Hi,

The local rep house is planning a mini-festival of obscure Spaghetti Westerns at the end of the month, and I was just curious if any of you here had seen these, and if so in general what you thought. (I plan on seeing all of them, by far my favorite Eurocult genre is the spaghetti western).

DAY OF ANGER

THE RUTHLESS FOUR

IF YOU MEET SARTANA PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH

DJANGO CHALLENGES SARTANA

FIVE MANY ARMY

THEY CALL ME HALLELUJAH (aka HEADS YOU DIE, TAILS I KILL YOU)

thnks,

doug

DAY OF ANGER (aka I GIORNI D'IRA and DAYS OF WRATH) has other merits but it can be recommended for Lee Van Cleef alone in perhaps his best, most 'mythic' role outside of a Sergio Leone. His five lessons of gun fighting are classic epigrammatic Spaghetti wit and wisdom. They could so easily be made chapter headings for a business best seller aimed at CEOs trying to stay alive (e.g.: "Third lesson: never get between a gun and its target"), they've already been lifted by subsequent toughguy teachers like Sean Connery in UNTOUCHABLES. His 'Thus endeth the lesson' patter is pretty much the same, and his relationship to Costner's not so distant from Cleef's to his co star Giuliano Gemma here...but! Van Cleef is a mean bastard and lowdown killer as well as a karate-kid-type mentor, and his is a very transitional relationship with young charge Gemma, a literal milksop at the start who learns to be tough only to discover that he's learned to be Evil as part of the bargain. What will he do?

RUTHLESS FOUR: In pattern it's an old fashioned gold fever epic (think all the way back to Stroheim's GREED and onwards to TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE) and Van Heflin gives a magnificent old fashioned body and soul performance as prospector Sam Cooper, a goodhearted guy hopelessly warped by decades of isolation and paranoia. He's a show in itself, but check out the other three, the weirdest most wonderful constellation of talents and roles: Klaus Kinski as a killer priest in killer shades who appears to be the dominant half of a crypto-gay duo, his bullied best friend a very against-type George Hilton, Sam's long lost son, a swaggering playboy on the surface but a girlish crybaby if you as much as poke him...and Cisco Kid Gilbert Roland, Sam's old friend and rival, warily eyeing this loony tunes crew while trying to outtrick the rest in getting the gold. The emotional dysfunction segues eventually into cool 'mission movie' group blam-blam dynamics as soon as the bickering crew gets menaced by mean bandits and then tag team action movie stuff becomes the order of the day...until squabbling over the gold takes over in the last act. Not perfect, but it's certainly an enjoyable, well acted novelty

IF YOU MEET SARTANA PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH. First of the longlived series, at this point with director-writer Parolini in command and Gianni Garko at his service (Giuliano Carnimeo would step in later, and Garko would eventually cede the role to George Hilton). In the beginning, Sartana was the darker, more violent and mysterious adult-oriented cousin of Parolini's other hero SABATA, a more kid-friendly character essayed by Van Cleef as a mix of Colonel Mortimer and James Bond in an episode of WILD WILD WEST. Eventually SARTANA became just as silly (in a good way), but at this point he and the series still have a little menace and grit in reserve in addition to a plot about as complicated as a Edgar Wallace Krimi. Garko embodies cool, and Klaus Kinski, William Berger, Gianni Rizzo and Fernando Sancho are the four stooges of the Apocalypse and of unflappably un-cool badguydom. A lot of fun.

DJANGO CHALLENGES SARTANA. Fake Django meets Fake Sartana. An okay example of a cheap Roman western, and it’s directed by Pasquale Squittieri who’d do somewhat better later with Spaghetti Crime (and with romancing Claudia Cardinale in real life), but this is sub-par…albeit a good lexicon of lowrent spaghetti moviemaking.

FIVE MANY ARMY: A solid but no better heist movie with Peter Graves heading up a Mission Impossible unit that includes Bud Spencer. Dario Argento co-wrote this. If he’s responsible for the dialogue, he was no better at that sort of thing then than he is today! I can imagine his touch in the generally synthetic tone with a batch of half-remembered late, late show movies rifled through for nice ideas...

THEY CALL ME HALLELUJAH: Among the best of the wacky western adventures. This is what SARTANA movies eventually evolved into…much the same way that Bond graduated from cool to three ring circus action-adventure-comedy cartoon. Later efforts along the same line eventually derail into total vaudeville stoogemania, but this one nicely matches outlandish characters (dancing Russian prince, for instance) with outlandishly inventive and well orchestrated action . Timing in this sort of thing is everything, and the pacing here, for quips as well as gunplay, is pretty damn tight.

IF YOU MEET SARTANA, PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH was the first of five Italian westerns starring the sturdy Gianni Garko as Sartana, a mysterious gunfighter who may possess supernatural powers, but certainly has skills with a gun and a deck of cards. A high body count, Piero Piccioni’s oddball score and Garko’s icy turn make this movie well worth watching for action fans.

DAY OF ANGER I found somewhat similar to DEATH RIDES A HORSE, in that Van Cleef is again playing mentor to a hot-headed young sugarfoot who has to grow up in a hurry. Both are very good movies.

I really like THE FIVE MAN ARMY, but maybe that's because I've wondered what MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE would look like as an Italian western. Peter Graves’ casting as The Dutchman, who plans an elaborate, split-second scheme to rob a train using four specialists, couldn’t have been coincidental. Action fans will get their fill, and the major setpiece--the train robbery--is handled extremely well with plenty of suspense. Graves badly imitates a Mexican accent at one point, but he performed others on M:I and wasn’t any good at those either. The outstanding score is by Ennio Morricone.

Rather criminally I think I have at least three of those in my unwatched pile(s) of spaghetti westerns, but I can definitely give a wholehearted recommendation for DAY OF ANGER. Van Cleef and Gemma are both at their spaghetti best, a bit more effort has gone into the script than usual and Riz Ortolani contributes a score that is very good and fits the film perfectly and yet at the same time avoids sounding like yet another Morricone knock-off.

DAY OF ANGER

THE RUTHLESS FOUR

IF YOU MEET SARTANA PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH

FIVE MAN ARMY


Just to add my recommendations of the above four to what everyone else said. THE RUTHLESS FOUR has a great score by Carlo Rustichelli. And Van Heflin's very good, one of the great underrated Hollywood actors from the film noir era who died too soon in 1971.

FIVE MAN ARMY has a great score by Morricone, as others have noted, but as not yet noted, it's one of a handful of Italo westerns to feature a Japanese star in its cast. Tetsuro Tanba (sometimes spelled Tamba), best known as Tiger Tanaka from YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, is one of the five of the title.

Funny I should read this now. Just last night, I began reading Bruce Dern's autobiography, and he says much the same thing about Heflin, highly praising his work in SHANE.

Dragging this further off topic for a moment, but he's also excellent as Athos in the 1948 The Three Musketeers.

I managed to see a couple of these recently. (Yeah, I know, I talked big about "seeing them all", but that's just me talking big again. Classic eyes-are-bigger-than-his-stomach guy, me.) I'm gonna catch FIVE MAN ARMY tomorrow.

MINOR SPOILERS

DAY OF ANGER struck me as being most notable for an exceptionally fine Lee Van Cleef performance. He truly was a great movie actor, in every sense of the word. I've seen movies that have taken two hours to tell the story that Cleef tells with a shrug and a quick downcast turn of his eyes toward the end of this.

It's a pretty pro forma "the downside of the gunfighter's life" story, though I did like how the action quickly doubles back on the same small town. The movie makes a real virtue of it's own (probably budgetary) limitations, giving you a sense of existential claustrophobia, as it were. The young kid can't really escape the town, though he thinks he can.

Apparently Tarantino's own print. Does he loan out his prints often?

IF YOU MEET SARTANA... had a extremely nice print, it looked brand new.

I think I like spaghetti westerns in part because they're so up front about being larger than life. I wouldn't exactly say there are no "real people" in the ones I've seen, but it is true that they tend to deal in types and archetypes. ("Real people" tend to be swallowed up by the melodramatics; one of the reason Leone is so awesome is that somehow he managed to square that circle.) On the one hand that makes 'em kind of comic booky, but on the other hand they can have an odd power. Here Sartana is a lot of things -- outlaw, edgy hero, ghost, personification of vengeance -- but not really one thing in particular. I hate to come across like a semiotician, but there's a "free space" of meaning around him that makes him oddly compelling.

It's very enjoyable. I liked it's outsized nature, as well as some superbly evocative imagery throughout -- some shots of Sartana as just a black figure were fantastic.

doug

Day of Anger is really excellent. Seemed like there was one section towards the end that I've always wished was cut out though. The one thing on Van Cleef and even Gemma to some degree in it, is the excellent dialogue they have to work with. Van Cleef gets classic one liner after classic one liner to say here. And unlike Death Rides a Horse where it felt like he chewed up and spit out JPL in every scene, Gemma more than stands his own ground. I'm wondering if screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi (Case of the Bloody Iris) is the one most attributable to the great dialogue in this film?

One other thing I've always like with this film is the really creative cinematography in places. Director Tonino Valerii really has an often unique eye for taking the audience along with his POV in not the usual ho hum fashion. I'm not sure how much he storyboarded out, but he always seems to find creative ways to realize scenes and sequences (even smaller ones sometimes). I just bought his film A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die after seeing that it will be showing at Venice. It was one of two of his films I always wanted to see but had put off. The other I still want to check out is the Price of Power.

Although a red print, Tarantino owns one, along with owning a print of THEY CALL ME HALLELUJAH. With They Call Me, it has always been a bit too wacky for me, either that or its not a film to enjoy sober.

I'd like to think Gastaldi came up with the one liners, unless they were all in the German source novel, which I kind of doubt (but has anyone read 'Der Tod ritt Dienstags'?). I wonder though who did such a good job of 'English-ing' the dialogue, Mickey Knox?

In any case, I'm impressed how much sharper and more original the stuff LVCleef gets to say here is than in his comparable part for DEATH RIDES A HORSE, where scripter Vincenzoni is reduced to stealing his best line from Oscar Wilde...admittedly a good line that Tarantino stole in turn.

Another fine feature of DAY OF ANGER is the excellent Lardani rotoscoped credits scored to Riz Ortolani's music (so different from the Spaghetti norm). As a rule of thumb, you can generally tell how good such a film is in advance by how good the music and the Lardani credits are, and this one passes the test with flying colors.

TRINITY and related Bud and Terence lite (slightly vs. their earlier grittier pairings for Colizzi) you have to be imprinted with at the target age of ca. twelve. Because I was, I always get a smile from seeing them though I almost always get bored pretty fast by the simplistic kid-friendly style...but once in a long while they genuinely surprise. Far and away the most brilliant part of the Trinities, far as I'm concerned, is the casting of Harry Carey Jr. and Jessica Dublin as the team's mom and dad in TRINITY IS STILL MY NAME. They may be meant to resemble Lil' Abner and 'Dogpatch', but the happy family (an old pimp, his over ripe old whore of a wife, and their monstrous children, belching and cursing away) is much, much closer to John Waters.

Just watched Reason to Live last night and it was quite good. It appeared to have some budget issues which looked to be overcome with some nice film tricks. Though it does seem to miss the stylish grandeur it aims for but nonetheless is fairly solid and entertaining. Bud Spencer's role is a riot (especially the scene where he causes a musical number to happen!). Savalas looks like he either has a really awful cold while he shot this or he was trying to play against type and go for something that was more understated in its portrayal of lunacy and grief (certainly isn't the Savalas I've come to know in films like The Family, Sol Madrid, Pretty Maids, etc.,). Venice audiences will be in for a treat!

Thanks for the note on Gastaldi. I'm certainly more interested now in tracking down other films he has been a part of.