers, pedophiles, or hypocrites all.

The Nun's Story doesn't. Its depiction of the Catholic Church is remarkably uncritical, yet neither is it an endorsement. It is an incredibly frank exploration of Catholicism, and specifically Nunnery. The early scenes showing the Nuns' training makes it clear that being a Nun isn't something people do for fun - it's serious, hard work, a complete and utter immersion in religion and devotion to God. In order to become a Nun, one must strive for perfection, sublimate individuality, recognize and criticize even the tiniest faults - and shed all vestiges of their previous life. One can't even talk without permission, or express their private thoughts or feelings - except to condemn them as fault or sin. Only the most devoted, strong-willed women can achieve this without bowing out or losing their sanity; and it's unlikely that they'll be singing and dancing with Whoopi Goldberg any time soon.

This process proves exceedingly difficult for Gabriele, who is a headstrong, proud and intelligent girl. At first, she willingly tackles being a Nun as a challenge; we never learn why she decided to become a Nun (unhappy family life? Personal problems? A sense of religious duty or calling?), but it's not all that important. It isn't long, however, before Gabriele's faults begin to surface. In the ultra-repressive and controlled environment of the Monastery, Gabriele finds herself increasingly critical of and disgusted in herself. The movie reaches an early climax when one of Sister Luke's mothers (Ruth White) suggests that she deliberately fail a medical exam in order to assuage feelings of pride and guilt. This provides an agonizing conflict: a viewer might reasonably ask whether it's right to ask a Nun to be dishonest, which might be a bigger flaw than pride.

But even as Sister Luke becomes an exemplary nurse, she finds herself unable to sublimate herself to the Church. She is nearly killed when she gives water to an asylum patient (Colleen Dewhurst) without permission. She becomes more and more independent in the Congo, taking initiative without her Mothers' knowledge and developing an attraction towards the handsome Dr. Fortunati (Peter Finch). She sees all of these as faults, even when her superiors don't. Her Mothers and Sisters are supportive and understanding, recognizing Sister Luke's virtues and skill - but she can only see the flaws. World War II provides the final straw; when her family and countrymen are being slaughtered by the Nazis, how can she possibly remain impartial? It's impossible to say Sister Luke isn't a strong woman, but her inability to see her strengths is her fatal flaw.

Fred Zinneman's direction, as usual, is handsome and at times beautiful. As in other works, his straightforward directorial style lets the actors, sets and locations do the work. Robert Anderson's script gives intelligent dialog and well-rounded, sensitive characters, avoiding the stereotypes and clichés of religious films, condemning neither the Catholic Church nor our flawed protagonist. Franz Planer provides gorgeous cinematography, particularly in the Congo scenes, and Franz Waxman gives a beautiful score.

Audrey Hepburn's performance is simply remarkable. Shedding her trademark uber-chic Givenchy costumes and lacking make-up, she lets her true beauty shine through. The device of letting us see only her face through her habit has a remarkably powerful pay-off. But more than this, Hepburn perfectly portrays the anguish and emotional conflict of Sister Luke; her expressive face alone conveys more than ten pages of screenplay. Anyone doubting Audrey's acting ability absolutely has to see her performance here; it's a revelation. The supporting cast includes fine performances from Peter Finch, Dean Jagger, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Niall McInnes, and Colleen Dewhurst, complementing Hepburn's performance and creating well-rounded characters of their own.

The Nun's Story is simply remarkable. Few other films are as honest about religion; and, truth be told, few are as intelligent, well-rounded and thought-provoking period. It is a masterpiece.

Rating: 10/10 - Must-See

Duck, You Sucker!

Duck, You Sucker! (or A Fistful of Dynamite) is one of Sergio Leone's oddest and most problematic films, and not just for the silly title. I've seen the 138 minute cut numerous times until my old VHS tape gave out last year, and in that form I always considered it one of Leone's lesser efforts. I finally got to see the extended 155 minute cut in my Topics in Film Class last fall (as part of a larger unit on Leone) and I loved it. A rewatch last night, however, confirmed that my problems weren't merely with the editing of the truncated version, but with the film itself. It's not in the same league as Leone's masterpieces - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the Once Upon a Times - and it's as frustrating and problematic as Once Upon a Time in America, and not nearly as rewarding. In Groggy-speak though, it's Leone's equivalent of Doctor Zhivago or Major Dundee - a fascinating film whose myriad flaws make it all the more interesting.

The film takes the general form of the Zapata Westerns, the subgenre of Spaghettis which transposed political issues of the '60s and '70s onto Mexico's various revolutions. Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger) is a grotesque Mexican bandit who comes across John Mallory (James Coburn), an IRA terrorist working in revolutionary Mexico as a miner/terrorist. Miranda decides that Mallory's "holy water" - he is a walking munitions dump, replete with nitroglycerin, dynamite and bombs of all sort - will be perfect for his plans to rob the Mesa Verde bank, and he none-too-gently persuades John to join him. Eventually they arrive in Mesa Verde, but when Juan robs the bank, he finds that it's been turned into a political prison for captured revolutionaries. Unwittingly drawn into the Mexican Revolution by his "friend", Juan finds himself in the cross-hairs of counter-revolutionary troops led by the brutal Gunther Ruiz (Antoine Saint-John), leading to an escalating amount of violence and brutality - with little or no hope of escape.

Leone's film is somewhat schizophrenic. It's obviously intended as a critique of the Zapata films, whose attempts at political commentary more often than not turned into juvenile, unconsidered Marxism (see A Bullet For the General for the most egregious example). The first half of the movie (save the bizarre and powerful opening scene) is more in line with Leone's adventurous and violent Dollars trilogy than the mature and elegiac Once Upon a Time in the West, but it takes an abrupt turn after the bank robbery and becomes a somber political film. Its nihilism, however, proves much more interesting than the sophomoric leftism practiced by most of its peers.

The opening scene is the most-discussed part of the film, and certainly worth examining. As Juan hitches a ride on a luxurious stagecoach, filled with a cross-section of upper-class society. The scene quickly turns into a grotesque parody of Eisenstein, showing extreme close-ups of the aristocrats as they eat and mock their fellow passenger. The political message of this scene is obvious and completely unsubtle; but lest we have too much sympathy with Juan and his peasant class, the scene is abruptly interrupted by a stage robbery - engineered by Juan's family. Juan's family robs the passengers and inflicts humilitation on them - stripping the men naked, raping the aristocratic woman (Maria Monti) who had earlier fantasized about the promiscuity of peasants like Juan, and they are ultimately dumped into a pig sty. Leone immediately stakes out his position, immediately perverting the revolutionary ideal - the simple peasant rising up against his capitalist oppressor - with an overt display of vulgarity and violence. It's a difficult scene to watch at times, but nonetheless it works, effectively foreshadowing what's to come.

Leone continually presses home the futility of revolutionary politics. Juan's big speech about the futility of Revolution is rather obvious but manages to be one of the most pointed things any film has ever said about this issue. Rejecting the romanticized view of his fellow Spaghetti directors - Damiano Damiani and Sergio Corbucchi most notably - Leone sees Revolution as something bloody, and ultimately futile. The movie reinforces this message with its almost endless scenes of massacre - most notably the death of Juan's family at the hands of Ruiz's men (unseen except for the tragic aftermath), the execution of men betrayed by revolutionary leader Dr. Villega (Romolo Valli), and the crane shot of prisoners being slaughtered en masse by the retreating Federales. There are perhaps a bit too many of these scenes, but they serve their purpose within the story. Revolution is a violent, bloody thing, with men like Villega benefitting as the proletariats and peasants die en masse. And only rarely is anything actually achieved but a repositioning of the status quo - as the futile cycle of coups and warfare that engulfed Mexico itself from 1910-1921 proved.



The film nonetheless has a number of flaws which prevent it from reaching the status of Leone's masterpieces. One of the movie's biggest problems are the villains and supporting characters. Gunther Ruiz (Antoine Saint-John, of The Wind and the Lion), the presumably German officer who provides our main antagonist, is a weakling with little screentime and few dialogues; the most menacing thing he does in the film is viciously brush his teeth. His henchmen are pushovers, making Darth Vader's Stormtroopers look competent by comparison, thus creating little dramatic tension in the later parts of the film. Other seemingly important characters - Rik Battaglia's revolutionary general, Franco Graziosi's crooked Governor - flit in and out of the story seemingly at random, without making any real impression. Our main characters and Villega are interesting personages, but the world they move through is full of ciphers. Perhaps that's the point - the Revolution is the villain, not any individual - but the fact that Leone sets up such characters and then abandons them (without their having much to do to begin with) proves problematic.

Another problem is that the film suffers from serious problems of pacing. The film's first hour or so is leisurely build-up, establishing characters and conflicts, but as it makes it shift into more serious territory it stumbles a bit. The movie jumps quickly from John and Juan's battle with Ruiz at the bridge, to the grotto massacre, to the night-time executions, with little transition between these scenes. The individual scenes are powerful enough, but the quick transitions between them seem jarring and disconcerting; only during John and Juan's train journey does the film fully regain its footing. John's flashbacks are also a bit overdone - the final one in particular goes on beyond all reason and goes from poignant to ridiculous. The movie also has a few odd moments of cartoonishness - most notably Juan's vision of John with a Bank of Mesa Verde banner glowing above his head - which are jarring and don't seem to have much purpose, amusing as some of them are.

Technically, Leone is at the top of his game. He makes wonderful use of editing and juxtaposting close-ups with landscapes throughout. He handles the action scenes with aplomb and the more intimate sequences are also skillfully directed. Although Giuseppi Ruzzolini is not quite a distinguished a cinematographer as Tonino Delli Colli, he still manages to make the rugged Almerian plains eerily beautiful, as well as the beautifully shot Ireland sequences. Ennio Morricone's eclectic and decidedly quirky score - especially the jaunty Sean Sean Sean theme sequeing into Edda Dell'Orso's beautiful soprano - is a bit jarring at first but contributes beautifully to the film.

Rod Steiger gives a decidedly grotesque performance as Juan. His character certainly comes across as a pale pastiche of Eli Wallach's Tuco, only more vulgar and overtly violent. Steiger indulges his hammier instincts, with a ridiculously comic accent. And yet, Steiger manages to draw some pathos out of his character - not surprisingly, the scene where he finds his dead sons is remarkably affected - not the least because Steiger's mouth is shut for most of the scene. Still, his realization during the bank robbery that he's been the victim of a cruel joke by Mallory (as he finds vault after vault of political prisoners) and the poignancy of his final plea - "What about me?" - as he's left alone in the midst of a Revolution he doesn't believe in and never wanted is remarkable.

More impressive, in spite of a no-less embarrassing accent, is James Coburn. His John seems throughout to be a nihilistic dilettante, lacking any real motivation as he flits around Mexico on his motorcycle. His suicidal destructiveness, embodied by his arsenal of explosiveness, is his defining characteristic. As the film progresses, however, and the flashbacks become more clear, we discover the source of his personality - burned out by an aborted revolution in Ireland, in which he was betrayed by his best friend (David Warbeck), he is a bitter, disllusioned shell of a man with nothing to live for. However, as he sees the massive human toll of the revolution - most notably on his unlikely friend Juan - John regains some sense of purpose, and ends up going out in perhaps the ultimate blaze of glory. Coburn's given only a handful of comparable performances (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid comes to mind), and in spite of his accent is a marvellous, convincing and very human John.

The rest of the cast isn't worth mentioning, with one exception. Romolo Valli gives a layered performance as the dignified Villega - like Gabriele Ferzetti in Once Upon a Time in the West, this veteran Italian actor serves as a reserved ballast to the more flamboyant American co-stars, and like Ferzetti he gets many of the film's best dramatic moments - most notably being forced to watch the executions of the men he's betrayed.



All things considered, Duck, You Sucker is a fascinating film, however problematic. The film's message is its title - the only sane course of action is to keep out of all things political, lest you lose your head. But as Leone hopes to show, even this nihilistic recommendation isn't really possible. The key ultimately is survival - and that is difficult enough without ideological baggage.

Rating: 8/10 - Highly Recommended

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

(Note: I'm enjoying my well-deserved Christmas break, and while I'm watching films I haven't felt compelled to write anything on them - although you may get a review of A Christmas Story AND a special article if you ain't done nothin' naughty all year - NAUGHTY! In the meantime, enjoy this review of one of my favorite films from the IMDB archives. It's long overdue inclusion of a Sergio Leone film into my blog, at least!)

In New Mexico Territory circa 1862, a mysterious bounty-killer known as "Blondie" (Clint Eastwood) and a shifty Mexican bandit, Tuco Ramirez (Eli Wallach), run a con job wherein Blondie turns Tuco in for money and then rescues him, splitting the reward money. However, the two engage in numerous double-crossings against each other, until stumbling across a dying Confederate soldier (Antonio Casale) who gives each man a clue to the location of a hidden cache of gold. Tuco and Blondie re-form their alliance to find the gold, only to find that Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), a ruthless hired gun, is already after the gold. The three men form a frequently-changing series of alliances to get at the gold, and they must avoid the Union and Confederate armies operating in the region.

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" is a landmark film in many respects. Its cultural influence is nigh-impossible to overstate, with its iconic musical score by Ennio Morricone, three memorably amoral protagonists, the close-ups, vast landscapes, and the title itself, all of which are instantly recognizable icons of cinema, having been referenced and replicated time and again in movies, TV shows, and even commercials. It is Sergio Leone's first truly great film, a transition from the low-budget Spaghetti Westerns ("A Fistful of Dollars", "For a Few Dollars More") to the big budget, artistic epics that Leone would make for the rest of his career ("Once Upon a Time in the West/America"). It is also a film of utmost importance to me; after watching this movie as an eleven year old, admiring its wonderfully quirky characters, style, music, and breath-taking cinematography, I realized for the first time that I wanted to devote my life to films, be it watching them, writing on them, or hopefully making them.

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" is a full-blown epic, and one with an interesting subtext. We see three completely amoral characters whose crimes - robbery, murder, and racketeering - are minor compared to the brutal carnage we see the Civil War inflicting. Taking place during the little-known Sibley Campaign in New Mexico, the film is not a documentary depiction of the war, but an allegorical one. This was the first total war, and Leone uses it as a metaphor for conflict in general, with faceless mass slaughter inflicted by rifles, machine guns, and artillery. Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes' transgressions are minor compared to a brutal, Auschwitz-like concentration camp, spies being executed in the streets, towns being shelled, and vicious, stalemated trench warfare over a "flyspeck" of a bridge. Even our amoral heroes have amounts of humanity which set them apart from the machine-like slaughter around them; Blondie saves Tuco's life and comforts dying soldiers of both sides; Tuco struggles with a mixture of affection and hatred for Blondie, and his troubled relationship with his brother (Luigi Pistilli), and even Angel Eyes shows disgust at the carnage he sees.

The movie is extremely episodic, the plot only secondary to the adventures of these characters. Leone's wonderful direction gives the film a fairy-tale quality, with an appearance of realism while being fanciful and at times almost surreal. The movie contains extremely memorable set pieces: the lengthy opening, with three gunmen going after Tuco; the "carriage of the spirits"; the prison camp; a shootout in a town under shellfire; an epic Civil War battle; Tuco running excitedly through the cemetery; and, of course, the unforgettable climactic "triello". Tonino Delli Colli's cinematography is simply breath-taking, with desert landscapes as impressive as David Lean's films contrasting with the most extreme close-ups imaginable. Carlo Simi's set designs, from shelled-out towns to prison camps to the cemetery, is breath-taking. And Ennio Morricone's score is, for lack of a better word, one of the most amazing ever written, the instantly recognizable theme tune and other brilliant pieces creating the movie's indescribable atmosphere.

The cast creates unforgettably iconic characters. Clint Eastwood is back as the Man With No Name, here much more human in this film despite retaining his cool, detached, shifty nature. Lee Van Cleef, who had played a likable character in Leone's previous film, now plays one of the most memorably evil characters ever. Aldo Giuffre, Antonio Casas, and Luigi Pistilli are effective in supporting roles, and Leone's usual stock cast - Mario Brega, Benito Stefanelli, Al Muloch, Aldo Sambrell, and many others - create their own iconography. But it's Eli Wallach who steals the show, as the scenery chewing Tuco, a shifty, double-crossing, foul-mouthed bandit who manages to be the most likable and human of the cast despite his faults; truly, one of the most memorable film characters ever.

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" is one of the most well-known and influential movies ever made, and with good reason. In terms of style, it is an absolute triumph, being one of the most amazingly made movies ever made. Those only familiar with the movie for its cast, its score, or peripherally through its iconic stature, are missing out on one of the most breath-taking cinematic experiences ever. Thank you, Sergio Leone.

Rating: 9+/10 - Must-See