Spaghetti Westerns (6 page)

This time Tessari is more specific with his reference points. There are allusions to Howard Hawks’s Westerns (in particular
Rio
Bravo
[1959], with its drunken sheriff and ragtag bunch of misfits facing tyranny) and Ringo’s ride through the desert at the film’s opening recalls John Ford’s cavalry movies, but Tessari’s sources go back a lot further than the late forties.
The Return of Ringo
is basically a rewrite of Homer’s
The Odyssey
, the mythical story of Odysseus’s voyage home after the Trojan War. For Odysseus read Ringo, for Penelope read Hally. Paco Fuentes and his gang represent the suitors, jostling for Penelope’s hand. The Trojan War may have become the Civil War, but Tessari intelligently Westernises the story, creating a film of power and complexity.

And not only that, for Tessari also cleverly parodied
A Fistful of
Dollars
, the most popular Spaghetti scenario of the time – the irony being that, to everyone in town, Ringo (disguised as a beggar) is a stranger, when in reality he’s a local. Only at the end, on Paco and Hally’s wedding day, does Ringo reveal his true identity. In the most impressive scene in the film (based on an image from
The Odyssey
), Ringo appears framed in the church doorway in a swirling sandstorm. Instead of his beggar’s rags, he’s now wearing his cavalry uniform and Paco is totally unnerved.

With its foundations in classic Westerns and classical mythology, Tessari added some decidedly odd characters to the melting pot. These include changing Odysseus’s son into a cherubic, blonde (and quite frankly irritating) daughter and incorporating two genre firsts – a fortune-telling whore and a camp florist named Morning Glory (who eventually gets fed up with making funeral wreaths and joins Ringo). Ennio Morricone’s score, like that for
A Pistol for Ringo
, verges on the traditional (it again features a wholesome ballad) and also includes references to classical compositions. In the Italian print of the movie, Morning Glory is called ‘Myosotis’ (a reference to the flower ‘forget-me-not’), a more apt name considering that Ringo returns home to a town that has forgotten him. It’s a clever gag that is completely lost in translation.

Without reaching the dizzying heights of Leone and Corbucci, Tessari made an important contribution to the genre with this movie. His films were less about stretching the boundaries of the Western and more about ironic homages to the genre’s giants, though what John Ford would have thought of this movie is open to debate. Even so, this is Tessari’s best Western and one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking Italian Westerns.

A mysterious coffin-dragging stranger named Django arrives in a nameless, muddy town. He discovers that the area is controlled by two warring groups – a Mexican bandit gang, led by General Rodriguez, and a band of red-hooded Confederate Klansmen, led by the fanatical Major Jackson. Django wants to kill Jackson (for murdering his wife) and in a massed gun battle in the main street he takes a machinegun out of his coffin and decimates the Klan. Jackson escapes across the frontier into Mexico, so Django enlists the help of Rodriguez to attack Fort Cheriba, a Mexican Army outpost, and steal a fortune in gold. Their raid succeeds, but the General won’t divide the proceeds. Double-crossed, Django steals the money, but is captured by the bandits and tortured, while the gold ends up in a pool of quicksand. The Mexicans cripple Django by crushing his hands, but later the bandits are trapped by Jackson and massacred. In the finale, Django meets Jackson and his men in a desolate graveyard, near his wife’s grave. Though his hands are smashed, he manages to fire his pistol and gun down his adversaries, in memory of his wife.

Corbucci had made three Westerns between 1964 and 1966 –
Red
Pastures
(1964, aka
Massacre at Canyon
Grande
),
Minnesota Clay
(1965) and
Johnny Oro
(1966, retitled
Ringo and his Golden Pistol
) – but they hadn’t achieved the success of Leone’s
A Fistful of Dollars
.
Django
changed all that. Not only was it as revisionist as Leone’s movies, it was one of the most distinctive Westerns ever made and had a huge impact on the Spaghetti Western boom, which hitherto had simply been ripping off the ‘Dollars’ and ‘Ringo’ films. Even today it’s a powerful (though admittedly low-budget) piece of comic-strip cinema and its value to modern action movies is demonstrated by the fact that there’s a print of it in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Set in a mud-strewn border town,
Django
took the
A Fistful of
Dollars
plot dynamic (one hero against two warring factions) and ideas from
For a Few Dollars More
(flashy weaponry and revenge) and twisted them into a magnificent, blood-splattered anti-Western. The hero, played by Italian Franco Nero, looked like no other protagonist of the era. Dressed in a long coat and black hat, he could be a soldier (there are allusions to him fighting for the Union in the Civil War), but the fingerless gloves, scarf and, most of all, the omnipresent coffin add a more macabre, gravedigger quality to his appearance. The most memorable aspect of the film is his machinegun, hidden in the box, which he periodically whips out to riddle the bad guys. Without a doubt, this was a very long way from John Wayne.

Corbucci, like Leone, kept his leading character mysterious and enigmatic (just as well, considering the appalling dubbing that is the film’s major failing) and the film fairly rips along, never wasting a second of its 87 minutes – economical filmmaking at its best. It also drew on a huge number of sources. The hero’s name comes from Django Reinhardt, the French gypsy jazzman, whose guitar-playing style was dictated when his hand was badly burnt in a fire. The film also has roots in offbeat fifties B-Westerns, Japanese samurai films and horror movies. The other characters from
A Fistful of Dollars
were altered considerably by Corbucci. Instead of the amiable tavern keeper and the jovial undertaker, Corbucci populates his town with a gaggle of tawdry whores and a violin-playing bartender. Even more excessive were Django’s adversaries. In place of gunrunners and liquor merchants, Django faces a group of downtrodden, vicious Mexican revolutionaries (led by a malicious, self-proclaimed General) and a bunch of racist, cross-burning Ku Klux Klansmen sporting red hoods (led by a redneck ex-Confederate Major).
Django
, even more than
A Fistful of Dollars
, is a succession of pop-art set pieces. Some are action packed – Django mowing down the Klansmen in the muddy main street, an attack on a Mexican army fort with the bandits posing as prostitutes. Some are sadistic – the Mexican General cuts the Klan priest’s ear off and makes him eat it, and Django has his hands mangled. Others are downright bizarre – whores indulge in a spot of mud-wrestling and the Major shoots peons as though they were clay pigeons.
Django
is unrelentingly brutal and pessimistic and, for all Corbucci’s claims that the film addresses political issues (the North/South confrontation, the Major’s racism, the Mexicans lying low during the revolution), any message is buried up to its neck in blood and mud.

It’s difficult to assess
Django
’s influence on American Westerns as the film was never formally released there or the UK, though Jack Nicholson did reportedly try to buy the rights in 1967. On the continent the film made Nero a superstar and began a whole sub-genre (trading on the Django name), which runs to about 20 movies – but far more if you count retitled cash-ins (mostly the German and French versions of completely unrelated films). Of the ones of direct lineage
$10
,
000
Blood Money
(1966),
Django Get a Coffin Ready
(1968) and
Django the Bastard
(1969) are all worthy successors, while
Django Kill
(1967) just steals the name.

All Corbucci’s most famous (and infamous) motifs are here – the extremely cruel violence, the larger-than-life characters, the hero’s brief but emotive (and ultimately doomed) relationship with a woman, a hopelessly one-sided finale and a pessimistic twist ending. Muddy brilliance.

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, Jerry Brewster and Ken Seagal, two Confederate outlaws, are on the run with a fortune in Yankee cash. About to be captured, they agree to split up – Seagal takes the money (and promises to look after his partner’s wife and child), while Brewster is taken prisoner. After five years behind bars in Fort Wilson, he returns home, but his ranch house is derelict, his wife dead and his son is missing. He vows revenge on Seagal and teams up with Winny Getz, a mysterious gunslinger. Brewster discovers that Seagal is now a rich landowner at war with a local saloon owner, Horner, over the lush grassland that surrounds Austin. Brewster sides with Horner in an effort to kill Seagal. As part of their plan, Brewster and Getz infiltrate Seagal’s gang and cross the path of Garcia Mendez, Seagal’s psychopathic henchman. Brewster also finds his son, Tim, and encounters Seagal’s beautiful sister, Mary-Ann. In a showdown, Mendez and his gang wipe out Horner’s men and Brewster is unmasked as a traitor. Brewster and Getz ambush Mendez in Austin, and Brewster kills Seagal in a duel. Getz reveals that he’s a Government agent, on the trail of the stolen money, but even though Getz knows that Brewster was one of the robbers, he allows him to settle down with Mary-Ann and Tim, as sheriff of Austin.

Director Lizzani is better known for his more serious political thrillers
Wake Up and Kill
(1966) and
The Violent Four
(1968) than his Spaghetti Westerns, though
The Hills Run Red
is one of the best examples of the genre. Written by Dean Craig, the film has a terrible, cliché-ridden script (‘Lookee yonder’, ‘Doggawn’ and ‘Stay as still as a cactus’ being the worst offenders), but is saved in just about every other department. The cast is an unusual mix of newcomers and familiar Western faces. Unknown Thomas Hunter, as the hero, makes the most of his role and does an excellent imitation of Steve McQueen (in
Magnificent Seven
mode
), whilst both Duryea and Silva appeared in many classic Hollywood Westerns – Duryea played Waco Johnny Dean in
Winchester
73
(1950) and oriental-looking Silva was vicious outlaw Chink in
The Tall T
(1957). Silva’s portrayal is the most memorable aspect of the film. Dressed entirely in black leather, he dominates every scene as he intimidates (and just plain scares) other members of the cast at regular intervals with his screaming, unhinged histrionics. His persona was highly influential – in one scene he strides into a saloon, shouts ‘Hasta la vista’ and opens fire on the patrons (years before Schwarzenegger appropriated the line and added ‘Baby’).

The Hills Run
Red bears the unmistakable stamp of fifties psychological revenge Westerns (like
The Naked Spur
[1953],
The Man
from Laramie
[1955] and
Ride Lonesome
), but updates their ideals for the sixties. There is more sentiment in evidence than in Leone’s films (particularly with the relationship between Brewster and his angelic son), but Lizzani knows where to draw the line and the last section of the film is a salvo of action sequences – a canyon ambush, a saloon massacre and a massed gunfight in Austin – where stunts, gags and sheer imagination take over. In another more visceral moment, Brewster voluntarily has the tattoo dedicated to his wife cut from his arm with a knife.

The film takes themes from
A Fistful of Dollars
(the warring-clans scenario),
For a Few Dollars More
(the younger Brewster joining forces with seasoned veteran Getz) and
Django
(the death of the hero’s wife), but also anticipates Sergio Sollima’s treatment of personality changes in
Face to Face
(1967). The end of
The Hills Run
Red
features a reformed outlaw being allowed to go free, even though the lawman knows he’s a guilty man. Brewster’s moral rehabilitation even extends to him being made sheriff. Morricone’s score – including the effective ballad ‘Home to my Love’ – has been little heard, but is up to his usual excellent standard.

An imaginative action movie and a cracking take on fifties Westerns with a sixties twist, this is one largely overlooked movie that thoroughly deserves a cult following.

A gang of scalp hunters, led by a sadistic half-breed named Duncan, are ravaging the countryside, indiscriminately attacking Indian camps and massacring their inhabitants for the bounty of a dollar a scalp. When the bounties are suddenly withdrawn, they begin to attack local white townships, but a mysterious Indian named Joe intervenes and tries to help the townspeople. A local doctor is in league with the bandits and tips them off about a train loaded with cash. The bandits steal the cash, but Joe foils the robbery and returns the money to the town of Esperanza. The bandits arrive and capture Joe after he has hidden the money. The hero is then freed when Estella, a young Indian woman, helps him. Duncan and the bandits take the whole town prisoner, keeping them locked up in the church, but Joe lures the scalp hunters away into the desert. Having gradually decimated the gang, Joe faces the remaining members until only Duncan is left alive. During the climactic duel in an Indian burial ground, Duncan learns that he killed and scalped Joe’s wife in one of his raids. Joe kills Duncan but is mortally wounded and sends the money back to Esperanza on his horse, while he remains in the graveyard and prepares to meet his ancestors.

This is one of future-superstar Burt Reynolds’ first successful starring roles, though he often cites it as his worst movie. He’s wrong, as anyone who’s sat through
At Long Last Love
(1975),
Smokey and
the Bandit 2
(1980) and Stroker
Ace
(1983) will no doubt attest. Corbucci’s fifth Western is one of his best, not least for Reynolds’ rippling portrayal of ‘feathers and leathers’ Joe, who whittles down the huge gang of scalp hunters single-handedly. Reynolds hardly says a word for the first half of the movie (and when he does it’s in a very basic ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ style), but as far as performances go, this is one of Reynolds’ better efforts. Like Eastwood, he was appearing in American TV Westerns (
Gunsmoke
and
Riverboat
) when he was cast in
Navajo Joe
in 1966. Though it failed to catapult Reynolds to superstardom and he left Italy before shooting was finished, Corbucci managed a pretty good cut-and-paste job. One of the most distinctive and successful aspects of
Navajo Joe
is the incredible screaming, clanging score by Ennio Morricone. The music incorporates much Native American-style yelling and whooping, as well as several effectively understated, flute-led compositions that enhance Reynolds’ on-screen relationship with the beautiful Indian maiden, Estella – played by the stunning Italian actress Nicoletta Machiavelli, in her most memorable role.