Spaghetti Westerns (9 page)

But the violence, especially in the uncut version, is still disturbing. Horses are hacked with machetes and later blown to bits with dynamite (the aftermath being particularly harrowing) and the saloon-keeper’s son is sexually assaulted by Zorro’s muchachos. The Stranger’s love interest is burnt to a crisp in the
Fall of the House of
Usher
-inspired finale, which also sees Hagerman swathed in molten gold. Among the other grotesqueries are a savage mass lynching and two scenes that for years were cut from all available versions of the film – an Indian is scalped by the townspeople (an ironic reversal of usual Western ‘etiquette’) and Oaks’s chest is torn apart during an operation, when it’s discovered he has been riddled with golden bullets. Moreover, the Stranger – after being shot and left for dead – has to endure a crucifixion (in a prison cell that vampire bats and lizards call home). Questi includes much religious imagery and mystical mumbo-jumbo about the ‘Land of the Dead’, and the whole film works as a rumination on ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’, death and rebirth. But his style is so erratic that this film belongs in a different universe to the other Spaghetti Westerns, far closer to
El Topo
and Warhol’s underground cinema.

It’s startlingly original and magnificently photographed, but for some reason
Django
Kill
doesn’t quite gel in the same way as
Django
or other less mainstream offerings. Tomas Milian (in his first starring role) is excellent as the half-breed stranger and many of the sequences are genuinely surreal (including the entrance of Oaks’s gang into town – an unsettling highlight), but this is an out-of-control, pop-art fantasy of a West that only ever existed in Questi’s delirious (but very imaginative) mind.

At a lonely way station on a stormy night, an outlaw gang rob a cash shipment resting there overnight. During the raid, four members of the gang attack the ranch house, killing the owner, his wife and teenage daughter – but a fifth man saves the rancher’s little son. Fifteen years later this little boy, named Bill, has grown up and plots revenge on the outlaws. He is joined in his vendetta by mysterious gunslinger Ryan, recently released from prison, who also has a score to settle with the gang. The pair track down and kill the first bandit, Cavanaugh, who is now a respectable saloon owner. The next is Walcott, now a banker. He has been entrusted with a million dollars’ worth of public funds and the rest of the murderers are his gang. Walcott steals the money and convinces the authorities to blame Ryan (who used to be a member of Walcott’s gang, but was betrayed). Walcott hides out in the Mexican village of El Viento and eventually Ryan and Bill, with the help of the local peasants, defeat him. In the dénouement, it transpires that Ryan was present the night Bill’s family was killed and it was he who saved Bill’s life. Though Bill holds Ryan partly responsible for not stopping the massacre, he decides not to kill his partner.

This was the first and most successful of a series of big-budget remakes of
For a Few Dollars More
.
Death Rides a Horse
can at least be excused accusations of plagiarism, as it was written by Luciano Vincenzoni (who scripted Leone’s film) and again starred cadaverous Van Cleef, as the older half of a pair of gunslingers who team up to catch the bandits. The connection was further stressed by the casting of Luigi Pistilli as chief villain, Walcott. Pistilli had played Groggy, a prominent member of Indio’s gang in
For a Few
Dollars More
. For the younger hero, previously portrayed by Clint Eastwood, director Petroni cast American John Phillip Law, who remains best known for his roles as an intergalactic angel in
Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy
(1968) and the super-thief hero in
Danger: Diabolik
(1968). But, unfortunately, this casting decision is the weak link in the film, as Law is no Eastwood.

That said, the film is still impressively staged. Anyone familiar with
For a Few Dollars More
will enjoy recognising Petroni’s blatant emulation. Every aspect of Leone’s film is present and correct – even down to the red-tinted flashbacks to the night of horror, the uneasy partnership between young and old, a prison break (using a locomotive instead of dynamite) and the final, apocalyptic shootout in a Mexican village (very reminiscent of
The Magnificent Seven
).
Death Rides a Horse
also marked a shift in the role of the villains and was the first Spaghetti to pit Van Cleef against a bunch of outlaws who have adopted masks of respectability. Here the villains have used their ill-gotten gains to set themselves up as ‘righteous men’ and Van Cleef must oust them from power before dealing with them in his own inimitable way (i.e. shooting them to pieces). This theme permeated all Van Cleef’s subsequent sixties Westerns.

Death Rides a Horse
is violent (especially the opening sequence) and Ennio Morricone’s harsh, chanted score emphasises this – the riding theme was reused in Quentin Tarantino’s
Kill Bill
(2003). At one point Law is buried up to his neck in sand, has salt pushed in his mouth and is left to die in the desert, while in another scene he is tortured by having his head trapped in a huge grain press. Not to be outdone, Van Cleef gets badly beaten up by the bandits before getting his revenge. Even stranger, however, was the fact that, despite such savagery, the film was released uncut outside Europe in 1969. The other main villain was played by British actor Anthony Dawson, who had played the killer hired by Ray Milland to bump off his wife (Grace Kelly) in Hitchcock’s
Dial M for Murder
(1953) and also had small roles in three James Bond movies –
Dr No
(1962),
From Russia With
Love
(1963) and
Thunderball
(1965). In
Death
Rides a Horse
he played ‘Four Aces’ Cavanaugh, so called because of the distinctive four ace playing cards tattooed on his chest.

Though this looks exactly like a Leone film and is heavily indebted to
For a Few Dollars More
it holds its own with the best Spaghettis. The epitome of the Italian revenge Western and one of Van Cleef’s finest.

Tubercular professor of history Brad Fletcher resigns from his post at a Boston university and heads West to convalesce. He inadvertently aids the escape of a notorious half-breed bandit, Beauregard Bennett, and finds himself drawn to the outlaw’s brutal, amoral life. So much so that when Beau reforms his old gang to terrorise the South-west once more, Brad joins them. Among Beau’s recruits is a newcomer named Charley Siringo, who isn’t a bandit but a lawman working for the Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. His mission is to track down Beau and break up the gang. Whilst they hide out with some renegades in the hills (where the locals fête Beau as a folk hero), Brad gradually loses his Eastern conscience and eventually is accepted into the gang. He undermines Beau’s leadership, but his first robbery, a bank hold-up in Willow Creek, is a chaotic failure – Siringo sells them out, the gang are wiped out and Beau is captured. Only Brad escapes unscathed.

Brad subsequently sets himself up in the outlaws’ hideout as a king and recruits a bigger, more brutal gang of ruffians. But the authorities send an army of vigilantes to wipe out the hideout for good. Beau escapes and rejoins Brad, but not before the outlaw community has been razed by the posse. Siringo intervenes and halts the vigilantes before they can kill Beau and Brad. Brad wounds Siringo, but Beau then kills Brad, before being allowed to go free by the lawman, who sees that Beau has changed. Beau Bennett the ruthless outlaw no longer exists.

Following the success of
The Big Gundown
, Sollima went on to make this film, which he regards as his own personal favourite. The basic plot is incredibly similar to
The Big Gundown
’s (a bandit on the run with a lawman on his trail), but
Face to Face
is a more complex film. Often touted as a parable of the rise of Italian Fascism, Sollima denied this and said that the film was about the changes that can occur when different personalities are transposed to different environments (becoming civilised amongst civilised men, violent among the violent). Instead of concentrating on the relationship between the outlaw (Beau) and the lawman (Siringo), Sollima replaced the groups encountered by Cuchillo in
The Big Gundown
(the Mormons, the Widow’s henchmen, the monks) and had the outlaw on the run encounter an educated, cowardly professor (Brad). This culture shock forms the centre of the movie. Brad gradually learns how to be an outlaw, whilst Beau learns that there is more to life than robbing banks and killing lawmen.

The film also draws on many historical sources (the James Gang, the plight of the South following the Civil War) and seamlessly interweaves some important political and social observations (including the exploitation of the masses, the moral acceptability of war and the professor’s quest to ‘go down in history’) – again without setting the action in the Mexican Revolution. The film has shortcomings: it is far too talky and some of the peripheral characters are sketchily drawn, in sharp contrast with their equivalents in
The Big Gundown
. However, Ennio Morricone’s score is by turns fittingly moving and aptly vicious and the three leads are cast perfectly. Milian, with an Apache Indian-style haircut and buckskins, gives what many believe is his best Western performance, while Berger does an excellent job of the lawman, a part modelled on Lee Van Cleef’s Corbett. But the real revelation is Volonte, a stage actor, who had previously played Mexican bandits in the first two
Dollars
films and Damiani’s
A Bullet
for the General
. Here, as the suave but naïve Easterner-out-West, he injects pathos and depth into a performance that could easily have been highly unconvincing. Sollima’s vision is unique and the epic sweep of the film transcends Spaghetti Westerns of the time – especially in the last quarter of the film, when the vigilantes are let loose on the outlaws’ hideout. And as well as the philosophising about education, death, morality and trust, there are plenty of gunfights to please the shoot-‘em-up fans. The failed heist is an excellently choreographed street fight (akin to the James Gang’s Northfield bank raid) and the finale is a familiar Leone-esque three-way shootout. As is usual with Sollima’s Westerns, beware the abridged version, which lost 15 minutes of footage, a couple of showdowns and quite a large chunk of Beau and Brad’s relationship.

The confrontation between the pistol and the mind makes this a Spaghetti Western with brains, even if they are sometimes splattered over the screen.

In the snowy wastes of Utah, outlaws hide in the mountains to avoid being captured by a vicious gang of bounty hunters led by Loco. When a local woman, Pauline, loses her husband to Loco’s band, she sends for Silence, a mute gunfighter who defends outlaws against Loco’s tyranny. When Silence arrives in the town of Snow Hill, he also has a score to settle with the crooked justice of the peace, Pollicut, the man responsible for him being mute – when Silence was a child, his parents were killed and, because he was a witness, he had his throat slit, rendering him speechless. Silence shoots off one of Pollicut’s thumbs, so he can’t fire a pistol. In retribution, Pollicut hires Loco to kill Silence, but, in a shootout, Loco’s gang is decimated. Silence is wounded, then nursed back to health by Pauline. Later, Pollicut cripples Silence’s hands, at the cost of his own life, while Loco captures the outlaws from the hills. In the final showdown, Silence attempts to save the outlaws, but he and Pauline are callously shot down by Loco and his men, who then turn on the outlaws and massacre them.

Drawing on influences such as André de Toth’s stark
Day of the
Outlaw
(1959) and Mario Bava’s snowy ‘Wurdalak’ episode of
Black
Sabbath
(1963),
The Big Silence
(also released as
The Great Silence
) is one of the most beautiful and imaginative Spaghetti Westerns, though it is also the most downbeat. Even Corbucci’s own bleak movies hadn’t gone as far as letting the villains win, but that is what happens here. Instead of the muddy town of
Django
, Snow Hill is a desolate, snowbound place, suspended in clouds of fog, where vicious bounty hunters run the show – a poke by Corbucci at Leone’s heroic bounty killers. The film echoes
A Fistful of Dollars
(in the intergang conflict between the outlaws and the bounty hunters) and
Django
(with the revenge subplot and the love story between Silence and Pauline), but the thought that went into its execution transcends the genre. With Morricone’s delicate, plaintive score (the antithesis of his
Dollars
music) echoing the falling snow, the film unfolds in classic style.