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.
Sadao Yamane spoke of the influence of Dashiell Hammett on
Akira Kurosawa, one that was recognised and written about by Japanese critics
on the release of ‘Yojimbo’ in 1961, even though Kurosawa himself would not
admit it at the time. (Kurosawa, it will be remembered, successfully sued Leone
and the producers of ‘Fistful of Dollars’ for their unauthorised remake of
‘Yojimbo’, securing the lucrative Pacific rights to the former in the
subsequent settlement.) He also cited two gangster films made in 1960 by
Kihachi Okamoto as being derived in part from Hammett, before recalling that he
(Yamane), who had read Hammett himself, saw elements of Okamoto’s films in both
‘Yojimbo’ and ‘Fistful of Dollars’. He finished by noting Hammett’s influence
on the crime writer Haruhiko Oyabu and cult film director Seijun Suzuki.
Jim Hoberman began by mentioning Sam Peckinpah’s “parallel
development of the Western†in the early 1960s, saying that the American
director had been impressed by Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954) and “had tried
to capture something of its spirit in ‘Major Dundee’â€(1965). He went to state
that “foreign invasions†in technology and popular culture (citing the
Trinitron television, the Beatles, and Spaghetti Westerns as examples) in the
1960s had “defamiliarised intrinsically American inventions†in a healthy way.
His last point was to observe that, while the summer of 1967 was known as ‘The
Summer of Love’, it was also the summer of the Watts riots and escalating
violence in Vietnam, a fact reflected in such films as ‘The Dirty Dozen’,
‘Bonnie and Clyde’, and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.
Giusti was then asked about the influence of fumetti
(comic books) on the Italian Western, with particular reference to Gianluigi
Bonelli’s Tex Willer, the evergreen Western hero whose adventures can still be
found on every newsstand in Italy. Giusti denied that there was any influence,
saying that the Willer books followed the American model and do so to this day.
He emphasised his point by saying that while Italian Westerns had been derived
from such sources as Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Stevenson, they had not been
derived from Tex Willer; in the Spaghetti Western, the Italian film-makers
“stripped everything away [from the traditional Western] and then put
completely different things back instead.†While this is essentially correct,
it seems worth suggesting that both the screen persona of Giuliano Gemma and
the generally conservative nature of his Western vehicles may well owe
something to the straight-shooting Willer; it was surely not a coincidence that
it was Gemma who was cast as the fumetti hero in Duccio Tessari’s last
Western, ‘Tex and the Lord of the Deep’, made for TV in 1985 but given a
theatrical release . . .
Cowie then asked about the bewildering range of pseudonyms
adapted by Italian casts an crews, but nothing of interest emerged by way of
response, and no mention was made of director Riccardo Freda’s introduction of
this trend in the late 1950s, after he noticed that Italian filmgoers, while
intrigued by the artwork for his groundbreaking horror film, ‘I vampiri’ (1956,
a.k.a. ‘The Devil’s Commandment’), lost interest as they read down the poster
and discovered that the film was made by Italians – whom, until Freda, had no
tradition of making horror, science-fiction, or fantasy films. Proceedings came
to a close after Corliss asked, tongue-in-cheek, why all good Italian Western
directors were called ‘Sergio’? – to which, of course, there is no good answer.
************
The first film of the day was ‘The Hills Run Red’ (1966),
directed by Carlo Lizzani under the splendid pseudonym, “Lee W. Beaverâ€. A
superior Western (recently released on Region 1 DVD by M-G-M), it tells the
story of Jerry Brewster (Thomas Hunter) and Ken Seagall (Nando Gazzolo) who, at
the close of the Civil War, find themselves in charge of a Confederate payroll.
Chased down by Yankee cavalry, they draw lots to see who will escape with the
money. Seagall wins, and Brewster ends up in the slammer for five years after
“trying to escapeâ€.
On his release, Brewster finds his house deserted and his
wife and child gone. Two gunmen, working for Seagall, try to kill him, but he
is assisted by a mysterious stranger called Winnie Getz (Dan Duryea). On
learning of Seagall’s betrayal, and that his wife is dead, Brewster vows
revenge. Realizing that his best chance lies in Seagall believing him killed,
he encourages Getz to cut out a tattoo from his arm. Getz duly delivers this
“proof†of Brewster’s demise, and is given a job by Seagall. Brewster follows
suit, impressing Seagall’s top gun, GarcÃa Méndez (Henry Silva), with his
fighting prowess. Working from the inside, Brewster finds a sympathetic ally in
Seagall’s sister (Nicoletta Machiavelli) and is reunited with his son, played
by the repulsively cute Loris Loddi, before the final confrontation, after
which Getz is revealed as a government agent charged with finding the missing
payroll.
While the revenge plot, and the grisly business with the
tattoo, are quite typical of the Spaghetti Western, ‘The Hills Run Red’ is
largely traditional, both in theme and look. Thomas Hunter is very good at
portraying both the vengeful and essentially decent sides of Brewster’s
character, and Duryea is in good form as the world-weary but wry undercover
agent. Machiavelli’s Mary Ann is rather underdeveloped, but Henry Silva really
makes the most of his role, laughing like a demented hyena and clearly having a
whale of a time as the black-leather-clad Méndez. And it goes without saying,
of course, that Ennio Morricone’s score is top-notch.
Afterwards, I managed to grab Lizzani for a few quick
questions, starting with the obvious one – ‘Perché il nome “Lee W. Beaver�’
There was, he replied, no particular reason for “Lee W.†other than he liked
it, but “Beaver†was a playful
English-language pun on ‘Bieber’, his German wife, Edith’s, surname. Had
he, I asked, been involved in the casting, and if so, were Duryea and Silva
deliberately cast for their associations with Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher
respectively? “Yes†and “yes†were his answers. I then mentioned Hunter’s
strong performance and my surprise that his career had not developed after this
film. Lizzani agreed, saying he thought Hunter could have been another Henry
Fonda, but that he did not know what had happened to him later on.
*************
With no further Spaghetti being served till midnight, I was
able to catch up with Henry Silva again, as a cold-eyed gunman in Budd
Boetticher’s ‘The Tall T’ (1957), the role referenced by Lizzani in ‘The Hills
Run Red’. In contrast to his roles in Boetticher’s ‘Ride Lonesome’ and
‘Comanche Station’, in ‘The Tall T’, star Randolph Scott plays an affable
character at the film’s outset, a former ramrod named Pat Brennan who is trying
to start his own ranch. Scott soon turns grim, however, when the stagecoach on
which he is hitching a lift is held up by Frank Usher (Richard Boone) and his
trigger-happy sidekicks, Chink (Silva) and Billy-Jack (Skip Homeier). Having
murdered the swing station owner and his son, they also kill Ed Rintoon (Arthur
Hunnicutt), the stage driver and Brennan’s friend. Discovering that the
newly-wed Mrs. Mims (Maureen O’Sullivan) is the daughter of a wealthy
businessman, Usher decides to hold her for ransom . . .
Budd Boetticher’s “Ranown cycle†of Westerns (so-called
after the production company formed by Scott and producer, Harry Joe Brown)
contain some of the purest examples of the Western form ever made. Like Scott
himself , the films are whipcord-lean, usually less than 80 minutes in length,
and mercifully free of the blarney and sentiment which make the Westerns of
John Ford seem so dated and inaccessible to sagebrush fans who grew up in the
Sixties and Seventies. Burt Kennedy’s scripts are models of streamlined
economy, filled with memorable characters and terse dialogue, all attributes
sadly missing from Kennedy’s later, ham-fisted efforts in the director’s chair.
It seems particularly appropriate that ‘The Tall T’ was
based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, a man long regarded as the modern
master of the crime novel, who began his career as a writer of Western stories
(one of which also formed the basis for the original and forthcoming versions
of ‘3:10 to Yuma’). Leonard’s books, Westerns or contemporary crime stories,
have much in common with Boetticher’s work – the same deceptively simple plots
in which characters circle each other warily, and the same spot-on, cut-to-the-bone
dialogue which reveals all we need to known about the characters while at the
same time advancing the story. Even today, with Leonard’s reputation firmly
fixed as a writer of modern, urban crime fiction, it requires no great effort
to imagine many of his stories transposed to a Western setting – always a
pleasing exercise for those of us who, like the old pistolero himself, have no
intention of hanging up our guns this side of Boot Hill.
As with Leonard’s novels, the best films of the “Ranown
cycle†are often variations on a theme, with Scott’s taciturn avenger played
off a highly personable villain who often finds he has more in common with
Scott’s character than with the trail trash with whom he is riding. The final
showdowns of these films are therefore often filled with a genuine sense of
regret, both on the part of the characters themselves as well as the audience.
But as they themselves say, on more than one occasion, “There’s some things a
man can’t ride around.â€
‘The Tall T’ is an excellent film, with stand-out
performances all round. The only false note, one which produced a collective
giggle in what was a gratifyingly packed house, occurred when Randy clasps
Maureen to his manly chest in a manner which suggested he was about to say, “Me
Tarzan, you Janeâ€, a thoroughly conventional scene which, perversely perhaps,
only served to underline the freshness and originality of the rest of the film.
Indeed, such is the quality of Boetticher’s work that it always comes as a
shock to read that the Ranown films were regarded as B-movies at the time of
their release. With movies as near-perfect as these, the terms A- and B-movies
become redundant, and it is clear that Boetticher, along with his contemporary,
Don Siegel, understood that a budget need be no bigger than is required to tell
a good story well, and that all the rest, as Siegel would have put it, is mere
“folderolâ€, a lesson that modern-day Hollywood (with the honourable exception
of Robert Rodriguez) appears to have forgotten.
*************
The last movie of the day was ‘The Grand Duel’, directed in
1972 by Giancarlo Santi, who, along with composer Luis EnrÃquez Bacalov and
co-star Peter O’Brien (real name, Alberto Dentice) was on hand to introduce it.
‘The Grand Duel’ proves a tired film with little to recommend it other than the
presence of Lee Van Cleef, who appears bored by the whole business. The story
concerns one Peter Vermeer (O’Brian), a young man who has been framed by the
villainous Saxon brothers for the death of their father (Horst Frank, who
appears as the father in flashback and as one of the brothers in the present).
Sheriff Clayton (Van Cleef) rescues Vermeer from a gang of bounty hunters, and
there is the expected cat-and-mouse shenanigans as Vermeer tries to escape from
Clayton’s custody while the Saxon brothers await a chance to deliver him to the
hangman. As mentioned in an earlier report, the score by Bacalov was borrowed
by Quentin Tarantino for ‘Kill Bill’, though, to be quite frank, it’s far from
his best work. Santi, former assistant to Sergio Leone, demonstrates little
visual flair throughout, apart from one nicely photographed scene where Vermeer
is held under a waterfall while being worked over by the bounty hunters. Horst
Frank has little to do other than look icily Teutonic, though Marc Mazza, the
tall, balding character acted best remembered for having his face slapped
repeatedly by Terence Hill in ‘My Name Is Nobody’, turns in a strong
performance as one of the beastly Saxon brothers. Other than that, I’m afraid,
there’s little more to be said for ‘The Grand Duel’, which is available as a
Region 1 DVD from Wild East, and on countless cheap-and-nasty public domain
labels.
************
As we’re now past the halfway point of ‘Spaghetti Western:
The Secret History of Italian Cinema 4’, it seems appropriate to take stock of
how it’s unfolding. When the line-up was announced, it was difficult to discern
any obvious theme running through the selection, and by now it is perfectly
clear that there isn’t one. While this is not necessarily a programming
deficiency per se, the fact that the films are not being shown in
chronological order also means that it’s impossible to view the movies within
any specific context – e.g., the development of the Italian Western. The point
of the retrospective, therefore, would seem to be that there is no point, apart
from watching a random bunch of Spaghetti Westerns. Furthermore, the inclusion
of such duds as ‘A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die’, ‘The Four of the
Apocalypse…’, and ‘The Grand Duel’ is baffling: one would suppose that, in a
country where the Italian Western has been derided or ignored for so long, the
curators would want to show the genre at its best. But there you go . .
. Quien sabe?
Equally baffling is the scheduling. While I did suggest,
jokingly, that the late-night screenings on Friday and Saturday might be
designed to sort out the men from the boys, and that the showing of only one
movie on Sunday might have been a concession to the heavy schedule of the
previous two days, I now find myself looking ahead with a far more jaundiced
eye to the second-week line-up. With between two and three movies a day scheduled
for Monday through to Thursday, we then hit another logjam on Friday, with five
films penciled in, beginning at 4:30 p.m. and ending circa 3:45 a.m., and a
further four on Saturday, beginning at 11:00 a.m. Now, as a veteran of
five-film all-nighters at the Scala cinema in London’s King’s Cross, I don’t
view the prospect of watching that amount of films with any particular
trepidation, but there’s a big difference between watching five Vincent Price
movies back-to-back just for the hell of it, and being expected to spend an
additional two hours getting back to my hotel, writing up my notes and then
turning up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for another movie at 11:00 in the
morning. To say nothing of actually getting to the press room to file copy, and
even, who knows, managing to actually meet the film-makers themselves for
longer than two minutes between screenings. Had better use been made of Sunday,
this ghastly scenario could have been avoided. Dark thoughts involving
tar-and-feathers and neck-tie parties are starting to circulate in my brain . .
.
My next gripe involves the so-called press conferences,
which are the first I’ve ever attended at which the press are not allowed to
ask questions. Not that I imagine asking questions is actually banned, but
as soon as the speakers are finished, the conferences end, and at no point thus
far have the curators or chairmen made even a token effort to take questions
from the floor. Photography is also not allowed at these “press conferencesâ€
(and that is a definite prohibition), which is another unwelcome first. The
general impression one gets is that all that’s required of the press at these
events is turn up, clap like monkeys, and be grateful we’re even allowed into
the building.
Lastly, a word on the prints. It simply beggars belief that
a major retrospective at one of the most prestigious festivals in the film
calendar should be showing what, in many cases, are quite clearly some form of
digital prints. The worst example of this so far was ‘Keoma’, in which (and
unfortunately I lack the technical language to describe it more accurately)
there was a horrible blue tinge on sections of the image, particularly in areas
of high contrast. During the film, I indicated the problem to director Enzo
Castellari, whom I’d already heard muttering in shocked tones about the
“azzurroâ€, and he just threw up his hands and shrugged. For the festival
organisers to have failed to locate a 35mm print of the film is bad enough (as
far as I know, Castellari himself owns the rights, so this shouldn’t have been
a problem), but to then cock up the projection of whatever digital print they
did get is nothing short of an insult to both the director and the audience.
Those responsible should consider themselves fortunate that “the Strongest Man
in Cinema†is of an equitable nature or they might have found themselves hurled
from the cinema like extras in a Maciste movie. Which, in my opinion, would
have been nothing less than they deserved.
Oh, yes, before I forget – we’re now, as I’ve said, into the
second half of this retrospective, and so far there’s been no sign of “the
godfather†of the event, Quentin Tarantino. Has someone, I wonder, “made him an
offer he couldn’t refuse�