Spaghetti Westerns (8 page)

The intricacies of the plot are down to Leone, Luciano Vincenzoni and an uncredited Sergio Donati (who co-scripted Sergio Sollima’s best movies and
Once Upon a Time in the West
). Like all the best adventure films,
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
relies on outrageous coincidence and surprise to power the story and captivate the viewer. The initial premise upon which the whole story rests takes place before the film has even begun. A Union patrol ambushes a Confederate gold shipment. Three of the escort survive and one of them hides the cache in a grave. Only Angel Eyes does any detective work to locate the cache – Blondy and Tuco become involved in the search by chance – and the treasure hunt is only a small part of the movie. There are also some great lines of dialogue – “If you have to shoot, shoot… don’t talk”, “There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend”, “I always see my job through” and the logical “Two can dig a lot quicker than one”.

But it is the imaginative Civil War setting that allows Leone the opportunity to inject pathos into his West. The war gave him the chance to direct epic scenes and it must have amused him staging the battle sequences in Spain, near Madrid (a second Spanish Civil War). Every detail looks authentic (though several aren’t) and the Civil War of
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
is the most convincing cinematic staging of the conflict. Refugees flee ruined towns, generals are reduced to travelling on rickety wagons, armies are shifted by railroad and soldiers kill and loot (and are executed when they are caught). This was a violent, merciless war, based partly on World War One (with entrenched armies fighting over a bridge at the behest of their idiot commanders) and World War Two (a prison camp with starving, rag-clothed inmates, high fences, gravediggers and death wagons piled high with corpses). If this film had depicted either of those more contemporary conflicts, it would have run into serious censorship problems.

The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
begins as a pretty standard Spaghetti Western (a shootout in a ghost town, a killing at a farm, a murder, a fumbled ambush) but the Civil War becomes more apparent as the film progresses and hangs over the action like a vulture. The first soldier who appears in the film is a legless Confederate reduced to selling information for a price, while several shots dwell on the dead or severely injured. Blondy (‘The Good’) is saddened by the conflict, seeing it as a waste of human life, Angel Eyes (‘The Bad’) runs a racket in a prison camp, selling on inmates’ possessions, while to Tuco (‘The Ugly’), a Mexican, the war means nothing and merely slows down his route to the graveyard.

To the annoyance of several (mostly American) critics, there was still no room for women in Leone’s West. While other Italian Western directors (in particular Tessari, Corbucci and Sollima) expanded the Leone formula and included meaty roles for actresses, Leone stuck to a male-orientated world. The only women in the movie were prostitutes, hoteliers, peasants or farmers’ wives. Even then, they either had one scene or had their scenes cut. In fact, there have been several versions of the film available, of various lengths, each with its own merits. Love scenes for Eastwood were excised from both
For a Few Dollars More
and
The Good
,
the Bad
and the Ugly
, and sex doesn’t enter into the equation. In this macho, war-torn world, there aren’t even any nurses in the hospitals. And again violence was directed at women, a feature of the film that Van Cleef, for one, loathed.

Though it’s best remembered for Morricone’s title theme – with its screaming, yelping vocals, cavalry trumpets and Shadows-style guitar, powered along by a pounding drumbeat – the score is much more than an echoing coyote howl in the desert. The Civil War scenes are accompanied by a haunting choral piece (‘The Soldier’s Story’) and a more expansive, trumpet-led composition – as when Angel Eyes visits a Confederate hospital in a scene only included in Italian prints (though the piece is still present on the soundtrack album). Blondy’s ordeal in the desert has an epic (as in Biblical epic) score, while Tuco’s breathless search for the grave in Sad Hill’s cross-strewn vastness is accompanied by one of Morricone’s best ever tunes, the towering ‘Ecstasy of Gold’. While there are none of the extended, montage-driven gundowns throughout the film, Leone makes up for it in the finale, where the three protagonists face each other in the huge circular arena in the middle of the graveyard. Here, the action consists of the three men staring meanly at each other for nearly five minutes – half of which consists of them taking their places at points on the circle before the contest can begin, accompanied by Morricone’s macabre bolero.

The most astonishing aspect of the film is the way Leone varies the film’s tempo – long scenes of silence (with little action), fast shootouts, chases, gags, pathos – but never loses its momentum. The camerawork by Tonino Delli Colli is superb, the performances perfect, the Spanish and Italian locations breathtaking. And for all its attempts at social comment (however successful or apparent),
The
Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
is also one of the great action Westerns. Eastwood has never been involved in a better film (though he’d probably argue he has), Van Cleef has never been more villainous, Wallach so overly dramatic and expressive. Its phenomenal success also resulted in the usual bunch of rip-offs, from Enzo G Castellari’s
Seven Winchesters for a Massacre
(1967), with a poncho-clad hero involved in a Civil War treasure hunt, to
The Handsome
,
the Ugly and
the Cretinous
(1967), an imaginative, scene-for-scene slapstick comedy version of Leone’s film.

Though many claim that the films that bookend
The Good
,
the Bad
and the Ugly
in Leone’s canon – the vengeful
For a Few Dollars More
and epic
Once Upon a Time in the West
– are his finest work, this is his best film, made by a director at his zenith, with a global superstar-in-waiting in the lead and a fantastical plot that is never short on surprises.

In the years following the Civil War, Jonas, an ex-Confederate colonel, and his three sons steal a shipment of Yankee gold. With it they plan to resurrect the Confederacy. They pose as a funeral escort with Clare, a prostitute, impersonating the wife of the ‘deceased’ and the money hidden in the coffin. Their ruse works, as they avoid Yankee patrols and sheriffs’ posses and are saved by the army from a bandit gang, until finally their goal, the Hondo River, is in sight. But they are almost robbed by a beggar and one of the sons rapes and murders an Indian girl. The sons have been at each others’ throats throughout and this atrocity is the last straw. In a final shootout, all the brothers are left dead or dying, while Clare has pneumonia and Jonas is mortally wounded. Even worse, Jonas makes the horrible discovery that it has all been for nought. The coffin contains the corpse of an executed bandit. The money has been mistakenly buried by the Union army.

An audacious change of pace for Corbucci following the madness of
Django
and comic strip action of
Navajo Joe
,
The Hellbenders
, an anti-racist, anti-militarist diatribe, is a cross between a mission/heist movie (will they deliver the cash-laden hearse to the rebels?) and a lamentation of the South’s fate following the Civil War. Jonas and his three sons are used throughout to represent different aspects of the Confederacy (greed, compassion, jealousy, racism) while the coffin and the mock deceased jokingly stands for the South itself (hoping one day to ‘rise again’). Even more disrespectfully, Corbucci has the dead soldier’s wife impersonated by a prostitute.

The best performance of the film obviously comes from the evertalented Joseph Cotten. Formerly of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre Project, and involved in milestones such as
Citizen Kane
(1941),
The
Magnificent
Ambersons
(1942) and
The Third Man
(1949), Cotten must have wondered what the hell had happened when he found himself in Spain making Spaghetti Westerns. Jonas is the most complex character in the movie, completely besotted with ‘the cause’ and blind to the disintegration of his clan. Cotten’s haggard portrayal is completely convincing. Astoundingly, it was Cotten’s second foray into Spaghettis.
The Hellbenders
was the sequel to
The Tramplers
(1966), which also starred Cotten as an ex-Confederate – the flamboyantly named Temple Cordine, head of the Cordine clan, who distributes justice by lynching anyone who doesn’t agree with his racist, redundant views. In both films, Cotten’s character is opposed by one of his sons, who tries unsuccessfully to make him change his ways.

So, what are the main things that
The Hellbenders
has going for it? Corbucci’s sense of the bizarre, for one thing, as well as Morricone’s mournful ‘Death of the South’ trumpet score and a cruel twist at the tale’s end. The premise of the coffin containing a dead soldier, but really brimming with stolen cash, was an idea borrowed from Leone’s
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
, but Corbucci uses it in a completely original way – Corbucci’s hearse is actually the same Confederate ambulance prop from Leone’s film. The riverside robbery that descends into a massacre at the beginning of
The
Hellbenders
is the only recognisably Corbucci-esque moment, the rest of the movie consisting of the family’s efforts to trick their way past various groups – a posse, the army, some bandits, a priest and the Indians. These encounters are filled with tension, but tension is not what the director does best, nor what his audiences expect. In a macabre joke, Corbucci even has Jonas and his hearse encounter one of the dead hero’s old comrades (now on pension), but he turns out to be blind and so can’t identify Clare as an impostor. Cotten made one further Spaghetti called
White Comanche
(1968), which starred another unexpected Anglo refugee – William Shatner, who’d just appeared in the
Star
Trek
TV series and must have thought he’d really reached the final frontier when he landed in dusty Spain.

The presence of Cotten makes this watchable, but the number of rip-offs released hot on the heels of
The Hellbenders
(none) gives a fair idea of its impact on the Spaghetti-Western craze.

Ex-lawman turned bounty hunter Jonathan Corbett is hired by rich Texan railroad tycoon Brokston to track down a Mexican renegade called Cuchillo Sanchez. Nicknamed ‘Sanchez the Knife’, he has allegedly raped and murdered a 12-year-old white girl. Made an ‘honorary deputy’, Corbett pursues the Mexican across Texas, but his prey outwits him at every turn, hiding out with a group of Mormons and later at a ranch ruled by the whip of the sadomasochistic ‘Widow’. Cuchillo escapes into Mexico, sheltering at a monastery, and eventually makes it back to his wife in his home town. Corbett tracks him there, but Cuchillo slips through his fingers again, whereupon Brokston, the Baron (his Austrian henchman) and Brokston’s son-in-law arrive and recruit a posse of Mexican rancheros. They flush Cuchillo out of the sugar-cane fields and corner him in the desert. But in the final reckoning it transpires that the real murderer is Brokston’s son-in-law – the manhunt has been an elaborate ruse to leave the Brokston name unblemished. In a duel, Cuchillo kills the real culprit, whilst Corbett guns down the Baron and Brokston. The posse, seeing justice done, disband. Corbett and Cuchillo go their separate ways, each having learnt that wealth and power count for more in the West than the law, but that sometimes the truth can prevail.

The Big Gundown
is one of the finest Spaghettis ever made, but unfortunately, like so many, it is only available in English in cruelly abridged versions (95 and 85 minutes respectively). Both versions remove much of the early and middle sections of the chase, including editing the beautifully constructed opening duel when Corbett nails three bank robbers. The original story was written by political scenarist Franco Solinas. In this version, the lawman (a younger man) ended up killing his aged quarry without realising the truth. Sollima reversed the characters’ ages and threw in some troubling subject matter, which inevitably led to censorship problems – in the 85-minute version no reference is made to the young girl’s rape. Sollima also changed the ending to Solinas’s story (making it more upbeat) and cast Van Cleef as the lawman (hot on the heels of his success in
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
) and Tomas Milian, a Cuban ex-pat, as his younger, wily adversary. The film also adds a touch of satire, with bounty hunter Corbett harbouring political ambitions to become a senator.

The Big Gundown
borrowed extensively from previous Westerns (Cuchillo’s knife-throwing skill is straight out of
The Magnificent
Seven
, the crooked railroad magnate is a B-Western standard) but reassembled them so as to seem totally original. Consequently,
The
Big Gundown
is equal to Leone’s films, but many Western fans have never even heard of it, let alone seen it. By contrasting the two protagonists (a believer in the law and a tearaway rebel), Sollima was making subtle political observations without resorting to (a) setting his film during the Mexican Revolution or (b) getting bogged down in a chin-stroking political debate. The points being made, though simplistic (poor, exploited peasantry equals ‘good’, rich tycoon equals ‘bad’), are the same points that several more lauded Italian political films have made, but
The Big Gundown
is far more entertaining. Poor Cuchillo is even despised by his own people. The Mexican rancheros that Brokston recruits are happy to catch the peon, as he was once a revolutionary who sided with Juarez in the Mexican Revolution.

Van Cleef and Milian give career-best performances, both eliciting a degree of humanity from their good but duped characters. Other turns of note are Nieves Navarro as the wicked ‘Widow’, who puts Cuchillo in a pen with a wild bull, Walter Barnes as the disingenuous Brokston, a man prepared to twist the law to protect his family (and a forthcoming land deal), and Fernando Sancho, usually cast as a swaggering bandit, here portraying a Mexican officer who hates Mexican peasants and interfering Americans with equal relish. Sollima also includes some very interesting characters. Look out for an ex-gunslinger turned monk who is christened ‘Brother Smith and Wesson’ by his brethren, and the Austrian Baron, complete with monocle and no sense of humour, who has a specially designed, quick-draw holster, reinforcing his credo of ‘speed over accuracy’. Although these characters seem to be self-conscious attempts by Sollima to make his movie different from run-of-the-mill Spaghettis, the authenticity of the settings and costumes makes this one of the most convincing portrayals of the West on celluloid. Ennio Morricone’s music (including the title song ‘Run Man Run’) is a classic and is among his most popular scores. The final chase through the cane fields is one of the great Spaghetti Western set pieces, as the hounds are unleashed and Cuchillo runs for his life. After the heights of
The Big Gundown
, Sollima made an inferior sequel with Milian called
Run Man Run
(1968).

As good as Spaghettis get. Though a decent print is as difficult to track down as Cuchillo himself, it’s well worth the effort.

Two Indian mystics find a half-dying stranger in the desert and nurse him back to health. He has been left for dead by his comrades, a bandit gang led by Oaks, who have stolen a Union gold shipment. Oaks and his men arrive in a violent town and are attacked and killed by the locals, led by Tembler the saloon-keeper and Hagerman the storekeeper. The pair then split the gold between them. The Stranger and the Indians arrive and decide to track down the haul, while a Mexican rancher named Zorro and his gang are also after the cache. The violence escalates until Hagerman kills Tembler and blames it on the Stranger, after the storekeeper has buried the gold in the cemetery. Zorro captures and crucifies the Stranger (in a cell full of vampire bats), but the Stranger frees himself and defeats Zorro and his gang. Hagerman now has all the gold and hides it in a beam in his house, but the building catches fire and he dies, gilded in molten gold, leaving the Stranger to ride out with nothing.

Over the years
Django
Kill
has gained a reputation as the most violent Spaghetti Western and, though the film has tempered with age, it’s still one of the oddest genre contributions. Several filmmakers in the sixties and seventies experimented with the form of the Western, with varying degrees of success. Maverick artist Andy Warhol made
Lonesome Cowboys
(1968), predictably with the emphasis on transvestites, bisexuality and camp parody; Dennis Hopper made
The Last
Movie
(1971), a loose, improvisational film deconstructing the mythology of Westerns; and Alejandro Jodorowsky made the strangest ‘Western’ of all time,
El Topo
(1971) – a rambling, Biblical odyssey that lampooned John Wayne, religion, mysticism and Sergio Leone in the name of ‘head-movie’ entertainment.

Questi’s
Django
Kill
is the most recognisably Western of the bunch, though the extreme violence, mystical waffle and bizarre characters still set the film apart from Leone, Tessari et al, and even from the excesses of Sergio Corbucci.

The film is loosely based on
A Fistful of Dollars
(two gangs, a cache of gold, a lone stranger), but it also wanders into Edgar Allan Poe horror,
Jane
Eyre
-inspired melodrama and dark, twisted sexuality. Like Corbucci’s
Django
, the two gangs in town are not your typical Western fare. The townsmen are led by Hagerman, a pious zealot (who keeps his wife locked in her bedroom with bars on the windows) and Tembler (who has a gang of self-righteous, stranger-hating toughs, who hang around his bar). The Mexicans are led by jovial, bewhiskered rancher Zorro, who has a psychic parrot and a gang of honchos (his ‘Muchachos’) dressed in identical black suits – an idea lifted wholesale from an earlier Spaghetti called
Three
Golden Boys
(1966). Moreover, Zorro fancies his own men. These protagonists sound interesting enough (almost the ingredients for a send-up), but Questi’s unrelenting violence and complete lack of humour make this a film that takes itself far too seriously. Its unusual content was taken very seriously by the censors and it lost over 20 minutes of footage when the movie finally made it outside mainland Europe in 1970 – though many of the deletions trimmed extended dialogue scenes about the afterlife between the Stranger and his Indian companions.