Our Man Exshaw has returned home from the city of mystery and intrigue, having covered one of the world's most important film festivals. John's columns have attracted the greatest number of readers our site has ever had, so we're happy to continue his diaries reflecting on the events that took place at the Venice International Film Festival's tribute to Italian Westerns. We'll be presenting the remaining segments of John's daily diary of events that took place at the festival. Please note that the diary entries were written contemporaneously with the on-going events.
Monday got off to a similar start to Sunday, with the need
to file copy putting paid to a second and last chance to catch the new Jesse
James movie. Then, at 3:30 p.m., I filed into the press conference hall for a
gabfest entitled “Eastern Western: The Impact of the Spaghetti Western in Asia
and Americaâ€. The panel for this event comprised of Marco Giusti, Richard
Corliss (Time), Jim Hoberman (The Village Voice), and Sadao
Yamane (or Yamane Sadao, if you prefer the Japanese surname-first rendering), a
venerable cinema journalist and current Professor of Film Studies at Tokei
University. It was chaired by Peter Cowie, the equally venerable founder of The
International Film Guide and author of definitive studies of The Godfather
films and Apocalypse Now.
Cowie began with a mea culpa on behalf of himself and
his generation of film critics who had dismissed the Spaghetti Western as a
sacrilegious abomination in the 1960s, saying that for those raised on the
classic, formal Hollywood Western, it was simply not possible then to
appreciate the innovation and iconoclastic viewpoint of directors like Leone
and Corbucci. He ended by noting that while “Hollywood won’t back actual
Westerns, [there are] plenty of films that are derived from the Spaghetti
Western template†– a perfectly valid general point, if somewhat undercut by
the recent or forthcoming release of ‘Seraphim Falls’, ‘3:10 to Yuma’, and the
Jesse James opus.
Giusti then talked about growing up with the Italian Western
in the 1960s, and how domestic product filled a gap in the second-run cinema
schedules created by the decline in Hollywood’s output of B-Westerns by the
likes of William Witney and R.G. Springsteen.
Richard Corliss recalled his youth in Philadelphia and how
he and his friends would enjoy the three types of Italian films then on offer:
the auteur film, the “personality†film (in which they could see actors
such as Marcello Mastroianni whom they’d first encountered in auteur
films), and genre films such as pepla and Westerns. He then proposed an
hitherto overlooked contribution by Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood to Western
fashion – the three-day growth of beard, which Leone used to make Eastwood look
older and more hard-bitten and which, as Corliss said, “is still very much with
us.†He also mentioned a story told by Sergio Donati, of how Eastwood began to
modulate his naturally “musical†voice after hearing the slower and more
laconic delivery of Enrico Maria Salerno, the actor who dubbed Eastwood in Italian
prints.