The Price of Power

Like every other art form, Spaghetti Westerns became swept up in the late '60s political ferment. This took most obvious form in the Zapata Westerns, flicks like A Bullet for the General (1967) analogizing the 1910 Mexican Revolution with Che Guevara and the Vietcong. Others took more subtle tracts: Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown (1966) began as a contemporary story about a crooked strikebreaker, then was retooled for a "safer" genre. Who searches Westerns for political messages?

The Price of Power (1969) stands out, even among such distinguished company. Four years before Executive Action, Tonino Valerii fictionalizes John F. Kennedy's assassination - in the Old West. The result is frustratingly uneven. Valerii mashes a political thriller with familiar Western tropes, resulting in an awkward experience.

Dallas, 1881 seethes with racial bigotry and resentment over the Civil War. President James Garfield (Van Johnson) visits Dallas hoping to heal old wounds, but a cabal of politicians, businessmen and bandits plots his death. Bill Willer (Giuliano Gemma), his father (Antonio Casas) murdered by the same conspirators, foils one assassination attempt and becomes a hero. When Garfield is killed, the local Sheriff (Benito Stefanelli) pins the crime on Jack Donovan (Ray Saunders), an innocent black man. Bill joins the President's assistant McDonald (Warren Vanders) and a newspaper man (Manuel Zarzo) to unravel the conspiracy.

Let's address the obvious first: The Price of Power portrays history as accurately as The Flintstones recalls Neanderthal man. Garfield was shot in a DC railroad station by Charles Guiteau, a lunatic who thought Garfield owed him a diplomatic post. Garfield died after a long, debilitating illness caused by unsanitary medical care. This, along with the backstage rivalry of Garfield's liberal Republicans and Roscoe Conkling's crooked Stalwarts, deserves a film in its own right. But Valerii's interested in evoking a more recent assassination.

The allegory isn't subtle. Garfield's wife (Maria Caudra) wears a pink dress when arriving in Dallas. Roughnecks post "wanted for treason" posters with Garfield's visage throughout the city. The President quotes Kennedy directly, saying "I look at things as they could be and ask, ‘Why not?’” The Texan Vice President (Jose Suarez) meets with the conspirators the night before the assassination. There's a Warren Commission-style judicial panel covering up the murder. Valerii even stages the shooting Zapruder-style, with concealed killers firing from an overpass. Price is surprisingly thorough in its compilation of conspiracy lore.

But Price is more interesting in theory than execution. Valerii and writer Massimo Patrizi show Garfield done in by a cabal of unreconstructed Confederates, angry at his policies of racial reform. Here's where Price breaks down. If evoking Kennedy, the comparison doesn't wash: Lyndon Johnson almost immediately passed the Civil Rights Act, legally abolishing segregation. By contrast, in 1881 Reconstruction was essentially finished; Garfield's liberalism extended more to civil service reform than racial equality. The film doesn't work either as analogy or history.

Price isn't entirely satisfying as a Western either. Valerii's direction mixes expected Almerian vistas with Stelvio Massi's expressive deep focus photography. He stages some good action scenes, as when Bill foils an ambush of the President's train, or how the crippled journalist outwits the Sheriff. Valerii's best trick has Bill duel with the Sheriff in the dark, using a lighted cigar to mark their targets. Spaghetti fans will immediately note the Sweetwater and Flagstone sets from Once Upon a Time in the West. Luis Bacalov also contributes a moody score.

But the second half bogs down in excessive exposition that kills narrative momentum. The conspirators argue and negotiate interminably with the Vice President and McDonald, never putting their threats into action. For that matter, the characters don't really gel. McDonald's role is unnecessarily murky; he goes from loyal bodyguard to possible conspirator to trial prosecutor within a few scenes. The most interesting villain is Wallace (Michael Harvey), a Confederate renegade hoping to restart the Civil War. Yet he's relegated to expendable henchman status.

Giuliano Gemma is well-cast as the straight-arrow Bill, though the material stresses his limitations. When Bill finds his slain father, his reaction's like someone spotting spilled coffee on the kitchen floor. Van Johnson spouts badly dubbed platitudes but Warren Vanders handles his inscrutable character well. Fernando Rey (The French Connection) plays the chief conspirator. Benito Stefanelli, familiar from 100 Spaghetti bit parts, gets an unusually meaty role as the two-timing Sheriff. Other recognizable faces - Antonio Casas, Jose Calvo, Michael Harvey, Lorenzo Robledo, Frank Brana - also appear.

The Price of Power is an interesting failure. As a Western it's slow and pretentious; as a political expose it's minor league compared to Z or All the President's Men. Ultimately it's an awkward attempt to graft contemporary American politics onto the past, by someone evincing little grasp on either.

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.

Day of Anger

Leone protege Tonino Valerii's Day of Anger (1967) is a pretty typical Spaghetti Wstern, with the requisite shootouts, revenge plot and double-crosses, and only a smattering of originality. Although it has a cool Lee Van Cleef (a redundancy if ever there was one) and some nice action scenes, it's otherwise pretty paint-by-numbers.

Shady gunslinger-with-a-past Frank Talby (Lee Van Cleef) rides into the Western town of Clifton with a mission. He has a grudge against Clifton's "respectable" citizenry, enlisting local stable boy Scott Mary (Giulliano Gemma) as a sidekick. Talby guns down his old partner Wild Jack (Al Muloch) and prepares for a showdown with Clifton's citizens, particularly the banker Turner (Ennio Balbo) and Judge Cutchell (Lukas Ammann) - all while teaching Scott the tricks of the gunfighter's trade.

Day of Anger's plot is pretty banal, fusing two Western cliches - the old-gun-trains-young pup, the standard Spaghetti revenge plot - without a lot of success or originality. The film is very talky for a Spaghetti, which is a problem considering the usual clunky dubbing and fortune-cookie wisdom disguised as tough talk. The plot progression and character development are pretty obvious from the get-go; even the Batman Begins-style twist - with the mentor turning into the villain - doesn't add much to the film. And the climax where "the student becomes the teacher" (reciting Talbee's lessons while gunning down his gang!) is painfully obvious and obnoxious.

Valerii's direction is generally good; he handles his cast well and stages the action scenes with aplomb. The photography of Almerian locations (including many from Leone's For a Few Dollars More) is quite striking. Riz Ortolani's score, however, is fairly generic, sounding too much like a '60s TV theme song at times. The movie has its share of well-staged shootouts - most notably, the horseback muzzle-loading duel between Van Cleef and veteran Spaghetti bad guy Benito Stefanelli. This is an inventive and brilliantly-staged sequence, that really should have been the climax rather than a random action scene halfway through the film.

Lee Van Cleef is his usual badass self - we're at the point where noting such about him is redundant - but Giulliano Gemma, star of A Pistol For Ringo and Valerii's The Price of Power, is a wet noodle - he's too clean-cut and frankly wimpy to cut it as a Western tough guy. The rest of the cast is pretty bland, aside from familiar faces Benito Stefanelli, Jose Calvo (A Fistful of Dollars) and Al Muloch (Once Upon a Time in the West) in larger-than-usual roles.

Day of Anger is, overall, a disappointing film given its fairly high reputation in Spaghetti circles. It's watchable, with a few nice individual scenes, but nothing that hasn't been done better elsewhere.