WE CONTINUE OUR SERIES OF REPORTS FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT JOHN
EXSHAW'S DIARY FROM THE RECENTLY CONCLUDED VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM
FESTIVAL.
Having crawled into bed at 5:30 a.m., the prospect of being
back on the Lido for the 8:30 a.m. screening of Takashi Miike’s ‘Sukiyaki
Western Django’ rather lacked appeal, to put it mildly, so I resigned myself to
the usual routine of four litres of espresso and a stint in the press room
prior to collapsing into a seat for the 4:30 p.m. showing of Franco Giraldi’s
‘Sugar Colt’ (1966). It came as a surprise to find Giraldi himself in
attendance, having heard earlier in the week that he “wasn’t well†– a rather
ominous phrase when applied to a man in his mid-seventies (and one that was
also used to describe Sergio Sollima’s condition when he was unable to attend ‘The Big
Gundown’). But there he was, sporting a crutch and a slight hobble, but
otherwise in fine fettle.
The film’s star, Hunt Powers (real name, Jack Betts – any
relation to Tom Betts of ‘Westerns… all’italiana!’ magazine, one idly wonders?)
had already told how he landed the part of Sugar Colt at the second Spaghetti
Western Round Table, but that didn’t stop him telling it again. Here’s how it
goes: “I was on my home, in California, when I decided to call my agent. He
told me he’d gotten a call from Franco Giraldi about the leading role in a film
called ‘Sugar Colt’ Do you ride a horse? he asked. For years, I told him. I’m a
superb equestrian. Do you shoot? Indeed I do, and have in fact won many
sharpshooting contests. Can you be in Rome in two weeks? You bet your ass I
can! I then called John Wayne and told him I needed to learn how to ride and
shoot in two weeks. Duke told me to come out to his ranch, and his head
wrangler taught me everything he could. I’ve never told Franco that story till
now, so I guess I did all right.â€
‘Sugar Colt’, whose screenwriters included Sandro Continenza
and Fernando Di Leo, proves to be a rather uneven film, part revenge Western
and part comedy, with a dash of spy film thrown in for good measure. Tom
Cooper, a former undercover agent codenamed Sugar Colt, is approached by one Pinkerton
(presumably old Allan himself) and asked to assist in solving a case in which
some 150 Union sharpshooters had disappeared in mysterious circumstances at the
end of the Civil War. Cooper, now the dandifyied owner of a ladies’ shooting
academy, refuses, but changes his mind almost immediately when Pinkerton is
gunned down in the street. Disguising himself as a doctor, Sugar Colt travels
to Snake Valley to crack the case . . .
If the script of ‘Sugar Colt’ proves to be a bit wobbly, the
same cannot be said of Franco Giraldi’s direction, which is remarkably assured,
with good, clean composition and impressive use of landscape throughout. Powers
plays his part well enough, though his uncanny and extremely unfortunate
resemblance to pop star Robbie Williams, right down to the same smarmy
expressions and narcissistic posing, is highly distracting. Not his fault,
perhaps, but is smarminess really a quality one wants in a Western hero?
Soledad Miranda, Jess Franco’s ill-fated muse, shines in her role as Josefa,
and is ably supported by Gina Rovere as her Aunt Bess. In one amusing sequence,
after Josefa has been overcome by some gas released by Sugar Colt (don’t ask),
Rovere, instead of delivering the expected slap to help her regain her senses,
cold-cocks her with a beautifully-delivered straight right to the face. Also in
the cast, glimpsed briefly as one of Cooper’s clients in the shooting academy,
is Mara Krup, well-remembered as the hotel owner’s wife who drools over No Name
in ‘For a Few Dollars More’. The remarkably annoying theme tune by Luis
EnrÃquez Bacalov, which usually has me reaching for the skip button on my CD
player, is thankfully underemployed. It’s also interesting to note that the
name ‘Sugar Colt’, which sounds pretty odd to English-speaking viewers, sounds
even odder when uttered by Italian-speaking actors.
Afterwards, I managed to get Giraldi’s attention for all of
two minutes. Not knowing he was going to be there, I had no sensible questions
prepared, and found myself saying something inane about his use in ‘Sugar Colt’
of Carlo Simi’s El Paso set from ‘For a Few Dollars More’. “Ah,†he said, “Very
good. You have a very sharp eye.†Which was nice of him, of course, though in
truth you’d have to be Tony Anthony’s title character in ‘Blindman’ not to spot
it. I then complimented him on his direction of ‘Sugar Colt’. “It’s not
perfect, not all,†he replied. “It is, I think, very naïve. But there are
things I like. . . . I have not seen it for years.†He agreed that Miranda was
good, adding “but she died very young.†And that was the end of another
sensational, in-depth interview.
At this point, I made the acquaintance of Thomas Niedermair
of the German Augsburger-Allgemeine newspaper, who appears to be the
only other foreign journalist who’s here exclusively for the Spaghetti, and we
headed to the coffee shop in the Palazzo del Casinò to compare notes on the
Festival. After getting a few minor cultural differences out of the way (e.g.,
curbing Thomas’ urge to tell me the German title of each of the films we
discussed by pointing out that it was a well-known fact that, in Germany, every
Italian Western ever made was retitled Django-something-or-other: ‘A Fistful of
Django’, ‘Django Plays the Piano’, ‘Django Wipes His Ass’, etc.), Thomas told
me that he had been present for the entire retrospective, bar three days when
he had had to return home. As his paper required only two general reports, he
was, in effect, here because he wanted to be. Good for him, I say. Vamos a
matar, compañeros!
Thomas shared all of my concerns about the way this event
was being run: the insane scheduling, the often-poor prints, the non-existent
communication, the no-questions, no-photographs press conferences, and so on.
He observed that the audiences for the less well-known Westerns were not only
small, but mainly comprised of people with accreditation (most of whom don’t
seem to be press) and that he failed to see how the event was making any profit.
One photographer he’d met had told him, “There’s no point in my being here. I
can’t do my job. I may as well go home.†As for the Italian press, after the
first few days, the Spaghetti Western event had dropped out of the newspapers
almost entirely – which, given all the above, hardly seems surprising.
I mentioned that the curators no longer appeared to be
making any attempt to inform the press office of each day’s arrivals, adding
that, the night before, I had spent at least an hour with one of them, during
which time he had not felt it necessary to mention the fact that yes, after
all, Franco Giraldi would be arriving today. Thomas then added to my bad mood
by telling me that not only had Alessandro Alessandroni given a small concert
earlier in the week (advertised only on some sort of communal notice-board),
but also that Ennio Morricone had dropped over to the Lido to collect an award.
This latter fact – that the greatest composer of Western film music ever to
draw a baton could arrive and depart from a Festival showcasing seven of his
movies without any word of it filtering down to those attending the event
– says, I feel, all that needs to be said about the complete lack of
communication in what has become an increasingly isolated (and isolating) event.
And on that happy note, I took my leave of Django Niedermair and headed off to
the isolation of the press room.
************
The next movie of the day, starting at 10:00 p.m., was
Franco Rossetti’s ‘The Dirty Outlaws’ (1967), shown here under its original
title, ‘El Desperado’. The film opens with Steve Blasco (Andrea Giordana),
known as the Desperado, finding himself the principal guest at a necktie party.
He is helped to escape by a friend, Jonathan (Aldo Berti), who has a penchant
for impersonating preachers and judges. Later, Blasco learns about a stash of
gold from Bill Flannery, a dying Confederate soldier, who has been sending
money back to his father, a blind gunsmith, in order to buy a ranch. Taking
Flannery’s uniform, Blasco travels to the almost-deserted town of Overton,
where he succeeds in convincing both the father and Cathy, the girl who looks
after him (Piero Lulli and Rosemarie Dexter respectively), that he is indeed
the prodigal son.
In the meantime, two Confederate soldiers arrive in Overton
to take charge of an expected payroll shipment. Unfortunately for them, a gang
of baddies are also on the trail of the money, and the soldiers and Blasco are
soon captured. Blasco is recognized by Lucy (Dana Ghia), an old flame who is
now the companion of the gang leader, Asher (Franco Giornelli), and is allowed
to assist in securing the gold. Blasco then tries to escape with the loot but
is tracked down and brought back to Overton, where Asher and his men torment
and then murder the blind Flannery before turning their attention to Blasco . .
.
‘El Desperado’ is the only Western directed by Rossetti, who
worked on the scripts of ‘Django’, ‘Get the Coffin Ready’, ‘ Ringo and His
Golden Pistol’, and ‘Texas, Adiós’, and is a very fine effort indeed – tense,
sharply photographed, with strongly delineated characters, and a splendid title
song which manages to be both parodic and rousing at the same time. Giordana is
well-cast as El Desperado, good-looking enough to be attractive to both Cathy
and Lucy but with a shifty and furtive air which suits the part well; he is,
however, extremely unconvincing in the action scenes involving fisticuffs.
Piero Lulli, always an asset to any Western (usually as nakedly ruthless
villains, as in Questi’s ‘If You Live, Shoot!’), is cast against type as the
blind gunsmith and proves very effective, as is Giornelli as Asher, one of
those bad hats who seem superficially more civilised than their men but who is
soon revealed to be a complete and utter swine. Berti has fun in his conman
role, and both actresses register well, particularly Ghia as a woman who senses
her best days are behind her. There’s also a nice part for Spaghetti regular,
John Bartha, as one of the unfortunate Confederate soldiers.
Rossetti, who attended the screening, clearly borrowed the
‘look’ of his film from ‘Django’, with the mud-covered main street the
principal setting of the story (in addition to making some sense of the
English-language title). I say “borrowed†because, according to Manolo
Bolognini, the producer of ‘Django’, Sergio Corbucci originally intended to set
his film in a snowbound town, but was dissuaded by Bolognini (who told him
snowbound Westerns never made a cent) and forced to wait until ‘The Great
Silence’ to achieve that particular ambition. The plot point of Blasco learning
of a cache of gold and then adopting the guise of a dead Confederate soldier
is, of course, strongly reminiscent of Tuco’s encounter with Bill Carson in ‘The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. ‘El Desperado’, which is available on DVD from
Wild East under its ‘Dirty Outlaws’ title, is an excellent Western which makes
one regret that Rossetti did not return to the genre.
*************
The high standard set by Rossetti’s film was maintained at
midnight by Romolo Guerrieri’s ‘$10,000 Blood Money’ (1966), starring Gianni
Garko, Claudio Camaso, and Loredana Nusciak. Garko (billed as ‘Gary Hudson’)
plays Django, here reinvented as a bounty hunter and minus his trademark coffin
and machine-gun, in what author Howard Hughes has correctly identified as one
of only four films featuring the character which are actually any good (three,
really, if one discounts, as one should, Questi’s ‘If You Live, Shoot!’).
The film opens with a seagull flying over breaking waves,
before cutting to a Trinity-like close-up of Django’s bare feet as he snoozes
on a beach beside the dead body of one of his victims. Not then, the usual introduction
to a film about a bounty hunter, but one quite in keeping with a movie which
demonstrates an admirably idiosyncratic approach to what, on the surface, is a
fairly typical story. On his return to town, Django meets Manuel Vásquez
(Camaso) and it is later suggested to him that he might like to collect the
$2,000 bounty on the outlaw. But Django declines, saying that he has great
faith in Manuel’s price rising much higher.
Manuel then abducts the daughter of Mendoza, a rich
landowner responsible for having the bandit imprisoned four years earlier.
Mendoza approaches Django to rescue the girl, but his offer is not sufficient.
Following a card game in which Django explains to Manuel that he is waiting for
his price to reach $10,000, two of the bandit’s henchmen bushwhack the bounty
hunter and leave him for dead. Django is nursed back to health by Mijanou
(Nusciak), with whom he begins an affair. Mendoza returns, this time with an
offer of $10,000. Mijanou, who takes a dim view of Django’s chosen profession,
tells him she will be leaving for San Francisco in six days’ time – with or
without him. Django waits for Manuel at his father’s house in Tampa. The two
men fight, then enter into an alliance to rob a gold shipment. Django agrees to
participate on condition that no one is killed. Later, having bloodlessly
disposed of its cavalry escort, Django finds the stagecoach surrounded by dead
bodies. Inside the coach is Mijanou, also dead. Django tracks down Manuel and
his men, steals the gold from them and uses it as a lure to provoke a settling
of accounts.
The first thing to be said about ‘$10,000 Blood Money’ is
that it’s better enjoyed if one tries to forget that Garko is playing Django,
not least because of the actor’s later identification with the role of Sartana.
In both Corbucci’s film and ‘Get the Coffin Ready’ Django is a revenge hero,
but in Guerrieri’s film, all that remains of the original character is the
name. Garko’s Django, despite the brutality of his calling, is a refined and
sensitive individual, quite the gentleman butcher, in fact. Remarkably, for a
Spaghetti Western hero, he not only falls in love with Mijanou, but asks her to
take him with her to San Francisco, implying that he too is sick of killing men
for money. He is then seen trying to buy her a hat, and later, when he finds
her dead, he cries both for her and for himself. How much of this was in the
original script, and how much resulted from the casting of Garko, himself a
refined and sensitive actor, would be interesting to know, but the result is a
Spaghetti Western that, in both theme and handling, may justly be described as
romantic – a rare enough thing, indeed.
Camaso’s Vásquez (referred to as ‘Cortéz’ in a number of
sources, though his name is clearly visible on the numerous Wanted posters seen
throughout the film) seems to have been inspired by Gian Maria Volonté’s El
Indio, not least in the casting of Camaso, the latter’s real-life brother, in
the part. Like El Indio, Manuel, on his return from prison, decides to inflict
what he considers an appropriate revenge on the man responsible (in this case,
abducting his daughter, and, by the way, slaughtering his innocent farm hands).
And, as in ‘For a Few Dollars More’, Manuel pulls off a daring raid which
increases the price on his head, thus making him a more attractive target for
bounty hunters. Nonetheless, Camaso, while never as well-known as his more
illustrious brother, was more than capable of creating unusual and distinctive
villains himself (see, in particular, his grotesque portrayal of The Professor
in Antonio Margheriti’s ‘Vengeance’), and in ‘$10,000 Blood Money’ he plays
Manuel with a suppressed malevolence (and plenty of eye liner) which is really
quite something to behold.
Nusciak, who of course had played Maria opposite Franco Nero
in the original ‘Django’, doesn’t have a great deal to do in a role which
mainly serves to illustrate that Django’s women, like Frank’s friends in ‘Once
Upon a Time in the West’, “have a high mortality rateâ€, but what she does, she
does well. Adriana Ambesi, as the abducted Dolores who falls in love with her
captor, has even less to do. Fernando Sancho, on the other hand, has a grand
old time playing Manuel’s father, a murderous old reprobate whose braces are
decorated with dead lawmen’s stars. In one ghastly scene, he encourages his
woman, Rosita (Linda De Felice), some years and many pounds past her prime, to
show off her dancing skills, laughing uproariously while Django and Manuel’s
men exchange embarrassed glances.
Black humour is also on display in a scene where Django
shoots a wanted man who is about to hurl some lighted dynamite at him. The
bullet hits the dynamite, and Django is forced to conclude that he may as well
forget about collecting the bounty as there’s nothing much left to turn in.
Django also borrows a leaf out of Sherlock Holmes’ casebook by placing his hat
on a tailor’s dummy and then trundling it past a window to foil an attempt on
his life, as well as employing No Name’s trick of setting his clothes on a
reversed chair before appearing out of nowhere and gunning down the baddies.
‘$10,000 Blood Money’ also boasts a wonderfully complex and evocative
soundtrack by Nora Orlandi which perfectly complements what, regardless of any
quibbles concerning its legitimacy as a genuine Django movie, is a first class
film.
Before the screening, Gianni Garko spoke of the hours and
hours of practice he undertook in order to learn how to play a Western hero
convincingly, particularly when it came to drawing a gun. A great admirer of
Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda, he was determined that, if he was going to appear
in a Western, he was going to do it properly. The results are clear to see in
‘’$10,000 Blood Money’, and, of course, Garko would later become one of the
greats of the Italian Western with his various portrayals of the avenging angel
known as Sartana. Guerrieri himself (real name Romolo Girolami, and uncle of
Enzo Castellari) was also in attendance. ‘$10,000 Blood Money’ can be obtained
as part of a German box set from Koch Media, and is also available as a
“reconstructed†DVD-R from the legendary ‘Franco Cleef’, a man whom, to quote
his partial namesake in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, may be described as a
“golden-haired angel†who watches lovingly over the Spaghetti Western.