How The West Was Hijacked? June 23, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film & DVD Reviews, Westerns , trackbackHow The West Was Lost
Rich Hall’s BBC 4 documentary How The West Was Lost, screened as part of the digital channel’s recent Westerns Weekend, was, despite my earlier - and as it turns out totally unfounded - fears, really very good. The American comedian’s take on the western was perceptive, intelligent, thoroughly researched and neatly presented; I trembled at the thought of a low-brow gallop through the stereotypes of the genre. What we got was 90 minutes of literate, articulate and energetic dissection, enlivened by Hall’s acerbic wit, and all of it coming from someone who clearly loves the genre.
Attempting to cram the entire history of the western into a mere hour and a half is clearly an impossible task, and I suspect many fans could have taken issue with some of Hall’s observations, but I found myself riding by his side from the off, from the moment he kicked the ass of the ‘film geek’ with his laptop, his bluetooth headseat and his braying assertions (shades of Woody Allen - if only life were like this…), to his description of what he was trying to do was film a documentary; no, not at all like An Inconvenient Truth - that was a ‘Powerpoint presentation’…
My estimation of Hall rose considerably as he not only exonerated Peckinpah from those misguided souls who would have him carry the can for the stomach churning horror pornography that passes today for ‘graphic realism’, but he also visibly coloured as he spat out the sobriquet ‘fuckwit’ in relation to George ‘Dubya’ and his cowboy politics (favourite film; alledgedly High Noon, which is a little redolent of the T.U.C. adopting ‘The Strawbs’ Part of The Union as their anthem). Not only do I, as most of us surely, like a little affirmation, but I stand and whoop at the passion. Go Rich.
The only point in the How The West Was Lost where Rich (and note, I feel we are on first name terms, buddies even; Richie, Richmeister, The Richster…) and I parted company was during his clear dismissal of the Spaghetti Western, principally, the entire western canon of Sergio Leone. Hall (because now I recall the calumny, we’re back to formalities), chucked the whole bowl of spaghettis into the air, damned them with (very) faint praise, and then disdainfully smacked ‘em waaaay out over the bleachers.
The problem, as it appeared to Rich, (deep breaths; forgiveness kicking in) is that the Italians contaminated this purest of American film genres with their Marxist / Catholic sensibilities. These pantywaist Europeans pissed long and hard into the water hole. Rich grimaced and narrowed his eyes at the thought; I wanted the screen to transmogrify into an enormous Leone-esque ’scope close-up, and then for me and him to circle each other in that slow dance of death. Cue Ennio…
Over the past few years, I’ve stared deeply into the part of my soul that wants to be buried at John Ford Point and I’ve come to the conclusion that - gulp - I too, am not a huge fan of the Italian Western per se (now we eschew the ever so slightly xenophobic connotations ‘Spaghetti’ brings to the table).
But I am a huge fan of Sergio Leone and the westerns he fashioned with various talented collaborators; yes, they’re pretty much all ’something to do with death’, which is in itself particularly Catholic, still, aren’t all westerns? Good meets evil; someone has to end face down in the dust. Though in Leone’s case, good meets evil…and usually a third character who straddles both heaven and hell. As for the politics, well, that’s a little more complicated, and more of that later.
Yet all Leone’s westerns are undeniably made by a filmaker who has a genuine passion for the genre, the films of his youth, those halcyon days before Benito came to town, made himself sheriff and buggered up the idyll. Westerns may affirm an idealised view of America for a country that even now seems desperate to hang on to a myth of nation building and it’s pioneers as the very apotheosis of rugged individualism, but their appeal fell far outside the borders of the country from which they sprang.
The whole world over, westerns spoke to small boys, little pardners of all ages, who just needed heroes; Leone simply aped his heroes, those behind as well as in front of the camera, at the same time bringing something unique to the table, an outsiders view of the western legend. Art sometimes reflected reality in an era when Walter Cronkite was bringing increasingly bad, and increasingly graphic, news from South East Asia into America’s comfortable and cosy living rooms. In life as in fiction, the lines between the good, the bad and the ugly were blurring.
It wouldn’t be the first time, or the last; I’ve touched on American interventionism as inspiration before - Leone’s idol John Ford’s Rio Grande approves of and reflects American foreign policy in Korea, and surely Vietnam informed The Wild Bunch. Among others.
In the States particularly, the hoopla that surrounded Leone’s supposed ‘realistic’ violence was not only turning into a very queasy joke, but smacked of Americans circling the wagons to protect their mythos, their westerns from them thar pesky furriners. Leone was accused of hijacking the western, but the truth is, before he burst on the scene so dynamically, the genre, if not drowning, was certainly going down for the second time. Leone didn’t hijack it as much as point a genre that was losing it’s way into a whole other direction, one which some talented directors would pick up and run with, and lesser artists would grubbily exploit, even to this day.
Either way, Leone must now be seen, surely, as among the giants; at the very least, as the Richmeister generously pointed out, no Sergio, no Clint. He still unforgiven Rich..?
Duck You Sucker (1971)
Some spoilers, I should warn you…
Produced at the height of the Vietnam conflict, Duck You Sucker - aka (the director’s preferred title) Giù la testa, A Fistful of Dynamite, Once Upon A Time…The Revolution, depending on which country it was released in - was Sergio Leone’s corrosive look at revolutionary politics. I will, by the way, stick with Duck You Sucker as the title, my comments here referring to the U.S. R1 DVD of that name, restored, mono sound and all, with scenes reinstated from various cuts following the premiere. Cuts. ‘Twas ever thus for the burly Italian.
Duck You Sucker depicts a fly-blown, dirt poor Mexico, a country in complete turmoil with ragged arsed revolutionaries tearing at the throat of heavily armed Government forces, an army bolstered by foreign mercenaries and capable of breathtaking atrocities, the tools of any despotic regime.
The ruling classes, we are shown from the off, are powerful, rich, corrupt and contemptible of the poor. The poor simply want what the rich have; it’s the getting of it that’s at the heart of Duck You Sucker. Leone, scion of Italy, the country that down the centuries has embraced bloody change, opens his film with a quote from Mao Tse-tung:
“The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or an embroidery; it cannot be done with elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence.”
We are, then, drawn into the first act of violence, but it’s hardly revolutionary; Mexican bandit Juan Miranda (a hugely enjoyable Rod Steiger, employing an outrageous accent) and his family of six boys (plus aging father), hold up a plush coachload of characters who are the very definition of bourgeois excess, killing the driver and shotgun, Juan raping the only woman in the group. If it’s a political statement, it is one that is pure and simple; you’ve got it, I want it. And I have the gun.
Moreover, Leone portrays this ship of fools as wallowing in a cesspit of their own excess. The coach itself is massive, a railway carriage affair pulled by eight straining horses through the pisspoor countryside. Inside the pampered posse gulp down an epicurean feast, swilling it down with copious amounts of wine, the camera focusing on their mouths so that they become glistening anuses. They are talking, literally, out of their backsides. The amoral Miranda has no time for them, only what they have, and at the end of his particular rainbow, where they put it; a nice juicy bank.
Providence sends him John Mallory (another excellent performance, and another outrageous accent from James Coburn), an I.R.A. explosives expert turned soldier of fortune. As we learn from a series of unfolding flashbacks - Leone follows the old Fordian dictum of there being little use in discarding a good trick - John is both a fighter and a lover, one-third of a ménage à trois, but an act of betrayal, or more correctly two acts of betrayal that lead to the same end, culminate in a devastating act of vengeance. On the run, he has quit his native Ireland.
Mallory is both a revolutionary and an idealist. But his tacit partnership with Miranda means that he’s soon forced to reassess not only what revolution means for those expendable agents of change, the poor bloody proletariat, but also for those chattering classes who promote it, urging others onto the guns, while at the same time sharing the same self-serving morals as those they seek to depose. Viva Zapata this is not.
Leone, and his fellow screenwriters Sergio Donati and Luciano Vincenzoni, gift Miranda the dialogue which reveal their own feelings on the nature of armed struggle. A pivotal speech comes as John studiously reads a copy of Bakunin’s political tract The Patriotism, and makes a throwaway comment about ‘the revolution’. Juan, who is, much to his disgust, becoming an unwilling and unwitting hero of the struggle, angrily turns to the Irishman:
“I know what I am talking about when I am talking about the revolutions. The people who read the books go to the people who can’t read the books, the poor people, and say, “We have to have a change.” So, the poor people make the change, ah? And then, the people who read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat, eh? But what has happened to the poor people? They’re dead! That’s your revolution.
Shhh… So, please, don’t tell me about revolutions! And what happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!”
John gives a thoughtful grunt, then tosses his book, with it’s series of earnest page markers, into the mud. Essentially, Juan’s speech neatly underscores the apparently glib opening Mao quote; no revolution without blood and sacrifice, but whose blood? Whose sacrifice? Well, Miranda’s for a start. In a scene that seems to echo the Mai Lai massacre of then recent notoriety, Juan’s family is wiped out, their bodies among the heaps of corpses that the camera glides over, touching on this body and that before settling on the image of the bandit’s tiniest son, his startled, innocent eyes wide open, staring into the dark.
Later, Leone’s camera sweeps majestically over the rail yards as the army machine guns pits of prisoners by their hundreds; if the Italian director has already forced his viewers to draw parallels with a contemporary revolution, here he shows us an image the could easily have come from the conflict of his youth, drawing both together. This is what happens in war; Mussolini and Hitler (to name but two) held no exclusivity when it comes to the authorship of unspeakable crimes against humanity. And the madness goes on.
Mallory is again thrust before the realities when the revolutionary leader Dr. Villega (Romolo Valli) is captured and the Irishman, hidden in the shadows, spies him fingering compatriots for Government forces. When Villega is released and rejoins the struggle, presumably as a double-agent, only John knows the depths to which this hypocrite is capable of sinking and that there’s hardly a cigarillo wrapper between him and mealy-mouthed Governor Jaime (Franco Graziosi), the hated figurehead of the oppressive government forces.
It’s interesting that the Americans portrayed in the film are fat-cat peripheral figures; Donati and Leone’s story, however, has the U.S. as the country Juan and John choose as escape, to put the whole slaughterhouse of revolution behind them. America, a land of milk, honey and those ‘big fat juicy banks’. Another myth, and one that’s ultimately out of reach for them both.
If all this seems a little heavy going, then I apologise for giving that impression, for Duck You Sucker is a fun film. Time and again, Leone follows a great tradition (dare I mention Ford again?) of mixing sometimes grim narrative with humour and Steiger and Coburn (neither, incidentally, Leone’s first choices for their parts), consummate movie actors, are more than adept at both. In one scene, Juan contemplates his loss, and sits in twisted torment, tears streaming down his face as Mallory looks on unable to offer anything by way of comfort where no comfort can be found; from a cage above, a songbird shits on Juan’s head. Slowly he wipes the slime away, looks up in resignation and says; ‘But for the rich you sing…’ John’s face creases into that familiar toothy smile; tragedy and comedy - two sides of the same currency.
In the comparitively slight, but often astonishing, Leone canon, Duck You Sucker is usually overlooked. However, it is now being re-evaluated as one of his very best, beautifully shot by cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini and produced with all the love, care and budget which, from For a Few Dollars More onwards, fans had come to expect; the hundreds of extras that fill gorgeous - occasionally horrifying - vistas that go on forever in towering crane shots, the sets and costumes and particularly the period uniforms of the military, the wonderful Ennio Morricone score, the startlingly humongous explosions that put the wind up his leads who were cheerfully urged ‘closer, closer…’ by their safely out of range director.
There’s delight too in the ’Wicked Witch of The West’ outfit - to suggest a potent, but pantomime combination of power & evil - that he clads actress Rosita Torosh in for that opening scene. It’s that fine attention to detail, the smallest references which he enjoyed and knew would appeal to fellow film buffs, which underlines Leone’s love affair with movies and the western in particular. Leone didn’t simply hijack the western, he re-energised it, however briefly.
Incidentally, while Mallory’s I.R.A. backstory is another clear nod in the direction of Ford, one wonders if the very first shot of Duck You Sucker, of Juan urinating into a nest of ants - and onto his leg - is another sly dig at his rival Sam Peckinpah (Leone showed Sam dead and buried in My Name is Nobody), whose famous opening to The Wild Bunch, of a scorpion stinging itself as it is attacked by red ants is a clear foreshadowing of events to come. Leone’s ants end up drowning in foaming piss and trodden under foot - another foreshadowing; socio-political certainly, but Marxism be damned.
One can only imagine what the suits at MGM thought of that opening scene, not to mention a film that dealt with revolution, the caravan of chaos that routinely follows the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, at a time when well-fed, privileged middle-class kids were tearing up the Berkeley campus. They probably choked on their martinis. And of course, at some 160 minutes long, the running time became - yet again - one of the battlegrounds on which Leone fought and lost.
As much as 40 minutes was hacked out following the premiere, dismantling one of the central themes - and one rarely addressed by the director up until this point - the fulcrum of real human relationships; desire, love, lust, revenge, loss, regret. It’s only recently, following MGM’s restoration on DVD can we appreciate the fuller picture that Duck You Sucker paints. Yes, it’s long and languid - it would hardly be Leone otherwise - but it’s a beautifully involving piece of work that actually belies the apparently bum-numbing length. Ironic that Leone actually didn’t want to direct (he had Peter Bogdanovich in mind), but both his leads threatened to walk unless he took the chair; the Italian wouldn’t do so again, officially, for another 13 years.
The final shot of Duck You Sucker is of a bereft, angry Miranda staring into the lens of the camera, into the eyes of you and I. ‘What about me?’, a plaintive line of Juan’s dialogue from earlier in the movie is repeated and in response up comes the title ‘Duck You Sucker’ - keep your head down, and run the other way when they urge you to fight.
Or simply steal their money; much safer…
Comments»
John, like you I’m no great fan of Spaghetti westerns - although there a few exceptions. Leone does tower above all the other Italian directors and lends the sub-genre a respectability it was otherwise unlikely to achieve.
For a long time I was never terribly fond of ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’ (sorry, but I cannot abide ‘Duck You Sucker’ as a title). It’s really only in the last ten years or so that I’ve come to appreciate it. As I’ve matured (at least I hope I have) the weary cynicism with which Leone viewed ‘revolution’ seems spot on. I think that little speech by Juan that you highlighted is possibly one of the neatest and most eloquent indictments of political idealism I’ve heard.
One thing I do have to ask you: how could you write about this film and make reference to Ford without mentioning ‘The Informer’? Still, a great analysis and a great read.
That final shot in ‘Duck You Sucker’, or (also my preferred title) ‘Giù la testa’, simply doesn’t work unless it’s either of those titles, and Leone wasn’t fond of the marketing department’s ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’.
Have a heart Colin; I did make an oblique reference to ‘The Informer’, but I figure mentioning Ford two or three (or more) times in practically every post is maybe getting a little wearing!
Thanks for posting.
I know what you mean about the title and the final shot, but I don’t know….as a movie title it just doesn’t sit comfortably with me. I seem to remember something on the Frayling commentary about the title sounding great in Italian but not translating very well.
As for the Ford thing, I was just stirring John - but you probably knew that anyway
Indeed!
From what I can remember of my ‘Something to Do With Death’ (now, where has it gone..?) a rough translation of giù la testa would be ‘keep your head down’, but no there’s no actual literal translation and Leone insisted ‘Duck You Sucker’ was common street slang in America…even to Americans who told him it wasn’t.
I’m intrigued by the Rich Hall special, which I hadn’t heard of until the other post you mentioned it in. Sidestepping Ford and Leone, was Anthony Mann discussed at all? As a footnote or more in depth? I’ve found myself once again waist deep in his westerns and surely, even in an hour and a half special, he’d warrant some analysis.
‘Sidestepping Ford and Leone, was Anthony Mann discussed at all? As a footnote or more in depth?’
Somewhere in-between; Hall simply didn’t have a great amount of time to go in depth on any film, star or director, and the whole was a little hamstrung by BBC budgets - there weren’t too many actual clips used; where the Beeb could they utilised trailers which are presumably cheaper, though the quality of some of them was terrible. IIRC (and my memory is awful, I’ll freely admit), there wasn’t a single clip used of any Anthony Mann western, though they did use stills of some quite spanking poster art for ‘Winchester ‘73′, which I’d love to get my mitts on.
BTW, I didn’t actually watch their showing of ‘She Wore a Yellow Ribbon’, but the clip they used in the doco was disappointing, as I’d feared, to say the least. I did record ‘Run of The Arrow’ which I’m pretty certain, while it was 4:3, it was open-matte. After the opening 20 minutes or so it proved a very acceptable print. I wish they’d get this out on DVD…
‘I did record ‘Run of The Arrow’ which I’m pretty certain, while it was 4:3, it was open-matte. After the opening 20 minutes or so it proved a very acceptable print. I wish they’d get this out on DVD’
Didn’t ‘Run of the Arrow’ sneak out in R2 a few years back and then disappear as an OOP title?
It appeared on schedules from DDHE - and pre-release detail also showed it to be 4:3 - but I’m not entirely certain it actually made it into production.
I too thought the documentary was excellent, stimulating, all that sort of thing. In my view, the omission was the contribution of Mr Hawks to the genre.
Re: Duck…An excellent appreciation of a superb film.I am beginning to think that this is Leone’s most interesting film. I prefer the French title “Once upon a time:the Revolution”. You then neatly have Leone’s first triology, Dollars and then his Once Upon a Time triology.
I’m not also sure that Leone was always intent on celebrating Westerns…I think he was aiming to destroy a few Fordian myths as well
Thanks Charlie; they’ve both been accused, but I’ve never been wholly sure that the destruction of Ford’s west was the agenda of either Peckinpah or Leone. Certainly both directors borrow from Ford (then, most have), but I’ve always been comfortable with assuming it was done out of affection and admiration, and if they tore down some of the old myths, then they simply created new ones all their own. It’s a kinda father / son vibe. In a good way.
Certainly Leone worshipped at Pappy’s altar; one of the Italian director’s prized possessions was a signed photo of the great man. Ten years after Ford’s death, Leone wrote an article for an Italian newspaper, titled ‘To John Ford From One of His Pupils With Love’ (the title tells all really) in which he described how, in trying for a certain neo-vérité in his westerns one of the things he was attempting was to emulate a man he described as ‘one of the real pioneers of modern cinematographic realism’.
I’m absolutely confident Leone’s westerns are indeed a celebration of the genre, but I’m genuinely interested in why you think they might not be.
BTW, I’ll pluck another comment from that piece pertinent to this blog, in which Leone writes of knowing his westerns are the ‘other side of the dollar’ to Ford’s: ‘I also know that the sunny and humane West of John Ford led the way into the arid prairies of my cinema, right up to the last slate of Giù la testa.’
You might have read this before, but if they’re any damn good, it’s evolution, not revolution, construction, not destruction.
Discuss…
Adrian; we’d be here ’til midnight if we talked about who and what Hall left out; I think I recall a slightly oblique reference when he was talking of High Noon - I could be wrong. As I said, the limitations of time, remit and budget.
Thanks John
I suppose I have always been slightly anti Ford…something about too many films with John Wayne’s distracting presence and a too honeyed view of “the ole West”, complete with bar room brawls and out of tune pianos. Not that Leone’s west of “Once upon a time..” is not romanticised either….
I will always bow to Peckinpah on the Western front…Pat Garrett for me is the final word on the subject.
On the directors, I think that David Thomson writes superbly well on Ford, Mann and Peckinpah…but then that’s because I agree with his views. His take on Leone is bit dismissive though.
Charlie; I’ve been thinking about this and I can’t let it go. I’ve argued fruitlessly over the years with those that simply hate Wayne, and by association Ford, and I may be banging my head against the proverbial, but, forgive me on a slow Friday afternoon, here goes anyhoo…
On Wayne; the Duke developed his familiar persona over many years - watch him in something like ‘The Big Trail’ (the recently released Grandeur version is simply gorgeous BTW), and there’s hardly anything there of ‘John Wayne’; no familiar rolling gait, or instantly recognisable….
…speech pattern. Pilgrim.
In many of his movies from the late ’50s on, directors bought, demanded and got in spades, ‘John Wayne’, the Hollywood personality that Marion Robert Morrison created, the whole package. But for Ford in particular, Wayne, I think, was mostly forced onto a higher acting plane. Yes, he brought with him a persona that made projects more commercially viable, but, for instance, as Tom Doniphon, as Nathan Brittles and particularly as Ethan Edwards, ‘John Wayne’ is subsumed by the characters. Off the cuff, I can only think of one ‘John Wayne’ performance for Ford in Donovan’s Reef, but then I reckon that was with the director’s approval.
I couldn’t give a bugger about the mediocre pictures Wayne made to pay the bills, when he was allowed to be lazy, or his odious involvement in the communist witch hunts; all I know is that he could be a consummate screen actor when he wanted to be, when he was given the chance.
On Ford; of the 140-odd films Ford made in a career that lasted over half a century, the reality is that only a fraction - a memorable and important fraction, it must be said - were made with Wayne.
It could be said that from his days making silent western star Harry Carey one of the highest paid actors on the planet, Ford was responsible for establishing the western myths on screen, the template for 100s of others to follow. Yes, it’s mostly (but not always) a honeyed view - ‘Pat Garrett’ which I agree is a stunning piece of work, is a highly romanticised view in itself (and I have nothing at all against romanticism) - but to those that dismiss the old man as a western hack, I can only say you aren’t looking hard enough, you haven’t given Ford a real chance. Bar room brawls (with the odd exception), out of tune pianos - the oater - weren’t really Pappy’s forte; it’s genuinely, IMHO, more complex than that. I urge you, look again. Look harder.
Or - and I refuse to believe this of someone who finds eloquence in Peckinpah & Leone - he’s not for you, but it could be as simple as that.
Eloquently put John. I certainly don’t hate Wayne but I actually believe that Hawks was better with him…e.g.Rio Bravo and Red River although The Searchers certainly tapped into a nastier Wayne which is refreshing. Very happy to have a re-think on Ford although I will still avoid “The Quiet Man”!!
Quite right on Pat Garrett…it is romanticised…e.g.Slim Picken’s death.