BY FRED BLOSSER
Sergio
Leone’s “Giù La Testa,†later retitled not once but twice for American release,
opened in Italy in October 1971 to great expectations by the director’s
fans. According to the preeminent Leone
expert Sir Christopher Frayling, in an informative audio commentary included in
a new Blu-ray edition of the film from Kino Lorber Studio Classics under its
second U.S. title, “A Fistful of Dynamite,†the Italian phrase meant something
like “keep your head down.†In other
words, in times of social convulsion like the bloody 1913 Mexican revolution
portrayed in the movie, save yourself unnecessary grief and keep as low a
profile as you can. Toshiro Mifune’s
wandering samurai in “Yojimbo†offered similar advice: “A quiet life eating
rice is best.†In Leone’s film, James
Coburn and Rod Steiger starred as mismatched partners -- a fugitive Irish dynamiter
and a volatile Mexican bandit -- who learn that you only bring sorrow and
tragedy upon yourself when you leap into the whirlwind of political
turmoil. When the picture reached the
U.S. through United Artists in July 1972, the title was changed to “Duck, You
Sucker,†a rough translation. In a literal sense, it’s the warning that
Coburn’s character invariably utters just before he detonates his nitro
charges. Leone thought it was a common
colloquialism in America. Maybe he was
thinking of “fire in the hole.†United
Artists gave the release decent publicity, selling it as an action movie in a
shorter (by half an hour) cut than the 157-minute Italian print. I remember seeing the ad art of Coburn and
Steiger prominently displayed on a billboard in downtown Pittsburgh that
summer, just before the picture opened. The ad extolled Leone as “the master of adventure.†Around the same time, United Artists Records
released Ennio Morricone’s eclectic soundtrack on vinyl. The New York Times panned the movie, but Time
Magazine offered a mostly positive review, one of the earliest to take Leone on
his own terms instead of dismissing him as a passing curiosity.
However,
audience turnout was sparse, and when the film reached smaller markets like the
one where I saw it in early fall 1972, the studio had renamed it “A Fistful of
Dynamite,†in an attempt to lure audiences who had flocked to Leone’s “A
Fistful of Dollars†and its sequels starring Clint Eastwood. The strategy gave the picture a second chance
in movie houses in that era before home video and streaming video when movies
had to make money at the box office or not at all. However, it didn’t do much
to boost business. In the meantime,
another violent drama about a fugitive IRA gunman in revolutionary Mexico,
Ralph Nelson’s “The Wrath of God,†had opened in theaters. Nelson’s film had
the added commercial advantage of a “Playboy†pictorial. For the record, it didn’t sell many tickets
either despite the publicity afforded by Hef’s magazine. Later, TV and VHS prints of Leone’s movie
retained “A Fistful of Dynamite†as the title, and their pan-and-scan format
ruined Giuseppe Ruzzolini’s beautifully composed Techniscope photography. The first respectful home-video edition
finally appeared in 1996 from MGM Home Video on laser disc. Remember that technology from the dawn of
home theater, sonny? The 1996 laser disc
retained “A Fistful of Dynamite†as the title, but restored the widescreen
aspect of the image and much of the footage missing from previous U.S. versions. “Duck, You Sucker†ultimately resurfaced as
the chosen title for its premier on U.S. DVD from MGM Home Video in 2007.
On
the run from the British government during the Irish Rebellion, explosives
expert John Mallory (Coburn) comes to Mexico to work for German mining
interests. There, traveling through the
desert on a vintage motorbike, he crosses paths with Juan Miranda (Steiger), a
sweaty, hot-tempered bandit who leads a gun-toting gang of robbers. The gang consists of Juan’s elderly father and
Juan’s six sons “by different mothers.†Miranda sees Mallory’s proficiency with explosives as the key to
realizing his long-cherished dream of breaking into the fortress-like Bank of
Mesa Verde. The loot will enable him and
his family to leave Mexico and reach the U.S., where -- like the worst
nightmare of a Trump supporter -- he expects to pursue an even grander career
robbing American banks. After Juan
deviously maneuvers Mallory into a partnership, the Irishman eludes him but the
two reunite in Mesa Verde. There,
Mallory has joined a cell of insurrectionists headed by the dapper Dr. Villega
(Romolo Valli). Villega plots a series
of diversions in Mesa Verde to support two imminent onslaughts by the rebel
commanders Villa and Zapata. One
diversion will be an explosion at the bank, dovetailing with Miranda’s own
obsession of pulling his big heist. Once
the building is blasted open, Juan will lead his kids inside and empty the
vault. But things take a turn he doesn’t
expect, and instead of getting rich from the break-in, he becomes an unwitting
hero of the revolution. For the cynical
Juan, who has no use for politics and no loyalties beyond his rough affection
for his aged father and his sons, it’s a dumbfounding development. Moreover, his new-found notoriety puts him in
the crosshairs of a punitive military expedition led by a ruthless officer in
an armored transport, Col. Gunther Ruiz (Antoine Saint-John).
In
retrospect, it’s easy to see why the film did poorly at the U.S. box office,
first under an opaque title and then
under, arguably, a misleading one. Leone
enjoyed using an elliptical narrative style in which often, as a scene begins
or unfolds, the viewer doesn’t quite know where the characters are or the point
of what they’re doing. Eventually, with
a visual or verbal cue, the meaning becomes clear. Fans enjoy this technique, similar to a
stand-up comic preceding a punchline with an elaborate set-up. Leone trusts that you’re smart enough and
curious enough to stay with him. But the
technique was bound to frustrate 1972 moviegoers who expected a straightforward
shoot-’em-up narrative, based on the poster art of Steiger firing a machine
gun, Coburn displaying a coat lined with dynamite, and a military convoy being
blown up. Some confusion also resulted
from the cuts made for the U.S. release. What happened to the paying job that Mallory was hired for, and if he’s
finished with rebellions as he had implied in one passing comment, why does he
end up collaborating with Dr. Villega’s resistance movement? A scene in the overseas print explained that
Juan had lured John’s employer and a military guard to a remote church, and
then killed them with a blast of Mallory’s dynamite. Mallory, known to be a wanted Irish rebel,
was blamed for the murders; presumably, as the authorities put out their
dragnet, he had only one recourse to slip out of Miranda’s devious grip -- go
underground, seek refuge with the Mexican revolutionaries, and resume his
insurrectionary career.
The
director’s big-scale action set-pieces are stunning, and deliver everything
that yesterday’s “Dirty Dozen†fans or today’s “Fast and the Furious†devotees
would want in violent spectacle, but they’re widely separated by scenes that
play out at a leisurely -- many would say excruciating -- pace. With a big budget, Leone could be as
self-indulgent as he wanted to be, to the eventual dismay of U.S.
distributors. Even though United Artists
speeded the opening scenes with edits for the U.S., we’re nevertheless
introduced to Juan in an extended sequence in which no shots are fired for a
long, long time. Hitching a ride on an
impossibly large, lavish stagecoach, he’s seated uncomfortably but mutely among
the paying passengers, a group of wealthy Mexicans and Americans. They subject him to insulting and racist
invective while an unctuous priest sits by. Leone uses extreme close-up to show the passengers chewing their food as
they spout their hateful comments and liken the underclass to “animals.†The close-ups ironically reduce their insults
to nonsense: now who’s the animal? Also
in close-up, a matronly passenger’s red lips suck suggestively on a cherry,
indicating that the woman is offended by the earthy peon but also sexually
aroused. The studio trimmed the end of
the scene by a few minutes to soften the implication that Juan eventually has
forcible sex with the woman. The cuts
helped the movie squeak through to a PG rating. They were made not so much because the situation seemed to play Juan’s
sexual aggression for laughs, but because moviemakers still had to handle
sexual content delicately for mainstream audiences to avoid offending what
Nixon called the Silent Majority. Today, in the #MeToo era when rape is rape by
any name, the implication of coerced sex is likely to make everyone squirm, not
just the church ladies. Overall, the
sequence on the coach is important in many respects, notably because the
close-ups through Juan’s-eye-view underscore that he’s Leone’s pivotal
character, but action fans would have begun tapping their feet, waiting for the
first outburst of action more than twenty minutes into the running time.
In
fairness to United Artists’ marketing department, it’s difficult to see how
they could have pitched the film differently, given the commercial landscape of
the time. It was too violent and
downbeat to be sold as a buddy picture like “The Odd Couple,†and not
prestigious enough for road show engagement like “Lawrence of Arabia.†A couple of years earlier, with the right
sales pitch, it might have captured the “M*A*S*H†crowd as a profane,
irreverent comedy-drama, but by 1972, confrontational movies with political or
counter-cultural subtexts were on the outs. In France, the release was titled “Once Upon a Time, the Revolution,â€
because Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West†had been enormously successful
in that country. In the U.S., Paramount
had butchered “Once Upon a Time in the West,†and it had disappeared quickly
from theaters in 1969, so no marketing angle there. In 2018, a shrewd distributor would bow to Leone’s
sensibilities, sell the movie to a hipster or art-house crowd, promote it
through social networks and the entertainment media, and build momentum and
Oscar buzz through word-of-mouth. Back
then, before Twitter and “Ain’t It Cool News,†when foreign films only rarely
made a splash in America and a Leone production was reflexively pigeonholed
into the Spaghetti Western category, that was hardly a viable option for UA’s
publicists.
United
Artists probably expected that the teaming of a laconic Gringo and an excitable
Mexican would remind fans of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,†especially
since the two films shared Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati as Leone’s
scripting partners and Ennio Morricone as soundtrack composer. As with other Leone films, Morricone assigned
distinct musical themes to the characters. Mallory’s is a melancholy aria sung by Leone’s go-to vocalist, Edda
Dell’Orso, and Juan’s is a jokey “wup . . . wup, wup†chorus. The 1972 Time reviewer thought it sounded
like the croaking of bullfrogs, but Frayling says it was meant to represent the
rumblings of a peon’s (or impoverished bandit’s) empty stomach. It’s a great Morricone score, and apparently
one that the Maestro himself is fond of, since he included excerpts from it
when he appeared in concert at Radio City Music Hall in 2007 to conduct a
performance of his major film compositions. However, Morricone’s signature touches aside, viewers who fondly
remembered “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly†for its sardonic humor and
larger-than-life characters were likely to be disappointed. The tone of “Giù La Testaâ€/â€Duck, You
Suckerâ€/â€A Fistful of Dynamite†is largely mournful rather than humorously
quirky, especially in the final half as fate closes in on the protagonists,
their interplay becomes more and more somber, and events spiral tragically out
of their control. Antoine Saint-John’s
villainous Gunther Ruiz is visually striking -- he looks like a gaunter Charles
Bronson -- but until the movie’s climactic scene, when the three characters
briefly and violently converge, he’s a remote figure mostly glimpsed by Mallory
and Miranda at a distance, not a strongly defined villain in his own
right. He’s not so much an individual
character as he is an abstract representation of counter-revolutionary
reprisal. This was probably a deliberate
choice by Leone, since it underlines the larger philosophy of the film, in
which John and Juan act (or react) at the mercy of larger social forces beyond
their ability to manage. However, I
imagine it disappointed the moviegoers who waited for Ruiz to emerge as the
successor to the sharply delineated villains played by Lee Van Cleef, Gian
Maria Volante, and Henry Fonda in the earlier Leone Westerns, anticipating a
dramatic, Morricone-scored mano a mano
showdown that never comes.
The
Kino Lorber Blu-ray edition is a clean, sharp transfer of the international
print with twelve extras, ported over by and large from the previous MGM Home
Video DVD and Blu-ray editions. Some of
the extras incorporate amusing but ephemeral material like trailers and radio
spots, but others are more substantial, notably:
• Informative
commentaries by Sir Christopher Frayling and Alex Cox on separate audio
tracks. Frayling’s was originally
packaged with the 2007 DVD. Cox’s is new
to this edition. A viewer could spend
the good part of a waking day running the Blu-ray print three times: first with
the actual soundtrack, then with the Frayling track, and a third time with the
Cox track -- much the same way that fans like me, back in the Stone Age before
disc players and Netflix, would set aside most of a Saturday to watch a triple
bill of the Eastwood/Leone classics at a second-run movie house.
• The short features
“Sorting Out the Versions†and “Restoration Italian Style,†which analyze the
differences between the Italian and U.S. prints and, in the latter, the
challenges addressed in rebuilding the longer print for DVD and reconciling
different audio, film, and video elements. From “Sorting Out the Versions,†I was surprised to learn that at least two additional scenes of more
than passing importance for character development and continuity were shot but
apparently never incorporated into any of the theatrical or home-video
prints. The feature suggests that these
scenes survive only in a few still photographs housed in an MGM archive. The short documentary includes some of these
stills, but wouldn’t it be nice if the footage itself were discovered and
packaged into some future edition of the movie?
• “The Myth of
Revolution,†an interview with Frayling that you’d expect to focus on the
film’s portrayal of the Mexican revolution, given the title of the
feature. Frayling does devote some
remarks to that topic, particularly to the point of how the picture’s jaundiced
view of revolutionary politics put it at variance with the leftist trend of
other European cinema of the time. Then
he segues into a more general analysis of the movie as a milestone in Leone’s
artistic evolution as a filmmaker, to the frustration of fans who preferred his
earlier pictures: “The grown-up Leone
[of “Giù La Testaâ€] isn’t as much fun as the innocent, regressive, child-like
Leone of the “Dollars†films.â€
• “Sergio Donati
Remembers,†a short interview in which the screenwriter notes that Leone
originally met with Peter Bogdanovich to direct “Giù La Testa.†But there was quickly a parting of ways. “A talented guy, but Bogdanovich wanted to do
a Bogdanovich movie, not a Sergio Leone movie, that was part of the problem,â€
Donati relates with a smile. “[Leone] told
the movie to Bogdanovich, and he say, ‘Zoom, zoom,’ but Bogdanovich says, ‘I
hate zooms, I never use zooms’.â€
• A reversible cover
sleeve showing the familiar U.S. ad art on Side A, and the rarer, lesser seen
European poster art on Side B.
Purists
may question Kino Lorber’s decision to market the new edition as “A Fistful of
Dynamite†rather than Leone’s favored title of “Duck, You Sucker.†Still, “A Fistful of Dynamite†is likely to
be the one most Cinema Retro-era viewers remember from local theatrical runs in
1972 and from later 1980s TV showings. It’s debatable, nearly fifty years after the film’s initial release,
whether either title is any more or less valid than the other. Along the same lines, die-hard collectors may
wish that Kino Lorber had gone all-out and included both the full print and the
edited US. cut for easy personal comparison of the two versions. Ironically, the once-ubiquitous U.S. edit is
now the harder of the two to find, unless you have a VCR and the old,
full-screen VHS tape. But the “Sorting
Out the Versions†feature reliably documents the changes, and regardless, any
release that has the potential to introduce new viewers to the prodigious
talents of Sergio Leone, James Coburn, Rod Steiger, and Romolo Valli is always
welcome.
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