Spag Western Essay #4: The Bounty Killer’s Convention
The era of the Spag Western did eventually wind down. Some one say that the advent of the Trinity films, the tongue-in-cheek satires of the Spag Westerns made by directors of the Spag Westerns was the killing blow, Leone thought so.
But self-satire is common in any film genre, or at least self-awareness. And how much more self-aware a genre can there be than the Spag Westerns? To put it in laymans terms, watching a lot of Spaghetti Westerns is, for fans of westerns both traditional and revisionist, a lot like horror fans watching Scream, or 70’s “grindhouse” cinema fanatics (be it Samurai flicks, Shaw Brothers chopsocky, or blacksploitation shooters) watching Kill Bill. It’s a lot of fun, and you can point out all of the references and influences, but you are never not aware of what came before.
Italian and American audiences got bored with the films pretty quickly, though the German market kept gobbling them up for a few years. The one undisputed international star of the genre, Clint Eastwood, abandoned it after three movies and started making American westerns with a definite degree of influence from the Italian style- High Plains Drifter even had a tombstone in the graveyard that said “Sergio Leone”.
So even as the genre petered out, it’s influence lived on…
But it wasn’t done, not quite yet.
Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima more or less invented the Spag Western’s greatest (only) real sub-genre: the Zapata Western. Set during the early decades of the 20th Century, in revolutionary Mexico, these gave the Spag Western a shot of much needed energy to keep audiences involved. Generally more thoughtful than the revenge-seeking loaner, these also tended to have some fine comedic bits scattered throughout.
Corbucci gave us the fantastic Vamos a Matar, Companeros! as well as Il Mercenario.
My love for the climactic shoot out in the latter is in no way superior to my love of the formers insanely catchy, crazy theme song. Both movies feature Franco Nero as a gun-running mercenary, Jack Palance as a vicious killer representing American foreign policy, and Tomas Milian and Tony Muscante trade-off roles as the buffoonish bandito who, over the course of the movie, becomes a passionate revolutionary, enflamed with the Marxist ideals of “the people”… it’s this last mark that makes the Zapata Westerns so much fun, and in some ways, more mature than the Vengeance Westerns, or the Dollar Westerns…
Allow me to digress: some historians believe that Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy was a thinly veiled criticism of American consumer/capitalism culture… this might be a stretch, but he definitely treated $$$ as the ultimate goal of all his characters (except for the vengeance-seeking Colonel Mortimer in A Few Dollars More)… Corbucci, who touched on this combination of cash and vengeance in his own Django, seemed to grow to resent this almost naive view of bounty hunters as heroic and made his greatest (and most enduring) western the same year that he made Companeros
Il Grande Silencio, The Great Silence, goes down in spag western history for a number of reasons. On the one hand, the bounty killers (Corbucci drops the polite “hunters”) are portrayed as vile, fierce, greedy fuckers. Essentially scalphunters, they are led by the psychotic “Loco”, played by Klaus Kinski. It’s Kinski, he’s named Loco, I guess you could have figured that he was psychotic- my bad.
The film is shot in knee- sometimes waist- deep snow, a definite change of scenery from the usual deserts of Almeria.
Jean-Louis Trintignant plays “Silence”, he isn’t just taciturn, he’s mute. And he has some sort of vendetta against the bounty killers. Set in 1899 in the mountains of Utah, during the great blizzard of that season, Loco and the bounty killers are wiping out the poor Mormons, driven by the corrupt local officials and ignored by an uncaring central government down on the flats. Silence shows up, and begins goading the bounty killers into duels- thereby always killing in self defense: he always lets the other guy go for his gun before he whips out his distinctive Mauser pistol and blows them away. Loco retaliates by ignoring every silent insult and challenge, and actually not only stays one step ahead of the hero- the bad guy wins by following the letter of the law.
The Great Silence is regarded by a number of film historians and fans alike as one of the crowning achievements of the Spag Western movement. It’s stark, bleak, grim. For Corbucci, it was sort of the penultimate variation on his favorite personal themes: a crippled hero (in The Hellbenders Joseph Cotton has a bad arm, in both Django and this one, the hero’s hands are brutalized), a town torn apart by greed and violence, and an uncaring, ineffective government.
The Finnish Progressive Music Association recently ran a project which encouraged musicians and bands to interpret the The Great Silence, Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy) did several featurettes for the kickass dvd, and it’s heavily featured in most books on the Spaghetti Western.
Honestly, I prefer Companeros or Il Mercenario for a rewatch. Remember: just because a movie is Important and Well-Made, doesn’t mean it’s Awesome. I mean, it IS, but not as awesome to watch with a couple of beers and a friend as the other two.