[Low Odysseys]

You all saw Kill Bill. Come on, admit it. Some of you really loved it, some of you mostly liked it, some of you thought it was totally radass, and some of you probably shrugged, like me, and said: “Yeah, hey Quentin? I saw all those movies too. I love them like you do, so thanks for reminding me of all those movies I love in one movie…”

An aside: granted, I mean that in a pretty radass way -other than the 2nd half of KB2, which was mostly balls in the same way that all of Sin City sucked after the 1st part was over: if you kill off your most interesting and complex character early on, why the fuck should I watch the rest?

Uh, hold on. I just had to edit an unexpented hate-rant about hipsters/irony and so forth. Lemme reset…

Anyways: Remember when Uma was in the coffin? Great music, yeah? Ennio Morricone. Originally used in one of my most favorite of the great Sergio Corbucci’s Zapata Westerns…

There were 3 important Sergios, you see. Leone, Corbucci, and Sollima. Sergio Leone “created” the stamp that gave us the spag western. Corbucci and Sollima refined it, and then both of them proceeded to deconstruct it while Leone sulked and raged and eventually did his own deconstruction… but thats another story.

The Zapata Western: still Italian, still shot primarily in Almeria, Spain, still dirty and grungy and with kickass soundtracks and that solitary foley effect for every single gunshot… but the Zapata Westerns had a bit more heart than the traditional “vengeance seeking stranger” spag western.

1st off: remember kids, this was Socialist Italy. So the Zapata Western was usually about a peasant (Tomas Milan, Tony Muscante, Rod Steiger. Huh?) who is mostly an oaf or a buffoon, but who gets embroiled in the Revolution in Mexico… usually aided by a suave foreign mercenary (Franco Nero played this role a half dozen times with variations) who is just in it for the money. Together they end up discovering the Real Revolution, the Peasant becomes a Believer, and The Mercenary goes off (or dies) in the end after having pushed away his financial scruples just long enough to do one thing “right”.

Usually they are opposed by an American gunfighter, representing American Foreign Policy (remember, this was the late 60s, early 70s: Vietnam) who was often played as a bloodthirsty bastard, or an ammoral sociopath, or Jack Palance- who could kind of do it all at once.

What does this all have to do with the music from Kill Bill? Have I lost you already?

Shit, no one reads this anyways. This is for posterity.

In Sergio Corbucci’s Il Mercenario (1968), revolutionary Tony Muscante and gunrunning merc Franco Nero have foiled evil Jack Palance. Muscante has become a real revolutionary by now, and has to go underground… Franco Nero goes to a bullfight and realizes that Muscante is still in the country, working as a clown. But Palance has figured it out too…

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you L’Arena

Now tell me that that didn’t rock. The circular setting (lifted from Leone’s own Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo) the Morricone score… the elegent pacing. Strangely, this came out the same year as another Corbucci effort, the incredibly bleak and influential Il Grande Silencio… where The Great Silence is a pretty nihilistic and grim movie (and an awesome one), The Mercenary (also released as “The Professional Gun”) ends on a pretty strong note: The blood-monied mercenary rides off after saving the revolutionary, admonishing him to “Keep dreaming. Just keep your eyes open.” Apparently the Italian and German audiences of ‘68 wanted the nastier Silence, and not the more hopeful Mercenary.

We can argue that Tarantino doesn’t actually “rip off” the movies he loves, he makes movies in the exact same way that Leone and Corbucci did: with complete awareness and affection for what came before…

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 8:12 am and is filed under Spaghetti Western. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.