Spaghetti Westerns (4 page)

Into the small Mexican town of San Miguel rides a poncho-clad gunslinger. The town is run by two rival gangs – the Baxters, a group of American gunrunners, and the Rojos, a bunch of Mexican liquor smugglers, led by Ramon. The stranger becomes a hired gun for the Rojos, thus escalating the conflict, but he later sees the Mexicans steal a shipment of army gold from the
Federales
. He cleverly plays one side off against the other, and is paid for his services, whilst saving the lives of a Mexican woman named Marisol and her family. But his ruse is discovered by the Rojos, who capture him and beat him up. He escapes and the Mexicans presume he has sheltered with the Baxters. In a ruthless attack, the Rojos burn down the Baxters’ house and massacre the entire clan, but the stranger has already left town. He recovers in hiding and returns to town to face the Rojos. In the showdown, he defeats the gang (using a square piece of iron hidden beneath his poncho as a breastplate), kills Ramon in a duel and rides out of town with a fistful of dollars.

Leone’s first Western is the foundation stone of the entire Spaghetti Western concept. Moreover, with
The Magnificent Seven
(1960), it is the most important Western of the sixties. It is ironic that such a defining film was made the same year that the greatest Western director of all time, John Ford, made his last Western,
Cheyenne
Autumn
, which to some extent apologised for the mistreatment of Native Americans by filmmakers down the years.
A Fistful of Dollars
was a million miles away from Ford’s vision of the West, created an international megastar in Clint Eastwood and kick-started an entire genre under the most extraordinary of circumstances.

Looking to remake Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movie
Yojimbo
(1961), Leone (using the pseudonym Bob Robertson) and his writers (including an uncredited Duccio Tessari) reworked the Japanese sword-flick as a Western – just as
The Magnificent Seven
had its roots in Kurosawa’s
Seven Samurai
. Leone even called his version ‘The Magnificent Stranger’. But both
Yojimbo
and
A Fistful of Dollars
owe a debt to crime writer Dashiell Hammett, who penned similar town-feud scenarios in
Red Harvest
and the clever Western whodunit
Corkscrew
.

For the role of the hero originally played by Toshiro Mifune, Leone approached two of the ‘Seven’, Charles Bronson and James Coburn, and also Henry Fonda. After failing to lure any of them across the Atlantic, Leone eventually hired American TV actor Clint Eastwood, who was playing Rowdy Yates in
Rawhide
. As the production began shooting, first in Cinecittà Studios in Rome and later on location near Madrid and in the deserts and mountains of Almeria, Southern Spain, Leone completely overhauled Eastwood’s clean-cut image.

Dressed in a Mexican poncho, with a couple of days’ stubble and a cigar held tightly between his teeth, Eastwood ushered in a new style of anti-hero. Steve McQueen and James Coburn had already experimented with the ‘strong, silent type’ in Westerns, but, under Leone’s direction, Eastwood’s vocal performance was pared to a minimum. The original script was very longwinded and Eastwood cut dialogue at every opportunity. Nevertheless, he found the first of the many quirky catchphrases of his career when he utters in the final duel: ‘When a man with a .45 meets a man with a rifle, you said the man with the pistol’s a dead man. Let’s see if that’s true.’ It’s not, incidentally.

When the film was released in America, the adverts dubbed Eastwood ‘The Man With No Name’, though it was really only a marketing ploy by United Artists. It is important that both Leone and Eastwood claimed to have created this new Western anti-hero. In actual fact, neither could have done it without the other’s participation. Leone’s vision plus Eastwood’s image resulted in an astoundingly fresh approach to the old myths.

But everything about
A Fistful of Dollars
(as Leone’s film would be rechristened) was refreshing and different, from the harsh desert landscape to the brutal censor-defying violence, the imaginative music and the exotic, suntanned cast. The international co-production employed performers from Italy and Germany in the other main roles with the rest made up of Spaniards (both professional actors and assorted locals and wranglers who lived in Spain). The music was a major contributing factor to the film and nothing like it had been heard before. Working in collaboration with Leone, Ennio Morricone and his whistling, guitar-playing associate Alessandro Alessandroni breathed new life into Western scoring, producing something akin to a Western pop song, which absorbed elements from classical music, folk music, beat music and opera.

A Fistful of Dollars
is a fast-paced, beautifully photographed action movie. The San Miguel town set near Madrid has been used many times, before and since, but never to such excellent effect. And the atmosphere Leone creates is unique from the off – the stranger’s meeting with four toughs at the beginning of the movie has passed into history. They scare his mule with gunshots and he strides to face them, pausing to order three coffins from the local undertaker. He provokes the gunmen with almost parodic dialogue – ‘My mule don’t like people laughing. Gets the crazy idea you’re laughing at him’ – before flicking back his poncho and gunning them down in double-quick time. As he nonchalantly walks back down the street, he adds to the undertaker, ‘My mistake. Four coffins.’ Never had violence in a Western been so fast, seemed so appealing and looked so cool.

Critics loathed lumbering, emotionless Eastwood and his swarthy adversaries, but audiences knew better. One snooty critic complained that the dubbed voices all employed the same brand of ‘Mexican mummerset’, that the Technicolor process gave the film a ‘pulmonary flush’ and that the action sequences looked ‘as though tomato sauce had been sloshed over a rather wretched meal’. Audiences didn’t care – they probably thought a pulmonary flush was a type of toilet. Ninety-seven action-packed minutes turned Eastwood into
the
Western anti-hero of the sixties. As the posters claimed: ‘He’s going to trigger a whole new style of adventure.’ And he did – the world over.

Reinvention doesn’t really cover what Leone and Eastwood did in 1964, but the film’s huge and enduring success is a testament to their achievement on a very low budget – even more so when you realise neither could speak the other’s language. When a director with imagination meets an actor with star potential, the man taking the money’s going to clean up.

At the end of the Civil War, two Confederate brothers, Gary and Phil O’Hara, separate; Gary goes home to his wife, while Phil heads west. Bored by life in peacetime Richmond, Gary soon follows Phil. Gary is hired by a wealthy banker, McCory, to kill a local outlaw, Blacky, but the outlaw is actually Phil and the two brothers are ambushed. Phil dies, but Gary survives and sets about defeating the banker, who is in league with a bunch of renegades masquerading as Confederate raiders. Eventually it transpires that Phil was innocent, that McCory is the real villain (foreclosing on the local farmers’ debts) and that the local sheriff is also involved, so Gary sets the record straight.

This was the first of a trilogy of Westerns Gemma made with Ferroni between 1964 and 1967. The only consistent features are the presence of Gemma (in each film playing a character named Gary), director Ferroni (billed as ‘Calvin Jackson Padget’) and some of the supporting cast and crew (including composer Gianni Ferrio). Like the ‘Ringo’ films (also starring Gemma), this trilogy, and in particular
One Silver Dollar
, harks back to American series Westerns of the fifties, with an added dose of violence.
One Silver Dollar
was followed by the best of the trio,
Fort Yuma
Gold
(1966), an entertaining Civil War-set Spaghetti that has a similar atmosphere (roving bands of guerrillas, ruined towns) to Leone’s
The Good
,
the Bad and
the Ugly
, though obviously on a lower budget. Here, Gary Hammond (Gemma) must deliver a warning despatch to the gold reserve at Union Fort Yuma before a gang of renegade Confederates infiltrate the stockade. It was followed by
Wanted
(1967), a more pedestrian tale of Sheriff Gary Ryan (Gemma) trying to expose a counterfeit branding ring. All three feature a strong central relationship between Gemma and a woman. Female characterisation was never a great strength of Spaghettis, but these films (especially the first two) make a commendable effort. Many Spaghettis didn’t bother with women and those that did made a pretty poor job of depicting them with anything more than cardboard conviction – epitomised by Gemma’s love interest in
Fort Yuma
Gold
, a dance-hall girl named Connie Breastfull.

Gemma’s character is always a good man, forced through circumstance to become responsible for other people’s lives. In two of the films he must clear his own blackened name; in the other he embarks on a mission that will save hundreds of lives. Gemma is an appealing hero, and the excellent villains (Cressoy, ex-muscleman Dan Vadis or Serge Marquand) and imaginative music (by Gianni Ferrio, sometimes in collaboration with Morricone or Alessandroni) ensured that the series was more interesting than run-of-the-mill Spaghettis.
One Silver Dollar
is so called because the scriptwriters used the cliché of the hero’s life being saved by a lucky coin in his breast pocket. The one aspect Ferroni did borrow from Leone, however, was the fact that the hero got tortured at some point in the movie (in
Yuma
he’s even temporarily blinded), making his vengeance all the more sweet.

One Silver Dollar
was overly praised in Italy for its realistic depiction of the post-Civil War South – which is as cliché-ridden in this movie as in any Hollywood attempt, complete with Southern belle. But it set Gemma up nicely for the first ‘Ringo’ film,
A Pistol for Ringo
, which appeared the following year.

A family of Scottish horse ranchers live with their seven sons on their secluded homestead. When the sons take their horses to market, they have them stolen by a gang of Mexican bandits in league with a local sheriff. The sons set off to try to recover the herd and Gregor (the cleverest of the brothers) infiltrates a Mexican gang, led by Santillana. Gregor dupes the bandits out of some gold, but they capture him and his girl Rosita. She tells Santillana where the brothers and the gold are hiding, but Gregor manages to save his siblings just as they are about to be executed. The bandits surround them and all seems lost until Rosita arrives with a rescue party, who save the day and rout the bandits, leaving the MacGregors rich.

This is the first successful comedy Spaghetti and the best Italian Western directed by Franco Giraldi (who also used the pseudonym Frank Grafield). Giraldi was Leone’s assistant director on
A Fistful of
Dollars
, while one of the scriptwriters on
Seven Guns for the
MacGregors
was the talented Duccio Tessari.

The violence of Giraldi’s film recalls some of the more brutal moments of
A Fistful of Dollars
, but the humorous narrative, parodic performances and slapstick fistfights lighten the mood. At one point, a gringo is dragged alive through a fire, but the moment of horror is offset by the Mexican torturer moaning that gringos are ‘much too soft’. A more interesting plot twist is when Gregor joins Santillana’s band (like Eastwood in
For a Few Dollars
More
), but instead of gunning down the gang, he tips his brothers off about the bandits’ forthcoming robberies (a bank, a gold convoy, a train shipment). When the bandits (led by Santillana’s incompetent lieutenant Miguel) arrive, the MacGregors have got there first and relieved the safes of their contents. These and other scenes strongly resemble Tessari’s ‘Ringo’ films (in particular
A Pistol for Ringo
), where stock characters and situations are expertly spoofed. Robert Woods is an excellent, easygoing hero, though he, like the other six badly dubbed brothers, doesn’t bother attempting a Scottish accent. The stunt work is great, Morricone’s Scottish pastiche score excellent (with drums, bagpipes and chants of ‘Whisky and Glory! Hurrah for the MacGregors!’) and Giraldi’s direction keeps the action tripping along. Leo Anchoriz as the intimidating villain ends up dying during an exciting knife fight with Gregor on a waterwheel.