Spaghetti Westerns (12 page)

Musante is good as Paco (a variation on Tomas Milian’s Cuchillo character from Sollima’s films), but it is Palance, as Curly, the black-suited, carnation-wearing hired-gun and saloon owner, who steals the show. Palance did some of his best work in Europe and was always good in Spaghettis, enlivening even the weakest efforts, but for Corbucci (here and in
Compañeros
) he gave superbly unhinged performances. Early in
A Professional Gun
he politely asks one of his own hit men (who has just bungled a job) if he’s married or has kids (he has neither), before having him pitchforked to death. Later, Curly is stripped by Paco’s men and left naked in the desert, miles from civilisation, but when he finally catches up with Paco (who’s hiding out in a rodeo show), their gundown in a bullring recalls the climax of
For a Few Dollars More
. Paco (in a clown costume) faces Curly, while the Polak acts as referee. When the shots are fired, we think Curly has survived, until blood begins to drip from his white carnation and he crumples into the dust. Curly’s penchant for crossing himself (like Tuco in
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
) is offset by his ruthless methods. In one scene he questions a wounded bandit as to Paco’s whereabouts. When no help is forthcoming, he puts a grenade in the bandit’s mouth, pulls the pin and makes a swift exit.

Undoubtedly Corbucci’s most polished Western, this movie was the perfect blend of explosive action and revolutionary rhetoric.

In 1880, the anti-slavery Northern President James A Garfield travels to Dallas, Texas to make a political address concerning his reforms. Though the Civil War ended a long time ago, the city is still run by corrupt Southern politicians, bankers, lawmen and lawyers who, in league with a gang of bandits, want the President dead. When he arrives, the President is assassinated by the corrupt sheriff’s men and an innocent black man Jack Donovan is framed for the crime. The corrupt Southerners plan to blackmail the new President with certain incriminating documents. Yankee gunman Bill Willer’s father has also been killed by the rebels (he knew of the assassination plot) and so Willer, with the help of Garfield’s aide, Agent MacDonald, sets about destroying the Confederate gang. Donovan knows who really killed Garfield and is shot as he is being taken to Fort Worth for trial, but Willer and MacDonald defeat the villains. Willer takes possession of the inflammatory documents, but realises how important they are and allows MacDonald to return them to Washington – the South won’t rise again.

Valerii’s third Western was also his most political. Also known as
Texas
and
The Death of a President
,
The Price of Power
was that rarest of Spaghetti Westerns – one that’s based on historical fact. As anyone with the vaguest knowledge of American history can see, this is a thinly disguised reworking of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas by persons unknown. In macabre echoes of that fateful day in November 1963, Valerii appropriates various factual details and weaves them into his scenario. The President’s tour of Dallas in an opened-topped carriage recalls Kennedy’s limousine ride, while other aspects are more explicit – the human-rights issues (as relevant as ever), the killing of a ‘patsy’ between jails, a phoney Warren Commission-like inquiry, the shooting from an overpass (instead of the Grassy Knoll) during a cavalcade around Dallas and the President’s wife’s pink dress (like Jackie Kennedy’s) splattered with the President’s blood.

But the real cleverness of
The Price of Power
lies in the effortlessness with which Valerii transposes these details and issues effectively to a Western setting. The film is not without its faults (the inquest scenes tend to drag and the plot gets a little convoluted) and certain aspects are clearly Spaghetti-esque (various prolonged, stylised duels and a crippled newspaperman with a rifle hidden in his crutch), but in the main it sustains its tension throughout. The politicising is cleverly handled and the film is truly epic in scope – Valerii’s equivalent of
Once Upon a Time in the West
, which used the same town and ranch sets in Almeria. The clandestine Southern group responsible for organising the assassination have all the classic ‘corrupt’ ingredients – a deceitful banker, a racist governor, a blackmailed Vice President, a crooked attorney and a conniving sheriff. Like Valerii’s other movies,
Day of Anger
and
My Name is Nobody
, the dignitaries are mixed up with outlaws.

Gemma, better known for his
Ringo
movies and Valerii’s previous film
Day of Anger
, gives one of his best performances. It’s his last great Western before he turned to comedy in the wake of the
Trinity
movies. Van Johnson, an American expat, is excellent as the President, Fernando Rey (later of the
French Connection
movies) is effective as crooked banker Pinkerton and leader of the insurrectionists, while Warren Vanders is suitably ambivalent as the FBI agent who teams up with Gemma. In one memorable scene the idealistic Northern President states his belief that no bullet can stop an idea. Willer is more realistic and replies that the only thing that counts in Dallas is the Colt. It can stop anything, ‘even a president’.

A fusion of themes from earlier Reconstruction-era Spaghettis
(
The
Tramplers
,
The Hellbenders
) and the Kennedy conspiracy results in Valerii’s most original film. In a humorous detail, one of the buildings in Valerii’s Dallas even resembles the Texas School Book Depository, with its distinctive high-arched windows. But James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 (not 1880), shot in the back by an insane young man who failed in his application to get on the federal government payroll. Such is Spaghetti Western artistic licence.

A shipment of army cash is stolen from the bank in Daugherty City. A mysterious stranger named Sabata recovers the money and is rewarded by the army, but it soon becomes apparent that the men really responsible for the heist were three respectable townsmen – the judge, the saloon-keeper and Stengel, a rancher. Sabata, with the aid of a Mexican drunkard called Carrincha and a drifter called Banjo (who lives with Jane, a saloon gal), sets about blackmailing the trio, promising to tell the authorities if their demands aren’t met. Stengel employs various gunmen to kill Sabata, but he seems indestructible. Eventually, Stengel hires Banjo to turn traitor, but even this ruse fails. Sabata, Carrincha and an acrobatic Indian named Alley Cat attack Stengel’s ranch and decimate his gang. During the battle Sabata kills the saloon-keeper and Stengel, but Banjo takes the judge prisoner. Banjo faces Sabata in a gunfight ‘bet’ (bankrolled by the judge) and kills Sabata. Leaving town with his winnings for nailing Sabata, Banjo takes Sabata’s corpse for burial, but, in a final twist, Sabata’s still alive. He takes Banjo’s haul, splits it with Carrincha and Alley Cat and scatters Banjo’s share to the wind.

This is Parolini’s most famous and lucrative Western. He had been making films since the late fifties and they nearly all feature acrobats, making his action sequences more impressive than most Italian movies. The year before he made
Sabata
, Parolini (under the pseudonym ‘Frank Kramer’) helmed
Five for Hell
, a variant on
The
Dirty Dozen
(1967) with Klaus Kinski as an SS officer, and
Sartana
(full title
If You Meet Sartana
,
Pray For Your Death
), which was essentially a dry run for this movie – Berger even played the second lead. For the title role of Sabata, Parolini cast Van Cleef. Van Cleef’s character was based almost entirely on his role as Colonel Mortimer in
For a Few Dollars More
. Instead of a colonel, Sabata is an ex-Confederate major and, instead of the gimmicks Mortimer was armed with (a derringer, his arsenal and his long-barrelled pistol), Sabata has a long-range rifle and a customised derringer (that has barrels in the handle). He was also dressed in Mortimer’s trademark black suit and frock coat. Banjo, his partner, has a Winchester hidden in a banjo, Carrincha is a knife-thrower and Alley Cat is an acrobat. Even the villain, Stengel, has a deadly cane that fires metal spikes. This inventiveness makes up for what the film lacks in plot, which, for the most part, consists of elaborately staged shootouts, as Sabata continually outwits his opponents.

The opening heist is beautifully concise. The robbery is carried out by a group of Stengel’s men in league with a troupe of villainous acrobats, who employ a seesaw to gain access to the bank and then dispatch the safe onto a wagon along a set of portable railroad tracks. True enough, this sounds ridiculous, but, by 1969, Spaghettis were getting pretty thin on imagination. Parolini’s acrobatic injections had already worked very well in sword and sandal spectaculars, war movies and the world of super-agents. It was only natural for him to apply his outrageous style to Westerns. Instead of the usual plotline of a hero tracking down the bank robbers, Sabata has shot and captured the perpetrators in the opening 15 minutes. The three businessmen behind the heist take fright and eliminate anyone else involved in the robbery (a Mafia-esque ploy), leaving Sabata the task of blackmailing the trio with the knowledge that they are responsible – thereby lining his own pocket. The ambiguous Banjo sides with Sabata, but eventually sells him out, while Sabata’s two
compadres
– the fat Mexican layabout and the acrobatic Indian – form a ‘Magnificent Three’ against Stengel’s huge gang. In the well staged finale, with the air thick with dynamite and bullets, they cut a swathe through Stengel’s camp, dispensing revenge from a mining car on tracks. Marcello Giombini’s humorous score (especially the lively opening song) contributed to the film’s huge success, which reaffirmed Van Cleef’s box-office clout. So much so that it started an acrobatic sub-genre, including
The Return Of Sabata
(1971), which was set in a circus, for once providing a reason why so many acrobats were hanging around town.

A greatly entertaining Western and one of the last decent Spaghettis before the
Trinity
-style comedies revamped the genre the following year. Worth seeing for the wonderful moment when Banjo strides into the main street to face a gang out for vengeance, with only his banjo for company.

During the Mexican Revolution, 1867, mercenary Sabata is hired by the revolutionaries to steal a shipment of Austrian gold from Colonel Skimmel to buy guns for the rebels. Sabata and his untrustworthy gang, including Escudo and ‘Blondito’ Balantine, steal the gold, but they’ve been duped: the treasure chest contains only sand. With the Austrians on the retreat, Skimmel and his staff plan to flee posing as beer merchants, with the gold hidden in a beer barrel. But before they can carry out their scheme, Sabata’s gang attack Skimmel’s fortress at Guadalupe, only for Balantine to cheat his friends and make off with the loot.

The second of Parolini’s
Sabata
trilogy, between
Sabata
and
The
Return of Sabata
(both of which star Lee Van Cleef), many rate this as the best of the trio, with Brynner taking over as the eponymous hero. The original Italian version called him ‘Indio Black’, but Brynner’s character was renamed Sabata for international release. In the UK, the film was released simply as
The Bounty Hunters
. Interestingly, Van Cleef went on to play Chris Adams in
The
Magnificent Seven Ride
!
(1972), a role originally played by Brynner in
The Magnificent Seven
.

Filmed on Western sets at Incir De Paolis Studios, Elios Studios and Cinecittà, and on location in arid Almeria,
Adios Sabata
is superior Spaghetti action entertainment. The bullets and acrobats fly as Brynner and his motley crew take on the Austrian army with dynamite, nitroglycerine and Gatling guns, in a series of splendid set pieces involving destroyed bridges, ambushes and big explosions. The unrelenting action, which is violent but ludicrously comic strip, can never be taken too seriously. Skimmel executes an informer with a model ship which is armed with real cannons; one of Sabata’s cohorts fires heavy lead ball bearings from his customised boots; and Apache acrobat Gitano (Joseph Persaud) performs the ‘Flamenco of Death’ as the ominous prelude to a traitorous spy’s execution. The shootout between Sabata’s gang and the Austrians at the San Juan Monastery was filmed at a ruin above the Treja Valley, Lazio, a location similar to the Cercon Monastery used for the gory ‘Blind Dead’ Knights Templar movies.

Adios Sabata
also features perhaps Bruno Nicolai’s best score – with Alessandro Alessandroni’s whistling to the fore and the echoing flutes, bolero trumpets and electric guitars creating Spaghetti Western atmosphere
par
excellence
. Despite some unintentionally daft dialogue (‘We Austrians have eyes everywhere’), Parolini surpasses himself with the action and one of the best scenes is the opening gun battle, staged in Almeria at the ramshackle ‘Texas Bounty Hunters Agency’, with Sabata (standing atop a pile of timber railway sleepers) shooting it out with the villainous Murdock Brothers, who arrive with a coffin for Sabata. Brynner excels as all-in-black Sabata, dressed in his fringed, open-necked outfit, with flared trousers, and armed with a sawn-off repeating Winchester carbine. The good supporting cast includes Dean Reed, who later famously became a Communist pop singer in Russia, touring the USSR and East Germany, and who drowned mysteriously in a lake in 1986; his strange story is recounted in the book
Comrade
Rockstar
.

This may be Parolini’s slickest Western – the paradigm of his gadget-laden Westerns, which began with
Left-handed Johnny West
(1965) and continued with
Sartana
and
Sabata
. As entertaining as they come, and twice as violent.

Yod Peterson, a Swedish mercenary and arms dealer, arrives in the Mexican town of San Bernardino. The settlement is in the throes of the Mexican Revolution as two factions fight it out – the Mexican rebels under General Mongo and the largely pacifist Xantistas, the followers of a local hero, Professor Xantos. The safe in town has a fortune inside, but no one knows the combination except Xantos – and he’s a political prisoner of the Americans across the border in Yuma. Mongo sends Yod and Vasco (one of the General’s brigands) on a mission to rescue the professor. After many explosive adventures they return with Xantos, but Mongo captures the Xantistas and threatens to murder them if Xantos doesn’t surrender. With the contents of the safe at stake, Yod and Vasco (who has been converted to Xantos’s cause) take on Mongo’s army and defeat it, at the cost of Xantos’s life. As Yod prepares to leave town, Vasco urges the Swede to stay. With the counter-revolutionary army on the way, Yod decides to join the revolutionaries in the imminent battle.

Cut from the same cloth as the hugely successful
A Professional
Gun
, and often touted as its sequel,
Compañeros
is a more elaborate, excessive remake – as though Corbucci couldn’t fit all his imaginative ideas into the first film and made this one to use them up, as Howard Hawks did with
Rio Bravo’s
sequel,
El Dorado
(1967). The central axis of
Compañeros
is again a relationship between a European mercenary (this time Swedish) and a Mexican revolutionary (highlighting all the familiar political and cultural differences), but although the Mexican (like Paco Roman in
A Professional Gun
) gains a conscience, this time the soldier of fortune also has a change of heart and sides with the rebels in the finale. Nero again played the mercenary (Yod, christened ‘The Penguin’ by Vasco, due to his gaiters and tailcoat) with his customary cool, while Milian played Vasco as a cross between Cuchillo (his peasant hero from Sollima’s Westerns) and Cuban icon Che Guevara (Milian is actually a Cuban). In the effective prologue, Vasco is the servant of a
Federale
general, polishing his boots, until Mongo’s men arrive and massacre the government troops. Thereafter, he polishes Mongo’s boots – such is Vasco’s lot. Whoever wins the Revolution, the poor will always lose.

Palance, cast as Wooden Hand John, a villainous gringo (this time a mercenary and Yod’s ex-partner), is again the most excessive character in the film – swathed in a black cloak, smoking marijuana and with a pet falcon named Marsha perched on his wooden hand. John lost his hand when Yod abandoned him during a previous adventure and John was caught and nailed to a tree – it was Marsha who ate his hand to free him. Now John wants revenge and doggedly shadows the Swede throughout the movie.

In an interview, Palance was once asked why such a fine actor as himself had never won an Oscar, to which he incredulously replied, ‘What? In Spaghetti Westerns?’ He immensely enjoyed making them, however, and Europe made him rich when Hollywood had forgotten him.
Compañeros
, at nearly two hours, is dreadfully overlong and there is much talk about revolution and pacifism on the journey back from Yuma, which jars with the action sequences (though there are plenty of those too, involving dynamite and machineguns). In one scene, Vasco and Yod escape in an old army lorry, pursued by the cavalry, until the steering wheel comes off in Vasco’s hands and they end up in a river. There are a couple of significant female roles in the movie (a Xantista named Lola who ends up marrying Vasco, and Zaira, one of Yod’s old flames), but their characters are uncharacteristically sketchy – most unusual for a Corbucci Western.

Compañeros
is worth seeing for one reason, however – the crackerjack finale. Though
A Professional Gun
is a better film,
Compañeros
’ climax is the highlight of the movie. Xantos walks alone into San Bernardino to give himself up. Realising that Mongo will shoot the professor on sight (and his pacifist followers won’t lift a finger to help), Yod rides into town to face Mongo, John and the bandits. On a par with Peckinpah’s ‘Battle of Bloody Porch’ from
The
Wild Bunch
(without the slow-mo effects), Yod levels the entire gang with Winchester, pistol and machinegun, as Morricone’s up-tempo, chaotic title song ‘Vamos a Matar Compañeros!’ (‘Let’s Go Kill, Comrades!’) blares on the soundtrack. As with all Corbucci’s Westerns, there’s a sting in the tail – here the safe contains only ears of corn and a sickle, the only wealth the peasants possess. The last of Corbucci’s Revolution trilogy,
What
Am
I Doing in the Middle of a
Revolution
?
(1972), again saw two characters (an Italian thespian and a priest) caught up in the conflict, with less success, though it did raise some interesting points about the Catholic church, and the relationship between the fantasy and reality of an Italian Western (with Italian actors playing Italian actors having adventures down Mexico way). It also included some good moments: a daring rescue from a firing squad with a length of rope dangling from a biplane; a motorbike-and-sidecar chase; a parody of the crop-duster sequence from
North by Northwest
(1959); and, in one of Corbucci’s weirdest ideas, a band of one-handed, machete-wielding revolutionaries who wear skeleton masks as they get revenge on their oppressors.

Compañeros
, though still a cut above its equally light-hearted imitators like
Long Live Your Death
(1971) and
Heads I Kill You
,
Tails
You
Die
(1971), is not as good a film as it thinks it is. It has a great (and largely undeserved) reputation in Europe as one of the classic Spaghettis, mostly because of three star turns (Nero, Palance and Milian) at their peak of popularity. However, the film didn’t fare as well as
A Professional Gun
in the US when it was released (cut) in 1971.

Following a bungled stagecoach hold-up, outlaw Sledge hooks up with his gang in Rockville. There he learns from an old man, an ex-convict, that there’s a million in gold deposited in a cell in maximum security, so Sledge sets about stealing it. Realising that, when in transit, the shipment is heavily guarded by 40 army riders armed to the teeth and a Gatling gun, Sledge decides to take the gold from the inside – he and his cohort Ward (disguised as a sheriff) are arrested and deposited in maximum security, in a cell next to the cache. They manage to break out, free all the prisoners and make off with the gold, but Ward is killed in the confusion. Hiding in the desert with their haul, the gang split the gold, but squabble over the proceeds. One of them is killed in an argument and Sledge makes off with the lot. He heads for the town of Siego to meet his girl Maria, but the gang, now led by the old man, lie in wait. Maria is killed and they steal the gold from Sledge and hide it. During the confrontation, Sledge’s arm is crippled, but he manages to take on the gang and defeat them – even though he doesn’t know where the gold is hidden.

The film opens in a
Big Silence
-like snowbound landscape for the failed stage robbery, but, although Garner’s hero is called Sledge, the action soon shifts to more familiar Spaghetti territory – the starkness of the desert. Like Clint Eastwood, James Coburn and Burt Reynolds, Garner was a popular leading man in the sixties who started in TV Westerns, made it to bigger-budget roles and dabbled in Italian Westerns. Here he’s cast as Sledge, an outlaw who’ll stop at nothing to get his hands on a gold shipment – risking the lives of his closest friends and even his girl. Needless to say, in the pessimistic Spaghetti West, Garner loses all. His role is completely atypical. Garner had played Brett Maverick on TV and later sent up Westerns with
Support Your Local Sheriff
(1968) and the sequel
Support Your Local Gunfighter
(1971). He’d also turned in hardman performances in
Duel at Diablo
(1966) and
Hour of the Gun
(1967), but this is his only outright anti-heroic role – a charismatic persona edged with bitterness.

Like
The Hills Run Red
(1966) and
Dead or Alive
(1967),
A Man
Called Sledge
uses several well-known American actors in supporting roles as Sledge’s gang, including Weaver, later the hapless protagonist of Spielberg’s
Duel
(1977), Akins (a fifties B-Western stalwart) and Marley, who played the producer who finds his favourite horse’s severed head in bed with him in
The Godfather
(1972). In complete contrast, the female lead Antonelli later became a well-known actress in Italian porn movies.