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I remember learning from Alex Cox that all the great spaghetti westerns are directed by a man named Sergio. There’s Leone, of course, but Corbucci and Sollima as well. This is one of the latter’s greatest films and it stands up well to my memory of it from two decades ago.
I’m watching it because 9th January would be Lee Van Cleef’s hundredth birthday and so chose the English dub rather than the original Italian language version. It’s an odd dub that shifts now and then back to Italian, with Van Cleef’s voice dubbed, but it mostly features his memorably deep voice.
He’s the hero of the film, Jonathan Corbett, but one of the best things about it is that he’s not a clear hero. He has honour and integrity and he’s cleaned up his part of the west, with the sheriff’s wall now free of wanted posters. His friends are keen for him to run for senator. However, he gets suckered into going after a Mexican who supposedly raped and murdered a twelve year old girl, without seeking proof first, becoming a rather flawed arm of justice. We may not be in on the real story yet, but we can see that it’s clearly a setup from the start.
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Just as he’s a good guy but not perfect, the man he’s chasing, “Cuchillo” Sanchez, isn’t the usual villain. There’s no surprise that he isn’t the monster claimed but that doesn’t mean he counts as a good guy. He’s sharp and inventive but he lives by his wits and they get him into and then out of a lot of trouble. He’s played by Tomas Milian and he continually gets better as the film runs on. He’s a worthy adversary.
In fact, everyone here is on best form and I don’t restrict that to the actors. Van Cleef and Milian are excellent, sure, but Walter Barnes and Nieves Navarro are happy to match their level, albeit with far less screen time, as does Fernando Sancho as Capt. Segura, the Mexican army boss who’s given excellent lines. At one crucial point in the film, with men ransacking his town for Cuchillo, he advises simply going to sleep. “Those who sleep don’t see and don’t hear,” he points out. It’s the safer option.
Gérard Herter has a particularly iconic role as Captain von Schulenberg, a rigid Austrian baron with a monocle, gloves, starched collar, even a cape. He’s supposedly the best shot in Europe—“23 duels. 23 widows.” Naturally, that talent gets tested late in the film.
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Sollima directs with panache, leaning on the beautiful cinematography of Carlo Carlini and the themes of the script by Franco Solinas and Fernando Morandi. There’s plenty here about power, about class and about justice, and the original 110 minute version lets those themes develop naturally.
Carlini is responsible for at least two utterly iconic spaghetti western moments here and I would elevate a third to a similar level.
The first comes early, before the main plot is set into motion. Corbett is still cleaning up the west and he’s got the drop on three crooks who come to him with loot thinking he’s their contact. Carlini shows the trio from Corbett’s perspective, with the corpse of their contact hanging behind them. They choose to shoot it out, so Corbett gives them each a bullet, and Carlini reprises the same shot with a bullet on a log in front of each of them, Corbett’s gun in the side of the frame. It’s gorgeous stuff.
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The second comes late, so I won’t spoil who and why, but we’re readying for a duel with a man leaning down to pick up a knife, with his opponent framed between his legs. It’s exactly the sort of shot we want to see in a spaghetti western but it’s rarely done this well.
The third comes in between, in a day labour camp for Mexicans. Cuchillo is in the barber’s chair getting a shave when Corbett rides into the camp and we see the latter arrive over the shoulder of the former. It’s impeccable setup aided by strong choreography.
To be fair, the script gives Carlini plenty of opportunity because most of the film is taken up with a quest, Corbett chasing Cuchillo over much of the west. We see towns and desert but that’s just the beginning. There’s that Mexican day labour camp, Mormons on the road south to Mexico, a wagon heading west to California, a widow of a homesteader, a monastery on the border, a Mexican army fort on the other side, a bordello, a prison, even a celebration parade for the Day of the Dead. Each of them has its part to play in developing the characters and their relationships to each other.
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Wherever we happen to be, of course, what we’re watching is Corbett chasing Cuchillo. I adore the fact that he keeps catching him but then losing him again, learning a little more in each encounter until he has enough to put the pieces together in a puzzle he didn’t know was a puzzle until late in the film.
I’ve been a fan of Lee Van Cleef since I was a kid, initially because he looked like a character but later because he created so many of them. He’s so closely associated with westerns that it became quite the joy for me to watch him in other genres, in pictures such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Kansas City Confidential and The Conqueror. He never seemed to fit in these but he always put on a memorable show anyway.
Sure, he started his film career in High Noon, a notable western, and continued to appear in American westerns both on the big screen and small, including Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but it was the westerns he made in Spain for the Italians that truly made him a star.
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He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role in For a Few Dollars More and was better yet in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, playing Angel Eyes, the “Bad” of the title. That led him to The Big Gundown and Death Rides a Horse, then to a series of his own, playing the title role in two Sabata films. He was a great hero but an even better villain, so he was often cast that way.
His tough but gritty demeanour made him a natural choice for the violent thrillers of the seventies but he was still busy with westerns. He did find his way late in his career to films like The Octagon, Escape from New York and Code Name: Wild Geese, every one of which I saw long before his more iconic western roles. As a kid, I was also a big fan of his ninja TV show, The Master, which sadly only ran to one season.
He married three times and died in 1989, a working actor until the end, his final feature, Thieves of Fortune, released posthumously. As a tribute to the villains he played so well, his grave marker reads “Best of the Bad”.
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