A need to write up my reports, combined with a lack of sleep, meant I had to pass on an 11:00 a.m. showing of ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’, a film one sincerely hopes is less clumsy than its title. The former kept me occupied till , when I rode up for the ‘Spaghetti Western Round Table 1’, at which the participants were: Giuliano Gemma, Fabio Testi, Enzo Castellari, Carlo Lizzani, Tinto Brass, Sergio Salvati, Luis eEnriquez Bacalov, and Pasquale Squitieri.
Testi was asked about his 1978 film, ‘China 9, Liberty 37’, directed, depending on which sources one consults, by Monte Hellman and/or Antonio Brandt, and which featured Sam Peckinpah in the cast. Testi recalled that, “Sergio Leone was supposed to do a role, and met Peckinpah on the set . . .†Whenever Testi had any scenes with Bloody Sam, he said, Peckinpah always wanted the dialogue rewritten so that he would have the last word.
Japanese poster for "The Hills Run Red"
Lizzani spoke next, about Italian cinema in general, with occasional references to the first of two Westerns he directed, ‘The Hills Run Red’ (1966, and due to be screened tomorrow). Lizzani has often been quoted as saying he made the film only as a favour to producer Dino De Laurentiis (who told him, “We have the three Cs in common – cuore, cervelloe culo†- heart, mind and ass). In cold print, Lizzani’s comment made it seem as if he, as part of the second wave of neo-realist directors (with all that implies in terms of political engagement and intellectualism), was dismissing the film, but in person he appeared quite happy to have made Westerns and talked about them with affection and wry good humour.
Tinto Brass, famed (if that’s the word) for ‘Caligula’ and a score of erotic movies of varying degrees of dullness, spoke mainly about his “Pop Art†Western, ‘Yankee’ (1966), and I’ll save his comments to accompany the report on that film.
Pasquale Squitieri, a pugnacious Southerner whose ‘Revenge Is a Dish Served Cold’ is due to be shown here, started out by asking, “What are Westerns, really? Action films . . . Sergio Leone understood that the key to the Western was the showdown.†He then went on to claim that icons of the American West such as the Colt revolver belonged as much to Italian as American history, citing an example of a factory in the south of Italy which made Colts under license at the time of the Risorgimento. He ended by saying, “I’ve never had a film at Venice, so I’d like to dedicate this moment to the magnificent Sergio Leone.â€
Next to speak was the Argentinean-born composer, Luis Enriquez Bacalov, who wrote the scores for ‘Django’, ‘A Bullet for the General’, ‘Sugar Colt’, and ‘The Grand Duel’, the latter of which was used by Quentin Tarantino in ‘Kill Bill’. He told us that, “Music brought modernity to the Western. Memorable music had been written for American Westerns, but, as Pasquale Squitieri has dedicated this event to Sergio Leone, I would like to dedicate it to Ennio Morricone . . .†Which was as far as he got before Squitieri cut in and growled, “Morricone wouldn’t have done anything if Sergio Leone hadn’t told him what to do.†Bacalov, unsurprisingly, was not prepared for this interruption and looked suitably startled. There was a bout of bickering, with Squitieri reiterating his point by saying that Leone had given Morricone the initial ‘whistle’ on which to build his score. Bacalov continued, refusing to give in to “the provocateurâ€, though he conceded the point about the ‘whistle’. Continuing his comments on Morricone, he noted that so overwhelming was his influence that all composers became afflicted with what he called “Morriconitisâ€. He finished by saying that because of “the primordial archetypes involved, it [the Italian Western] was a very interesting period†in which to be involved. He was then asked his views on Tarantino’s appropriation of his music for ‘Kill Bill’. He remarked that he thought that Tarantino, with his enormous knowledge of films, may well have been drawing a connecting backwards, from his samurai sword epic, via Leone and the Spaghetti Western, to Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’ (the source for ‘Fistful of Dollars’). In any case, he said, he believed that what Tarantino had done was more sophisticated than simply “borrowing†some music he happened to like.
Ennio Morricone
Squitieri, who obviously felt he hadn’t got his point across with sufficient clarity the first or second time, then stepped in again, forcefully explaining, as if to a group of particularly backward children, that, “Sergio Leone created a language – copied, okay. But the greatness of Sergio Leone was that he created the epic language, and many directors copied him. He created this narrative language – the close-ups on the face, on the hand. He created a style, an epic cinema.â€
At that point, Giuliano Gemma had to leave for a TV interview, which gave moderator Marco Giusti the opportunity to introduce the musician and composer, Alessandro Alessandroni, and to ask him to take Gemma’s place on the podium. Alessandroni, founder of the Cantori Moderni and frequent collaborator with Morricone, is best known for his whistling and vocals on the soundtrack of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. A genuinely modest man, he had been content to sit in the press seats, until bushwhacked by Giusti. “I was hoping you weren’t going to ask me to talk . . . I can whistle,†he quipped, perhaps hoping to escape the ordeal. Once seated, however, he told of a particular remark in an L.A. newspaper (presumably on the occasion of the Sergio Leone exhibition at the AutryMuseum in 2005), that had pleased him: ‘They wrote, “The whistler added the sauce to the spaghetti.â€â€™ He recalled that he had begun his whistling career when an orchestra leader had called for a volunteer. “I didn’t know I had a photogenic whistle,†he added, smiling. He then confirmed that Leone had indeed heard a ‘whistle’ and had passed it on to Morricone, “as Pasquale has said.â€
There was only one film scheduled for today, perhaps a concession to the rough ride we’d been put through on Friday and Saturday. While Sergio Corbucci’s ‘Navajo Joe’ (1966) may be on one his lesser works, lacking the extravagant excess of ‘Django’ and ‘The Great Silence’, or the sweeping narrative and character interplay of ‘A Professional Gun’ and ‘Compañeros’, it remains highly entertaining, with a standout performance by Aldo Sanbrell as the baddy, and a most appropriately scalp-tingling main theme by Ennio Morricone.
Mervyn Duncan (Sanbrell), the half-breed leader of a gang of scalphunters, leads his men in a raid on an Indian village, killing as many people as possible for a bounty of “a dollar a head†(which was also the film’s Italian shooting title). As they ride to the town of Esperanza, they are tracked by a lone rider, Navajo Joe (Burt Reynolds), who kills two men sent after him by Duncan. In the town, Duncan learns that the scalp bounty will no longer be paid, and he makes a deal with a crooked doctor (and son-in-law of the town’s banker) to hold up a train carrying a large amount of money. However, Duncan and his men are relieved of both the train and the money by Navajo Joe, who drives the train into Esperanza. The doctor, on the pretext of riding for help, allows himself to be used as a hostage by Duncan in order to get to the money. The ‘decent, God-fearing’ townsfolk, with Duncan closing in on them, are forced to swallow their racism, and appeal to Navajo Joe for help. He agrees, on condition that he is appointed sheriff, and paid “a dollar a head†by each person in town . . .
Burt Reynolds has made something of a habit of ridiculing this film in the past, suggesting that, unlike Clint Eastwood, he got “the wrong Sergio†– not a view likely to be endorsed by, say, Franco Nero, who became a global superstar thanks to the “wrong Sergioâ€. While Reynolds is very impressive in the action scenes, his attempt at laconic stoicism is less so. And then there’s that rather unfortunate wig . . . Actually, Reynolds’ performance comes across better in the Italian version than the English, where his lack of ability to disguise his modern-day speech patterns makes scenes (such as the one where he queries the sheriff’s credentials as an American) ring somewhat false. Sanbrell is great in any language, and it is to be regretted that the retrospective’s budget could not have stretched to a return ticket from Spain. The scene where he explains his background toFernando Rey’s preacher remains most unusual in Spaghetti Westerns, where the baddies are generally baddies because they’re bad – no psychological explanations necessary.
While I was shooting the spaghetti with Alex Cox on Saturday, I asked him what it was about Sergio Corbucci, about whom he’s always spoken with great enthusiasm, that particularly appealed to him. One thing, he replied, was the way Corbucci presented women as positive figures in his films, even when their characters may be only marginal with regard to the main storyline, and how he differed in this respect from Leone, for whom women were largely seen as an impediment to action. Alex’s point is well illustrated by ‘Navajo Joe’. It is Estella, the half-breed girl played by the stunning Nicoletta Machiavelli, who gets closest to Joe and best understands him; it is the saloon girls who learn of the plot to rob the train and expose it, at great personal risk; and it is the banker’s daughter who is the only member of the town’s “respectable†society to gladly accept Joe’s offer of help. None of these characters – outcasts in the main – are central to the story, but Corbucci skillfully delineates and deploys them in such a way as to a certain depth to what otherwise be just another revenge Western.
Burt Reynolds sporting the worst hirsute chapeau in western history as Navajo Joe.
Another difference between Corbucci and Leone that is well illustrated by ‘Navajo Joe’ is the use of music. Outstanding though Morricone’s score is, with its drum-driven main theme and impossibly soaring vocals, one can tell that it has been incorporated into the soundtrack in the traditional manner, that is, laid on afterwards rather than being an integral part of the film’s fabric. In Leone’s films, Morricone’s music, in addition to its normal function, also prefigures and comments on the unfolding narrative. This daring and innovative use of music is one of the principle reasons why Leone is and will remain the undisputed trail boss of the Italian Western.
But the principle difference between Leone and Corbucci lies in their personalities: Sergio Leone lived to make movies, while Sergio Corbucci made movies to live. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine Leone calling an early halt to filming because the bullfights were on in Madrid later, as Corbucci did during the shooting of ‘Navajo Joe’. And it is equally impossible to imagine the genial Corbucci reacting as Leone did on the occasion of actor Al Mulock’s suicide during the shooting of ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. Leone’s first concern, it seems, was for the costume in which Mulock plunged to his death, and he was later heard to curse the late departed when he was unable to assemble the opening sequence of the film as he’d envisioned due to missing shots of Mulock. Truly was it said, “There are two kinds of people in this world . . .â€
When I was in Madrid last year, interviewing Aldo Sanbrell and Frank Braña, I determined to track down Robledo as well. Aldo and he had been friends for many years – there was a picture of the christening of Aldo’s son on the wall of his office, showing Sergio Leone acting as godfather, and Robledo as chief witness – but latterly Robledo had become reclusive, and he and Aldo had lost contact.
Lorenzo Robledo
Working from an old industry guide, I headed one evening for Robledo’s last known address in Madrid. Trouble was, the street no longer existed – or rather it was no longer named after General Mola, one of Franco’s goons. Eventually, I found the apartment building and managed to roust the concierge. Asking for Robledo produced only a shaking of the head. I showed him Robledo’s name written down and explained who I was. More head shaking. Could I see Señor Robledo? No, no, is asleep. Asleep? Well, sure, it was late and Robledo was in his eighties . . . Could I leave a message for him? No, no, is asleep. The concierge put his hands together and rested his head on them to indicate sleep. Asleep, yes, I understood that, but . . . Is asleep there, there, he said pointing at the floor. Finally, the penny dropped. Es muerto? Much vigorous nodding of the head, but nothing, it seemed, was going to make him utter the dreaded ‘m’ word. Last year, was all he added . . . Lorenzo Robledo went to sleep sometime in 2005, unnoticed and apparently forgotten. R.I.P. Lorenzo Robledo.