Monday night, watched a 1959 movie called Venezia, la luna e tu (‘Venice, the Moon and You’), in which Alberto Sordi played a gondolier who – you’ve guessed it – gets involved with two silly foreign girls. With only Tonino Delli Colli’s colour photography to recommend it, the main surprise of the film was in seeing Sordi, Nino Manfredi, and director Dino Risi – all of whom, a year or so later, became leading figures in the commedia all’italiana movement which cast a critical eye on contemporary mores in a changing Italy – caught up in such an inconsequential piece of fluff.
Tuesday morning: As there was nothing kicking off on the Lido till the evening, I caught a vaporetto over to Dorsoduro and made my way to the church of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, which Donald Sutherland worked so hard to restore in Don’t Look Now. Obviously, whoever took over from him wasn’t killed by a red-coated, homicidal dwarf because the building looks much better than it did in the movie, the restoration having been completed by the Venice in Peril foundation – whose sign can be seen on a wall in the film – by the end of the Seventies.
San Nicolo dei Mendicoli
And so down to business . . . Last month, the Venice Film Festival announced a 32-film retrospective entitled Spaghetti Western as part of its ongoing series, The Secret History of Italian Cinema. This strand of the Festival began in 2004 with Kings of the Bs, co-curated by Quentin Tarantino, who is also named as “the godfather†(yes, that’s really what they call him in the publicity handouts) of this year’s event.
The 2004 line-up included examples of Westerns, pepla (sword-and-sandal movies), poliziesci (Seventies’ cop movies), horror, and giallo by such stalwarts of Italian popular cinema as Riccardo Freda, Vittorio Cottafavi, Antonio Margheriti, Sergio Sollima, Enzo G. Castellari, Fernando Di Leo, Umberto Lenzi, and Lucio Fulci. Surprisingly, even Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust was allowed to rear its controversial head as well. In 2005, the series was reduced in scope to accommodate a Secret History of Asian Cinema, but managed to find room for two films each, fully restored, by Mario Bava and Massimo Dallamano, as well as four biopics of Casanova. The following year provided even thinner pickings for Spaghetti fans, with only a restored print of For a Few Dollars More featuring in a line-up dominated by centennial celebrations of Rossellini, Visconti, and Mario Soldati, along with The Secret History of Russian Cinema (which must have been a lot of fun).
This year’s Secret History, while obviously welcome in its own right, encourages aficionados of Westerns all’italiana to hope that the “officialâ€Â Italian film industry, and more particularly its idealogically-hidebound critical establishment, have finally woken up to what the rest of the world has known for the last quarter of a century – since the publication of Christopher Frayling's seminal Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone – namely, the importance of this much maligned but hugely popular and influential sub-genre. While commemorations of increasing size and sophistication have proliferated abroad, particularly in Spain and the United States, the official position in Italy has seemed to be that the Italian Western was an embarrassment and something unworthy of discussion by serious, politically-engaged, chin-stroking intellectuals – or “just a dirty SONOFA.....!â€, as a certain Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan MarÃa RamÃrez (‘known as “the Ratâ€â€™) might have put it. Whether or not the event will mark a true change in critical attitude in Italy remains, of course, to be seen, but, at the very least, it can be construed as an encouraging development – though one would have to suppose that the only people to whom the globally-popular Spaghetti Westerns remain a “secret†is the chin-stroking intellectuals themselves.
A somewhat surprising aspect of the event is the inclusion of the term “Spaghetti Western†in the title itself, rather than the more politically correct “Western all’italianaâ€. In fact, there is some evidence of an underlying tension in the fact that, while most of the pre-Festival publicity material available to foreign journalists included the expression “Spaghetti Westernâ€, the official programme opts for “Western all’italiana†instead. A case of cold feet at the last moment, perhaps?
Tarantino himself ensured that things got off to a controversial start when the line-up was announced by putting a sharp-toed cowboy boot into today’s Italian cinema., saying, if memory serves, that it was all “boy meets girl, they have a relationship, they have problems, blah, blah, blah . . .†(or words to that effect). Cue howls of outrage and denunciation from the auteur crowd, with only the giallo maestro, Dario Argento, coming to Tarantino’s defence, saying that while “Tarantino is too scornful . . . he is rightâ€, a sentiment heartily endorsed by those of us who love movies from the days when Italian popular cinema, to quote Rod Steiger’s Juan Miranda in Giù la testa (A Fistful of Dynamite, Duck, You Sucker), had “balls like the bull!â€
With Sergio Leone featuring only outside the event, with the presentation of a restored Italian print of Fistful of Dollars, there is a temptation to see the line-up as a case of “the best of the restâ€. On the other hand, the absence of the Maestro, at least within the context of the Festival, removes any necessity to make unfair comparisons with his work, and in the forthcoming reports, I’ll try to review the films on offer in their own right, with references to Leone kept to an unavoidable minimum.
The line-up for Spaghetti Western: The Secret History of Italian Cinema 4 is as follows:
$100,000 for Ringo/100.000 dollari per Ringo (Alberto De Martino/1965)
They Call Me Trinity…/Lo chiamavano Trinità (Enzo Barboni/1970)
Get the Coffin Ready/Preparati la bara! (Ferdinando Baldi/1967)
A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die/ Una ragione per vivere e una per morire (Tonino Valerii/ 1973)
The Bounty Killer/El precio de un hombre (Eugenio MartÃn/1966)
Django (Sergio Corbucci/ 1965)
The Big Gundown/La resa dei conti (Sergio Sollima/1966)
Keoma (Enzo G. Castellari/1976)
Compañeros/Vamos a matar, compañeros! (Sergio Corbucci/1970)
The Return of Ringo/Il ritorno di Ringo (Duccio Tessari/1965)
One Silver Dollar/Un dollaro bucato (Giorgio Ferroni/1965)
Four Gunmen of the Apocalypse/I quattro dell’apocalisse (Lucio Fulci/1975)
Navajo Joe (Sergio Corbucci/1966)
The Hills Run Red/Un fiume di dollari (Carlo Lizzani/1966)
The Grand Duel/Il grande duello (Giancarlo Santi/1972)
The Reward’s Yours, the Man’s Mine/La taglia è tua, l’uomo l’ammazzo io(Edoardo Mulargia/1969)
Yankee (Tinto Brass/1966)
Blood and Guns/Tepepa (Giulio Petroni/1968)
Django, Kill! (If You Live, Shoot!)/Se sei vivo spara (Giulio Questi/1967)
Sugar Colt (Franco Giraldi/1966)
The Dirty Outlaws/El Desperado (Franco Rossetti/1967)
$10,000 Blood Money/10.000 dollari per un massacro (Romolo Guerrieri/1967)
Seven Guns from Texas/I sette del Texas (JoaquÃn Luis Romero Marchent/1964)
Vengeance Trail/La vendetta è un piatta che si serve freddo (Pasquale Squitieri/1971)
Matalo! (Cesare Canevari/1970)
Death at Owell Rock/La morte non conti i dollari (Riccardo Freda/1967)
Last of the Badmen/Il tempo degli avvoltoi (Nando Cicero/1967)
The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe/Il mio nome è Shangai Joe (Mario Caiano/1973)
No Room to Die/Una lunga fila di croci (Sergio Garrone/1968)
Savage Gringo/Ringo del Nebraska (Antonio Román & Mario Bava/1965)
Antonio Margheriti’s …And God Said to Cain/…e Dio disse a Caino (1969) was originally listed in the pre-Festival publicity, but seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the final line-up, for reasons I have yet to fathom. It has been “replaced†by the 1969 Japanese film, The Fort of Death/Gonin no shokin kasegi, directed by Eiichi Kudo, which was originally announced as a companion piece to the Spaghetti Western event. Also in that category is Miike Takashi’s latest film, improbably entitled Sukiyaki Western Django and featuring the Godfather himself, Quentin Tarantino, among the cast.
The Western theme continues outside the main event with a special screening of John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924), and a very welcome five-film Budd Boetticher retrospective, featuring The Tall T (1957), Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). Also showing is Andrew Dominik’s new take on the Jesse James story, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt.
So it looks like a long two weeks in the saddle, and no doubt a few of the movies will have to be missed in order to secure scalps (interviews, to you tenderfoots), but I’ll be doing my best to eat as much Spaghetti as possible. However, if I start seeing any red-coated dwarfs dogging my tracks, I’m telling you now, I’m on the next ’plane outta here . . .
The Grand Canal from the Campo San Vio, by Canaletto