Spaghetti Westerns (7 page)

Navajo Joe
is more overtly a ‘message’ film than any Corbucci had previously attempted. He abandoned the underlying racism of
Django
(which concentrated on post-Civil War Southerners attempting to continue the conflict) and made his villain a full-blown, Indian-hating bastard. In the chilling opening sequence, half-breed scalp hunter Duncan stops near a Navajo encampment and smiles at a young woman (Joe’s wife) washing her clothes before, without warning, shooting her dead and scalping her. His psychological unbalance is explained in an effective scene later, when he describes why he hates whites (like his father) and Indians (like his mother) – the first time a Corbucci villain had the opportunity to explain himself.

The film is exceptionally violent for its time and is still one of Corbucci’s most graphic movies – included are some vicious beatings, convincing stunts (supervised by ex-stuntman Reynolds) and death by tomahawk, bullet, knife, scalpel and strangulation. The relationship between Joe and his obedient horse is a brief concession by Corbucci to traditional Hollywood Westerns (his mount even carries the money back to town in lieu of Joe), though other aspects of the movie (the Indian hero, the downbeat ending) are obviously influenced by bleaker, more considered fifties ‘Cowboy and Indian’ Westerns, including Burt Lancaster’s action-packed
Apache
(1954), the brutal
The Last Wagon
(1956) and Kirk Douglas’s
The Indian
Fighter
(1955).

Reynolds said this film was so bad that it was only shown in prisons and on aeroplanes because no one could leave – ‘I killed 10,000 guys, wore a Japanese slingshot and a fright wig.’ Ignore Reynolds’ opinion.

A fast-drawing stranger arrives in a desolate Mexican border settlement and witnesses a bandit gang, led by their sadistic leader Aguila, wipe out a company of Mexican
Federales
and make off with their uniforms. The stranger joins the band to steal a gold shipment from the US Army, but he’s double-crossed and beaten. Facing the gang alone, he picks them off one by one and kills Aguila, before returning the money to the US Army.

If the story seems familiar, that’s because it is. This is by far the most blatant rip-off of
A Fistful of Dollars
, made clearer under its alternate title,
For a Dollar in the Teeth
. Not only does Vanzi use a simplified version of the same plot, but Anthony plays a nameless stranger dressed exactly like Eastwood’s poncho-wearing stranger and sucks meanly on cigars. But this film had American backing (it’s a US/Spanish co-production) and, like Eastwood’s
Hang
’
Em High
(1968), it represents an American’s idea of a Spaghetti Western – short on plot and characterisation, long on violence. But the whole package (including an appalling performance by Wolff in the Ramon Rojo role) is so poorly executed that its success, especially in America, is difficult to fathom. The finale is memorable, however. In
A Fistful of Dollars
the stranger uses a square of iron cut from an old mining railcar as a makeshift bullet-proof vest. In
A Stranger in Town
the hero uses a whole railcar (which runs on tracks down the main street) as he faces Aguila, who is armed with a machinegun.

The film’s success made Anthony a star and resulted in three ‘Stranger’ sequels –
The Stranger Returns
(1967),
The Silent
Stranger
(1969) and
Get
Mean (1976) – and several other similar outings, including the surreal
Blindman
(1971), Anthony’s best film. If
The Silent Stranger
(wherein the stranger finds himself in Japan) is the weakest of the ‘Stranger’ films and
Get Mean
is the oddest (the Stranger battles Moors and Vikings in Spain), then
The Stranger
Returns
is the most accomplished. Also called
A Man
,
a Horse
,
a
Gun
and
Shoot First
,
Laugh Last
, this is more imaginative and better plotted than its predecessor, set in a truly wild West. Anthony’s stranger (again in a poncho) tracks down a renegade (played by Italian strongman Dan Vadis) and his gang, known as the ‘Treasure of the Border’ because of the massive bounty on their heads. The bandits steal a solid-gold stagecoach (yes, you read it right) and the stranger gets beaten up and dragged behind the coach before levelling the gang with his four-barrelled shotgun. But the details of the film – which is more parodic and less slavishly imitative than
A
Stranger in Town
– work a lot better. The stranger sunbathes under a pink parasol, has a natty sidekick (called the Prophet) with a box full of fireworks, christens his horse Pussy (which makes for some rather strange dialogue) and never finishes his ineptly rolled cigarettes – they taste so bad.

The most successful imitators of the Eastwood movies, the ‘Stranger’ films demonstrate just how powerful and popular an icon the poncho-draped Western hero had become in the sixties.

During the Mexican Revolution, a young gringo called Bill Tate joins a band of Mexican gunrunners working for the revolutionaries. The band is led by Chuncho (who’s in it for the money) and his half-brother Santo (a believer in the cause). They steal guns from the government to sell to General Elias, whose hideout is in the hills. On the way, the gang stop off at San Miguel and help the peasants kill their rich, exploitative boss. But after their liberation they want Chuncho to stay on as mayor. Chuncho seems keen, but Tate is determined to get to Elias and convinces the rest of the gang to leave with the guns.

Eventually, Chuncho abandons the peasants and rejoins his gang, but, in a battle with government troops, the gunrunners are decimated. Chuncho and Tate survive and continue alone to Elias’s headquarters, though the Mexican has to nurse the gringo when he catches malaria. At the headquarters, Chuncho sells the guns but General Elias sentences him to death – San Miguel has been attacked, the peasants massacred, but the armaments could have prevented it. Santo escaped and is about to kill Chuncho when Tate intervenes and kills Santo and Elias. Weeks later, Chuncho and Tate meet up in Cuidad Juarez and Tate tells him that he is a hired assassin and that their whole relationship has been an elaborate ruse to complete his contract. With that, Chuncho shoots Tate as they are boarding a train to the US – the Mexican is no longer a bloodthirsty bandit, but a revolutionary.

This is the only Spaghetti Western to deal with the Mexican Revolution with anything remotely resembling incisiveness. Corbucci’s imaginative political Westerns were much more light-hearted in their commitment, while other attempts, like
Tepepa
(1968),
Run Man Run
(1968) and Leone’s
Duck You Sucker
(1971), either didn’t have the power to convey the key issues of the Mexican people or got lost in star-laden, overblown scenarios – films that existed purely to blow up trains, bridges and extras as elaborately as possible. Most forgot what the word revolution actually meant.

Damiani didn’t and
A Bullet for the General
, based on an excellent screenplay by political writer Franco Solinas (
Salvatore
Giuliano
[1961],
The Battle of Algiers
[1966]), was much more than a succession of over-the-top set pieces. Carefully constructed, the film featured plenty of action (filmed in Almeria), but the story was a strong element in the film. The relationships between the main characters highlighted the revolution’s differing perspectives. Chuncho is a bandit, seeing the war as an opportunity to make a few pesos. Santo is a priest, devoutly observing his twin beliefs – God and the revolutionary people. Tate, a character who for much of the film seems quite sympathetic, is the ultimate betrayer (a government assassin), and Adelita is a peasant girl who rides with Chuncho’s
hombres
, but finds that, through the gringo’s manipulation, she has lost the thing she holds most dear (her lover, another of Chuncho’s band). Along the way, this gang encounter various groups (the army, peasants, political prisoners and revolutionaries) and their presentation in the film is utterly convincing.

There are certain things that make it obvious this is a Spaghetti Western, like the golden bullet Tate carries around in his valise (to the accompaniment of a riff on the soundtrack that sounds as though it has come straight out of
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
), which hammers home its significance to the story. But, for the most part, Damiani has succeeded in his aim, which was to make a serious statement about the Mexican Revolution. Even the usually excessive Kinski is more subdued than normal as the monastically clad, pistol-packing padre, though in one sequence he is allowed to indulge in histrionics and throw hand grenades at an army parade in the name of the ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’. The film was originally called
El Chuncho
–
Quien Sabe?
(‘El Chuncho – Who Knows?’), a title as elliptical as Solinas’s plot.

This is much better than Castel’s other political Western,
Requiescant
(1967), directed by Carlo Lizzani. Damiani gets the balance right between tension, action, politics and history and allows his characters to develop. Not your usual Spaghetti, then, but that was Damiani’s intention.
Bullet
was a surprise commercial success and opened the floodgates for the political Westerns that followed.

During the Civil War, Angel Eyes, a hired gun, learns of a shipment of Confederate army gold that has vanished and sets about locating the one man who can identify its whereabouts, a Confederate cavalryman called Bill Carson. Meanwhile, a bounty hunter named Blondy has joined up with Tuco, a Mexican outlaw, in a bounty scam. But after Blondy double-crosses Tuco, the Mexican takes him into the desert to torture and kill him. There they encounter Carson, half-dead, who tells each of them one part of the gold’s location. Tuco knows that the cache is buried in a war cemetery on Sad Hill, while Blondy learns the name on the specific grave.

With the two now disguised as Confederate soldiers, Blondy recovers at a monastery functioning as a war hospital (run by Tuco’s brother Pablo). Moving on, they are captured by a Union patrol and taken to a Union prison camp where Angel Eyes is working as a sergeant. He tortures the name of the cemetery out of Tuco and packs him off to jail, while Blondy sides with Angel Eyes and his gang to find the gold. Later, Tuco (who has escaped his escort) and Blondy are reunited and wipe out Angel Eyes’ gang, though their leader evades them. Continuing towards the graveyard, the duo intervene in a battle for a strategically important bridge, blowing it sky high. Eventually finding the vast cemetery, they also find Angel Eyes and the three shoot it out with a fortune at stake. Blondy kills Angel Eyes and outwits Tuco, takes half the money and rides into the distance, while Tuco is left alive – rich but without a horse.

This is probably the most famous Spaghetti Western of them all, no doubt due to Ennio Morricone’s distinctive theme tune (which everyone, whether they’ve seen the film or not, is familiar with). Moreover,
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
is one of the most popular, enduring Westerns ever. Along with
The Searchers
(1956),
The Magnificent Seven
(1960),
Once Upon a Time in the West
(1968),
The Wild Bunch
(1969) and
Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance
Kid
(1969), it is regularly voted into lists of contemporary audiences’ favourite films of all time. It is also unusual in that it works not only as an action film, but also as a great art movie and a morality tale. Seldom has a Western looked so beautiful and asked so many questions about human nature. It is truly epic in scale, even more so than Leone’s next film,
Once Upon a Time in the West
, as the Blue and the Grey (actually the Spanish army in period costume) fight it out as the backdrop to Leone’s treasure hunt.

Leone recast his two leading men from
For a Few Dollars More
, but altered their characters. Eastwood was now Blondy, more a cunning conman than a bounty hunter, while Van Cleef was the villainous hired gun, christened ‘Angel Eyes’ (originally called ‘Setenza’ in the Italian version, which means sentence, as in ‘death sentence’). Eastwood even abandoned his trademark poncho for the film (he only wears it in the final gunfight, after he steals it from a dead Confederate artilleryman). But Leone was obviously less concerned with Blondy and Angel Eyes and more interested in the character of garrulous, foul-mouthed Mexican
bandido
Tuco (played by Wallach, who appeared in
The Magnificent Seven
). For the first time in a Leone movie, we see a major character with his guard down. Tuco comes across as a slightly inept, bumbling outlaw and is easily outwitted and double-crossed by Blondy; but nevertheless, using his own distinctive methods, he manages to survive. He is also a fall guy for Eastwood. It is Tuco who always ends up on his knees in the dust or dangling precariously from a rope, while Blondy strides through every situation without breaking a sweat. In return for this humiliation and betrayal, Tuco leads Blondy into the wasteland to kill him (but inevitably fails). We also learn more about Tuco’s character than was expected in a Leone film. In one affecting scene, he visits his brother, a monk, and learns of the death of his parents.