Spaghetti Westerns (14 page)

This is an exploitation movie through and through (some of the sequences look like they belong in a women’s chain-gang movie like
Sweet Sugar
[1973]), but it’s also an entertainingly refreshing Western. Well worth seeing.

During the Mexican Revolution, Juan (an illiterate Mexican bandit) and his sons are planning to rob the bank at Mesa Verde. On the way they encounter an Irish dynamiter, John Mallory, an ex-IRA terrorist on the run from the authorities. Together they blow up the bank, but, unbeknownst to Juan, it is being used as a political prison and Juan is instantly hailed a revolutionary hero. Mallory is working for the rebels, led by Dr Villega, but the rebellion’s success leads to government reprisals, under the vicious Colonel Gunther Ruiz. The revolutionaries split up; Mallory and Juan manage to stall the army’s advance during an ambush at a bridge, but elsewhere Juan’s sons are trapped and killed and Villega is tortured into betraying many key figures in his organisation. Eventually the rebels decide to stop and fight, and attack an army train. In a pitched battle, Ruiz is killed and Mallory is badly wounded. When Juan goes for help, Mallory commits suicide by blowing himself up.

Along with his decade-spanning gangster monolith
Once Upon a Time in America
(1984), this is arguably Leone’s weakest film and a poor attempt at a political Spaghetti Western. This is even more obvious when compared to similar films by Corbucci, Sollima and Damiani (films that centre on the uneasy alliance between a Mexican peasant and a foreigner – often a mercenary). Leone’s film can’t make up its mind whether it has a serious political dynamic (à la
A
Bullet for the General
or
The Big Gundown
) or a jokier, more parodic atmosphere (like
A Professional Gun
). The writers involved in some of these movies (Sergio Donati, Luciano Vincenzoni) contributed to
Duck You Sucker
. Though the political message is as powerful as any of the above, Leone’s film is overlong and overblown, and includes too much crude and distasteful humour (an unwelcome addition to mainstream Italian cinema in the seventies) and a plethora of bad language that seems at odds with the lyrical elements of the story. Steiger is allowed to overact outrageously. Not in the entertaining way that Eli Wallach livened up
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
but in a ham-fisted, bullish way that ensures he’s always centre stage – proving that he can wave his arms about, adopt a funny accent and shout louder than anyone else.

By contrast, Coburn, the original choice for the hero of
A Fistful of Dollars,
gives one of the finest performances of his career. Mallory is also the best-equipped and most emotionally wracked of the mercenaries who found themselves in the Spaghetti West’s version of the Mexican Revolution. His first appearance in the film is one of the high spots. A huge explosion stops Juan and his gang in their tracks. Through the smoke and dust appears a motorcycle, the rider kitted out in goggles and leather helmet (like a First World War flying ace). Later, when Mallory unbuttons his long duster coat, it is lined with sticks of dynamite and fuses, while his flask carries a vial of nitroglycerine. Juan soon surmises that Mallory is a handy ally to have when robbing a bank – in fact he imagines a halo above Saint John’s head and later refers to the nitro as Holy Water. But for every finely observed detail and superbly executed action sequence, there’s a scene that goes on for far too long, or a rant from Steiger to ruin the pace.

With
Once Upon a Time in the West
Leone had set himself apart from his compatriot directors. Even the biggest-budget Spaghettis couldn’t match the grandeur of his movies after
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
but in many cases a lower-budget approach made the other movies more interesting. Big sets, big-name stars and big explosions don’t always make a better film.
Duck You Sucker
often looks more like a Peckinpah movie (a director originally asked to direct the project) and also like the star-laden super-productions set in Mexico, like
Villa Rides
(1968),
100
Rifles
(1968) and
Two Mules for Sister Sara
(1970), films that existed solely for their action sequences. Moreover, when Leone started out in Westerns in 1964, he wanted to rip all the superfluous talking out of the Western and go back to a more primitive world, where guns spoke louder than badly dubbed words. After his radical approach, bringing so much life, modernism and savage beauty to the genre, it was ironic that his last Western and his gangster epic were longwinded affairs. But the film does have some tremendous redeeming features which make it worth watching. Mallory’s flashbacks to his time in the IRA in Dublin have a lyricism absent in the rest of the movie and Ennio Morricone’s majestic, surreal score is far superior to the images it accompanies. The main theme has a soprano vocal and swathes of strings, a more up-tempo version of his famous theme from
Once Upon a Time in the West.
International distributors edited the movie, and subsequent releases have similarly exorcised much of the bad language and trimmed the film, though a fully restored version is now available. It was also released under the titles
A Fistful of
Dynamite
and
Once Upon a Time in the Revolution
, but that didn’t change the film’s fortunes – it didn’t gross anywhere near as much as the
Dollars
trilogy. The scenes where Mallory and Juan first meet, and the bridge demolition (a spectacular action sequence which is Leone at his best) are the film’s finest moments. The protagonists’ central relationship has been dealt with better by other directors, while the train-collision climax falls flat because the engines look suspiciously like models – which is what they are.

The full version of
Sucker
is better for being longer (the early sections of the film make more sense), and is obviously the second part of Leone’s next trilogy – a ‘birth of a nation’ scenario that spans the coming of the railroads, the emergence of big business, the death of the cowboy and the appearance of gangsters. According to Mallory’s motto in the movie, ‘Revolution means confusion’ – and on that score Leone has aptly captured the flavour of the period.

After completely failing in a horse-rustling scheme, Trinity and Bambino team up again and turn their hands to outlawry, but in their first attempted robbery they find themselves giving their victims money. Arriving in Tescosa, they are mistaken for federal agents sent to investigate the criminal activities of Parker, a wealthy rancher. Bought off by the villain to turn a blind eye, Trinity discovers that Parker is making a fortune running guns from San Jose and selling them to roving Mexican bandit gangs. The whole outfit is hidden in a mission, with the innocent monks forced to front it. The duo eventually save the monks, expose the operation, defeat Parker’s gang and confiscate the proceeds, only to have to hand it over when a Texas Ranger suspects that he’s seen Bambino’s face on a reward poster.

This is the second
Trinity
film and the last to star Hill and Spencer as the ill-matched, hard-hitting, fast-drawing duo. It is also still one of the most successful Italian films ever made. This time around, the action includes gunrunning monks, crooked ranchers, farting babies and even a guest appearance by the heroes’ parents. Less well structured than
They Call Me Trinity
, this is nevertheless a superior comedy Western. Instead of the quick-fire, punchy format of the first movie, director Barboni (again signing himself EB Clucher) stretches the scenes out much longer, so that the film becomes a series of ten-minute sketches, each strung around a comic Western situation (a card game, a confrontation in a saloon or a meal in a fancy French restaurant). The shootouts are much more imaginative, with Trinity’s quick draw further quickened by speeding up the footage. In one scene, he has time to slap his opponent across the face before drawing his own gun (these rapid comic effects reappeared to lesser effect in
My Name is Nobody
) and his adversaries are gunslingers with parodic names like Stinger Eastsmith and Wildcard Hendricks.

The fistfights are similarly impressive, with the tight choreography making the action both brutal (in a
Tom and Jerry
kind of way) and funny, as stuntmen fly through the air, get hit by highly unconvincing breakaway furniture or wind up on the receiving end of one of Bambino’s pile-driving punches – Trinity tends to hit a couple of adversaries to show willing and then leave it to his brother.

As with the previous
Trinity
film, there is some messy eating accompanied by farting and belching, but in this movie it’s raised to an art form. A running gag features a family of settlers with a baby called Little Ebaneezer, who has a noisy problem with wind (or ‘aerodogy’ as it’s diagnosed in the movie), much to Bambino’s amusement. The film has two set pieces that rely on the heroes’ disgusting table manners for laughs. In the first, the duo share a meal with their parents that consists of some kind of roast bird – their mother can’t identify what species, but she caught it hanging around the ranch. In the second, the most notorious and riotous sequence in the film, Trinity and Bambino, now dressed in smart suits and bowler hats (which they have bought with their winnings from a poker game) decide to eat out in a fancy French restaurant. Not having a clue how to eat in such a posh establishment, they drive the maître d’ and his put-upon assistant Jorge to distraction, offend their fellow diners, go for their guns when a waiter pops a cork and douse a flambé dish.

Barboni must have got a big laugh out of casting one of John Ford’s favourite actors, Harry Carey Jr (in his first Spaghetti Western), as Trinity’s father. His speech to his two sons – trying to convince them to embark on a life of crime, so that he can be proud of the prices on their heads – is played for laughs. In more serious movies it would have been a heartfelt plea to settle down. But there is less of the fine wordplay of
They Call Me Trinity
– the accent here is on the physical, with much lampooning of Westerns and religion.

A poker game features a display of Trinity’s nifty card shuffling (again speeded up and in some cases played backwards) and the local
peones
have black eyes because the drunken phoney monks them up after confession, giving them a shiner for absolution. Bambino visits the mission to test the theory and ends up demolishing the confessional booth. The finale of
Trinity is Still My Name
, like its predecessor, is an extended punch-up, this time set in the mission, where Trinity and Bambino (dressed as monks) take on Parker’s unarmed gang in a mass brawl. They are fighting over a money bag (referred to throughout by the monks as ‘the root of all evil’) and the sequence, a drawn-out chase and fistfight, becomes an irreverent game of American football, complete with monastic chanting on the soundtrack. For much of the film, Hill and Spencer are dressed in dapper suits and bowler hats, further reinforcing their resemblance to Laurel and Hardy, and Hill’s love interest is better integrated into the story. Here he falls for a pioneer called Wendy, played by the gorgeous Yanti Somer – his female equivalent, with blonde hair and vivid blue eyes. Unlike
They Call Me Trinity
, absolutely no one gets killed here. This was obviously a conscious effort by Barboni to appeal to a younger fan base as well as to disenchanted Western fans, tired of bloodletting. It also explains why the movie quickly overtook Leone’s movies as the most financially successful Spaghetti Western of all time. The appeal of the
Trinity
films transcends all ages, the silly humour can be appreciated by kids, the Western send-ups by their parents. Following the astronomical success of the
Trinity
movies, Hill and Spencer became the most bankable comedians in Europe, starring in knockabout comedies with exclamatory titles like
All the Way Boys!
(1972),
Watch Out, We’re Mad!
(1973) and
Go For It!
(1983).

Many ersatz
Trinity
films followed, including the appalling
Jesse and
Lester:
Two Brothers in a Place Called Trinity
(1972) and Barboni resurrected the formula for the 1995 TV movie,
Trinity and Bambino
:
The Legend Lives On
, but none equalled the appeal of the first two movies. Their anarchic and childlike spirit is illustrated by Trinity’s reasoning when he suspects foul play in Tescosa – ‘Parker gives us four thousand to close an eye and the Sheriff tells us to steer clear of a bunch of drunken monks. Something stinks here.’