Before heading into the press room, I decided (perhaps
unwisely, as it turned out) to visit a photographic exhibition on the first
floor of the Palazzo del Cinema. Entitled “Fotografi nel West (all’italiana)â€,
it showcased approximately fifty production stills, starting, not surprisingly,
with those of Angelo Novi, Sergio Leone’s regular on-set shutterbug (who can be
seen as one of the monks in the Mission of San Antonio sequence of ‘The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly’). Other photographers represented included Divo
Cavicchioli (who took some good portraits on the set of ‘A Bullet for the
General’), and Enrico Appetito. The exhibits have been lent to the Venice
Festival as a kind of trailer for what I gather will be a larger exhibition
mounted by the Comune di Cesena and the Regione Emilia Romagna later this
month. Agreeable enough though the exhibition was, the fact remains that most
of the stills were familiar from books and other sources, and I’d have been
rather more impressed if some of the accompanying captions hadn’t contained
incorrect dates and misidentified subjects.
After belting out some copy, I headed for the 4:30 p.m.
screening of the Japanese samurai movie, ‘The Fort of Death’, only to find that
the shoebox-sized cinema in which it was showing was full. While this was my
own fault, having pushed my stay in the press room right to the wire and then
mistimed my run to the cinema (forgetting how long it can take to cut a trail
through the red carpet rubberneckers – where’s Django and his machine-gun when
you need them?), I decided not to lose too much sleep over it (not that I’ve
much to lose), as the film was not originally intended to be part of the
Spaghetti Western retrospective anyway, apparently being forced to substitute
for Antonio Margheriti’s mysteriously-missing ‘…And God Said to Cain’.
Presumably, the cross-over appeal of a samurai film with Spaghetti Western
references was responsible for what was another first for this retrospective: a
full house. And so, swearing mildly, I fought my way back through hostile
territory to the comparative safety of Fort Press Room for another stint of
on-line scribbling.
***********
Two hours later, it was time for the first Western of the
day, Edoardo Mulargia’s ‘The Rewards’s Yours, the Man’s Mine’ (1969), shown
here under its original release title of ‘El Puro’. The story concerns a
gunfighter who, like Gregory Peck’s character in the film of that name, has
grown weary of being called out by every on-the-prod, would-be shootist looking
to make a name for himself. Unlike Peck’s character, however, Joe Bishop, known
as El Puro (“the Pure Oneâ€, though the name may also refer to the Spanish
phrase, de puro cansado, meaning “out of sheer tirednessâ€) has dropped
out of sight completely, becoming a hopeless drunk in the process. A gang of
bad hats, led by the flamboyant Gipsy, are determined to locate El Puro and
kill him, both for the $10,000 bounty on his head and to clear the way for the
takeover of “the whole of Mexicoâ€, as the megalomaniac Gipsy modestly puts it.
Eventually, they track down Bishop to a small border town, where he is fighting
the demon drink with the help of a saloon girl named Rosy. The bad hats kill
Rosy, and El Puro is blamed for her death. After a friend manages to prove his
innocence, Bishop is released from jail and the stage is set for the final
showdown with Gipsy and his minions.
If you imagine, based on the above synopsis and Mulargia’s
generally undistinguished career, that ‘El Puro’ is just another Spaghetti
Western, then you’re in for a big surprise. I’d had some warning of what to
expect thanks to a number of conversations with Marc Fiorini, the
Italian-American actor who played Gipsy under the pseudonym ‘Ashborn Hamilton,
Jr.’ Fiorini, the only guest of the retrospective who’s made the effort to be
here from Day One, was joined today by his co-star, Robert Woods, who’d flown
in from L.A. The following account of the making of ‘El Puro’ is based on their
joint recollections (and I mean “joint†in at least two senses of the word).
But first a brief digression concerning Fiorini’s choice of
pseudonym. As a good product of the Sixties’ counterculture (both then and
now), Fiorini had settled on ‘Ashborn’ as a play on the word ‘phoenix’ – born from
the ashes. Sitting at a restaurant on the Via Veneto one day, he was
considering out loud the possibilities of linking it with ‘Jefferson’,
‘Edison’, or ‘Thompson’, when Federico Fellini, who’d obviously been
eavesdropping, leaned over from the next table and proposed ‘Hamilton’.
Needless to say, Fiorini did not respond by telling the director to clear off
and mind his own business – hence ‘Ashborn Hamilton, Jr.’
Faced with the prospect of making a low-budget Western at
the small Pisorno Studios (located, rather improbably, in Tirrenia, Tuscany),
Woods and Fiorini took the script of ‘El Puro’, which already contained an
existential slant, and persuaded Mulargia to let them turn it into a “Zen
Buddhist Westernâ€. Mulargia, who made some good-to-average Westerns and a
couple of women-in-prison flicks under the name ‘Edward G. Müller’, was
encouraged to go along with this idea after being handed a large joint. “Smoke
this,†Fiorini recalls telling him, “and then you’ll hear us better.†And so,
with Mulargia (for whom Woods had made ‘Pray to God and Dig Your Grave’ the
year before) to some extent “tuned in and turned onâ€, the first Zen Buddhist
Western (made at least a year before Alejandro Jodorowsky’s more-celebrated ‘El
Topo’) got underway.
When we first meet El Puro, he is unable to pay his bar
bill, and is beaten up and ejected from the premises. This sort of scene,
usually involving the “comic relief†town drunk, is something of a Western
staple, but in ‘El Puro’, the hero’s punishment is both painful and
humiliating. Gipsy, meanwhile, in a scene reminiscent of Tuco’s shopping
expedition in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, helps himself to various items
from a clothing store, demonstrating, like Harmonica, an “interest in fashionâ€,
though for rather different reasons. His gang, whom we’ve previously seen
rescuing Gipsy from a siege, is comprised of Mario Brega, whose character, Tim,
shows an unhealthy interest in underage girls, along with a perhaps too-tender
concern for his younger brother (Maurizio Bonuglia), the beautiful-but-ugly
Aldo Berti (who had a bit part in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’), and (I
think) Angelo Desideri as a tweed-wearing Englishman, complete with pince-nez.
Having set up the basic premise, described by Woods as “the
death and rebirth of a gunfighterâ€, the film then focuses for long periods on
El Puro’s struggle with John Barleycorn in a manner which pushes it well into
the realm of the experimental. These scenes, in which the normally handsome
Woods really does look a wreck, complete with orange eyeballs (too much weed,
perhaps?) and kaleidoscopic hallucinations, may well try the patience of
viewers expecting them to be both brief and functional, as, for example, in the
scenes of No Name’s “resurrection†in the mine prior to his showdown with the
Rojos. Too bad; anyone hoping to get the most out of ‘El Puro’ has to be
prepared to just “go with the flow and enjoy the show,†as Fiorini likes to put
it.
The next key scene, in a film which has long since
jettisoned any pretence of following traditional narrative progressions, occurs
with the death of Rosy (played by the stupendous Rosalba Neri, an
always-welcome presence in every popular Italian genre of the Sixties
and Seventies). Her beating at the hands of Aldo Berti’s Cassidy is watched
with rising excitement by the deranged Gipsy, who then walks over to Cassidy
and kisses him full on the mouth. While Gipsy’s homosexuality has been hinted
at earlier, it has not been made explicit until this point. In fact, Fiorini
recalls a sequence set in the clothing store, cut from the final print, in
which Gipsy offers Cassidy a choice of a blue or a pink dress; Cassidy chooses
the blue one, cuts it in half, and wears the top as a shirt for the rest of the
film. The reinsertion of this scene would, I think, strengthen the film, by
making Gipsy’s later kiss seem less like a “shock tacticâ€. According to both
Fiorini and Woods, when the kissing scene had been successfully shot in one
take, Aldo Berti, who apparently wasn’t just playing a gay caballero,
announced to anyone who would listen, “I don’t think that was quite right.
Let’s do it again.â€
The final showdown of ‘El Puro’ is, fittingly enough, quite
unlike any other you’ve ever seen. Mario Brega, whose brother has died of
gunshots inflicted by Bishop earlier, charges El Puro like an enraged rhino –
quite a sight, as you can imagine. When El Puro shoots Gipsy, the latter drops
his pistol and falls forward, extending his hand like a gun and going “Pow!â€
before stretching his length in the dust, a reference to an earlier scene where
Gipsy has dreamed he is going insane.
Both Woods and Fiorini take a justifiable pride in ‘El
Puro’, while at the same time admitting that it fell somewhat short of what
they’d envisioned. Fiorini, though critical of the editing, says that Mulargia,
while he “was not in the moment†and “was unable to immerse himself in the
metaphysical aspects,†nonetheless “did his best.†Woods concurs with this,
pointing out that the Zen Buddhist aspects became diluted. As an example, he
mentions the fact that El Puro appears bare-footed in the final shootout, all
that remained, in visual terms, of the notion of rebirth into a new state of
being. For the scene to have worked, he says, El Puro should have appeared as
naked as the day he was originally born. “And I was quite prepared to stand
there with my dick hanging out in front,†he adds, though presumably Mulargia,
to say nothing of the film’s producers, might have required something stronger
than grass to allow that onto the screen.
While certain of the transgressive elements found in ‘El
Puro’ had surfaced before in Italian Westerns – or at any rate, in Giulio
Questi’s ‘Django, Kill!’ (1967), in which the protagonist also undergoes a
death and rebirth (though in an overtly Christian rather than Buddhist sense)
and confronts a gang of homosexuals led by a flamboyant and deranged lunatic –
the movie is, to a large extent, successful on its own terms. Marc Fiorini
enjoyed pointing out that this film, and in particular his kiss with Aldo Berti,
predated the much-ballyhooed ‘Brokeback Mountain’ by thirty-six years, though
as Questi’s movie, as well as Giorgio Capitani’s ‘The Ruthless Four’ (1968),
demonstrate, Italian film-makers were rather less reticent in depicting “the
love that dare not speak its name†than their Hollywood counterparts. Though
not for all tastes, by any means, ‘El Puro’ perfectly illustrates the basic
rule-of-thumb for delving into the wonderful world of Spaghetti Westerns –
always expect the unexpected. On those grounds alone, to say nothing of
Alessandro Alessandroni’s memorable score, it deserves to be better known, and
hopefully a DVD release will follow in the near future.
************
With no more Spaghetti scheduled till midnight, I was able
to get some copy filed before riding up for Budd Boetticher’s ‘Ride Lonesome’
(1959) at 10:00 p.m. The cinema, one of the larger ones, was filled to about
sixty per cent of its capacity, which was pleasing to see. What was
considerably less pleasing was that we were left sitting there, without even a
piece of wood to whittle on, for more than twenty minutes, during which
absolutely nothing happened. At one point, an aggrieved Englishman was heard to
call out, “This is supposed to be an international festival! Can nobody tell us
anything?†He may as well have saved his breath, because whoever was
responsible for running this show continued to give a good combined impression
of Claude Rains in ‘The Invisible Man’ and Jean-Louis Trintignant in ‘The Great
Silence’.
Eventually, the reason for this delay was revealed, when a
bunch of techies involved in the restoration of the Boetticher films arrived
and were introduced. Incredibly, given their tardiness, one of them then proceeded
to give his best Oscar-acceptance speech, thanking everyone he’d ever met and
droning on about the restoration for at least ten minutes. Needless to say, I
switched off, hearing in my head the Duke’s celebrated putdown of Harry Morgan
in ‘The Shootist’ – “Put it in a nutshell? You couldn’t put it in a barrel
without a bottom. You’re the longest-winded bastard I ever listened to. . .
.†I mean, really . . . While it’s one thing to have a film delayed
for an introduction by the director or somebody actually involved in the making
of it, it’s quite another to be kept waiting for the privilege of listening to
a bunch of back-room boys with bad time-keeping giving themselves a big hurrah.
It says much for the forbearance of the audience (who probably weren’t
intending to watch the midnight movie anyway) that these windbags were given a
round of applause rather than the bum’s rush . . .
Well, at least ‘Ride Lonesome’, when it finally started,
looked like it had been restored, which, though I didn’t mention it at
the time, is more than can be said for ‘The Tall T’, which still suffers from
changes in colour tone at the reel changes and an overall “dusty lookâ€. ‘Ride
Lonesome’ is probably the best of the “Ranown cycle†(or, at any rate, my
favourite), and the one which most clearly influenced Sergio Leone. Randolph
Scott plays bounty hunter Ben Brigade, a man who definitely has “something on
his mind, something to do with death.†In the opening scene, he captures Billy
John (James Best), who’s wanted on a charge of murder. Boetticher’s framing,
with Billy John in the background and Brigade’s gun and gun hand in the
foreground, was later borrowed, emphasised and made synonymous with the Italian
Western by Sergio Leone.
Before being made prisoner by Brigade, Billy John manages to
send word to his brother, Frank (Lee Van Cleef). In the course of his journey,
Brigade is joined by an amiable pair of outlaws, Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts)
and Wid (James Coburn), and the recently-widowed Mrs. Lane (played by Boetticher’s
then wife, Karen Steele). Boone and Wid have also been trailing Billy John,
intending to hand him over in exchange for an amnesty which will allow them to
start a new life within the law. Following an Indian attack, Boone saves
Brigade’s life and thwarts an attempt by Billy John to escape, but he warns the
bounty hunter that, at some point before journey’s end, he and Wid are going to
have to make a play for the captive. Eventually, however, it dawns on the party
that Brigade isn’t exactly in a hurry to deliver Billy John to justice; in
fact, he’s using him as a lure to draw Frank into a confrontation.
Like Henry Fonda’s villain of the same name in ‘Once Upon a
Time in the West’, Van Cleef’s Frank has a history of hanging people who didn’t
deserve it – Brigade’s wife, in his case. Finally, in a clearing dominated by
the same hanging tree used by Frank, Brigade calls a halt, setting the scene
for a settling of accounts. Afterwards, he allows Sam and Wid to take Billy
John and get their shot at a new beginning, possibly with the involvement of
Mrs. Lane. For Brigade, however, like Harmonica, there is no future, and his
last act is to set fire to the hanging tree.
All the qualities found in ‘The Tall T’ are also present in
‘Ride Lonesome’ – only more so. Script, dialogue, photography, action, and
editing are all absolutely first class in this masterpiece of laconic economy.
Scott is at his most grimly authoritative, and while Pernell Roberts may lack
Richard Boone’s dangerous presence, both he and Coburn are a delight to watch.
The only minor criticism that can be made arises, as in ‘The Tall T’, from the
scenes revolving around the woman: it’s fair to say that Roberts’ lines about
“a woman like that [having] a need, a need deep down that only a man can git atâ€,
haven’t aged well, and indeed it’s hard to imagine they didn’t sound pretty
funny back in 1959. The only other flaw, perhaps, in ‘Ride Lonesome’ is the
manner of Frank’s death. Having being built up throughout the film (“You jes’
wait till my brother Frank catches up to us.â€), his actual demise is
unsatisfactorily abrupt, almost perfunctory. After an exchange of words, Frank
charges his horse at Brigade, Brigade lifts his Winchester, and ‘bang!’, Frank
is dead. Somehow, one feels, Boetticher should have given Van Cleef a bigger
exit, as Leone would do so memorably in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. But
what the hell . . . as Joe E. Brown observed, “nobody’s perfect.â€
************
The experimental tone set earlier in the day by ‘El Puro’
was continued at midnight with a screening of Tinto Brass’s ‘Yankee’ (1966), a
decidedly oddball effort from a director best known for a seemingly endless
succession of sex sagas. The story, such as it is, involves a gunman known only
as Yankee (played by French actor, Philippe Leroy), who travels south of the
border to a territory controlled by a sadistic bandit called “Great†Concho
(played by Emilio Largo himself, Adolfo Celi). Holding out the promise of a shipment
of gold, Yankee embarks on what seems like a live-action game of chess with
Concho, killing off a number of the bandit’s pawns before being captured,
tortured, and then escaping for the inevitable showdown.
Whereas ‘El Puro’ might be termed an intellectual
experiment, with its examination of the psychological and spiritual state of
its protagonists, ‘Yankee’ is a visual experiment, drawing on such sources as
the Surrealists, Chinese ideograms, and, most particularly, Italian comic books
for its inspiration. This is evident in the presentation of Yankee himself:
Leroy, a tall, gangling actor, is dressed in black and given a slightly
over-sized hat which, in long shots, combine to give him the look of a cartoon
figure drawn by Bruno Bozzetto, whose animated Western, ‘West and Soda’ had
appeared two years earlier. Characters are introduced with fetishistic
close-ups: a spur, an ankle, etc., and there are a lot of strange camera
angles, weird lighting effects, and disjointed cuts intended to create a suitably
delirious and “unreal†experience.
Which, of course, is all very well and quite clever in its
own way, but a feature film of almost 100 minutes in length requires something
more than an assortment of visual tricks, no matter how eye-popping, to hold the
viewer’s interest. Unfortunately, and in common with so many films based on, or
attempting to emulate, comic books, ‘Yankee’ offers characters who are little
more than ciphers (a splendidly grotesque one in Celi’s case, admittedly) with
the result that the whole exercise soon becomes tiresome in the extreme, a
relentless visual assault incapable of engaging either the intellect or the
emotions.
As with everything else in ‘Yankee’, the violence is quite
extreme. In one scene, a member of Concho’s gang, shot in both arms, is left to
die on the ground. Another of the bandit’s henchmen leans over him and we hear
a beating sound. We assume that the second man is rather brutally putting his
friend out of his misery, but then Brass cuts to a different angle and we see
that, no, what he’s actually doing is beating the man’s gold teeth out of his
mouth with the butt of his gun ( a scene which both predates and prefigures the
infamous “gold rush†sequence in ‘Django, Kill!’). There is also a shot in
which a peón woman is suspended on her husband’s shoulders with a noose
around her neck, one which authors Antonio Bruschini and Federico De Zigno, in
their excellent book Western all’italiana: The Wild, the Sadist and the
Outsiders (Glittering Images, Florence, 2001) cite as “anticipating the key
flashback sequence of Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.†This may
well be so, though for anyone to whom the thought of Sergio Leone actually
being influenced by Tinto Brass, of all people, is too horrible to contemplate,
there remains the comforting fact that Leone had already demonstrated a decided
penchant for the imaginative suspension of characters running back through Tuco’s
tribulations to those of Silvanito in Fistful of Dollars.
Brass himself was present to introduce the film, but
appeared to have little to add to what he had said at the Spaghetti Western
Round Table on Sunday. After citing various sources on which he had drawn for
‘Yankee’, the most important of whom seemed to be Guido Crepax, creator of the
erotic comic-strip, ‘Valentina’ (a character based, to a large extent, on the
screen persona of Louise Brooks), Brass recounted how the film had been taken
away from him on completion and re-edited. Brass sued to have his name removed
from the credits, but was later persuaded to relent so that the film could
qualify for a subsidy (and a wider release, presumably). His only other
involvement with the Western genre came when he was asked to shoot a
nude scene with Laura Antonelli for the film ‘A Man Called Sledge’ (1970),
which he did, but which was not included in the final cut.
There now follows a learned footnote for people who like
that sort of thing: As mentioned in my first report, prior to this trip I
engaged in some largely fruitless research intended to discover the
contribution of Venetians to Italian cinema. As you may recall, Terence Hill
seemed to be the only person to qualify in terms of serious international
recognition. But there was also Tinto Brass, who, though to a much lesser
degree, might also be considered a household name – if only in households whose
occupants possess a marked fixation with big-breasted actresses. While
reputable reference books list Signor Brass’s birthplace as Milan, the IMDb has
opted for Venice (or “Venice, Veneto, Italyâ€, as it so helpfully put it,
presumably for the benefit of anyone likely to confuse the original with some
other world-famous floating city of the same name). A chance encounter with
Signor Brass provided the opportunity to clear up this matter and in so doing,
add immeasurably to the sum of human knowledge. Who could resist? Certainly not
me. So, Signor Brass, where did you first see the light of day? “In Milan,â€
replied Signor Brass, unwrapping one of his trademark cigars. “But my family is
Venetian, and we returned to Venice the same day I was born. So when I’m asked,
I usually just say ‘Venice’, as it’s a lot easier than explaining.†Grazie,
Signor Brass.