Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation 9780748695461

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Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation

Edited by Austin Fisher

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Austin Fisher, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9545 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9546 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0998 8 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Austin Fisher 1. The Quiet Man Gets Noisy: Sergio Leone, the Italian Western and Ireland Christopher Frayling Part I Trans-genre Roots 2. Pietro Germi, Hybridity and the Roots of the Italo-Western Pasquale Iannone 3. Malaysian Pirates, American Cowboys and the Marginalised Outlaw: Constructing Other-ed Adventurers in Italian Film Aliza S. Wong Part II Ethnic Identities, Transnational Politics 4. Spectacles of Insurgency: Witnessing the Revolution as Incoherent Text David Hyman and Patrick Wynne 5. Emancipation all’italiana: Giuseppe Colizzi and the Representation of African Americans in Italian Westerns Lee Broughton 6. Corbucci Unchained: Miike, Tarantino and the Postmodern Discursivity of Exploitation Cinema Mikel J. Koven

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Part III Asian Crossovers 7. Bounty Hunters, Yakuzas and Rōnins: Intercultural Transformations between the Italian Western and the Japanese Swordfight Film in the 1960s Thomas Klein 8. Spaghetti Westerns and Asian Cinema: Perspectives on Global Cultural Flows Ivo Ritzer 9. Cowboys and Indians: Transnational Borrowings in the Indian Masala Western Iain Robert Smith Part IV Routes of Relocation, Transition and Appropriation 10. For a Few Comic Strips More: Reinterpreting the Spaghetti Western through the Comic Book William Grady 11. Transit to East Germany: the Distribution and Reception of Once Upon a Time in the West in the German Democratic Republic Rosemary Stott 12. Spaghetti Westerns and the ‘Afterlife’ of a Hollywood Genre Pete Falconer Filmography Notes on the Contributors Index

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Figures

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The Good, the Bad, the Weird deploys Spaghetti Western stylistics within a Manchurian action schema 2.1 Bandits head off across the Sicilian landscape leaving one man dead in In the Name of the Law 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 The protagonists are met with hostility upon their arrival in town in Germi’s In the Name of the Law and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars 2.5, 2.6 Striking diagonal compositions in The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo 6.1 Jamie Foxx and Franco Nero share a prolonged two-shot in Django Unchained 6.2 Django’s outlandish outfit is suggestive of Gainsborough’s ‘The Blue Boy’ (Django Unchained) 7.1 Shiba and Kikyô prepare for the showdown in Three Outlaw Samurai 7.2 Shiba stands in front of the peasants, who are powerless to do anything, with the petition in Three Outlaw Samurai 7.3, 7.4 The widescreen composition as the hero arrives in town in Zatoichi on the Road foreshadows that of Django 9.1 Khote Sikkay adopts Sergio Leone-style composition 9.2 Shera and Rakesh evoke the Tonto–Lone Ranger relationship in Kaala Sona

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The villain in Sholay, modelled on El Indio from For a Few Dollars More Neeta performs in Wanted: Dead or Alive Loveless replicates the form of a Spaghetti Western showdown Alejandro Jodorowsky and François Boucq’s Bouncer: Raising Cain utilises the visual language of the Spaghetti Western’s flashback sequences Jean Giraud’s Blueberry artwork registers the influence of Hollywood landscapes. From La piste des Sioux The more surreal and arid imagery of later Blueberry comics. From Ballade pour un cercueil The hallucinatory artwork of the 1974 Blueberry album, Le hors-la-loi East German poster for Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod/Once Upon a Time in the West Poster for Osceola, featuring Gojko Mitić

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Acknowledgements

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his volume emerged from the inaugural Spaghetti Cinema festival and conference in April 2013. Huge thanks are therefore due to Garry Whannel and the Research Institute for Media, Art and Design at the University of Bedfordshire for supporting the event. I am also indebted to Johnny Walker for providing invaluable advice at an early stage of the book’s conception, and to Gillian Leslie and all at Edinburgh University Press for their warm and enthusiastic support (not to mention their patience). Many other people have helped this volume to see the light of day, and I am very grateful to all of them. These include Luke Hockley, Gavin Stewart, Carlota Larrea, Catherine Grant, Chelsea Wessels, Flavia Laviosa and Matt Smith. Finally, and obviously, thanks must go to the thirteen scholars whose work this book comprises. Each of them has opened new and fascinating avenues of investigation. A section of Chapter 1 previously appeared in Christopher Frayling’s Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death (Faber & Faber: 2000), and is reproduced with the kind permission of Faber & Faber and Farrar Straus & Giroux. An expanded version of Chapter 5 has previously appeared in Lee Broughton’s The Euro Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film (I. B. Tauris, 2015). A section of Chapter 8 was previously published in the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 2: 1, published by Intellect.

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Introduction Austin Fisher

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n many ways, the remit of this book revolves around an obvious proposition. The Spaghetti Western, as a transatlantic meeting place, is of necessity a cinematic category to be considered in international contexts, the hundreds of films which the category comprises documenting shifts in Italy’s cultural outlook, as the reference points of American popular culture became ever more visible in the post-war years. Yet an Italo-American focus tells only a fraction of a story in which myriad strands of influence converged within, and continue to emanate from, this amorphous group of films. Spaghetti Western is a classification constantly in transit between cultures, genres and conceptions of taste, and its patterns of production, distribution and consumption display diverse acts of ‘border crossing’ and translation. By appraising a broad selection of films – from the internationally famed works of Sergio Leone to the cult cachet of Sergio Corbucci and the more obscure outputs of such directors as Giuseppe Colizzi and Ferdinando Baldi – this volume seeks to reconsider the cultural significance of the Italian Western, its position within global cinema and its continuing trends of reception and appropriation around the globe. Scholarly volumes are always at pains to stress their timeliness in relation to trends within their broader disciplines, and in this respect this one is no different. What Mette Hjort has termed Film Studies’ ‘transnational turn’ (2010: 13) highlights a desire to understand the ways in which cinema has offered a means to document the movement of peoples and identities across perceived cultural and spatial boundaries. A medium whose development through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has coincided with a marked historical fluctuation of inherited borders, cinema has been pertinently described by Tom Conley as ‘the privileged geopolitical medium . . . at once local and global’ (2013: x). Thus, what might at first appear to be a merely modish application of ‘trans-’ prefixes – ‘transnational’, ‘transcultural’, ‘translocal’ – in fact signifies wider

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historical approaches to cinematic output that scrutinise nationallyconstituted discourses and thereby seek to understand the complexities of specific cultural-political moments. Even such a seemingly nationallybased discipline as Italian Film Studies increasingly embraces these concerns, recognising and interrogating the unstable, movable nature of the ‘national’ referent in a globalised era, and thereby questioning notions of a local industry talking to or for its nation state. The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, for example, introduces its inaugural edition with a mission statement that places Italian cinema ‘within the realm of a post-national and trans-cultural debate . . . transcending geo-ethnic land and sea borders and moving away from merely celebratory local cinematic experiences’ (Laviosa 2013: 4). Such undertakings are also characteristic of recent scholarship around the Western genre, whose well-worn tropes are increasingly studied for how they have been decoupled from their supposed roots in US culture. Multifarious strands of international Westerns are being repositioned within a polycentric cultural landscape (rather than one approaching the USA as the genre’s ‘centre’), revealing the Western to be a malleable space of cultural blending that has traversed national and political boundaries. Recent research into how the genre has obtained diverse meanings upon contact with particular historical, cultural and political contexts includes volumes edited by Miller and Van Riper (2013), Klein et al. (2012) and Higgins et al. (2015), along with special journal editions of Frames (Iverson 2013) and Transformations (Cooke et al. 2014). As Miller and Van Riper explain, issues central to the Western’s dynamics such as imperialism, industrialisation, the relationship between individual and community, and the rights of indigenous peoples are not unique to the USA or to the late nineteenth century: ‘They were, and are, part of the shared experience of all expansionist nations, and the international appeal of the Western rests, in part, on the potential for the historical experiences of one culture to resonate with audiences from another’ (Miller and Van Riper 2013: xiv). The approach summarised in the quotation above makes a valuable point about the genre’s cross-cultural appeal, but still positions the Western genre as one that originated in the USA, to then be embraced and adapted by other cultures: ‘a genre with its roots on the latenineteenth-century American frontier . . . relocated to other frontiers’ (Miller and Van Riper 2013: xvi). Neil Campbell goes a step further down this transnational route, arguing that ‘the West’ breaks away from notions of ‘rootedness’ in the USA altogether, constantly renewing and transforming itself in various cultural forms. Campbell applies Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of interlocking ‘contact zones’ to escape

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approaches that identify a single point of generic origin: ‘To examine the West in the twenty-first century is to think of it as always already transnational, a more routed and complex rendition, a traveling concept whose meanings move between cultures, crossing, bridging, and intruding simultaneously’ (Campbell 2008: 4). Indeed, this line of enquiry is now flourishing, with recent scholarship following Campbell’s lead by examining how the Western narrative format and its various iconographies have been deployed for the negotiation of multifarious national and sub-cultural identities since before Hollywood’s golden age. To cite just a few notable examples, this includes studies of pre-World War I Westerns shot in the French Camargue region (Wessels 2014), socialistera Hungarian Westerns (Simonyi 2013), Latin American ‘Third’ Westerns (Wessels 2015) and Australian outback Westerns (Cooke 2014, Wessels 2014). Such approaches allow for a broader picture to emerge: one of alternative trajectories from generic building blocks, which emerge from no single point of origin and thus result not in American Westerns and copies of (or reactions to) American Westerns, but instead countless global offshoots of a format that has by the whims of historical circumstance become known as a ‘Western’ due to the economic hegemony of the USA in the first half of the twentieth century.1 By focusing on the globally-oriented origins and legacies of Westerns produced or co-produced by Italian studios, this volume seeks to engage with these evolving fields of enquiry, addressing routes of cultural, political and ethnic relocation that lie at the heart of the ‘Spaghetti’ Western phenomenon. By analysing these films’ processes of production, distribution and consumption as sites of dynamic cultural exchange wherein supposed boundaries become blurred, the book aims to widen the sociohistorical debate around this much-loved filone.2 It is for precisely this reason that this volume does not reject the USA as one of its contextual reference points (as do Miller and Van Riper, for example, whose remit is ‘Westerns produced outside the United States’ (2013: xvi)), since this would paradoxically serve to perpetuate a US-centric perspective by dividing the Western into ‘American’ and ‘others’. If, as Campbell argues, the Western was never firmly moored to US national experience in the first place, then the Spaghetti Westerns must be considered a constituent part of this continuum, rather than an anomalous reaction to a founding text. Though the Italian Western has become one of the most culturally visible variants to contemporary eyes, it is nevertheless one of many manifestations of an innately transcultural genre. In my own past work on the Spaghetti Western (Fisher 2010, 2011), I approached the films as historical documents, following well-established fields of academic enquiry that analyse film’s role

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in negotiating, questioning and shaping conceptions of the past and its relationship to the present.3 I specifically investigated the connection between the politicised strands of this filone that emerged in the second half of the 1960s and the contemporaneous ideological ferments that were erupting in Italian factories and university campuses, in response to global events in the various theatres of conflict at the height of the Cold War. The function of such films as A Bullet for the General (Quién sabe?, Damiano Damiani, 1966), Face to Face (Faccia a faccia, Sergio Sollima, 1967) and Tepepa (Giulio Petroni, 1969) was, for the purposes of my study, one of registering the immediate concerns, confusions and conflicts of the films’ time and place. Yet, particularly given the extraordinarily long and influential reception tail of the Spaghetti Western, such an approach raises an important question: if this filone is indeed to be read as a document of ‘time and place’, which times and which places? The immediate concerns of 1960s and 1970s Italy are certainly pivotal to an understanding of these films’ cultural-political significance, but so too are their varied antecedents and legacies in Italian neorealism, French comic books, Japanese chanbara films, Bollywood, Eastern Bloc film distribution and the contemporary cinema of Quentin Tarantino.4 It is to be hoped that, by examining these and other disparate contexts, this volume will go some way to enriching our comprehension of this broad vista. This is by no means to say that scholarship on the Spaghetti Western has hitherto been manacled to the concerns of a narrowly Italian milieu: far from it. Dimitris Eleftheriotis influentially approached this filone as one that highlights ‘the accelerated mobility of cultural products around the world and their increasing detachment from national contexts’ (Eleftheriotis 2001: 98). Indeed, the various scholarly trends outlined above increasingly converge to throw light on the diverse contexts of the Spaghetti Western’s transnational production histories, reception patterns and afterlives. David MartinJones’s examination of Django Kill . . . If You Live, Shoot! (Se sei vivo, spara!, Giulio Questi, 1967), for example, considers how the film spoke to diverse shared experiences of the Cold War era, and thus offered ‘open-ended transnational political resonances for different audiences around the world’ (Martin-Jones 2011: 180). In a similar vein, Christopher Robé analyses the Spaghetti Western’s politicised strands for how they provide an understanding of cultural flows between ‘First’ and ‘Third’ world markets (Robé 2014). Michelle Cho’s study of The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Choŭnnom, Nappŭnnom, Isanghannom, Kim Jee-woon, 2008) adopts a more culturally-specific approach, by examining the film’s merging of overt

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Figure I.1: The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008) deploys Spaghetti Western stylistics within a Manchurian action schema.

quotations from Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy with equally explicit references to Manchurian action films such as Break Up the Chain (Yonghwa chusik hoesa, Lee Manhee, 1971). Cho compellingly links The Good, the Bad, the Weird’s historical setting in Manchuria during Korea’s period of Japanese occupation to the region’s broader status as a liminal frontier land with a ‘hallowed position of being one of the Korean independence movement’s sites of development [and] an important symbolic role as the birthplace of Korean nationalism’ (Cho 2015: 53). Thus, in this context, the Spaghetti Western’s ‘transnational’ legacy is one of co-optation for the task of negotiating an East Asian national identity. Cho’s approach highlights an important point: that, while the analysis of Italian Westerns’ innately ‘transnational’ aspects provides insight into the films’ ongoing global significance, it is through situating particular manifestations of this process in their historical and cultural ‘moments’ (locally, regionally, nationally or industrially) that we can best obtain a meaningful apperception of this point. If the ‘trans-’ prefix is to avoid becoming a merely trendy scholarly accoutrement, it should work to aid understanding of complexities within specific national, local and sub-cultural contexts. As Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim have argued, a ‘critical transnationalism’ is one that interrogates ‘how these film-making activities negotiate with the national on all levels – from cultural policy to financial sources, from the multiculturalism of difference to how it reconfigures the nation’s image of itself’ (Higbee and Lim 2010: 18). This volume can only scratch the surface of the Spaghetti

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Western’s multifarious paths of hybridity and its continuing global reach across perceived boundaries of genre, nation and identity. The analysis offered in these pages, however, seeks to advance this field of enquiry by offering a set of case studies grounded firmly in their historical, cultural and political circumstances. The volume opens with an extended piece from the undisputed father of scholarly enquiry into the Spaghetti Western, Sir Christopher Frayling. Frayling’s seminal book Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (1981) has surely been a key inspiration for all subsequent serious analysis of this filone: this one included. It is therefore apt that his latest work opens proceedings, both providing new perspectives on the filone’s cross-cultural significance and offering methodological challenges for the chapters that follow. Four sections then progress from the Spaghetti Western’s antecedents to its legacies. In Part I, two chapters uncovering hitherto overlooked inspirations and influences (from post-war neorealism and nineteenth-century literature) illuminate the complex interweaving of cultural reference points in Italy prior to the 1960s. Part II then considers the diverse ways in which this filone addressed issues of ethnicity and identity through three chapters that reconsider its position vis-à-vis the global politics of its era. Part III interrogates oft-drawn parallels between the Spaghetti Western and Asian cinema, by charting complex routes of reinterpretation that belie linear readings of cultural influence, and by introducing the perspective of the filone’s extensive appropriation in India. Finally, Part IV assesses three further examples of how the Spaghetti Western’s legacies have been negotiated as its global distribution left its mark on East German censorship, on French comic books, and, finally, on the contemporary Hollywood Western. Christopher Frayling’s chapter charts a personal journey, continuing his pioneering work questioning conceptions of ‘authenticity’ by looking at how Italian Westerns responded to well-established ethnic images within Hollywood Westerns which were themselves ‘inauthentic’ in the first place: those of ‘Irishness’. Considering whether the contemporaneity of Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ with both a growing fascination with anti-colonialist movements in Western Europe and the zenith of the Italian Western might have played a role, Frayling investigates the hitherto overlooked issue of how images of Irishness filtered through into Italy’s version of the genre. As Italians forged their own interpretation of the Western myth, transposing numerous elements from Hollywood while cutting the genre adrift from its nation-building imperative, Frayling asks, in what form did the Hollywood genre’s ubiquitous negotiation with a stereotyped Irish ethnicity survive, and what significance

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did this hold in this cultural moment? He discovers, intriguingly, that a secondary (or even tertiary) conception of ‘Irishness’ abounds in the Spaghetti Western. Taking Sergio Leone’s Duck, You Sucker! (Giù la testa, 1971) as a key case study, Frayling charts the labyrinthine intertextual journey through Hollywood’s representations of Irish culture on which Leone and his crew embarked: most pertinently, through the films of John Ford. He concludes that in the Italian Western, ‘Irishness’ exists as part of a larger signifying structure surrounding a reworked, magnified and updated cinematic imaginary, rather than a purposeful reference to contemporary events in Ireland. Frayling thus lays down a gauntlet to beware of drawing direct parallels between films and the contemporary events that surround them too readily. Part I opens with Pasquale Iannone’s study of Western tropes in Italian cinema’s ‘neorealist’ phase. Taking as his key case studies In the Name of the Law (In nome della legge, Pietro Germi, 1949) and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo (Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo, Pietro Germi, 1952), Iannone explores the complex ways in which Germi worked references to American genres into his work, thereby debunking approaches presupposing an Italian neorealism separated from ‘popular’ cinema, and demonstrating an oft-overlooked precursor to the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying in Germi’s two films a representational equivalence between the Italian South and the American West, this chapter charts a lineage of tales of banditry that blended the international and the local. Aliza Wong then identifies the influence on Spaghetti Western director Sergio Sollima of Emilio Salgari’s nineteenth-century hero Sandokan. Drawing a detailed line of continuity from this iconic character of Italian children’s literature to the postcolonial heroes of Sollima’s westerns all’italiana, Wong illustrates a genealogy of ‘Other-ed’ hero archetypes who, through their resistance to imperialist might, were designed to appeal to revolutionary sentiments within Italian national identity from the Risorgimento onwards. By extending the focus to Sollima’s own ‘Sandokan’ television series, Wong’s analysis also identifies a melding of the Spaghetti Western’s anarchic borderlands and the primitive wilds of South-East Asia, through which Sollima sought to expound anti-imperialist rhetoric. This chapter thus uncovers continuities in imagined, exotic spaces offering Italians a politicised outlet for fantasy fulfilment. Part II begins with David Hyman and Patrick Wynne’s response to my analysis of the popular politics of the Spaghetti Western (Fisher 2011). Taking A Professional Gun (Il mercenario, Sergio Corbucci, 1968) as their key example, they argue that the ‘incoherence’ I identified as a political weakness of this filone’s ‘insurgency’ variant is rather a

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manifestation of decontextualised transnational bricolage that, by blurring the boundary between ‘text’ and ‘paratext’, allows us to appreciate the possibilities open to an audience for creative participation within revolutionary discourses.5 The film is therefore read as a temporal dislocation that exists within images of the Mexican Revolution, and as a conduit through which a plurality of fluid meanings open up for the fomenting of a revolutionary sensibility. Lee Broughton’s chapter then offers an alternative take on representations of ethnicity in the Spaghetti Western. While much has been written about this filone’s portrayal of Mexican ethnicity, this chapter examines its representation of African Americans, and asks what this might tell us about the politics of race in Italy and the USA in the 1960s. Specifically, Broughton identifies in the films of Giuseppe Colizzi a lineage from the commedia dell’arte and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’, through which the Spaghetti Western facilitates an inclusive racial discourse that found a particular resonance in an era of mass protest. Part II then ends with Mikel J. Koven’s study of this filone’s extraordinarily influential afterlife, interrogating a critical commonplace that labels the cinema of Quentin Tarantino (as well as that of his collaborators such as Miike Takashi) ‘postmodern’. Examining the precise implications of this term, Koven identifies in Tarantino’s curation of the Spaghettis’ afterlife a particular kind of postmodern engagement, examining Django Unchained (2012) not as reductive pastiche (as many critics hold), but rather as an ironic ‘language of grindhouse cinema allusions’. The chapter thus identifies, charts and examines a complex web of references traversing cultural boundaries, which ultimately provides a subversive ‘paracinematic’ discourse. Part III appraises three overlapping instances of appropriation in Asian film industries. Firstly, Thomas Klein revisits the Japanese chanbara, or ‘sword film’. Challenging notions that focus solely on the kinship between the Japanese format and the US Western, Klein instead charts the chanbara’s relationship to the Italian version. In the equivalence between the outlaw heroes of the Spaghetti Western and the ‘sword film’, he identifies documents of Italy’s and Japan’s respective processes of post-war Americanisation. Ivo Ritzer then takes the Italian Western’s iterative negotiation with Asian identities as a case study to chart multidimensional routes of cultural transfer. Deploying scholarly approaches around the ‘transnational’, he frames the Italian Western as a junction in a global network of cultural exchange, both borrowing from and influencing Asian cinematic discourses. Using The Warrior’s Way (Sngmoo Lee, 2010) as a key example, he therefore sees the Italian

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Western’s most significant legacy to be its decoupling of the Western from its ideological and historical reference points, freeing the format up for myriad, heterogeneous cultural contexts. To conclude Part III, Iain Robert Smith continues this methodological focus on processes of cultural transfer, by examining how the Spaghetti Western has played a part in the negotiation of cosmopolitan identities within Indian cinema. By focusing on the network of transnational borrowings that resulted in the ‘Curry’ or ‘Masala’ Western, Smith goes beyond ‘unidirectional models of cross-cultural influence’ to illuminate the networks through which cultures overlap, and the transformations that result from combinations, borrowings and exchanges across national contexts. He also compellingly enters into the debates outlined at the start of this Introduction, eschewing approaches that interpret ‘international’ Westerns as translations of the genre designed to conform to the specificities of local cultural practices. Deploying a memetic model of cultural hybridisation, he argues for close attention to the specifics of historical context, while warning against the privileging of national signifiers and the attendant misrepresentation of complex negotiations with global cultural flows and exchanges. Part IV opens with William Grady holding a common point of throwaway critical reference for the Spaghetti Western – the comic book – up to close scrutiny. Relocating this filone in a continuum of subversive, surreal treatments of the Wild West, Grady identifies a more substantive alienation effect in both the Spaghetti Western and the Western comic book, whereby familiar generic space is ‘made strange’ in both formats. Further, by assessing the Spaghetti’s influence on later comic books from around the world, Grady’s study illuminates another transcultural exchange that took place around this nomadic filone. Focusing in particular on the French bande dessinée, the chapter charts a rich history of transnational negotiation with the Wild West. In the Blueberry series, Grady presents a fascinating tension between appropriation of, and resistance to, US popular culture, making reference to French national crises while becoming mediated through the surreality of the Spaghetti Western. Rosemary Stott then illuminates the Spaghetti Western’s hitherto under-researched patterns of release and ‘official’ reception in the German Democratic Republic, identifying a conduit for transcultural currents that were crossing the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War. Taking Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, Sergio Leone, 1968) as a case study, her chapter uncovers a process of international cultural transfer causing this object of cultural production to be repositioned as it

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entered a new, state-controlled, reception context. Stott’s key insight concerns the film’s borderline acceptability for the East German censors, which marked a shift in the selection criteria for foreign imports upon its release in 1981. Once again, we see the Spaghetti Western providing us with insights into larger processes of cultural-political change, as this filone obtains fresh meanings in a new cultural backdrop: this time, one of ideologically-driven aversion to the Classical Western genre. This case study therefore offers insights into the peculiarities of this cultural moment, when East German authorities were juggling the appeal of Western culture with socialist ideological imperatives. Finally, the volume closes with Pete Falconer’s interrogation of the ever-disputed ‘death’ of the Western. Considering how the genre and its attendant tropes have functioned since its departure from mainstream production, Falconer uses the Spaghetti Western as a touchstone for understanding the implications for how the Western more broadly is produced and understood to the present day. By analysing varying levels of familiarity with the genre’s traditions, Falconer holds that the Italian Western makes the genre ‘strange’, and alienates the viewer from the world of the Wild West. This final chapter thus makes a compelling case for how the seemingly familiar codes of the Western have in fact been rendered alien in differing ways upon contact with various contexts, and thereby offers insights into the representational practices of twenty-first-century Westerns such as Appaloosa (Ed Harris, 2008), 3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold, 2007) and True Grit (Ethan and Joel Cohen, 2010): films that insistently place themselves in a longgone past through painstaking attention to historical details. Falconer’s intervention illuminates the extent to which the Spaghetti Western has come to hold sway over the dominant lexicon of the Western genre’s cultural memory. Falconer’s chapter is therefore an apt note on which to end this volume. Throughout the book, the Spaghetti Western is approached as a unit of culture that has traversed space and time, encompassing temporal journeys as well as physical ones within ‘transcultural’ readings. Taken together, and through their very diversity, the various chapters attest to this filone’s survival instinct, as it has adapted and morphed in response to multifarious cultural conditions, and continues to do so in an era when familiarity with the larger Western genre and its traditions can no longer be assumed. This collection therefore seeks to advance scholarly debates around both the significance of Italy’s popular cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and its ongoing influences on our contemporary culture.

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notes 1. Iain Robert Smith’s chapter in this volume further explores this scholarly trend with specific reference to the Indian ‘Curry’ or ‘Masala’ Western, and situates the tendency within the Western’s ‘cultural roots controversy’ as outlined by Christopher Frayling ([1981] 1998: 121–40), which branded international Westerns as culturally ‘inauthentic’. 2. The word ‘filone’ is generally preferred to ‘genre’ in scholarship around popular Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, as a way of distinguishing this industrial context from that of Hollywood. This of course runs the risk of making rather broad generalisations about both the popular cinema of the USA and the scholarly field of ‘genre studies’, both of which are vast and heterogeneous: a trap into which I have fallen in the past (Fisher 2011: 36). This caveat notwithstanding, ‘filone’ remains a useful descriptor for this set of culturally- and temporallyspecific production and distribution practices, in which numerous trends of very rapid replication would ebb and flow according to the whims of the market, often existing for only a short period before ceasing to be profitable. 3. The work of Marc Ferro ([1977] 1988) and Pierre Sorlin (1980), for example, influentially investigated how cinematic representations of the past illuminate films’ contemporary condition. 4. While my own work has considered the uses made of the Spaghetti Western by Quentin Tarantino, this was done purely to back up an argument that, divorced from their immediate contexts, the films are stripped of their intended political meanings (Fisher 2011: 193–201). I now consider this to be an oversimplification, since detailed analysis of the cultural moments in which the films have been distributed and received is just as valuable in the appraisal of their ongoing cultural significance. Had Django Unchained (2012) been released before I wrote the book in question, I like to think that I would have approached the subject somewhat differently. Mikel Koven does precisely this in these pages. 5. This is indeed a justified criticism of my previous work. I argued too forcefully and too defensively for the necessity of political coherence within the films’ texts. Hyman and Wynne’s chapter therefore offers a valuable entry point into a re-evaluation of the Spaghetti Western’s politics.

references Campbell, Neil (2008), The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Cho, Michelle (2015), ‘Genre, translation, and transnational cinema: Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird’, Cinema Journal, 54: 3, 44–68. Conley, Tom (2013), ‘Foreword’, in Raita Merivirta, Heta Mulari, Kimmo Ahonen and Rami Mähkä (eds), Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945–2010, Bristol: Intellect, pp. ix–xiii. Cooke, Grayson, Warwick Mules and David Baker (eds) (2014), ‘The Other Western’, Transformations, 24 [online], (last accessed 2 September 2015).

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Cooke, Grayson (2014), ‘Whither the Australian Western? Performing genre and the archive in Outback and Beyond’, Transformations, 24 [online], (last accessed 2 September 2015). Eleftheriotis, Dimitris (2001), Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks, London: Continuum. Ferro, Marc ([1977] 1988), Cinema and History, trans. Naomi Greene, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Fisher, Austin (2010), ‘Out west, down south: gazing at America in reverse shot through Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe?’, The Italianist, 30: 2, 183–201. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher ([1981] 1998), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: I. B. Tauris. Higbee, Will and Song Hwee Lim (2010), ‘Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies’, Transnational Cinemas, 1: 1, 7–21. Higgins, MaryEllen, Rita Keresztesi and Dayna Oscherwitz (eds) (2015), The Western in the Global South, New York: Routledge. Hjort, Mette (2010), ‘On the plurality of cinematic transnationalism’, in Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen E. Newman (eds), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, New York: Routledge, pp. 12–33. Iverson, Heath (ed.) (2013), ‘Commies and Indians: the political Western beyond Cold War frontiers’, Frames Cinema Journal, 4 [online], (last accessed 2 September 2015). Klein, Thomas, Ivo Ritzer and Peter Schulze (eds) (2012), Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western, Marburg: Schüren. Laviosa, Flavia (2013), ‘Editorial’, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 1: 1, 3–6. Martin-Jones, David (2011), ‘Transnational allegory/transnational history: Se sei vivo spara/Django Kill . . . If You Live, Shoot!’, Transnational Cinemas, 2: 2, 179–95. Miller, Cynthia and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds) (2013), International Westerns: Re-locating the Frontier, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Robé, Christopher (2014), ‘When cultures collide: Third Cinema meets the Spaghetti Western’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 42: 3, 163–74. Simonyi, Sonja (2013), ‘Csikós, puszta, goulash: Hungarian frontier imaginaries in The Wind Blows under Your Feet and Brady’s Escape’, Frames Cinema Journal, 4 [online], (last accessed 2 September 2015). Sorlin, Pierre (1980), The Film in History: Restaging the Past, Oxford: Blackwell. Wessels, Chelsea (2014), Once Upon a Time Outside the West: Rethinking the Western in Global Contexts. PhD thesis, University of St Andrews. Wessels, Chelsea (2015), ‘An “imperfect” genre: rethinking politics in Latin American Westerns’, in MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi and Dayna Oscherwitz (eds), The Western in the Global South, New York: Routledge, pp. 183–97.

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chapter 1

The Quiet Man Gets Noisy: Sergio Leone, the Italian Western and Ireland1 Christopher Frayling

M

any commentaries on the Italian Western have contrasted – implicitly or explicitly – the ‘authentic’ Hollywood Western, as part of a folk culture, with the ‘inauthentic’ Italian Western, as part of an entrepreneurial culture. The Hollywood Western is the real thing; the Italian product is ersatz: an example of hybridity, with Hollywood as the original plant. But what of ‘inauthentic’ Italian Westerns, if such they were, responding to images within Hollywood Westerns which themselves were palpably inauthentic in the first place? This chapter started life with the thought that images of Irish people in Italian Westerns might be an example of just such a phenomenon: part of a hall of mirrors, rather than of ‘other’ and ‘self’; a reflection of a reflection, which is not how the issue of identity is usually addressed. As Joseph M. Curran wrote in Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen: The Irish have indeed lost most of their ethnic distinctiveness in today’s America, but a good deal of what has been lost can be found in the movies. Despite their factual distortion, movies since the days of Edison reveal a lot about how America perceived the Irish, how that perception gradually changed and what role moviemakers had in changing it. (Curran 1989: 121) Maybe this was a case of a perception of a perception . . . Then I read three texts about the role of Irish immigrants in the myths and realities of the American Wild West: the book How the

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Irish Won the West by broadcaster Myles Dungan (Dungan 2006, 1–10, 160–254) and the articles ‘Seeing is Believing’ and ‘Land Beyond the Waves’ in A Mass for Jesse James by cultural commentator Fintan O’Toole (O’Toole 1990: 16–22, 82–5); plus an analysis of the main differences, within cultural history, between ideas of ‘the West’ in America (a land of promise, which was there to be ‘won’, once upon a time in the west) and ideas of ‘the West’ in Ireland during the Irish Literary Revival (a land which was lost, and waiting to be rediscovered, once upon a time when there was the west) – ‘Synge, Country and Western: the Myth of the West in Irish and American Culture’ by the cultural theorist Luke Gibbons (Gibbons 1996: 23–36). Then someone sent me a cutting from the Irish Daily Star of 30 January 1990, headlined ‘Gunslinger Clint Eastwood is descended from the Lord Mayor of Dublin’: ‘Clint Eastwood is believed to be descended from Alderman John Eastwood, mayor of Dublin in 1679’, thus ‘on the opposite side of the fence to the stubble-jawed outlaw of the Spaghetti Westerns’. The elision of history (1679) and myth (‘Gunslinger Clint Eastwood’) – not to mention the casual inaccuracy (‘stubblejawed outlaw’) – seemed by now to be part of the story being told. Maybe the Man with No Name was Irish . . . It occurred to me, after thinking about these pieces, that it would be interesting to look more closely at the depiction of Irish people in Italian Westerns rather than the more usually studied American ones: after all, both Italy and the Republic of Ireland were largely Catholic countries; the Irish historically played a major role in the evolution of the urban frontier in America – sometimes as the sons and daughters of the gangs of New York – as well as in entrepreneurship on the Western frontier and in the US Cavalry during the ‘Indian Wars’; Irish-American filmmakers (most notably, John Ford and Raoul Walsh) and actors (such as William S. Hart, Harry Carey Sr and Tim McCoy) had made decisive contributions to the American Western genre in film (see Brennan and O’Neill 2007: 66–78, 104–14); and, where topicality or timeliness was concerned, there was the prominence being given in the media to the ‘Troubles’ in the North of Ireland from autumn 1968 onwards – precisely the same time as the most radical of the Italian Westerns were being made and released. Another North, another South (see Bew and Gillespie 1999: 2–46). Actually, the headlines started a little earlier with the blowing-up in March 1966 of the top half of the Nelson Pillar in O’Connell Street in Dublin – a monument which had somehow survived the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent Civil War – by a splinter group of disenfranchised Republicans. This attracted considerably more publicity than the official 50th anniversary of the Rising itself.

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October and November 1968: the Civil Rights marches in Derry, which ‘opened up’ the modern Ulster crisis. January 1969: the transition from Civil Rights as the key issue to age-old nationalist and religious animosities. August 1969: the sharp deterioration into sectarian conflict and the decision to send in British troops. December 1969– January 1970: the split within the IRA between the ‘Officials’ and the ‘Provisionals’ – the name being a deliberate echo of the Easter 1916 Proclamation of the ‘Provisional Government of the Irish Republic’. April 1970: the first major clash between Nationalists and the British army. June 1970: the first military action by the Provisionals. August 1971: the introduction of internment without trial. September 1971: the hundredth victim killed. January 1972: thirteen men shot by members of the Parachute Regiment during a Civil Rights rally in Derry on ‘Bloody Sunday’, with heated arguments about who fired first and a steep rise in recruitment to the Provisionals. The annual Derry marches to commemorate the Easter Rising – in March 1970 and April 1971– proved particular flashpoints. In short, the ‘Troubles’, and the contested meanings and legacy of Easter 1916, were very much in the news on the continent of Europe in the late 1960s. In Italy, the events listed above tended to be treated in the press as a struggle for liberation: on a par with simultaneous struggles in what was then known as the Third World, only closer to home.2 Maybe there would be some reflection of this in the Italian Westerns, matching the ways in which these films reflected other concerns of the New Left, as studied by Austin Fisher (Fisher 2011: 77–160) and myself (Frayling [1981] 1998: 217–44). Fisher (2011: 151) cites the French commentator Gérard Chaliand writing about youthful versions of the New Left at the time. His account was based on eyewitness observations: The anti-imperialist movement which condemned the wars waged by the West was, apparently paradoxically, fascinated by armed struggle and guerrilla warfare. This young left absorbed pell-mell into its imagination fragments of the Spanish Civil War [especially from the film For Whom the Bell Tolls], the October Revolution [Eisenstein’s film October was reissued in 1967], the resistance to Nazism [several directors of Italian Westerns recalled this], the Mexican Revolution, the Long March [in China] and Che Guevara . . . In France after 1968, Third Worldism, hitherto involving relatively few people, capitalised on the recruits from the May Movement . . . [In] West Germany and Italy, terrorist-type movements made their appearance modelled on [the Latin American model of] the Tupamaros in Uruguay . . . The Red Army faction,

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christopher frayling the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades thought that they could use a spiral of violence and repression to mobilise the masses by showing them that the democratic state is in fact repressive and unpopular. Great names lent their voices (Sartre, Genet) to . . . this mishmash of populism and anti-Imperialist Third Worldism. (Chaliand 1989: 217–21)

It was a time when there was much talk of ‘fascism’ in the Italian political establishment; of Togliatti’s ‘historic compromise’ between socialism and the middle class; an increasing disillusionment with formal politics and at the same time discussion about the ‘imperialism’ of American forces in South-East Asia and in some countries of Latin America. A time when the writings of Frantz Fanon – especially The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks – were very fashionable on university and college campuses, as were the recently translated writings of Herbert Marcuse, and of others who argued that since the working class in Western Europe and America had become so thoroughly absorbed into capitalism, the political energy had shifted to capitalism’s supplying bases in the Third World. In Western Europe, there was the ‘rivoluzione mancata’, the revolution that might have been; in the Third World, there was the possibility of real revolution. Maybe there was one about to happen in Ireland. There were earnest seminars on the neglected importance of culture in the early writings of Karl Marx, such as the Grundrisse. A time when the famous poster of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, with his beard, long hair, beret and defiant gaze – known to many, after Sergeant Pepper, as ‘Che in the sky with jacket’ – was pinned to student walls all over Europe, sometimes next to Clint Eastwood with his poncho, stubble and cigar, and soon to be joined by Bob Dylan in his ‘outlaw’ phase on the cover of John Wesley Harding. The ‘Che’ photograph, suitably cropped, had been published and widely distributed for the first time by the left-wing Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, without crediting the original photographer Alberto ‘Korda’ Diaz Gutiérrez.3 And, finally, it was a time when, according to Jean-Luc Godard’s collaborator J.-P. Gorin, ‘every Marxist on the block wanted to make a Western’. After May 1968, student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit went to Rome to prepare a ‘left-wing Western . . . about miners on strike, who fight against their masters, about the boss with his gang of thugs who attacks the workers, the workers who take over the mine, and so on. At one point, there was to have been a duel’ (Frayling, 1993: 27). Of course there was. Maybe Ireland should be added to the list of fragments on the minds of some of the generation whom Jean-Luc

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Godard dubbed the ‘children of Karl Marx and Coca-Cola’. I can remember that after a performance in London by a visiting Italian theatre troupe, in spring 1972, there was a collection on behalf of the Provisional IRA. Perhaps this is more than a question of the image of Irish people in film and popular culture, then: a question, too, of how some Italian films responded to social unrest not at home in Italy (studied by Fisher), but in another corner of Western Europe; social unrest that was topical and – in its civil rights phase at least – presumably of some interest to radical Italian students who were simultaneously demonstrating in the streets of Rome. In other words, if ‘Mexico’ sometimes stood for South-East Asia and Central America in Italian Westerns, and the political stance of a few screenwriters/directors stood for Italian leftwing concerns of the moment, was there a place as well for other (less theoretical) issues from one of the outer reaches of Europe? Were the ‘Troubles’ as fashionable as the other causes in Chaliand’s eclectic list? After all, one Italian Western responded, albeit belatedly, to the assassination of Irish-American President Kennedy – The Price of Power (Il prezzo del potere, Tonino Valerii, 1969) – by transposing the tragic events which took place in Dallas in 1963 to a main street in post-Civil War Dallas in 1881 during the era of Reconstruction: in this, the legacy of the naïve President (a red-haired Van Johnson, ex-matinée idol, of Swedish-Dutch extraction), his race reforms and the gospel of peace, is thwarted by a syndicate of nasty and influential Southern politicians. The main purpose of Dungan’s book is to explore the historical contribution of Irish-born immigrants to rural America in the era depicted in the traditional Western, but he introduces his study by outlining the two basic stereotypes of the Irish – thanks to Hollywood and popular literature – in stories set in nineteenth-century America. First, on the urban frontier, particularly in the eastern cities of Boston and New York, when America was going through her growing pains: the wheeler-dealers of local politics; the corrupt elections on behalf of the Irish Democratic Party and the rise of the Tammany Hall political machine and the local bosses; Catholic Irish in a Protestant American ‘nativist’ culture, and the tensions this created – less a melting-pot than vegetable soup with all the ingredients remaining separate. Dungan writes: The classic image of the nineteenth-century Irish immigrant to the USA is of the peasant fleeing economic and political serfdom and sailing to North America in an unseaworthy ‘coffin ship’ – the indigent vassal on a leaking vessel. He (for the stereotypical

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christopher frayling Irish emigrant is male) would arrive in Boston or New York, stick close to his own, settle in an eastern urban ghetto and endure poverty and bigotry at the hands of the dominant WASP culture. He would probably become political fodder for an Irish Democratic Party ward heeler, probably become a trade union activist and his children and grandchildren might, slowly and painstakingly, climb the political and economic ladder. (Dungan 2006: 4–5)

Or they might – according to Hollywood – if they were played by James Cagney, become gangsters, growing up in the crowded Hell’s Kitchen district of the Lower East Side – counselled by a local priest played by Pat O’Brien or Spencer Tracy – both of them . . . Irish Mafia. Cagney’s Tom Powers in The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) was based on the real-life Bugs Moran; Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll inspired other gangster films of the era. Or they might work in vaudeville like George M. Cohan, with the sentimental songs of Ernest R. Ball (‘Mother Machree’, ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, ‘A Little Bit of Heaven (Shure They Call It Ireland)’) as background music. Or become pugilists such as ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett or John L. Sullivan. Or they might become policemen on the beat – from Riley the Cop (John Ford, 1928) via Lieutenant Finlay in Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947) to Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) – in countless films set on city streets. Several screen Irish joined the armed forces, serving for example in the Fighting 69th in the trenches of the First World War. The prominent role played by Irish Catholics in the Legion of Decency and the post-Code administration helped to ensure that the stereotypes did not get out of hand, and that rags-to-riches stories remained on the whole optimistic.4 Then, on the rural frontier – since ‘a significant percentage didn’t remain on the eastern seaboard’ (Dungan 2006: 5) – where Irish immigrants became working cowboys or railroad workers, sergeants or other ranks in the Far Western outposts of the US Cavalry, having joined the army during the American Civil War. These were the sorts of character played by Victor McLaglen in John Ford’s ‘Cavalry’ trilogy – Sergeant Mulcahy and Sergeant Quincannon – keen on bluster and the bottle, with a short fuse and a taste for slapstick fistfights or ‘donnybrooks’, very sentimental and with a heart of gold. Thirty of the men who died at Little Big Horn were born in Ireland, 140 members of Colonel Custer’s 7th Cavalry – out of a total of 800 – were also Irish, and that is not counting the second-generation immigrants, born in the USA of Irish parents. An officer of the 4th Cavalry observed of his Irish

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troops: ‘I prefer the Irish; they were more intelligent and resourceful as a rule’ – which does rather challenge the Fordian stereotype.5 Dungan then looks at some of the Irish individuals who made an important mark – in non-military settings – on the rural frontier: the ‘Silver Kings’ of Virginia City chronicled by Mark Twain, and the ‘Copper Kings’ of Montana, mining entrepreneurs and tycoons; Thomas Fitzpatrick – mountain man, Indian agent and friend of Jedediah Smith; several members of the Donner Party of covered-wagon pioneers, who famously became marooned in the snow of the High Sierras in 1854, with gruesome consequences; Oscar Wilde lecturing the miners in Leadville, Colorado in April 1892 about the decorative arts and being asked by members of his audience ‘who shot’ Benvenuto Cellini; and the courtesan Lola Montez, born either in Limerick in 1818 or in Grange, Co. Sligo in 1821 though she never admitted to either the date or the exact place. The list also includes several of the participants in the ‘Lincoln County War’, in New Mexico in the late 1870s: on one side, Lawrence Murphy from Wexford, James Dolan from Loughrea, Sheriff William Brady from Cavan town and John H. Riley from Kerry, forming the Murphy–Dolan–Riley ranching and retail combine; on the other side the Englishman John Henry Tunstall (from South London), the Scots-Canadian Presbyterian Alexander McSween and, as a Regulator, Henry McCarty or McCarthy or Henry Antrim – better known as Billy the Kid when he changed his name to William Bonney, born in the Five Points of New York City (or maybe, according to some contemporary accounts, in Ireland) to an Irish immigrant family. Very few Hollywood films, says Dungan, have stressed the Irishness – even the England versus Irishness – of the conflict. Only Young Guns (Christopher Cain, 1988) – made when identity politics had moved centre stage – offers an exception, with Jack Palance attempting an Irish accent as Murphy, location filming in New Mexico, Billy played by Emilio Estevez (whose grandmother was Irish and who was the great-grandson of a Famine immigrant), and Terence Stamp as Tunstall (who in fact was shot at the age of twenty-four and was thus an unlikely candidate to become Billy’s kindly surrogate father). Billy the Kid was killed by another Irish-American, Pat Garrett, on 14 July 1881 (Dungan 2006: 206–54). Other Irish celebrities in the West included Captain Thomas Mayne Reid (born in Co. Down), who between 1848 and 1883 wrote seventy adventure novels – many set in the Southwest – including the best-selling The Scalp-Hunters (1860), and in the process became one of the first to mythologise the Far West and its maverick heroes: an Irish Karl May, except that he had actually worked as a fur-trader and

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fought in the Mexican–American War during the decade he spent in America. Add to this Frank Butler, sharpshooter husband and manager of Annie Oakley, who worked with Buffalo Bill for seventeen years, and the character portrayed in the musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946). Buffalo Bill liked to claim Irish ancestry as well. Frank Harris, born in Galway, wrote a semi-autobiographical novel Reminiscences as a Cowboy which formed the basis of Cowboy (Delmer Daves, 1958) with Jack Lemmon in the Greenhorn Harris role as a Chicago hotel clerk who dreams of riding the range. Dungan’s robust study does not include Wild West characters of so-called ‘Scotch-Irish’ extraction such as Davy Crockett (fifteen of those who died in the Alamo were Irish), Kit Carson, Sam Houston and the Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, and the Confederates Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson and J. E. B. Stuart.6 Dungan is concerned mainly with Catholic immigrants from south of today’s line. The articles by Fintan O’Toole, about A Mass for Jesse James, concern a former parish priest in Asdee near the North Kerry coast who on 4 April every year until 1959 would say a solemn Requiem Mass for the repose of the souls of Frank and Jesse, whose grandfather left the village in 1847 (the year Jesse was born in Montana). The surviving members of the Irish branch of the family, who had stayed in Asdee, would join in the prayers. Jesse, he would remind the congregation, was shot in the back by Bob Ford – also Irish – as he nailed a simple icon of the Virgin Mary to his cabin wall (the James family were, in fact, Protestants). For O’Toole, this strange commemoration was a tribute ‘to the abiding power in Ireland of the images and icons of the American myth’, ‘a dramatised version of someone else’s dramatised version of ourselves’ (O’Toole 1990: 16–22, 82–5).7 The Jesse James Tavern, next door to St Mary’s Church where the Masses were said, still contains colour photographs of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood above the bar. So I wondered if any of this rich mix of history, myth and movie stereotyping – as well as contemporaneous events in the North of Ireland – had somehow filtered into the Italian Western of the 1960s and early 1970s and, if so, in what particular forms. The earliest Spanish and/or Italian Westerns of 1963–5 tended to try to emulate traditional American Westerns – by then an endangered species – in the hope that Italian audiences would think that was what they were. They included The Secret of Captain O’Hara (El secreto del capitán O’Hara, Arturo Ruiz Castillo, 1965), a formulaic cavalry-versus-Indians Western; Buffalo Bill (Buffalo Bill, l’eroe del far west, Mario Costa/John W. Fordson, 1964); Billy the Kid (Fuera de la ley, Léon Klimovsky, 1964)

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with Francisco Martínez Celeiro/George Martin in the lead role; and Son of Jesse James (Solo contro tutti, Antonio del Amo, 1965), with Claudio Undari/Robert Hundar. The novelist Alberto Moravia in a January 1967 review article noted that during this early phase of the European Western, the process of ‘Italianisation’ had not yet really begun (Moravia 2010: 645–7). Nor, it should be added, was there anything remotely Irish about the Italian versions of the Billy the Kid and Jesse James legends. The companion-piece to Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, 1964) – Mario Caiano’s/ Mike Perkins’s Bullets Don’t Argue (Le pistole non discutono, 1964), also produced by Jolly Films – was a reworking of the Billy the Kid and OK Corral stories with Pat Garrett (Rod Cameron) tracking the Clanton brothers George (Angel Aranda) and Billy (Horst Frank) into Mexico. Caiano himself recalled of this film that it was ‘a traditional film that followed all the classic schemes of the American Western’ (Grant 2011: 42–3). Garrett was not presented as Irish-American, but then again he never was in the Hollywood versions either. After this initial phase – and indeed during it – Italian Westerns never showed much interest in the melting-pot of different waves of immigration, or the significance of the Frontier in American political rhetoric, or the promise/winning of the West, or even the sense of a burgeoning community in frontier towns. There was to be no transformation of the desert into a garden. Italian and Spanish filmmakers were detached from these ‘foundation myths’, even when they were emulating Hollywood films. So the image of Irish people was likely to be very different, and for very different purposes – perhaps reflecting/ subverting the predominant Hollywood images for European consumption. One aspect of history they certainly did absorb was the ‘code duello’ – regulating the rituals of pistol duels – which was drawn up in Ireland in 1777. There was certainly no shortage of ritualised duels in Italian Westerns. In researching this, I felt an affinity with another book I had recently been reading: Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art by Guyanese-born David Dabydeen (1987). When this book was first announced, many art historians were surprised by its title. Black people in Hogarth’s paintings? Surely there were only one or two, and they were in the background. Actually, Dabydeen had found and analysed examples in two dozen paintings – servants, pages, street-vendors, chambermaids, companions and others: it was just that nobody had noticed them before, or if they had they had not considered them worthy of comment. Hogarth’s Blacks started to put this particular record straight.

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The first thing that struck me was the use of Irish surnames: in Sergio Leone’s Westerns, Baby ‘Red’ Cavanagh (his first Irishman with curly red hair in For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più, 1965), in league with a crooked sheriff), Bill Carson and Arch Stanton (the name next to the grave) in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966), not to mention Sean Mallory in Duck, You Sucker (Giù la testa, 1971) and Jimmy O’Donnell the Union organiser played by Treat Williams in Once Upon a Time in America (1984). The name ‘Mallory’ was most likely derived from the Gregory Peck character, the mountaineer Captain Keith Mallory, in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961), and it led in Italy to My Name is Mallory (Il mio nome è Mallory . . . M come morte, Mario Moroni, 1971) with the American Robert Woods in the title role. Once Upon a Time in America, in its earliest pre-production phase 1967–9, was to have been centred on the conflicts between Irish and Jewish immigrant gangsters in 1920s New York before the Italians arrived and turned crime into big business. Then there were the surnames Corbett in The Big Gundown (La resa dei conti, Sergio Sollima, 1967) and Ryan in Death Rides a Horse (Da uomo a uomo, Giulio Petroni, 1967) – both played by Lee Van Cleef – or the former lawman Murph (Walter Rilla) in Day of Anger (I giorni dell’ira, Tonino Valerii, 1967) and the Rev. Riley (Adolfo Lastretti) in Find a Place to Die (Joe . . . cercati un posto per morire!, Giuliano Carnimeo, 1968): a phoney ‘wandering missionary’, conman and pervert, like a fair number of priests in Spaghetti Westerns (though monks (and Mormons) tended to be better treated). In They Call Me Trinity (Lo chiamavano Trinità . . ., Enzo Barboni, 1970), Sheriff Bud Spencer’s assistant in Alliance City is called Jonathan Swift. In these cases, such Irish flavour as there was came largely through the characters’ names and appearance rather than plot, dialogue or characterisation. Then, in the 1970s – coinciding with reports of the ‘Troubles’ – Lynn Redgrave played Mary O’Donnell, a distant version of her reallife sister Vanessa, as an intense, bespectacled, virginal, red-haired Irish colleen-journalist who takes the Mexican Revolution much more seriously than the other lead characters in Don’t Turn the Other Cheek (¡Viva la muerte . . . tua!, Duccio Tessari, 1971); this was a send-up of the recent, more radical Italian Westerns written or suggested by Franco Solinas. In the final sequence, Lynn Redgrave yells an uncharacteristic expletive at her two mercenary companions (Franco Nero as conman Orlansky, Eli Wallach as cowardly Lozola posing as revolutionary leader ‘El Salvador’) and resolves to find another revolution to write about in Guatemala, while her companions ride off in

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disgust. O’Donnell seems well-intentioned, but the cynical Orlansky is convinced that she is ‘someone who creates an idol and then destroys him’: a celebrity-stalker who masks her careerism with apparent revolutionary commitment. This was followed by Lynne Frederick playing Emanuelle ‘Bunny’ O’Neill, a pregnant prostitute (her first name is a clue) who survives a vigilante attack on a flyblown Western town, only to be viciously treated by a psychopathic bandit called Chaco who looks and behaves like Charles Manson (Tomas Milian) in Lucio Fulci’s late entry Four of the Apocalypse (I quattro dell’apocalisse, 1975), very loosely based on two Bret Harte stories ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ and ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’. In the original Harte, the prostitute was called ‘Duchess’. ‘Bunny’ O’Neill eventually dies while giving birth, and her lover Stubby (Fabio Testi) takes his protracted, cruel revenge on Chaco. Fabio Testi also starred in China 9, Liberty 37 (Amore, piombo e furore, Monte Hellman, 1978), opposite Jenny Agutter as Catherine, the conflicted wife of grizzled Warren Oates. She has an Irish accent throughout, but this is never explained. In White Apache (Bianco Apache, Bruno Mattei, 1987), the central character is an Irish boy who is the sole survivor of an Indian massacre and is brought up by the Apaches to become Shining Sky (Sebastian Harrison, son of Richard), a man who does not quite fit into either American or Apache society. Cowboy turns Indian this time, in a variation on Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970). There were certainly more explicitly Irish figures in Italian Westerns, post-1968 – first male, then female. One of the most significant is featured in The Return of Sabata (È tornato Sabata . . . hai chiuso un’altra volta!), directed by Gianfranco Parolini/Frank Kramer at Elios Studios in 1971. Sabata (Lee Van Cleef) is reduced to showing off his gun-stunts in a circus, and finds himself in Hobsonville, Texas. Hobsonville, he soon discovers, is being run by a corrupt Irishman, a leprechaun-figure usually dressed in a three-piece tweed suit, bowler hat and chianti-red hair, called Joseph McLintock: a name derived from the character played by John Wayne in the relatively recent Andrew V. McLaglen comedy Western McLintock! (1963). McLintock! also starred Maureen O’Hara as Wayne’s estranged wife, and was a reworking for more senior citizens of The Taming of the Shrew – the same distant literary source as John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). McLaglen had been assistant director on The Quiet Man, and McLintock! tried hard, in its sprawling way, to appear neo-Fordian. Hobsonville, in The Return of Sabata, resembles Lawrence Murphy’s Lincoln town (in some versions of the Billy the Kid story, notably Chisum – also directed by McLaglen). Joseph

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McLintock (Giampiero Albertini) seems on the surface to be a pillar of the local community, and enjoys quoting selectively from the Bible; he also likes levying heavy taxes on the locals – for gambling, drinking and prostitution – and issuing counterfeit coins and banknotes while stashing the gold he amasses as a result. He gives hypocritical speeches outside City Hall about ‘a city we can all be proud of – a shining and moral home for men and women’. His entrances tend to be accompanied by Bach-style organ music scored by Marsello Giombini, and when Sabata finds his gold in the last reel, hidden behind a sacred tapestry, it falls down McLintock’s chimney to the sound of the Hallelujah Chorus. McLintock is most prominently featured in a sequence set in his private Catholic oratory which doubles as his bandit headquarters. This sequence begins with a solemn church service (cue organ music) and a homily from an Irish priest (who also has chianti-hair, this time curly): We pray to the good Lord to keep us away from being possessed of the fleeting pleasures of the carnal urge, of violence, of the will to create discord – O Father, let us go back to the innocence we knew originally so we can claim our future in Christ. The priest then recovers from delivering this homily to a congregation of hypocrites by coughing loudly, and taking two big swigs from a bottle of whiskey secreted in his pulpit. ‘A splendid ceremony, Father’, says McLintock, who is dressed in his best shirt with grey cravat. A man rushes up to him, whispers something in his ear, McLintock replies ‘not here’ and leads the man to the high altar. ‘You’re supposed to eliminate an enemy of the organisation and you’ve failed in your mission.’ McLintock then turns the bejewelled crucifix on the altar away from him so the crucified Christ cannot see what he is about to do, swivels round and punches the hapless man in the face with his left hand. ‘Thank the Lord you are alive, because you really owe it to him.’ Then, as the camera zooms in on his face and as he looks lovingly at the cross, now back to its usual position on the altar, he says ‘Mercy we have learned from him.’ He crosses himself. McLintock acts throughout the film like a Mafia boss—and is clearly meant to be a riff on the Hollywood stereotype of the corrupt Boston politician as well as a version of Lawrence Murphy. His cultural roots come from well before the ‘Troubles’: more a case of the Italian Western amplifying, and parodying, one of the cherished myths of classic Hollywood cinema. The Italian version of the genre was full of corrupt governors, sheriffs, marshals and lawyers: officialdom was

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usually presented as an excuse for freelance gunfighters to take over, even in some films pre-dating A Fistful of Dollars. But the McLintock character was presented in unusual detail. The reason he looked the way he did was clearly because of another Italian Western, which had been released three years earlier. This was Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, Sergio Leone, 1968), which features another pivotal Irish character. I have written extensively about the gestation of this film elsewhere (see Frayling 2000: 247–301), but for the purposes of this chapter the most important element is that amid all the many citations of American Westerns contained in Leone’s film (High Noon, The Iron Horse, Johnny Guitar, Shane, Pursued and The Searchers in the opening two sequences alone) the focal point of the whole postmodernist enterprise was the films of John Ford: the surprising use made of Woody Strode and Henry Fonda, both of them members of what was called ‘Hollywood’s Irish Mafia’; the location in Monument Valley, on the Arizona–Utah border, where Ford had made ten of his Westerns, between Stagecoach (1939) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964); explicit visual references to Wagon Master, My Darling Clementine, The Searchers, Sergeant Rutledge, Two Rode Together and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Once Upon a Time in the West was part of a European cinematic ‘moment’ which included Chabrol’s take on Hitchcock, Melville’s on Hollywood gangster films, Godard’s on the ‘B’ movies from Republic Studio, Bertolucci’s on film noir and Leone’s take on Ford. When Bertolucci, Argento and Leone were preparing their original treatment in Rome, they talked a lot about Ford’s Westerns and their memories of first watching them dubbed into Italian as they were growing up in Italy. They wanted to include a sequence which would distil their responses to Ford’s utopian communities out West with their ‘dreams of a lifetime’ and sense of promise, symbolising Ford’s gratitude to the USA as the son of an immigrant family from the West of Ireland (the Once Upon a Time element), which they would then collide with a brutal massacre of an entire family in the desert by railroad agents (the In the West element). Sergio Leone observed of John Ford, in retrospect: As Romans, we have a strong sense of the fragility of empires. It is enough to look around us. I admire very much that great optimist, John Ford. His naïveté permitted him to make Cinderella – I mean, The Quiet Man. But, as Italians, we see things differently. That is what I have tried to show in my films. The great plains – they are very beautiful, but, when the storm comes, should people

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christopher frayling bury their heads in the sand? I believe that people like to be treated as adults from time to time. Because a man is wearing a sombrero, and because he rides a horse, does not necessarily mean that he is an imbecile. (Frayling [1981] 1998: 135) So what remains in the end? The family. Which is my final archetype – handed down to us from prehistory . . . What else is there? Friendship. And that is all. I’m a pessimist by nature. With John Ford, people look out of the window with hope. Me, I show people who are scared even to open the door. And if they do, they tend to get a bullet right between the eyes. But that’s how it is. Politics are never absent from my films. (Frayling 2000: 306) John Ford is a film-maker whose work I admired enormously, more than any other director of Westerns. I could almost say that it was thanks to him that I even considered making Westerns myself. I was very influenced by Ford’s honesty and his directness. Because he was an Irish immigrant who was full of gratitude to the United States of America, Ford was also full of optimism . . . If he sometimes de-mythologizes the West . . . it is always with a certain romanticism, which is his greatness but which also takes him a long way away from historical truth. (Frayling 2000: 258) There is a visual influence there as well, because [Ford] was the one who tried most carefully to find a true visual image to stand for ‘the West’. The dust, the wooden towns, the clothes, the desert. The Ford film I like most of all – because we are getting nearer to shared values – is also the least sentimental, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. We certainly watched that when we were preparing Once Upon a Time in the West. Why? Because Ford finally, at the age of almost sixty-five, finally understood what pessimism is all about. (Frayling 2000: 258) John Ford regarded America as a land of opportunity where, a long time before, the promise of liberty, peace, adventure and bread had been made – a promise that was not going to be forgotten. As far as he was concerned, the promise had undoubtedly been kept . . . His America was a utopian land, but it was an Irish utopia! In other words, an immigrant land, deeply Catholic, full of pietàs and camaraderie and communities with a lot of humour but without irony – and, more important, without cruelty. I know that my vision of America is very different and that in my films I have always looked at the wrong side of the dollar, the hidden side rather than the face. I also know that the sunny and humane West of John Ford led the way into the arid prairies of my cinema, right up to the last slate of Giù la testa . . . If you think about

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it, Fordian heroes are never individuals or solitary riders. Instead they are men who are always deeply rooted in their community, exactly like Irish immigrants who are happy with their new life. (Frayling 2008: 168–9) As Leone often noted, John Ford’s American films felt Irish, while his Irish films felt American. The sequence of the massacre takes place at the remote Sweetwater ranch in ‘a stinking piece of desert’ near Monument Valley, built by the pioneer Irish Catholic Brett McBain (Frank Wolff) – Bertolucci was reading the paperback police precinct novels of Brett Halliday and Ed McBain at the time. McBain’s wife has died, and he has been bringing up his two sons Patrick and little Timmy (Enzo Santaniello) and his daughter Maureen (Simonetta Santaniello). Was this name perhaps a reference to Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man? Or was it because actor Frank Wolff’s wife was called Maureen? After all, Woody Strode’s wife Luana appeared uncredited in the opening sequence at the remote railroad station – as a nervous Native American woman. Bertolucci, Argento and Leone had been watching together The Searchers (the attack on the Edwards ranch by the Comanche), My Darling Clementine (the barn-dance in the makeshift church, as a celebration of nascent community values) and The Iron Horse (the locomotive hurtling over the camera, on its way to rescue the beleaguered workforce). They had also screened Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947), in which Robert Mitchum as Jeb Rand sings the ‘Londonderry Air’ – ‘an old-fashioned tune’ – with musical-box accompaniment, on his return from the war, and his adopted family joins in to reassure themselves that ‘the best and finest thing there is – is family’. In Pursued, the tune was the ‘Londonderry Air’ – public domain – but the words were specially written for the film. In Once Upon a Time in the West, Maureen gaily sings the words of ‘Danny Boy’, which goes with the general sense of Irish domesticity and the red gingham tablecloths laid out for the delayed wedding reception.8 Brett McBain was played by American actor Frank Wolff, who was born in San Francisco and had settled in Europe to make a career in 1960. For Once Upon a Time in the West, Wolff dyed his curly hair, sideburns and moustache bright red – a colour that evidently runs in the McBain family. McBain was presented as an Irishman who seemed crazy – building a ranch in the middle of nowhere – but who was in fact more savvy than anyone had realised, spotting a massive investment opportunity when the railroad lines reached his well. If all had gone to plan, Brett might well have been running the town of Sweetwater – like

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Lawrence Murphy in Lincoln – but then again, as Harmonica says, ‘You don’t sell the dream of a lifetime’. As it is, Brett, Maureen, Patrick and Timmy are all gunned down by Henry Fonda and his gang of hitmen employed by the railroad. By turning Fonda into a ruthless, blueeyed, smiling child-killer, Leone was, he said, building on ‘the intuition which John Ford brought to Fort Apache’ when he cast Fonda as ‘an unpleasant, authoritarian colonel who violates moral codes and treaties with the Indians’. The audience would be struck in an instant by the profound contrast between the pitiless character Fonda is playing, and Fonda’s face, a face which for so many years (in Young Mr Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine and elsewhere) ‘had signified justice and goodness’ (Frayling 2000: 271). The images on the screen no longer signified just themselves, or their original significations (although the ‘cinematic memory’ was still there) – but they signified Leonian variations as well, a process he called ‘cinema cinema’. Semiotics was fast becoming intellectually fashionable in Italy and France at the time. Fonda’s face – like Ford’s Westerns – had been turned by Leone and his scriptwriters into an abstraction. But the sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West where Sergio Leone most explicitly refers to Ford, and to the destruction of his utopian dream by the railroad, occurs when Harmonica and Cheyenne are examining the kit of wooden parts that has been delivered posthumously to Brett McBain’s farm. They take the measure of what will become the train station. The Sweetwater farmhouse, centre of McBain’s little community, is in the background. Harmonica figures out the Irishman McBain’s stratagem. (‘He knew sooner or later that the railroad coming through Flagstone would continue on West. So he looked over all this country out here until he found this hunk of desert. Nobody wanted it, but he bought it. Then he tightened his belt and for years he waited.’) Cheyenne catches on quickly: ‘Aha, he was no fool, our dead friend, huh? He was going to sell this piece of desert for its weight in gold, wasn’t he?’ To which the reply is, ‘You don’t sell the dream of a lifetime.’ McBain is ‘our dead friend’, because agents of the railroad company have massacred him and his entire family: Leone’s most extreme take on what really might have happened to ‘the dream of a lifetime’ and the utopian community which supported it in the films of John Ford. When promoting Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone announced to the press that as his next project he intended to make a revisionist version of Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), a film he considered ‘artificial and untruthful’ (see Frayling 2000: 301). He was of course being provocative – it had recently been noted that

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his films were getting bigger and bigger in scale – but it would have been fascinating to see his take on the character of the idealistic Gerald O’Hara (originally played by Thomas Mitchell), who believes that ‘the land’s the only thing that matters’, and who names his plantation in Georgia after his beloved Tara Hill in County Meath, but who backs the wrong side in the Civil War and after Gettysburg sees his cocooned world of romance and chivalry collapse around him. ‘There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South’, ran the nostalgic opening caption, Walter Scott-style. ‘Here in this pretty world, gallantry took its last bow . . . Here are the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair . . . a civilization gone with the wind.’ Leone’s opening caption would no doubt have been very different: something about ‘where life had no value . . .’ perhaps. Instead, Sergio Leone went on to make, after an on–off gap of eighteen months, Duck, You Sucker (Giù la testa, 1971): a belated critique of the more overtly ‘political’ Italian Westerns and of Hollywood’s Mexico, as well as – through its two main characters – a study of the destructive potential of revolutionary or political commitment of any kind.9 Whereas the Franco Solinas scripts appealed to legal left-wing groups, the cynicism of Giù la testa appealed more to the very far left at the time.10 Juan Miranda is a naïve Mexican peasant, a born anarchist believing only in his family and friends, who crosses the path of a professional revolutionary and explosives expert with a guilty past, Sean Mallory, who uses him for his own purposes. They come to depend on one another, in an uneasy but touching friendship, and the peasant teaches the intellectual a lesson. The encounter – and the dialectic – proves disastrous for both of them. The setting is a particular historical moment, in 1913, when the initial excitement of the Mexican Revolution is over, and General Victoriano Huerta is trying to put the initial revolutionary impulse into reverse. His downfall is imminent, and his brutal attempts to hold on to power resemble the decadence and cruelty of the last days of Fascism. Giù la testa was filmed between April and July 1970 on location in Spain – Almeria, Los Filabres, Gergal, Guadix, Burgos, Granada, Medinaceli sixty miles from Guadalajara (standing in for the town of Mesa Verde) – and in Ireland at Toner’s Pub on Baggot Street Lower in Dublin (established 1818), the Sally Gap in Wicklow, and the drive and demesne of Howth Castle (the sequences in a vintage car and around the tree). Edited in autumn 1970 and released in 1971 under various titles, it was the only Italian Western to feature sequences filmed on location in Ireland, with Leone’s characteristic mix of realism, fable and abstraction. Originally based on a treatment called ‘Mexico’, which Leone

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had read during post-production of Once Upon a Time in the West, it became Giù la testa (‘Keep Your Head Down’, after a popular Italian slang phrase ‘Giù la testa, coglione’), then in the United States Duck, You Sucker (a phrase which Leone had convinced himself was in common parlance) before a title change to A Fistful of Dynamite following poor box-office returns. United Artists hoped the ‘Fistful’ brand might pack audiences in: it didn’t. In France, the film was released as Il était une fois la révolution, Leone’s preferred title and the one he originally wanted before being dissuaded. He always stressed, in interviews, that the film was intended as a critique of the image of the Mexican Revolution, rather than its historical reality; it was also about ‘all wars and revolutions’ at some level, rather than just Mexico – hence the visual references in the film to the young Mussolini, the flight of the King, the Nazi massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine, the cattle-wagons carrying Jewish victims to their doom in Poland, and the last days of Fascism: These are signs which are there to connote all wars and revolutions. Whether in Ireland or Spain, or wherever. Here, the Mexican Revolution is only a symbol. Not the historical one. It only interested me in relation to cinema: Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, ‘La Cucaracha’. A true mythology.11 Giù la testa was in some ways reacting against Hollywood’s Mexican Revolution, ‘and also against the romance of the sombrero, the picturepostcard Mexico of the Cisco Kid and Zorro, and the singing cowboys’. Leone also related this to contemporary (mid-1969) debates in Italy about ‘the disillusionment of my generation with the subject of revolution’; when Sean Mallory throws away the Bakunin book Patriotism, ‘you suspect damn well that this gesture is a symbolic reference to everything my generation has been told in the way of promises . . . But don’t imagine that there weren’t continuities with earlier Westerns as well.’ By ‘continuities’, Leone seemed to mean: sandy Spanish locations standing in for New Mexico, the border and Northern Mexico; flamboyant and noisy Spanish bad guys in decorated sombreros, and gipsy extras; German co-stars in co-productions; the contrast between two styles of acting – flamboyant (Spanish), quiet (American); regular doses of ‘chilli con carnage’, to keep the audience from getting bored; an emphasis on elaborate firearms; a duel – or settling of accounts – in the last reel; Ennio Morricone or Morricone-style music; a ‘Mexicanisation’ of the traditional Hollywood Western; and Catholic iconography – crosses, cemeteries, churches, bell-towers, sculptures and priests – rather than the traditional Protestant imagery of the Hollywood Western. In Giù la testa,

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for example, there is a ‘halo’ around Sean Mallory’s head, an altar with ‘holy water’ (nitro) consecrated on it, and the window of the bank at Mesa Verde is presented as if it was the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament with the Host at its centre. ‘It only interested me in relation to cinema . . .’ There was the reaction against the recent tendency within Italian Westerns, but more importantly – for Leone anyway – there were the ways in which Hollywood films such as Viva Villa! (Jack Conway, 1934),12 Juarez (William Dieterle, 1939)13 and Viva Zapata! (Elia Kazan, 1952)14 had reinterpreted the Revolution for largely North American audiences and in the process made it a projection of North American values, and of how the United States hoped it would be seen across the border. These films did, in their distinctive ways, treat the Mexican Revolution as a historical event in its own right. But then there were the popular Hollywood adventureWesterns of the 1950s and 1960s – where American soldiers of fortune ride across the border Gary Cooper-style in search of lost illusions, spiritual renewal, ‘la revolución’, gold, a bullshit-free zone, and America’s libido. Between The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960) and The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966), these films, in their different ways, all enacted President Kennedy’s famous promise of technical and military assistance, as part of the new frontier, to ‘those people in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery’. In these films, the redemptive power of America’s intervention is measured against old-style colonialism, banditry, vulgarity and primitive folklore. By 1966, though, these soldiers of fortune were beginning to ask – with Burt Lancaster in The Professionals – ‘Maybe there’s only one revolution, since the beginning. The good guys against the bad guys. The question is: who are the good guys?’ Everything in these films was seen from the point of view, the perspective, of the North American heroes – which was assumed to be the audience’s point of view as well. The films are also about the USA’s self-perception on the world’s stage. But the question ‘who are the good guys?’ was about to get a very different answer, in Italy, where the adventure-Westerns were particularly popular: an answer that reacted against the Americanisation of the Revolution, and of the journey across the border, in a very postmodern way. Since the 1930s, Mexico had been the Third World country to which the Hollywood community felt the closest affinity, as indeed they were the closest geographically. From the mid-1960s, that was all to change – in Italy, anyhow. As for the picture-postcard presentation of Mexico mentioned by Sergio Leone, the Hollywood settings for these exotic adventures, over and over again – in features, ‘B’ movies and serials – had tended to

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consist of sleepy villages with peasants in white cotton calzóns photogenically patting tortillas in the background, in a country which seems regularly to host violent coups engineered by European-style heelclicking dictators from the world of operetta. Local colour consisted in peacetime of mules, siestas, serenades, crucifixes and bell towers, cacti, huge sombreros, folkloric fiestas against high-contrast skies and machismo rather than toughness; and during la revolución – a time of transition – of automobiles and flying machines, machetes and machine-guns, motorcycles and locomotives, barbed wire, automatic weapons and spectacular set-piece raids. The music was usually derived from Aaron Copland’s El Salón México – written in the mid-1930s and heavy on the trumpets/syncopated strings/strumming Spanish guitars/ dance rhythms – via his students such as Elmer Bernstein, who scored The Magnificent Seven. Then there were of course the singing cowboys who went ‘south of the border, down Mexico way’, a song by the way which was written by two British songwriters who had blagged their way into Gene Autry’s dressing-room in Dublin. Then for Sergio Leone there was always John Ford: not the Ford of the Westerns this time, but the Ford of films set in Ireland. Leone was keen enough on the Fordian connection to suggest Peter Bogdanovich – Ford’s biographer in 1967 and a well-known fan of his storytelling abilities – as the possible director of Giù la testa, until the two men fell out. There had, in fact, been a recent film reference, which may have set a kind of precedent – in Louis Malle’s Viva Maria! (1965). The opening sequence of this film made an explicit link between the ‘Irish’ and ‘Mexican’ Revolutions. It was set in ‘Ireland, 1891’, and showed the juvenile Maria O’Malley – in a blue ‘sailor suit’ dress designed by Pierre Cardin – playfully laying a fuse, for her father to detonate. It is as if she is playing with a ball of cotton. The British garrison on a castle esplanade, with drilling soldiers in scarlet tunics and black bearskins and a Union Jack up the flagpole, is nearby. Mr O’Malley is dressed in tweed trousers and waistcoat and a tweed cap, Quiet Manstyle. There is an explosion, and Maria gaily walks away hand in hand with her father, humming a nursery rhyme. Later, she will grow up to become a revolutionary in Central America (Brigitte Bardot), after her father is blown up in 1907. Asked by critic Philip French if Viva Maria! might in fact have inspired the ‘political’ phase of the Italian Westerns, Louis Malle replied: ‘I didn’t think of that – that’s funny.’ (French 1992: 50–1). Maybe, he added, they had a common source in Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1954): ‘We thought it would be fun to put Bardot and Moreau in the same situation as Cooper and Lancaster in Vera Cruz and to do a pastiche of those buddy films.’

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The transformation of the treatment of ‘Mexico’ into a workable screenplay for Giù la testa was largely the work of Sergio Donati (in spring and summer 1969), embellished with some comedy by Luciano Vincenzoni and revisited by Donati early in 1970. These were Leone’s Dollars screenwriters. In this lengthy process, the character of Sean Mallory grew in importance and depth. While Juan Miranda was a characteristically ‘Leone’ character – a carnivalesque Sancho Panza who puts camaraderie and family before any civic responsibilities – Sean Mallory seems to have been largely Donati’s contribution. As he has recalled: ‘Mallory is my character. If you read my first mystery novels, this kind of hero is my particular hero . . . he’s a character from my repertory – the unlikely hero, the disenchanted hero’.15 Mallory started life in early drafts as an absinthe-drinking, romantic revolutionary who has become disillusioned with the ideals of his youth because of a personal tragedy. He displaces his bitterness into dope and drink, and has come to thrive on chaos and destruction. This survived into the finished film. He gives a conscience to Juan Miranda, ‘which makes him a lost soul forever’, as Leone put it. Through the dialectic of Juan/Sean, Leone/Donati, he grows as a character throughout the story – a first for Leone. Up to now, by his own admission, Leone had treated his main characters as ‘puppets’. A cutting from The United Irishman, discovered near Sean’s motorbike, tells us that the British government has placed a £300 bounty on his head. Juan happily assumes Sean is a fellow bandit, though the latter is diffident about the nature of the trouble he is in (‘Oh, we had a wee fart of a revolution in Ireland’). Sean is an explosives specialist. So instead of the usual gun duel, there is much cat-and-mouse business involving dynamite and nitro-glycerine. He carries his equipment – short fuse, medium fuse, long fuse – inside the lining of his long duster-coat (‘If you pull that trigger and shoot me, I fall, and if I fall, they’ll have to alter all the maps. You see, when I go, half this bloody country goes with me. Including yourself’). However, he has lost his illusions. He drinks too much: in one sequence, he is so paralytic that he is incapable of operating his detonator, so Juan has to blow up the mine-owner Aschenbach and his escort of soldiers by putting his foot on the handle. He also smokes dope, and behaves like a suicidal dilettante, saying things like: ‘If it’s a revolution, it’s confusion’ and ‘When I started using dynamite, I believed in many things . . . finally I believe only in dynamite’. For much of the story, he manipulates the naïve Juan. But unlike the double-crosses of Leone’s earlier films, this manipulation leads to personal tragedy, and Sean learns something from it. In a very touching

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scene in a cattle-wagon, he realises the depth of Juan’s grief, and begins to recall a time when he, too, was capable of experiencing the normal range of emotions. In a final slow-motion flashback, he fantasises about an idyllic moment in rural Ireland, when he was young, in love, and with his ideals intact. Juan, who is somehow in synch with this fantasy, instinctively turns to look at his friend. The Irishman has just confessed to his Mexican partner, as Juan shows Sean the rosary he has kept since the massacre of his family in the grotto, ‘Oh, my friend, I did give you a royal screwing.’ Juan shakes his head, as if to signal, ‘No, don’t say that.’ Sean, mortally wounded in the spine, then blows himself up, in a variation on Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), a film which Leone judged ‘a masterpiece: when cinematic researches lead to such perfection and such emotion, I really am profoundly respectful’ (Simsolo 1987: 148–9). In Pierrot, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), having wrapped his face in multi-coloured sticks of dynamite and lit the fuse, then changes his mind and fumbles for the burning tip: ‘how stupid!’ are his last words. In Giù la testa, Sean takes a deep drag on his joint of marijuana which doubles as a detonator, smiles and relaxes into his idyllic fantasy just before the huge explosion. Ferdinand’s gesture is impetuous and pointless; Sean’s is calculated: he has been deliberately dicing with death ever since the two men met. The betrayals in this story have serious consequences, such as that of Dr Villega (Romolo Valli), the intellectual strategist tortured by Reza into giving away his co-conspirators. This also marks a development in Leone. As he was to put it: [Villega’s action is not] a farcical form of treachery like in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Sean’s war consequently becomes an individual act, without political ideology. When Juan barges into Sean’s suicidal gesture in front of the bridge, he unwittingly prevents him from dying alone. The very worst thing that could happen is that they will, as a result, escape death. And the people they are protecting will be exterminated! Because of an action which is completely mad. I love the dark irony of that. (Simsolo 1987: 161–3) Villega’s betrayal leads to a firing squad in the rain, lit by candles and looking like Goya’s painting The 3rd of May in Madrid. It also leads to the final stage of Sean’s self-realisation, as he forces Villega to atone for his guilt by taking part in another suicidal gesture. The intellectual is now expected to get his hands dirty by shovelling coal into a locomotive

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packed with dynamite, which will collide with Reza’s troop train. Villega senses his motive, and makes a desperate defence of his forced action: ‘It’s easy to judge. Have you ever been tortured? Are you sure you wouldn’t talk? I was sure. And yet I talked.’ His protests are angrily cut short by Sean, and as the locomotive hurtles towards its explosive destination, the Irishman urges him to bail out (‘just close your eyes and jump . . . for Christ’s sake save yourself’). But Villega just closes his eyes. The key to Sean’s character is contained in a series of flashbacks to his time as a young IRA man: flashbacks which, characteristically for Leone, suggest optimism in the past and no future to look forward to. In the first he is motoring through the Irish countryside: a darkhaired colleen in the back seat takes off his hat, and they kiss, while their friend behind the wheel smiles approvingly. Then, the two men are busy distributing copies of a broadsheet called ‘Irish Freedom’ in a Dublin pub. Then (coinciding with Sean’s recognition of Villega, ‘that night in the rain’), Sean is drinking at a Dublin bar when a policeman and two British soldiers appear with the friend, who has been severely beaten up: the soldier points to various individuals in the pub, and the friend nods. Sean watches them anxiously in a mirror. He turns round, with a Lee Enfield rifle wrapped in newspaper . . . just as a Mexican firing squad opens fire. At the moment on the locomotive when Sean tells Villega to ‘shut up for Christ’s sake’, we are transported back to that bar: the two soldiers are shot, and the friend looks Sean in the eye and begins to smile. But he, too, is shot; as he collapses, we hear Sean tell Villega, ‘I don’t judge you . . . I did that only once in my life. Get shovelling.’ The last flashback is that marijuana-stoked reminiscence, in which he fantasises his younger self, the girl and his friend running happily through the Irish countryside: the girl leans against a tree and Sean kisses her, then the friend begins to kiss her too. His reverie is broken only by the huge, map-altering explosion, and Juan’s shout of ‘Johnny!’. Leone noted that, in many countries, the last flashback to ‘the two Irishmen sharing the same woman’ was excised, which irritated him considerably: This wasn’t just libertarianism and free love; there was also a symbolic dimension. This woman represented the revolution everyone wanted to embrace. And Sean sees these images while smoking his strange cigarette. You don’t know if he’s dreaming, imagining or remembering . . . And I inserted the scene in such a way that Juan also sees Sean’s phantasm . . . So they are together again, just before the Irishman blows up. (Simsolo 1987: 159–61)

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The cinematic origin of these flashbacks – in the script and film – was John Ford’s The Informer (1935), in which the shambling drunkard Gypo Nolan (Victor McLagen) wanders through the expressionist fog of a studio-bound Dublin in 1922 (it was shot in a Hollywood warehouse) and betrays his friend Frankie McPhillip to the police in exchange for the blood-money which will pay for his passage to America. Vincenzoni remembered running the film while working on the screenplay. The Informer, taken from a 1925 novel by Ford’s distant cousin Liam O’Flaherty, was based on an actual incident of November 1923, during the Irish Civil War, which followed the treaty with the British. Ford’s film distils the novel into a simple morality tale with many sentimental songs, and relocates it in 1922 – with the British still in evidence. Nolan is presented as a confused simpleton who is ‘as strong as any bull’. The Informer, famously, scarcely refers to the IRA, known throughout as ‘the Organisation’ and ‘the rebels’. Sergio Leone’s reworking of Ford’s film retains the theme of betrayal, but shifts the emphasis from the traitor (also called Nolan) to the avenger, one wholly devoid of forgiveness. Moreover, it is quite explicit about what exactly ‘the Organisation’ is. One sequence in The Informer particularly touched Leone, towards the beginning of the film. ‘On a certain night in strife-torn Dublin’, Nolan looks at a ‘Wanted’ poster for McPhillip – cue Rule Britannia on the soundtrack – and in a brief flashback recalls singing a rousing song with him, rifle on his back, bottle in his hand, in the camaraderie of a Dublin pub. He then looks back at the ‘Wanted’ poster: ‘£20 Reward – for Murder’. He tears it down, but the wind blows it towards him as he listens to a tenor rendition of ‘The Rose of Tralee’ by a street-singer. For the rural flashback sequences, Giù la testa raided Ford’s later and more relaxed film The Quiet Man (1952), which tells of the return of another Sean (John Wayne) to a windswept cottage near the village of Innisfree, set in an impossibly green landscape and filmed in and around Cong, County Mayo. Leone borrowed the greenery, the name of Sean, and a dose of Fordian sentiment. The key sequence here (filmed in Cong, County Mayo, in the grounds of Ashford Castle) was when Sean (John Wayne) first catches sight of the red-haired colleen Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara), dressed in blue with a bright-red skirt, as she guides a flock of sheep towards a green pasture in bright sunlight. She turns to him defiantly and coquettishly. Cue the theme tune Innisfree. ‘Hey, is that real?’, Sean says to the local matchmaker and storyteller (Barry Fitzgerald); ‘She couldn’t be.’ ‘Ah, nonsense, man; it’s only a mirage brought on by your terrible thirst!’

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Leone had a lot of respect for The Quiet Man. He was particularly fascinated by its autobiographical elements: ‘The characters most like [John Ford] are not the soldiers in blue, but those who – like John Wayne in The Quiet Man . . . – are simply looking for a roof over their heads, where they can live in peace, protected by the law, with good neighbors for a chat and a pint after Mass.’ (Frayling 2008: 169) Ford, he added, could not make up his mind whether he was a Sean or a John: in some ways like the Mallory character in Giù la testa. But Leone did not hesitate to take Ford to task for his ‘shameful’ attachment to a postcard Ireland (‘he has the sentimentality of the Irish living in the United States who still believe in green prairies extending into the future’), and his historical oversight (‘he made up a fairy-story where there was no reference at all to the IRA, and he shows that country as if it was another utopian paradise’) (Frayling 2000: 331). In their excitement, Leone and Donati seem to have forgotten that the IRA as such was not formed until 1917, when Michael Collins revived the almost moribund Irish Republican Brotherhood. Before then, in 1916, its precursors were known as the Irish Citizens Army, the Irish Volunteers and the IRB. Leone observed that the ‘men of the IRA were very young’ (Frayling 2000: 331): in 1913, they would have been very young indeed! In Giù la testa, events of 1922 are transposed to at least nine years earlier, in a visual set of references which are more cinematic than historical, and which perhaps chimed in the scriptwriters’ minds with the ‘Troubles’ post-1968, when the IRA was back in the news as we have seen. The main musical theme in Leone’s film, by composer Ennio Morricone, was associated with Sean – lyrical, slow, romantic – at times played against the image, such as during the sequence where the two protagonists blow up a bridge with a mighty explosion. It is as if Sean is remembering the good old days in Ireland, Morricone’s equivalent of Ford’s ‘Innisfree’. The theme was also played for the flashbacks and, according to Sergio’s widow Carla Leone, it was she who first suggested the words ‘Sean, Sean, Sean’ – rather than the original ‘wah, wah, wah’ – at one of the early conversations between director and composer around a piano: the only time lyrics mattered in a Leone/ Morricone collaboration. James Coburn – fair, laid-back, lanky, detached – was not everyone’s idea of an Irishman, but he was cast as Sean. Originally, in the wake of Once Upon a Time in the West, the part was created for Jason

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Robards. Then it was reworked for Malcolm McDowell, of If . . . fame (‘because the men of the IRA were very young’). United Artists wanted superstars above the title, so Rod Steiger took over from Eli Wallach as Juan (Donati had written the part for Wallach), and James Coburn became Sean. At one stage, as Clint Eastwood informed an American Film Institute seminar, he was offered a major role: it must also have been that of the Irishman. The producers were even, apparently, prepared to shoot it in Mexico, if it made the project more attractive to him, but he declined (‘The film was nice’, said a film student at the seminar. ‘Was it? I didn’t see it’, replied Eastwood) (Frayling 2000: 322). He was soon afterwards to play (in 1971) the unorthodox Inspector ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan – whose surname had been a byword for quarrelsome, pugnacious Irishmen in Hollywood ever since George Hill’s controversial farce, full of ‘stage Irishmen’, The Callahans and the Murphys (1927).16 Harry Callahan vied with another Irish cop for audience attention that year – Gene Hackman’s Oscar-winning ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), set in grubby New York rather than edge city San Francisco. Coburn was in fact of Irish– Swedish–Scottish descent. Leone had wanted to work with him ever since he saw the actor throw his knife in The Magnificent Seven, and had offered him the lead in A Fistful of Dollars. He announced at the time of Giù la testa’s release, ‘Coburn is a Clint Eastwood with more panache and humour’ (Frayling 2000: 343). It was, by then, a familiar needle. Coburn’s quick grin and reflective squint still had meaning in them, in spring 1970 – before they became part of his regular routine. The locations for the filming of the flashbacks in Ireland – Dublin, Howth and Wicklow – were selected with help from John Boorman: a filmmaker whom Leone much admired, especially for Point Blank (1967), Hell in the Pacific (1968) and Deliverance (1972):17 Boorman: My contribution to this film is extremely marginal. I was in my home in Annamoe, County Wicklow, one day when Sergio Leone drove up in a car with his producer [Fulvio Morsella] looking extremely depressed. He didn’t like the weather! And he asked me – he said he was shooting these flashbacks and he asked me where he could find these various locations. And he described what he wanted to me – incidentally, in English. I met Leone on a number of occasions and we always conversed in English . . . So I was able to recommend most of the things he wanted. There was just one where I said, ‘Look – I don’t know about this one – I’ll have to make a couple of enquiries. When are you shooting?’ He

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said, ‘Tomorrow!’ They just flew in and shot a day or two later. It was quite extraordinary. Then, my only other connection with this film occurred some months later when I found myself sitting next to James Coburn and he reminisced about the film. I told him of my slender connection, and he described to me the first day of shooting. He had been costumed and made up in the hotel and then a driver was to bring him to the set; and the driver drove him out into the desert, in Almeria, and stopped. And there was no unit. Nobody. And Coburn said to the driver, ‘You must have brought me to the wrong place – there’s nobody here.’ He got very agitated and the driver, who didn’t speak English, just shrugged and said, ‘No – this is where we have to be.’ So he kicked his heels there for a while, and suddenly in the distance came this cloud of dust, and trucks and cars arrived and people got out and set the camera up. And Leone was having a furious row with his cameraman [Giuseppe Ruzzolini]. They were arguing and he took no notice of Coburn, who just stood there. And finally, the camera was set up and Leone came over to him and looked at his face and put his hand on the top of his hat and turned his head left and right, and finally Coburn had had enough. He said, ‘This is ridiculous – when are we going to start shooting?’ Leone said, ‘We just did the first shot: it was a close-up of your eyes.’ And that was his introduction to the methods of Sergio Leone. James Coburn was interviewed at the time, on the set, and made a similar point about Leone’s distinctive way with actors.18 Coburn: Sergio sometimes likes little arbitrary movements and reactions. For his photographic scheme of things he needs to put a look someplace where you really wouldn’t look, and you have to work out ways of doing that to give him what he wants without losing what you are doing. Do not sacrifice your character for a particular photographic scheme and do not sacrifice the scheme because of a choice that seems arbitrary. So, you see, little intricate problems like that creep in all the time when you’re working, but Sergio is very understanding and very open . . . This is pretty free because we’re building the characters – they’re just flat, paperthin, written by an Italian and translated by an interpreter rather than a writer. So the characters are really kind of plastic characters . . . When you have really good screen literature, when you have something that really talks, where you say something in both

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christopher frayling a cinematic and a literary sense, then it’s different. Then you stick to the text . . . Otherwise you have to invent a lot of things . . . It depends on the material.

John, do you remember any of the places you recommended? Toner’s Pub in Baggot Street? Boorman: Yes, I recommended that and also the Sally Gap in Wicklow, up the road from my home. An extra flashback was filmed, but discarded, which showed the young Sean Mallory throwing a bottle into the air, with the Wicklow Mountains in the background. Boorman: Yes, that was shot at Luggala Estate [which was used for Zardoz and Excalibur]. And I remember recommending Howth Castle and the grounds. The actor who played Sean’s friend Nolan in the flashbacks, David Warbeck, recalled that Sergio Leone found a vintage automobile collection for the period car, and in the same collection was a wonderful vintage bus – so Leone said, ‘We must work this into the film’, and proceeded to film a shot of the bus going through the countryside, but never used it . . . Boorman: Yes, that’s right! There was this collection of old cars and coaches. Garech Browne [patron of Irish music] had this collection at Luggala, and that’s where he found them. I put him on to that as well. Warbeck’s memory was that Leone wanted the bus to be ‘full of virginal Irish schoolgirls going to school’, or full of nuns or something. ‘So’, he said, ‘the hotel we were staying in was absolutely packed with virginal, miffed-looking schoolgirls and Sergio spent a lot of time shooting this bus going up and down . . .’ Boorman: Mass transit! Probably as a response to Giù la testa, Ralph Nelson – who had recently made the sentimental Flight of the Doves (1971) in Ireland, about two abused orphans seeking love in ‘a far-off place’ where lives their Granny O’Flaherty (Dorothy McGuire): it featured a St Patrick’s Day

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Parade complete with the inclusive song ‘You don’t have to be Irish to be Irish’ – wrote the character of Emmet Keogh (Ken Hutchison) into his film The Wrath of God (1972). He may also have been reacting to recent publicity in America about the Provisional IRA. Keogh is an exmember of ‘what was called The Squad’, which had performed ‘political assassinations against the Black and Tans’ in the early 1920s. He is wandering around volatile South America in his tweed suit (filmed in Mexico) in search of peace and quiet, but he keeps running into firing squads, necktie parties (‘a new kind of Irish jig, Mr Keogh’), and tempting offers to run bootleg Scotch whisky (‘Now, if you had made it Irish’) and armaments for assorted revolutionary and counter-revolutionary groups. He teams up with a sharpshooting priest (Robert Mitchum) and a shady Sydney Greenstreet figure called Jennings (Victor Buono), who used to be an informer for the Black and Tans. Eventually he becomes friends with Jennings, in a common cause. The dialogue is full of cod-Irish aphorisms: ‘Whoever heard of an Irishman doing a logical or expected thing?’ ‘My grandfather back in Ireland always did say that God’s greatest gift to man was a woman who could keep a still tongue in her head.’ ‘God bless you, my son.’ ‘I’m not your son.’ ‘Thank God for that.’ The style is phoney Leone, and Keogh comes across as a romantic bandit, an athletic leprechaun who wants to settle down and make a home for himself – somewhere. When post-production on Giù la testa had just been completed, David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter was released (in November 1970). This started life as an adaptation by Robert Bolt of Madame Bovary, was then transposed to Vichy France in 1944 (with Rosie Ryan accused of collaborating with the Nazis), and finally to the West of Ireland at the time of the 1916 rising. Some commentators subsequently criticised the film for ‘blackening the legacy of 1916’, which they related to the concurrent ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, and the latter-day cultural battle for the meaning of 1916. In fact, the film had been planned several years before the ‘Troubles’ gathered momentum – a reminder of the dangers of reading current affairs into big-budget films in unproblematic ways, not allowing for lengthy periods of pre-production. In the same year, Martin Ritt’s The Molly Maguires (1970) told the story of Irish Catholic miners versus WASP mine-owners in the Pennsylvania coalfields, 1876.

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This, again, seemed to be a displaced version of the ‘Troubles’, cashing in on the headlines, but had in fact long been planned by director Ritt and screenwriter Walter Bernstein (both blacklistees who refused to name names) to be about McCarthyism and moral cowardice.19 The casting of Sean Connery and Richard Harris was the most topical element. Leone may have emphasised Mallory’s anachronistic membership of the IRA as a nod towards headlines about the Provisionals in late 1969, but his much deeper interest was in Hollywood movie images of the golden age, and especially the Irish films of John Ford; old idealism rather than new politics. Similarly, the use of Irish names and characters in the Italian Western – especially in scripts co-written by Luciano Vincenzoni – seems to have had more to do with the scriptwriters’ ‘take’ on the Hollywood Western (and the gangster film) than with adding the ‘Troubles’ to the already varied menu of the New Left. Films were and are sometimes slower on the uptake than critics realise. The one explicit reference to an Irish-American in the news, President Kennedy, took six years to be translated from headlines into Western. There were certainly more strong-minded female Irish characters in these films post-1970 – which might distantly be related to headlines about Bernadette Devlin or Vanessa Redgrave – but these, too, chimed with the age-old stereotype of the fiery red-haired colleen (Maureen O’Hara-style), which went back a very long way. On the whole, Alberto Moravia’s wise conclusion seems the most sensible: the American Western was about a myth; the Italian Western was about a myth about a myth (Frayling 2000: 118). And part of that myth about a myth was a more cynical take on the Irishmen of John Ford, on the traditional Hollywood tale of rags to riches, and on the political machinations of City Hall. While A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More were breaking box-office records in Italy, over in Hollywood two big-budget Westerns were released which played unproblematically to the age-old stereotypes rather than updating them. The Hallelujah Trail (John Sturges, 1965), a comic version for Cinerama of widescreen epics such as How the West Was Won and Cheyenne Autumn, set in the fall of 1869, featured among its gallery of Western types on a wagon train ‘a group of teamsters under the leadership of one Kevin O’Flaherty’ (played by Tom Stern). O’Flaherty swears mightily (but acceptably to a family audience): ‘For the beloved love of all the saints and Pat and Mike and Bridget and all the sons of purgatory’. He insists on being mockdeferential to the diehard Republican wagon-master Frank Wallingham (Brian Keith):

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‘What’s your excuse this time, you ignorant immigrant lump?’ ‘Lump, is it? Well . . . we’ll be having a word with Your Lordship.’ ‘I’ve told you I’m not a Lordship.’ ‘You can’t expect an Irish serf to forget the habits of a lifetime, now, can you?’ As President of the teamsters, O’Flaherty calls his men out on strike because of bad working conditions in the desert: ‘poor drinking water and no whiskey ration’. When Wallingham tears up his petition of grievances, O’Flaherty calls him ‘a capitalist profiteer’. More subtly, he gives a warning about the dangers of Sioux Indians shaking up bottles of warm French champagne: ‘It’s like dynamite – that’s why they hired us Irish teamsters. It’s our business.’ The following year, Edward Dmytryk’s Alvarez Kelly (1966) featured as its central character a cynical, happy-go-lucky cattleman (William Holden), who is also a tough businessman, in 1864 during the American Civil War. Kelly is referred to, in the traditional theme song sung by the Brothers Four as ‘I–I–I–Irish Señor’, and he explains that he was raised on a Texas farm where ‘my father was like an Irish lord’, but was killed defending his home during the Mexican War. Now he will take what he can – ‘I don’t care who wins’ – as a ‘return for my birthright’. The plot concerns the theft of 2,500 head of Mexican range-bred steers from a Union Major by the Confederates under Col. Rossiter (Richard Widmark), and an audacious cattle-drive to the hungry South troops through Grant’s lines. Abraham Lincoln called this ‘the slickest piece of cattle-stealing I ever heard of’. It resembles in distant ways the ancient, seventh-century Celtic legend of ‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’ (Ulster versus Connacht rather than North versus South, and with a female warrior-heroine), but after the big speech by Holden about his upbringing, the film quickly loses interest in his Irishness, or Irish-Mexican-ness. The suggestion is that as an entrepreneur who has lost his birthright, and as an uprooted Irish-Mexican, he is temperamentally closer to the Confederacy than the Union: like Gerald O’Hara. But still, ‘God deliver me’, he says, ‘from dedicated men.’ If the movies were one place where Irish-American ‘ethnic distinctiveness’ still resided, and where America’s perceptions of the Irish found a platform at a time of rapid social change, it has to be said that the distinctiveness by the mid-1960s looked very ‘old Hollywood’: a union organiser with a twinkle in his eye and a chip on his shoulder, who wears a tweed cap and waistcoat in the sweltering Colorado desert;

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a tough entrepreneur who feels his loss of identity but masks it under a raffish façade of cynicism and ‘money, whiskey and women’. They were joined in 1972 by a hyperactive romantic bandit named after Emmet, in The Wrath of God, who just wanted to settle down. The Italian versions of such stereotypes were noisier, magnified and filtered through an aesthetic of films about films. They were a reflection of a reflection, the other’s other. In some cases, the process made them more complex, in others even more stereotypical than they already were in Hollywood. In no cases did they match the rags-to-riches theme of the old days, or the search for home: their presentations were engulfed in pessimism. Was this just a case of product differentiation, when literally hundreds of Westerns were pouring off the cinematic assembly-line? Or did the headlines about the ‘Troubles’ remind filmmakers of the films they had seen a long time ago? Whatever the reasons, the presentation of the Irish in Italian Westerns provides an interesting and unusual perspective on recent debates about the politics of identity, and postcolonialism, precisely because it operates entirely in the world of images and of ‘mythologies’ in Roland Barthes’s sense rather than W.B. Yeats’s.

notes 1. This essay started life as a lecture at the conference Spaghetti Cinema, organised by Austin Fisher and the University of Bedfordshire, delivered on 12 April 2013. In expanding it, I have benefited from conversations with Luke Gibbons, John Exshaw and Fintan O’Toole. 2. Thanks for his insight to Lorenzo Codelli of the Cineteca di Friuli, Udine, at the conference Sergio Leone – cineasta visionario e innovativo (Bibliomediateca Mario Gromo, Turin, 22 October 2014). 3. On Feltrinelli and the Che Guevara poster – which in the process became an Italian phenomenon – see Ziff 2006: 15–31. 4. On these screen images of Irish immigrants, see Curran (1989), Slide (1988) and Brennan and O’Neill (2007). 5. See Buscombe 1993: 159 (article on ‘Irish’). 6. See Kennedy (2000): one of seven books Kennedy has written on the subject since 1995. 7. See also O’Toole 1998: 31–45. 8. The words of ‘Danny Boy’ were in fact written by lyricist Fred Weatherly in Bath in 1910, and only set to the traditional ‘Londonderry Air’ three years later in 1913, first recorded 1915. Only subsequently did ‘Danny Boy’ – as it came to be known – evolve into the signature-tune of Irish-Americans. In 1968, when Once Upon a Time in the West was made, Maureen O’Hara had recently recorded it as one of her ‘favourite Irish songs’, and so had Andy Williams (1961), Connie Francis (1962) and Johnny Cash (1965). 9. On the making of Giù la testa, see Frayling 2000: 302–47.

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10. Paper by Gabriele Rigola of the University of Turin, at the conference Sergio Leone – cineasta visionario e innovativo (Bibliomediateca Mario Gromo, Turin, 22 October 2014). 11. Author’s interview with Sergio Leone, February 1982. See also Simsolo 1987: 156–66, and De Fornari 1984: 22–3. 12. On Viva Villa!, see Frayling [1981] 1998: 217–23; Woll 1980: 45–9; Slotkin 1998: 413–15. 13. On Juarez, see Vasey 1997: 156, 204; Woll 1980: 60–3; Custen 1992: 44, 98–9; Slotkin 1998: 415–16. 14. On Viva Zapata!, see Frayling [1981] 1998: 223–4; Biskind 1976; Vanderwood 1979; Slotkin 1998: 420–6. 15. See Frayling 2008: 158–9. 16. See Curran 1989: 34–5; Slide 1988: 107–8. 17. Conversation with John Boorman at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin, 1 November 2011, with 40th anniversary screening of A Fistful of Dynamite. 18. Barbra Paskin interview with James Coburn on the set of Giù la testa in Almeria (typescript). See also Frayling 2000: 342–3. 19. On The Molly Maguires, see Curran 1989: 114–15.

references Bew, Paul and Gordon Gillespie (1999), Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles, 1968–99, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Biskind, Peter (1976), ‘Ripping off Zapata’, Cinéaste, 7: 2, 10–15. Brennan, Steve and Bernadette O’Neill (2007), Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, Belfast: Appletree Press. Buscombe, Edward (ed.) (1993), The BFI Companion to the Western, London: BFI. Chaliand, Gérard (1989), Revolution in the Third World, trans. Diana Johnstone and Tony Berrett, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Curran, Joseph M. (1989), Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen: The Irish and American Movies, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Custen, George F. (1992), Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dabydeen, David (1987), Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press. De Fornari, Oreste (1984), Sergio Leone, Milan: Moizzi. Dungan, Myles (2006), How the Irish Won the West, Dublin: New Island Books. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher ([1981] 1998), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher (1993), ‘The wretched of the earth’, Sight & Sound, 3: 6, 26–9. Frayling, Christopher (2000), Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death, London: Faber & Faber. Frayling, Christopher (2008), Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy, London: Thames & Hudson. French, Philip (ed.) (1992), Malle on Malle, London: Faber & Faber.

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Gibbons, Luke (1996), Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork: Cork University Press. Grant, Kevin (2011), Any Gun Can Play: The Essential Guide to Euro-Westerns. Godalming: FAB Press. Kennedy, Billy (2000), Heroes of the Scots-Irish in America, Belfast: Ambassador Productions. Moravia, Alberto (2010), Cinema Italiano: Recensioni e interventi 1933–1990, Milan: Bompiani. O’Toole, Fintan (1990), A Mass for Jesse James: A Journey Through 1980s Ireland, Dublin: Raven Arts Press. O’Toole, Fintan (1998), The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities, Dublin: New Island Books. Simsolo, Noël (1987), Conversations avec Sergio Leone, Paris: Stock Cinema. Slide, Anthony (1988), The Cinema and Ireland, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Slotkin, Richard (1998), Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Vanderwood, Paul J. (1979), ‘An American Cold Warrior: Viva Zapata!’, in John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson (eds), American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, New York: Frederick Ungar, pp. 183–201. Vasey, Ruth (1997), The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Woll, Allen L. (1980), The Latin Image in American Film, Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Latin American Center Publications. Ziff, Trisha (ed.) (2006), Che Guevara: Revolutionary and Icon, London: V&A.

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part i

Trans-genre Roots

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chapter 2

Pietro Germi, Hybridity and the Roots of the Italo-Western Pasquale Iannone

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eleased in 1949, at a time when Italian neorealism1 was reaching its high point, Pietro Germi’s third feature, In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law), can lay claim to being one of the first Italian sound films to explore seriously the phenomenon of the Sicilian Mafia. However, rather than any obvious allusions to the gangster picture, the film was influenced – both formally and in terms of narrative – by the Hollywood Western. Enrico Giacovelli has described In the Name of the Law as ‘the first and probably only Italian Western before the era of [Sergio] Leone. To find a second’, he claims, ‘we need only look to a later Germi film, Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo (The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo)’ (Giacovelli 1991: 30). The latter film is a Western-influenced tale of banditry in the years after Italian unification and was released in 1952. In this chapter, I will look to build on Giacovelli’s observation while bearing in mind the view of scholars such as Alessandro Tedeschi Turco and Christopher Frayling who are less convinced by Germi’s links to the US Western. I will argue that, like other Italian post-war works such as Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), Germi’s two titles sought to address social issues through the prism of uniquely American genre(s) and did so with greater nuance and dexterity than many English-language scholars have given them credit for. Just as Bitter Rice can be described as a hybrid work, so too can Germi’s two films. Indeed, Germi himself is somewhat of a hybrid as a filmmaker, marrying aspects of neorealist filmmaking with genre and popular cinema.

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Through engagement with a variety of historical and theoretical writing in both Italian and English I will discuss Germi’s directorial style as well as his position in the landscape of Italian post-war cinema. Then, through close textual analysis of key sequences from In the Name of the Law and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo, I will argue that although these films do not represent radical exercises in revisionism or demythologisation, they do not simply take an American model and transplant it into an Italian context. Germi did not necessarily seek to reproduce the personal styles of individual Western directors such as John Ford, but there is little doubt that, like most of his generation, he had a uniquely Italian cultural impression of the ‘Hollywood Western’: The vast landscapes of the American West were by this time [the late 1940s] indelibly etched into the popular imagination on both sides of the Atlantic. John Ford’s repeated and spectacular framings immortalised the distinctive buttes of Monument Valley, continuing an aesthetic tradition stretching back to the vivid descriptions of James Fenimore Cooper and the paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. (Fisher 2011: 25)

a ‘carpenter’ caught between two stools Outside of Italy, Genoa-born filmmaker Pietro Germi (1914–74) is probably best-known for directing one of the great examples of the commedia all’italiana, Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana, 1961). Indeed, the second half of his career was almost exclusively dedicated to comedy – other notable titles include Seduced and Abandoned (Sedotta e abbandonata, 1964), The Birds, The Bees and the Italians (Signore & signori, 1966) and the 1972 Dustin Hoffman vehicle Alfredo Alfredo. However, in the first half of his directorial career (1945–60), Germi seemed to work in every genre except comedy – from melodramas to historical pictures, gangster films to Westerns. During this period, Federico Fellini was one of Germi’s many screenwriting collaborators, and this despite the two being opposed in temperament and aesthetic tastes. ‘Germi seemed to represent everything that Fellini disliked’, writes Fellini’s biographer Tullio Kezich, ‘including a marked predilection for well-constructed stories, developed in such a way to have a beginning, middle and end. That said, Germi did have an influence on Fellini who appreciated above all his integrity and determined professionalism’ (Kezich 2002: 111). Fellini

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nicknamed Germi ‘Il falegname’ (‘The carpenter’), on the basis of the director’s general demeanour as well as his attitude towards filmmaking. ‘He was a carpenter, a patient and hard-working artisan’, writes Giacovelli; ‘he was a filmmaker in the Classical Hollywood mould, a label which once rang like an insult but now seems more of a compliment’ (Giacovelli 1991: 10). In his 2005 monograph on Germi, Tedeschi Turco provides a useful overview of critical and academic work on the director (Tedeschi Turco 2005: 11) and starts by pointing out that, in spite of his relatively low international profile, Germi actually won a variety of prestigious international prizes during his career, including the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for The Path of Hope (Il cammino della speranza, 1950) and the award for Best Italian Film for Four Ways Out (La città si difende, 1951). He won his most eye-catching prize in 1962 when Divorce Italian Style edged out Ingmar Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel, 1961) and Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad, 1961) to win the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Tedeschi Turco argues that although Germi was the subject of attentive criticism throughout his career, this usually came in the form of reviews of individual films rather than any in-depth analyses of his body of work as a whole (Tedeschi Turco 2005: 11). Breaking down Germi’s fluctuating critical reputation into five main periods, he notes that it was only in the 1990s that serious writing started to appear on the director, some twenty years after his death. One of these key critical works – Giacovelli’s monograph – goes unmentioned by Tedeschi Turco in his initial overview, but the former does more in attempting to position Germi in the overall landscape of Italian cinema of the post-war period, albeit in a somewhat pungent tone. ‘There was a time when Germi was one of the four or five leading Italian directors, those who were guaranteed favourable reviews before their films were even ready’, he notes. ‘Those were the years when all you needed were a couple of non-professionals and a couple of sequences shot in the streets for your film to be proclaimed a neorealist masterpiece’ (Giacovelli 1991: 9). The picture of Germi built up by Giacovelli is that of a filmmaker who fell between many stools, one that was generally misunderstood. He concedes that Germi was not a truly great director, but neither was he a ‘modest artisan’. ‘He was simply someone that had something to say and wanted to explain it to everyone, at a time when many had nothing to say but still managed to say it in an obscure and unpopular way’ (Giacovelli 1991: 10). Another interesting aspect of Germi’s body of work, and one that sets him apart from many of his contemporaries, was that he started taking on lead acting roles more than a decade into his directorial

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career. Writer/director Mario Soldati offered Germi a small role in his film Flight into France (Fuga in Francia, 1948) while he was still in his early thirties, but he was unhappy with his own performance and for a few years concentrated only on directing. ‘Had I wanted to, I could have written many more roles for myself in later films’, he later said. ‘Between mafiosi and Sicilian miners, soldiers from the Piedmont army, policemen of all types, for a face like mine, it wouldn’t have been difficult’ (Faldini and Fofi 2011: 387). Germi went on to star in several of his own films, including The Railroad Man (Il ferroviere, 1956), Man of Straw (L’uomo di paglia, 1958) and, perhaps most famously, the Carlo Emilio Gadda adaptation The Facts of Murder (Un maledetto imbroglio, 1959), in which he played Inspector Ciccio Ingravallo opposite Claudia Cardinale. Germi also appeared in Lipstick (Il rossetto, 1960) and Blood Feud (Il sicario, 1961), two early pictures by Damiano Damiani – a director who would go on to make two very tonally different Spaghetti Westerns such as A Bullet for the General (Quién sabe?, 1966) and A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (Un genio, due compari, un pollo, 1975). Screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni – another figure with close links to the world of the Italo-Western through his work on Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966) and Giulio Petroni’s Death Rides a Horse (Da uomo a uomo, 1967) – once noted that Germi ‘had the artistic grit of an Italian Spencer Tracy, with [facial] features that seemed to be carved in wood’ (Faldini and Fofi 2011: 387). Vincenzoni, who worked with Germi on films such as The Witness (Il testimone, 1946), Seduced and Abandoned (1964) and The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (1966), shared many of Germi’s political views: In those [post-war] years, if you weren’t enrolled in the PCI [Italian Communist Party] like ninety per cent of Italian filmmakers, if you didn’t have a hammer and sickle tattooed on your forehead, you ran the risk of being called a fascist. While we were certainly not fascists, Germi and I were a breed apart’. (Faldini and Fofi 2011: 387) The director himself went so far as to call communism a societal ‘scarlet fever; less serious than cancer but an illness all the same’ (Faldini and Fofi 2011: 387). In his 1963 essay on Sicilian cinema, novelist and playwright Leonardo Sciascia briefly outlines the way in which Germi’s political beliefs were manifested in his films. ‘Politically,

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[he] was a social democrat and in his art, he was inclined toward an optimism where individual romantic revolutions replace and elide collective ones’ (Sciascia [1963] 2004: 1,214). While monographs on Germi exist in Italian, French and German, almost forty years after his death there is no English-language study. A glance at some contemporary English-language reviews might give us an idea why. Writing in Sight & Sound in 1952, Gavin Lambert argues that ‘Germi does not seem to have found a personal style, nor material in which he is sufficiently confident not to sensationalise it’ (Lambert 1952b: 64). Lambert again, in his Monthy Film Bulletin review of The Path of Hope, notes that while Germi demonstrates skill as a craftsman, he has a superficial approach to social problems, that the film remains remarkable only for its well-composed images (Lambert 1952a: 105). Lambert’s dismissive tone is characteristic of English-language writing on Germi, the majority of which, to this day, struggles to see past canonical figures such as Rossellini, Fellini and Visconti when it comes to this particular period in Italian film.2

a melting pot of genres In the seven decades since its first flowering, Italian neorealism has become one of the most written-about and debated cinematic trends. Theorists ranging from André Bazin to Gilles Deleuze3 and filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese have all commented on neorealism’s crucial importance in film history; how it represented a watershed, a turn away from the studio-bound, star-laden style of Hollywood towards a cinema that was more true to life and grounded in the socio-political reality of the time. In discussing Germi’s position between two seemingly opposed filmic styles, I am bringing together, and indeed building on, statements by Giacovelli regarding the director’s relation to neorealist cinema, as well as two more recent interventions on the subject by English-language scholars. In the first chapter of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western, Fisher reflects on the influence of American culture in post-war Italy and rightly affirms that ‘neorealism was neither a rupture from the past nor a movement at variance with the world of “genre” cinema’ (Fisher 2011: 32). Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe go even further in their 2011 polemic, where they argue for a decentring of neorealism in Italian film studies (O’Leary and O’Rawe 2011). Germi exemplifies the kind of Italian filmmaker who, because of his engagement with genre, has slipped through the cracks – certainly

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in English-language scholarship – and this is what makes O’Leary and O’Rawe’s intervention particularly useful in discussion of his work. Taking issue with many of the preconceptions regarding neorealist cinema as well as the trend’s seemingly immovable position in Italian film studies, the authors note: What seems to us to make the critique we perform here so overdue but also so delicate is that Italian cinema has been perceived (or asserted) to be a key site for the elaboration of Italian nationhood and identity. The privileging of cinema’s allotted role of ‘mirror’ of the nation has led to a downgrading of popular genres and a kind of nationalistic cinema history in the scholarship. (O’Leary and O’Rawe 2011: 109) ‘Neorealism’, the authors note, ‘has come to be perceived as the ineluctable centre of Italian cinema for reasons that are as much ideological as aesthetic’ (O’Leary and O’Rawe 2011: 110). These comments – and O’Leary and O’Rawe’s article as a whole – seem to offer clues as to why the rich body of work of a filmmaker like Germi remains so underexplored in Anglophone film studies. His open engagement with genre and predilection for storytelling with as wide an appeal as possible, as well as his political outlook, have led him to suffer a similar fate to that of contemporaries such as Alberto Lattuada (the two were in fact born within two months of one another, in 1914). ‘The filmmaker is more of a storyteller than a polemicist . . .’, Germi once said; ‘there always has to be a story before a polemic and the polemic should always come out of the story – it can’t be the true root of the film’ (Giacovelli 1991: 6). Regarding the hybridity of In the Name of the Law specifically, and its relation to neorealism, Giacovelli argues: Even if certain minor characters are played by non-actors from the real locations, even if the locations themselves are rigorously real, even if there is a faint attempt to bring certain social problems to the fore . . . Germi’s neorealism is romantic, novelistic, fictionalised. (Giacovelli 1991: 27) So which Hollywood genres does Germi draw on? Given that both In the Name of the Law and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo are concerned with bringing the rule of law to a lawless land, and that they make bold use of landscape, there is no doubt that they are influenced by the Hollywood Western. For In the Name of the Law, there is also a crime thriller element, the film being one of the first to examine the Sicilian

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Mafia. To complexify things further, and add to the melting pot of genres, Danielle Hipkins has provided a psychoanalytical reading of the film, highlighting on the one hand the Oedipal relationship between the male protagonists and, on the other, the relationship between the film’s hero and its only major female character, Baroness Teresa Lo Vasto (Jone Salinas). Hipkins argues that while In the Name of the Law has elements of the Western and the crime film, it also draws on the gothic melodrama when it comes to the ‘feminine’ subplot. She points out that ‘internal or dark, claustrophobic spaces are cast in the classically Freudian reading of the maternal space as swamping, and contrast starkly with the arid, desert-like, open and challenging “western” spaces of the daytime mafia confrontations’ (Hipkins 2011: 207). The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo might seem easier to categorise in terms of genre. Moving at a faster pace than the earlier film and with a period setting, it seems to be more of a straightforward historical adventure with the line between good and evil more clearly defined than In the Name of the Law. That being said, Tedeschi Turco is right to comment not only on what he describes as a certain acerbic quality that serves to undermine any leaning towards lyricism, but also on Germi’s boldness in approaching a period in Italian history that was still shrouded in controversy (Tedeschi Turco 2005: 70–1). Giacovelli describes it as an historical film that was ahead of its time, just as Alessandro Blasetti’s 1860 was on its release in 1934 (Giacovelli 1991: 46). Having outlined the various generic influences feeding into both In the Name of the Law and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo, we can observe that it is certainly the Western that unites the two more than any other genre. While suggesting that the influence of American cinema conventions was ‘perhaps over-hastily’ spotted in Germi’s films, Christopher Frayling highlights an important point regarding why the Western in particular might have appealed to Italian filmmakers seeking to set their films in southern Italy: Perhaps the hostility to codified law (and to the encroachments of central government) which is often enshrined in Hollywood Westerns (of both the ‘classical’ and ‘professional’ types) and which was to become central to the Spaghetti westerns, finds a parallel (albeit rising from a different set of traditions) in the equivalent hostilities of Southern Italian society. (Frayling 1981: 58) This idea of bringing law to areas of the meridione suspicious of the authorities was something that appealed to the sensibilities of Germi as a filmmaker. Orio Caldiron has remarked that the law was in fact

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Germi’s central preoccupation throughout his career: ‘the law as an institutional apparatus of codes, tribunals, prisons and criminal records but also as a moral system that inspires the conduct of the individual’ (Caldiron 2004: 9). This theme appears as early as Germi’s first feature film, The Witness (Il testimone, 1946), the story of Pietro (Roldano Lupi), a young man accused of murder who is given a reprieve after a witness to the crime, the elderly Giuseppe (Ernesto Almirante), withdraws his statement. On its original release, the film did poorly at the box office. Germi’s second film Lost Youth (Gioventù perduta, 1947) generally fared better. This film, another crime thriller, tells of policeman Marcello (Massimo Girotti), who goes undercover to infiltrate a group of Roman youths responsible for a series of robberies. Noting how the director was already showing signs of Hollywood influence, Giacovelli notes that ‘For Germi, Lost Youth represents a discovery of the city and of the night, two key elements of the great American gangster films. Both The Witness and Lost Youth are films about murder and guilt, on the inevitability of punishment’ (Giacovelli 1991: 20–1). Tedeschi Turco also picks up on a crucial element in Lost Youth, one which will be carried on into In the Name of the Law – that of the father–son dynamic.

in the name of the law In the Name of the Law, Germi’s third feature, was shot in 1948 and released the following year. Germi had always been fascinated by Sicilian codes and customs but had yet to set foot on the island. It was to be the first of several pictures the director would make on and about Sicily, including Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned. ‘I only arrived in Sicily to scout for locations after the screenplay had been completed and I have to say that the work we had done had no need to be modified’, Germi commented; ‘. . . I was interested firstly in the milieu and then in the mafia’ (Faldini and Fofi 2011: 142). The film was based on Piccola Pretura (Local Prosecutor’s Office), a novel by Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo, an anti-Mafia activist in the 1930s who then went on to become one of Italy’s most prominent magistrates in the 1940s. After the end of the Second World War, his attitude towards the Mafia changed dramatically, with his hatred towards the latter superseded by a fervent anti-communism (which he of course shared with Germi). As John Dickie states: Lo Schiavo was a conservative whose political sympathies had made him a supporter of Mussolini’s regime in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Liberation, his conservatism turned him into a

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friend of the most murderous criminals on the island. The magistrate-novelist’s bizarre rewriting of mafia records in Local Prosecutor’s Office testified to an unspoken and profoundly cynical belief: better the mafia than the Communists. (Dickie 2013: 31) In the Name of the Law tells of Guido Schiavi, a young magistrate from Palermo (Massimo Girotti) who is given the task of bringing order to the Mafia-ridden (fictional) Sicilian town of Capodarso. The film opens with an expansive shot of the Sicilian landscape, the credits roll to a medley of themes from Carlo Rustichelli’s score, at first brooding, then galloping, then intensely lyrical: throughout In the Name of the Law, extra-diegetic music is used in a fairly conventional way – closer to John Ford than to Sergio Leone. After the credits, Germi presents further shots of the sun-blasted ancient landscape, this time accompanied by voice-over: This land, this boundless solitude crushed by the sun, is Sicily. It is not just the joyous garden of oranges, olives, flowers that you know or think you know, but it is also a bare, burnt land of blinding white walls, a hermetic society of ancient customs that the stranger cannot comprehend. A mysterious, splendid world, one of a tragic and rugged beauty. By turns authoritative, poetic and not without a little condescension, the introductory voice-over sets the tone for the film as a whole: this is the story of one man’s impact with a land, a people he will struggle to comprehend. The film’s opening sequence shows immediately how Germi looks to draw on the iconography of the Western genre. We close in on a man leading two horses and a cart across the landscape. Germi cuts to the point of view of a bandit hiding behind some rocks who is seen covering his face as he waits to pounce. Another bandit does the same close by. The bandits then ambush the man – one pushes him to the ground while the other unties the horses. The victim decides to fight back, and in the struggle uncovers one of the bandits’ faces and recognises him. The other bandit strikes him on the head, knocking him unconscious. As the bandits stand over their victim, Germi holds the shot as the identified bandit cocks his rifle and fires two shots. ‘He recognised me’ he says, before exiting the frame. We then get a brief shot of the dead man before a final cut leads into the sequence’s final shot – a meticulously composed image in which the bandits are seen riding off into the valley as it zigzags into the distance (Figure 2.1). To the left of the frame, in the foreground, there is the wheel of the discarded cart, while on the right, slightly further away, there is the dead

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Figure 2.1: Bandits head off across the Sicilian landscape leaving one man dead in In the Name of the Law (1949).

body. The shot is only held for around fifteen seconds: enough for the image to impart not only a sense of the violence and brutality of this world, but also its undoubted beauty. The viewer’s first glimpse of Guido comes when he arrives at a remote train station, just as his predecessor is getting ready to go the other way. The train, a dark streak through the scorchingly white landscape, comes at an angle towards the camera and, as it leaves the frame, Guido is revealed on the platform. Rustichelli’s plodding horns emerge on the soundtrack as Germi cuts to a medium close-up of Guido, dressed in a dark suit and hat. A shot from the character’s point of view follows; we see a small coach waiting for him in the middle distance. We then cut back to Guido and then to his predecessor, who sits on one of his suitcases. Guido asks if the coach goes to Capodarso and, after being told that it does, he starts to make his way across the tracks. ‘They’re waiting for you at Capodarso’, says the outgoing magistrate with a vaguely knowing smile. He then tries to persuade Guido to go back to Palermo, telling him that it’s not too late to reconsider his new post. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll thank me when you hear my story’, he says. But before he can say anything else, he is

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interrupted by the horn of an approaching train. He rushes to grab his luggage before jumping on. Guido is then driven along rugged terrain to finally arrive at Capodarso. The coach rumbles into town, making its way along streets that are deserted except for various wandering goats. The coach stops suddenly in the large village square which, again, contains more goats than humans. Guido emerges, dusts off his hat and surveys his new surroundings. Germi then presents a series of shots of groups of townspeople staring impassively at his protagonist. In the first shot, five women of varying ages (all dressed in black) sit with their hands on their laps on a street corner. They occupy the right side of the frame while on the left, two herders lead goats away into the distance. We cut back to Guido and then we have another shot of staring townspeople – this time the men of Capodarso. Three stand in the foreground, two stand on the right while a line of nine others sit in the background to the left of the frame (Figure 2.2). This second image in particular is an example of the kind of shot composition that Germi will return to again and again in both In the Name of the Law and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo – the multi-planary deep focus composition reminiscent of the work of cinematographer Gregg Toland for both John Ford and Orson Welles. In just two shots, the viewer gets a sense of the task facing the new magistrate, the wall of omertà he will have to break down. Germi then punctures the brooding, almost funereal atmosphere by cutting to a shot of two town officials marching to meet Guido. Rustichelli’s score takes on a lighter, more comic tone as the two men walk straight past Guido and ask the driver where the new magistrate is (the implication being that Guido looks far too young to be in such a position). This tonal shift – from the foreboding to the comic – also surfaces in an early scene from Sergio Leone’s early Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, 1964) when we see Joe (Clint Eastwood) arriving in the Mexican border town of San Miguel. As his protagonist trots slowly along a deserted street, Leone uses horizontal pans rather than static deep focus compositions to show the suspicious glances that come his way. Before we even get to these shots, however, another rider approaches. As the rider gets closer, he turns out to be a lifeless corpse. Leone shows a note pinned on the dead man’s back that reads simply ‘Adios Amigo’, a message that could have been given to Guido by the outgoing magistrate. Eastwood’s character is briefly accosted by the town’s ebullient bell-ringer before being approached by a group of local cowboys, who challenge him. Comparing the arrivals of Guido and Joe, it is particularly interesting to note how two separate 1.37:1 shots in Germi’s film (Figures 2.2 and 2.3) seem to be folded into one 2.35:1 image in A Fistful of Dollars (Figure 2.4).

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Figures 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4: The protagonists are met with hostility upon their arrival in town in both Germi’s In the Name of the Law (1949) (2.2, 2.3) and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) (2.4).

Guido is treated with suspicion by all strata of society in In the Name of the Law, from the community on the ground to the Mafiaendorsed Baron Lo Vasto (Camillo Mastrocinque), and he continues to be met with impassive stares wherever he goes. Throughout, much is made of Guido’s young age (26). ‘The young are pure at heart, they shouldn’t have such dark thoughts’, he is told. Germi’s protagonist is upright and unwavering in his convictions but as a character, he – like The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo’s Giordani – can be said to lack nuance and complexity. Mafia boss Massaro Turi Passalacqua (Charles Vanel), by contrast, is certainly no stereotypical villain. Dickie dedicates a chapter to Germi’s film in Mafia Republic and begins by describing a key sequence in which Guido meets Massaro and his men on the outskirts of town: The scorched exteriors that stretch out before the camera seem timeless. A young man in a double-breasted jacket [Guido], his

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chiselled face shaded by a fedora, sits erect in the saddle. Suddenly he swivels to look out across a lunar landscape of dust and rock. He sees eight figures on horseback emerge over a hilltop to stand silhouetted against the sky. (Dickie 2013: 20) It is a key sequence, with strong echoes of the classic Western. After Guido and his party identify the figures as Mafiosi, Germi cuts between shots of both parties as they gallop to meet each other. Massaro first introduces Guido to his men and then takes the young man aside to talk. They trot along side by side on their horses, the camera keeping them both in shot. Guido voices his concerns to Massaro about the way Capodarso is run and that he intends to implement the law of the Italian state. Germi cuts to a medium close up of Massaro as he stops in his tracks. ‘Look behind you’, the Mafia boss says. ‘You are a brave man, but we make the law here, according to ancient customs.’ Massaro reinforces his belief that the Mafia are honourable men, not delinquents. ‘Free and independent’, he says, ‘like the birds in the sky.’ In a confrontation between Guido and Massaro towards the end of the film, the boss confesses: ‘As I listened to you, I thought of my own son and thought I would have been proud if he had talked like you.’

the bandit of tacca del lupo It’s many years since I’ve seen it, but I think there were very important elements in The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo; new and even prescient elements . . . Maybe it was one of the first historical films that went in a certain direction – a realistic reconstruction and a sense of psychology. (Pietro Germi, in Faldini and Fofi 2011: 145) After In the Name of the Law, Germi made three features before embarking on The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo. The latter stars the major Italian star Amedeo Nazzari and is set in 1863 in the aftermath of Italian unification. As with In the Name of the Law, the opening titles unfurl over a rugged landscape accompanied by another galloping Rustichelli theme. Instead of voice-over, exposition is provided through text: With the dissolution of the Bourbon empire, Italian unification has just been completed. The enthusiasm that the liberating passage

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pasquale iannone of Garibaldi had stirred up among Southern Italians had largely dissipated. The farmers, long oppressed by poverty, were given to blaming the new Piedmont government while lamenting the King of Naples. It is with the dispersed remains of the Bourbon army that the phenomenon of banditry comes to the fore, a phenomenon that was to occupy soldiers from the north in a brutal guerrilla war.

In the opening scenes, we see bandit Raffa Raffa (Oreste Romoli) arrive at the town of Melfi in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. Like a bandit equivalent of In the Name of the Law’s Guido, he proclaims that his men have come ‘to establish law and order’. This is not the law of the new Italian state, however; this will come in the formidable shape of Nazzari’s Captain Giordani, who arrives from the north charged with hunting down Raffa Raffa and stamping out banditry in the region. As a character, Giordani turns out to be very different from Girotti’s Guido. The fact that he is several years older is particularly important. Giordani, while strongly principled, is perhaps less idealistic than Guido. Germi scholars Mario Sesti and Alessandro Tedeschi Turco hold differing views on the Fordian aspects of the protagonist of The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo. Sesti describes Nazzari’s character thus: An inscrutable official who knows that he has to use ruthless methods even if these will make him unpopular, he has an unshakeable sense of discipline and duty. [He] doesn’t take advantage of his implicit sadism or sense of power, [he is] tireless and taciturn, tough and generous. [As a character] he would not have displeased the director of Fort Apache. (Sesti, in Tedeschi Turco 2005: 72) Tedeschi Turco fails to see the link between Giordani and Fort Apache (1948) protagonists Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) and Kirby York (John Wayne), agreeing more with a comment by Adriano Aprà, who argues that, while Nazzari’s character is outwardly similar to Girotti’s magistrate, his certainties as a soldier have been gradually eroded throughout his various military campaigns (Aprà, in Tedeschi Turco 2005: 73). Going further, I would argue that, rather than recalling Fordian characters, Giordani anticipates not necessarily the lawbringers of the Spaghetti Western, but the ageing, world-weary characters of Sam Peckinpah: Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton in The

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Wild Bunch (1969) or James Coburn’s Pat Garrett in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). In terms of Giordani’s position in The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo, he is undoubtedly the protagonist given that we only see Raffa Raffa at the beginning and at the end of the film. Indeed, the representation of the film’s titular bandit is similar to the depiction of the eponymous real-life Sicilian bandit in Francesco Rosi’s 1962 film Salvatore Giuliano (in the sense that they are both physically absent for most of the films and are yet at the heart of most of the pro-filmic events). While In the Name of the Law sees one character attempt to bring the rule of law to one particular town, The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo is more of a pursuit. The films are set some eighty years apart and in different areas of the Italian meridione but the landscapes and communities are strikingly similar. Furthermore, in both, there is a deep suspicion of authority, with omertà stifling attempts at dialogue between the law and the communities they serve. There are also many formal similarities between the two pictures, most notably the powerful group shots of impassive townspeople – images so unmoving we could be looking at still photographs. In the second film, these compositions are far more rigorously stylised. As we have seen, In the Name of the Law features a variety of deep focus compositions, often on two or three planes, and the same is true of The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo. In the latter, however, these planes are strikingly diagonal, triangular (Figures 2.5, 2.6). I would argue that, rather than representing an empty formal flourish on the part of Germi, these shots – as in many Westerns – seek to emphasise the landscape, the forms and shapes of the land.

Figures 2.5 and 2.6: Striking diagonal compositions in The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo (1952).

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In Il paesaggio nel cinema italiano, his 2002 study of landscape in Italian cinema, Sandro Bernardi touches upon the use of landscape in the Hollywood Western, including Ford films such as My Darling Clementine (1946) and Fort Apache. In these films, he argues, characters engage in a dialectical relationship with landscape – they endure and suffer it, they fight against it, but they are also part of it . . . The specificity of the American western, it seems to me, is the way it is able to give landscape a role, to assign the mystery of nature a very precise role in narrative economy, constructing as it were, a myth of nature. (Bernardi 2002: 57) While this dialectic may not be as pronounced in In the Name of the Law and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo, in both of Germi’s films the landscape and the indigenous communities are shown to be alien to the protagonists. Both Guido and Giordani come from the outside and are shown to never fully understand either the land or those who live on it. By the end of the later film, with his hopes of finding Raffa Raffa seemingly over and his troops disheartened and depleted, Giordani meets a shepherd, Carmine (Vincenzo Musolino) who, fuelled by a desire for revenge after Raffa Raffa violated his wife, offers to help hunt the bandit down. It is thus a member of the indigenous population that comes to Giordani’s aid just when he thought his mission had failed. This leads to the film’s climactic showdown, a gun battle between Giordani’s troops and Raffa Raffa’s bandits. With gunfire blazing around him, Carmine challenges Raffa Raffa to a knife fight and finally gets his revenge by stabbing the bandit to death.

conclusion There can be little doubt that, despite the several international recognitions he received throughout his thirty-year career as a filmmaker, the relative stylistic classicism and thematic eclecticism of Pietro Germi has led to a certain neglect, especially in terms of English-language scholarship. ‘Germi’s good points and bad points had gone out of fashion by the time of his death [in 1974]’, writes Giacovelli in a postscript to his monograph on the director; ‘even for young cinephiles who were always ready to re-evaluate everything, he was looked upon as the grandfather whose wisdom you might admire, but ultimately you have no intention of taking that wisdom on board’ (Giacovelli 1991: 112). While the love of Italian critics and filmmakers for the Western is well documented and goes back to the earliest days of that

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uniquely American genre, few filmmakers before Sergio Leone took the bold step of actually attempting to make their own. As both Frayling (1981) and Fisher (2011) highlight, the narratives of many of the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s draw from both the Hollywood Western and traditions of (southern Italian) brigandage. In this chapter, I have sought to argue that this was an approach first tested by Germi in the immediate post-war years and that it was his methodology, his harnessing of Western iconography for the telling of stories that are uniquely Italian (whether this means late nineteenth-century brigandage or the problem of the Mafia during the post-war period), that makes him stand out as a progenitor of the Spaghettis. While filmmakers like Ford and Akira Kurosawa are often called upon in discussions of the birth of the Italo-Western, Germi is undoubtedly deserving of more recognition, having done more than any other Italian filmmaker in laying the groundwork for the genre’s celebrated hybridity.

notes 1. Neorealism was a reaction to fascist-controlled cinema in Italy and spanned approximately ten years (c.1942–52). Some of the key characteristics of the trend included the use of non-professional actors mixed in with professionals and the extended use of location shooting, as well as an interest in working-class characters and small-scale stories. Its main proponents included directors such as Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, and theorists such as Cesare Zavattini. 2. While several of the most important English-language reference works on Italian cinema such as Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present by Peter Bondanella (1983), Italian National Cinema by Pierre Sorlin (1996) or, more recently, Mary P. Wood’s Italian Cinema (2005) do indeed mention Germi, very few discuss his early films in any great detail. 3. André Bazin wrote extensively on neorealist cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. Key articles include ‘An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism (Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation)’ as well as essays on individual films such as Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948). See Bazin (1968, 1971). Gilles Deleuze (1989) situates neorealism at the transition point between what he calls the ‘movement image’ and the ‘time image’.

references Bazin, André (1968), What Is Cinema? Volume 1, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Bazin, André (1971), What Is Cinema? Volume 2, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Bernardi, Sandro (2002), Il paesaggio nel cinema italiano, Venezia: Marsilio.

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Bondanella, Peter (1983), Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, New York: Continuum. Caldiron, Orio (2004), Pietro Germi: La frontiera e la legge, Roma: Bulzoni. Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dickie, John (2013), Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse. Cosa Nostra, ’Ndrangheta and Camorra from 1946 to the Present, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Faldini, Franca and Goffredo Fofi (2011), L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano da Ladri di biciclette a La grande guerra (Volume 2), Bologna: Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher (1981), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Giacovelli, Enrico (1991), Pietro Germi, Milan: Il Castoro. Hipkins, Danielle (2011), ‘Which law is the father’s? Gender and generic oscillation in Pietro Germi’s In the Name of the Law’, in Dana Renga (ed.), Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millennium, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 203–10. Kezich, Tulio (2002), Federico Fellini: La vita e i film, Milan: Feltrinelli. Lambert, Gavin (1952a), ‘Review of The Road to Hope’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 19: 223, 105. Lambert, Gavin (1952b), ‘Further notes on a renaissance’, Sight & Sound, 22: 2, 61–5. O’Leary, Alan and Catherine O’Rawe (2011), ‘Against realism: on a “certain tendency” in Italian film criticism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16: 1, 107–28. Sciascia, Leonardo ([1963] 2004), ‘La Sicilia nel cinema’, in Leonardo Sciascia, Opere 1956 – 1971, Milan: Bompiani. Sorlin, Pierre (1996), Italian National Cinema, London: Routledge. Tedeschi Turco, Alessandro (2005), La poesia dell’individuo: Il cinema di Pietro Germi, Verona: Cierre Edizioni. Wood, Mary P. (2005), Italian Cinema, Oxford: Berg.

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chapter 3

Malaysian Pirates, American Cowboys and the Marginalised Outlaw: Constructing Other-ed Adventurers in Italian Film Aliza S. Wong

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irates, cowboys, bandits, adventurers, heroes and anti-heroes – all have permeated the imaginations of children, young and less young alike, globally. In Italy, however, these protagonists and nemeses have held a special place in the cultural landscape as radical politics, colonial and post-colonial subjectivities, and anti-imperial sentiment, engaged the vocabularies and rhetoric of Italian intellectuals, authors and innovators. Even as Italy struggled with the difficult work of permeable identities, these fictional characters offered Italians an arena within which to play out different scenarios, express discontent, and resist the resonances and remnants of imperial rule. This chapter examines the ways in which a hero of the nineteenth century – a Malaysian pirate who, in his rescuing of the imperially downtrodden, of the exploited and the betrayed, spoke in actions and words with anti-imperialist flourish – became reimagined as a twentiethcentury, post-war anti-hero by a director of westerns all’italiana who had, in his own films, fashioned a bandit, a ‘noble savage’, who opened the eyes of a Texas ranger to the corruption of the aristocracy and Orientalist assumptions. The first section will introduce the nineteenth-century Italian children’s author Emilio Salgari (still one of the most widely read Italian authors today), and the hero of his most famous and well-loved novels: the pirate Sandokan. The Italian reading public devoured Salgari’s

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Sandokan adventures, sweating in the humidity of the island jungles, smelling the salt air of the South China seas, and tasting the mineral tang of blood splattered as Sandokan’s scimitar and kris tore through his enemies. Indeed, when literary and cultural critics speak of Salgari, they do so with an affectionate tone, ‘as though one were speaking of an old uncle who entertained one as a child with his stories, and who remains a nostalgic memory’ (Milani 2012: 1). But even as Italians lived vicariously through the imagined wild of South-East Asia, they were propagandised with the themes of revolution, of post-colonial dignity, of anti-imperialist rhetoric. These tales of adventure and radical heroism inspired many Italian youths (whom Umberto Eco described as having been ‘divided into two groups: those that held to Salgari and those that held to Verne’ (Eco 2005: 225)), including Sergio Sollima (born in 1921), director of the politically-charged Spaghetti Westerns The Big Gundown (La resa dei conti, 1966), Face to Face (Faccia a faccia, 1967), and Run, Man, Run (Corri, uomo, corri, 1968). The second section of this chapter will offer an analysis of Sollima’s radical westerns, focusing specifically on the protagonist of La resa dei conti and Corri, uomo, corri: Cuchillo, played by the Cuban-American-Italian actor Tomás Milián. Like Salgari’s Sandokan, the rogue/thief/bandit/rascal Cuchillo demonstrates through his words and actions the corruption of the powerful, the stereotypes and Other-ing at play in the subjugation of the peasants, and the indignities and dishonourable systems propagated by the conflagration of the imperial interests of the USA and the capitalistic aristocracy of Mexico. The third and final section of this chapter will examine the ways in which Sollima melds his vision of the anarchic borderlands of the USA and Mexico with his imagining of the primitive wilds of SouthEast Asia in his 1970s television series and films, bringing Sandokan, Salgari and Sollima together. Via an examination of how Sollima chose to adapt Salgari’s novels and the character of the pirate Sandokan to bring to the forefront the political themes he had already introduced in his Marxist Spaghetti Westerns, the ways in which these nineteenthcentury anti-imperialist heroes still resonated in 1960s and 1970s Italy will become more apparent. This chapter examines the connections and interplay between the adaptations of Emilio Salgari and a director of the western all’italiana. Through a discussion of hero and anti-hero, context and sub-context, scene and landscape, it examines the influence of Salgari on the American West of the directors of the Italo-Western. A critical analysis of Salgarian characters and Spaghetti Western banditi, and a discussion

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of the intersections between pirate and outlaw, adventurer and cowboy, the exotic and the frontier, will foreground the panorama between visionaries and childhood heroes and dreams. The western all’italiana expanded upon, appropriated and re-envisioned Salgarian stylings: the anti-imperialist renegade, the Other-ed, marginalised hero, fastpaced explosions of violence. It continued, sustained and glorified the Salgarian motifs: the heralding of courage, contempt for exploitation, a strong sense of right within a shaky sphere of morals, and an unwavering sense of honour.

emilio salgari, sandokan and the making of an anti-imperialist pirate Even after the Italian Wars of Independence in 1848, 1859 and 1866 (the first of which failed, the second of which unified the majority of the peninsula, and the third of which brought the Veneto into the nation), and the Franco-Prussian War that completed the nineteenth-century unification movements with the entry of Rome, Italians struggled to define the social and cultural limits of the nation and national identity. The oft-heralded and misattributed quotation ‘Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani’ (‘Italy is made, we must make Italians’) has plagued Italian politicians and nationalists as multiple threads of belonging and allegiance, loyalty and disloyalty, began to pull at the delicate fabric of an ‘accidental’ unification (Dickie 1999; Graziano 2013; Hom 2013; Moe 2002; Patriarca 2010). Playing with the discourses of the ancient nation, of subjugated colonies now liberated into nationhood, of meridionalism,1 empire, and diaspora, writers found new tropes to employ in both directly and indirectly addressing the problems they uncovered in their quest to find Italy and Italians (De Francesco 2013; Wong 2006). One of the most beloved of these authors, Emilio Salgari, helped Italians to imagine themselves even as he guided them through the imaginary world of the exotic Other, whether that be through the humid jungles of South-East Asia or the arid landscapes of the wild American West. Salgari, one of the most popular Italian and widelyread adventure novelists at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, wielded considerable influence on the ways in which the Other and therefore the Italian self were constructed in Italian popular culture (Pireddu 2010: 21). The author of over 200 stories and novels, Salgari held a firm place in the hearts of Italian children who, in his prose, sought entry into the otherworldliness being opened for

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larger mass consumption. It was also through Salgari, accompanying his Malaysian pirates, fighting alongside his most famous hero Sandokan, sailing the tropical seas, that Italians found a vocabulary of courage, of rebellion, or of anti-colonial discourse, anti-imperialist refrain.2 Even as the novels continue to fascinate Italians of all generations (Brand and Pertile 1996: 479), the adaptations of Salgari, in film and television, although less successful, continue to introduce the nation to new definitions of self, politics, and self-determination. Over fifty cinematographic adaptations of Salgari’s novels, and many more inspired by his work (corsair narratives, jungle adventure stories, and swashbuckling B-movies like Morgan, the Pirate (Morgan il pirate, Primo Zeglio/André De Toth, 1960)), including those of Sergio Sollima, have renewed Salgari as a contemporary voice as well. By widening the lens on Salgari and the connection with Spaghetti Westerns first introduced in a chapter in the anthology edited by Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Wong 2013), an examination of Salgari’s life story reveals another type of Orientalism, of Other-ing that saw both East and West as fertile ground for cultural, political and personal revelation. Born in Verona, Italy on 21 August 1862 into a family of merchants, Salgari spent much of his own youth reading adventure novels and dreaming of exploring the world. His love of reading led to the realisation that he wanted to create worlds for other Italians to enjoy and, like the authors he so admired, he believed the best adventures came from real lived experiences. Enlisting at the naval academy in Venice (although his only voyage at sea would be a short trip along the Adriatic), Salgari planned to captain his own ship in the future. Poor marks at the naval institute, however, soon ended his plans to sail the seas and whatever true life adventures he sought to narrate would be replaced by imagined worlds, constructed lands, created characters, and fashioned exploits. In those far-off, exotic, foreign, Other-ed locations peopled by swaggering heroes, sinister foes, and the wiles of the unknown and unexplored, Emilio Salgari helped to construct a paradigm for adventure, contact, and conflict for the Italian reading public (Wong 2013: 302–3). Though virtually unknown to the English-speaking world, his books have sold millions of copies in Italy, Spain, and several countries in Latin America, and carry a cultural weight and significance that has defined romance, thrill, and exploration (Lucas 1995: 97–8). Debuting as a writer in 1883 for the Milanese illustrated magazine La Valigia, that same year Salgari became an editor for La Nuova Arena, a newspaper in Verona where he published his first serial, Tay-See, an

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adventure set in Cochin, China, just before the Franco-Chinese war. An unexpected success, this serial would help Salgari to define his writing style: fast-paced action punctuated by swordfights and battles, plot twists, strong-willed, strong-charactered protagonists, all set in exotic locales. Producing almost half a dozen serials a year, Emilio Salgari developed a national following quickly, and Italian publishers scrambled to find other authors who could emulate his style, flair and verve. The cultural critic Mario Tropea describes Salgari as having therefore actuated a fusion between the register of high theatrical pathos . . . on the one hand, and the simplification of the popular serials of exposition on the other hand. Between theater (of gestures or attitudes, situations or plots) and narrative, and as a chronicle of didactic information, [his work] divulges contemporary historical facts. (Tropea 2012: 140) Other nineteenth-century writers, such as Luigi Motta and Emilio Fancelli, penned further adventure stories to satisfy the demand for tales of adventure (Wong 2013: 306–7). Despite his fame as a writer and his fan base of millions, Salgari never attained financial success and stability. The illness of his wife led to astronomical medical bills, and he made several poor investments and signed poorly negotiated contracts owing to his lack of business skills. He was left almost destitute. Overwhelmed by creditors and family misfortunes, he committed suicide in Turin on 25 April 1911. In his final act, befitting the convictions of a would-be adventurer, Salgari performed a ritual self-disembowelment, committing seppuku, the ceremonial suicide of the Japanese samurai (Arpino and Antonetto 1982; Salgari 1940; Salgari and De Nardis 1939). For Italians, Salgari brought together the imagined sagacity of the East and the noble courage of the West. Despite Salgari’s popularity in Italy, however, he never received the acclaim nor achieved the literary heights of some of his contemporaries, most notably Jules Verne. In his youth, the Italian scientist, holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi (born in 1919) devoured American tales of adventure, voraciously reading James Curwood and his tales of the Hudson Bay, the Wild West, the North American unexplored, untamed frontiers. Levi’s father, however, proscribed Emilio Salgari, describing the piratical tales as slices of pernicious exotica. Middle-class Italian children could arguably be divided into two camps, that of Salgari devotees (the ‘Salgariani’) and those who followed Jules Verne (the ‘Verniani’)

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(Thomson 2002: 40). When thinking back nostalgically to his own childhood, Umberto Eco (born in 1932) considers that when forced to choose between the Salgariani and Verniani, he ‘held for Salgari’. However, with hindsight, Eco wonders about that choice: Salgari, retold, cited from memory, loved for all the colors it gave one’s infancy, no longer seduces new generations or – to tell the truth – the elders either. When they reread him in search of a little ironic nostalgia, the reading simply makes them tired, and too many of those mangroves and wild pigs come to be an annoyance. (Eco 2005: 225) Still, Salgari impacted on the Italian cultural scene and Latin American literary elite. The composers Pietro Mascagni and Giacomo Puccini were contemporary fans. In post-war Italy, Salgari experienced a re-evaluation. As the Italian journalist Prosperi noted in 1963: [Salgari] is an engaged writer; he speaks of actualities and judgements with a concealing but strong imperative moral . . . His overall work is overwhelmingly an anti-imperialist polemic, against the politics of violence and conquest, in defense of the weak and the oppressed. Indeed, ‘Salgari not only entertained us, he also taught us about liberty’ (Lucas 2012: 164). Federico Fellini (born in 1920) read Salgari’s works as a first exploration of the unknown world, as a fictive realm that offered possibility after challenges to tyranny, dictatorship, empire and materialism (Kezich 2007: 53). Sergio Leone (born in 1929) was also inspired by the outlaw hero in the pages of Salgari (Bergfelder 2005: 192). Bruno Traversetti maintains: recent history obliges us no longer to insinuate, but rather to highlight clearly . . . that exotic . . . encompasses, yes, . . . far off lands, but under the conditions that between those countries and ours is a solution of formal and ideological continuity, a distance of life and of language that allows for the recognition of the far off land as ‘Other’, ordered by a valued logic system and by diverse emotional reactions. (Traversetti 1989: 6) Salgari was also particularly popular in Latin America, where he was seen as a pioneer in anti-imperialist writing, a system of ‘anticolonial affirmation’ (Tropea 2012: 148). Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia

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Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes all read his works (Anon. 2013). Luis Sepulveda recalled how his grandfather introduced him to the adventures of Salgari and how, as an adult, he would repeat them from memory in the prison of Temuco as a mantra of resistance against tyranny (Tropea 2012: 150). Paco Ignacio Taibo II proclaimed proudly: ‘I read 63 books written by Salgari, one more than . . . Che Guevara. [Salgari] is much more interesting than Bucharin, for example. His heroes are trembling, passionate. The antiimperialist and revolutionary aspect of this author must absolutely be reevaluated’ (Taibo 2011: back cover). Beyond simply the entertainment value of Salgari’s adventures, these Latin American authors, intellectuals and leaders saw ‘a master of liberty’. In his works, they found a reflection of the preoccupations of their own countries, their own struggles (Tropea 2012: 150). Most recently, the work of Emilio Salgari has enjoyed a resurgence, with several of his Sandokan works reprinted. In these new editions, Salgari’s writings were described as a ‘work of note like the Divine Comedy’ (Lucas 2012: 166). Writers such as Claudio Magris (1980) and Osvaldo Soriano have written on Salgari’s cultural and literary importance, and scholars have begun to resituate the Salgarian works in the Italian literary pantheon, exploring the panoramas of the imagined landscapes and the wide swath of heroes and heroines. Described by Magris as ‘small, imperfect, but inconfundible master of the art of grounding the unity of the world of words’ (Traversetti 1989: 10), Salgari, in playing such an important role in youthful reading, helped to open the Italian cultural landscape to the possibilities of anti-imperialist revolt, diversity, and social justice. Salgari’s Indo-Malaysian cycle, according to literary critic and writer Ernesto Ferrero, helped Italy to make ‘significant strides towards multiethnicity’ (Nay 2012: 119). Indeed, Tropea argues: The truth seems to be this: that the instinct that moved Salgari was libertarian . . . [It] led him to orient his stories and narratives wherever, on the planet, there were battles over human rights and new and old defenses against oppression and exploitation, whether anarchical and individual . . . Wherever there were these battles, in the parts of Africa closest to Europe . . . or in the dark heart of the continent of the ‘African cycle’ (La Favorita del Mahdi, I predoni del Sahara, Sull’Atlante, and one can also add I briganti dell Riff, the last book published while Salgari was still alive); or in Cocincina . . . in British India of Mutiny or in the Malaysian archipelago of pirates, in which Salgari invested one of his most emblematic heroes, Sandokan . . . we find Salgari with

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aliza s. wong his unequivocal sympathy for the rebel, the pirate, the outlaw, the corsair, the filibusterer, the insurgent, the marauder, the brigand, even, at least in the interest of these typologies, for the mutinous, those unjustly imprisoned. (Tropea 2012, 146)

In Sandokan, Salgari created the ‘Tiger of Malaysia’, who, in eleven adventure novels, swashbuckled his way through battles with injustice, challenging the British and Dutch imperial powers who seek to destroy him, fighting for freedom, independence. In Le tigri di Mompracem, Sandokan is tall of stature, slim, with a powerful musculature, energetic features, masculine, proud, possessed with a strange beauty. Long hair falls on his arms: the blackest beard frames his lightly bronzed face. He has a broad forehead, shadowed by two stupendous arched eyebrows, a small mouth that showed teeth as sharp as wild beasts’ and luminescent as pearls; two of the blackest eyes, of fascinating brilliance, that burn, that make down before them any other gaze. (Salgari [1900] 2005: 9) This pirate, loyal, honourable, brave, but ruthless in his protection of the downtrodden, the exploited, the colonised, acted with confidence, kris or scimitar in hand as he fought continuously against the egregious encroachments of the imperialistic Europeans. In Le due tigri, Salgari speaks to his anti-imperialist persuasion as he questions the legitimacy of French and Spanish rule in Asia: What do they want in our Gia-dink (Bassa Cocincina), those French-Spaniards? Are they so miserable, these Western peoples, that they do not possess sufficient lands to satisfy them, to run and steal that of the Asians? . . . They have the craving to seize land from those weaker than them . . . and for these playthings, here we have the French and Spanish who swear to make them dance to the sound of cannons. (Salgari [1904] 1969: 368) Whereas ‘neither Stevenson nor Conrad, were able to imagine a world in which Europeans were not superior to other peoples’, Salgari imagined a realm ‘made possible by another world forced to bend to the will of the European powers, and therefore ready to be transformed into a stage upon which were projected drives, dreams, and the instinct to escape’ (Ambrosini 2007: 8). Reading Salgari helped to resolve a ‘hierarchy of the sympathies and antipathies that surrounded the

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people and the races, of a social Darwinism founded not of pseudoscientific criteria, but on the instinctive attractions and aversions of the authors towards those who were addressed’ (Letourneaux 2007: 24). Sandokan, dark, mysterious, exotic, diverse, represented the ‘Otherness’ of the Italians themselves, burdened by their own contradictions of meridionalism, of their non-Europeanness, their own early modern and modern history of colonial domination by Austria, Spain, and France. In the flourish of nineteenth-century rhetoric, Salgari implied that Sandokan wielded resistance in the thrust of his kris: that in the slash of the two-handed hold on the scimitar could be read a demand for self-determination, autonomy and independence. Perhaps in Salgari’s swashbuckling pirate adventures, in the features of his anti-imperialist protagonists, in his Other-ed landscapes, one can see a glimmer of the anti-heroes of the Spaghetti Westerns: ‘the praise of courage and contempt for riches, the strong sense of honour and the myth of all-conquering heroism’ (Troiano n.d.).

sergio sollima, radicalism and the making of the anti-imperialist spaghetti west If Salgari framed his works within what literary critic and writer Bruno Traversetti calls ‘the parabola of [his hero’s] actions when destiny brought them the plague of conflict’, then ‘the great victories of the heroes, the things they had done that made terrible and sinister their reputation and legendary their names, took place in reality . . . in a past that was external to the effective material of the novels’ (Traversetti 1989: 27). In fact, many of the protagonists of the Spaghetti Westerns were depicted in just this way – silent, brooding, but with a foreboding past shrouded in the unknown and the clandestine. Like Salgari, who created the jungles and South China Seas in the contours of his mind when his dream of an adventurous life were dashed by poor marks at the naval institute, the directors of Spaghetti Westerns often worked with imagined landscapes and frontiers, never having visited the USA or experienced life in the American West. Both the adventure novels and the Spaghetti Westerns played with the ‘myth of the myth’, rather than worrying about questions of ‘authenticity’. They negotiated what had already been imagined about the imaginary landscapes, building, reconceptualising, re-ordering the cultural systems and preoccupations in existence. As the Italian literature scholar Flavia Brizio-Skov observes, they did not engage with the ‘preoccupation[s] [of] historical verisimilitude, nor [did they] share the same initial ideals.

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In the Spaghetti Western there are no cities to build, nor communities to save; the future, like the past, is out of frame, only the present exists’ (Brizio-Skov 2011: 87). While this might skim over the diversity of the Spaghetti Western (since the Italian version of the frontier offered those inclined towards criminality the chance to build cities that served as fronts for corruption, as in Death Rides a Horse (Da uomo a uomo, Giulio Petroni, 1967)), Brizio-Skov makes the keen observation that the possibility of frontier was represented very differently in the Italian Westerns. Yet like the protagonists of Salgari’s adventures – often brown-skinned, exotic Others from the tropics of Malaysia, the cerulean blue of the Caribbean, or the jungles of India – who speak with the vocabulary of vendetta, of oppression, of anti-imperialism, of the southern question, with a language that connects with Italian audiences, the cowboy of the Spaghetti Western appeals to the same familiarity. Austin Fisher argues that the archetypes of the West run parallel with the main tropes of the Italian South and that therefore the idea of contested space, a vast landscape, and the issues of identity, empire, domination, banditry, and the urgency of ‘redemptive violence’ (Fisher 2011: 3), are themes familiar to an Italian audience, that speak to the preoccupations and discourses of the time. Salgari’s anti-imperialist message spoke just as clearly and brazenly to his turn-of-the-century readers as to the modern audiences. If the directors of the western all’italiana were indeed inspired in their youth by the Salgarian romance, their heroes reflected the pull towards rebellion, towards justice, against fascism, against dictatorship in post-war Italy. Unlike Sergio Leone, who favoured plot and action as a means of communicating political context, Spaghetti Western directors such as Damiano Damiani, Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima used interchange and soliloquy to convey the revolutionary moral (De Fornari 1997: 91). Indeed, the long sequences of monologue and dialogue that imbued Sollima’s films with their political significance rendered his works to be inevitably different, more complex, more layered than the traditional Westerns of John Ford or Howard Hawks. While many Italians might have seen Westerns produced in the USA as uncomplicated, as playing to traditional heroic tropes of cowboys who wore white hats and knights on horseback, the westerns all’italiana offered an alternative ending. They were, in fact, as Brizio-Skov contends, ‘the four terms that characterized the frontier myth and the filmic production of the western – battle, success, progress, democracy – reduce[d] to two, battle and success’ (Brizio-Skov 2011: 197). Violence was not portrayed as a rite of purification, a means of renewal and rebirth. Instead, in the dominant cycles of Spaghetti Westerns, violence could be a means

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of acquiring more power, of personal gain, of individual advancement. Violence did not serve as a reluctant last resort in an attempt to administer justice and achieve a peaceful, more equitable community. Instead, as Brizio-Skov argues, the cowboys all’italiana performed in a hostile world in which justice does not exist and the law of the strongest reigns. The protagonists destroy the ‘bad guys’ in order to take possession of the loot or because they cannot stand bullies and so, by eliminating them, they incidentally perform a good service for the community. (Brizio-Skov 2011: 197) While the popular myth of an American cowboy as a man who looked down upon the frontier as a new adventure to be explored, a new challenge to be conquered, seemed to dominate the discourse, the antiheroes of the Spaghetti Westerns never gazed fully upon the frontier, but rather squinted, scanned slowly, slyly, out of the corner of their eyes. They saw, but did not engage. As the Italian critic Oreste De Fornari observed, they alternated ‘between venality and gallantry’ (De Fornari 1997: 41). Brizio-Skov takes it one step further, arguing that in the westerns all’italiana [t]he hero is a bounty hunter, a stranger with no name, or an outlaw who, in the course of events, striving to achieve a certain goal, commits some good deeds, not for the good of society, but only because he hates those who are arrogant and pushy. In the Italian western we are dealing with an anti-hero . . . The anti-heroes of the spaghetti western operate in a way that recalls the Far West, but only as a cinematic myth, an echo of far-away things. (Brizio-Skov 2011: 88) In Faccia a faccia, which Fisher describes as ‘by some distance . . . the most loquacious and intellectually sophisticated of all Spaghetti Westerns’ (Fisher 2011: 78), and La resa dei conti, Sollima, as director, highlights the ways in which power, aggression and violence were interwoven in the conformity of bourgeois society (Fisher 2011: 80; Fridlund 2006: 181–4). Even as he carefully lensed the gunfights, thickening the tension, heightening the tonality of viciousness, Sollima appears indecisive on the ‘legitimacy and appeal of political violence’ (Fisher 2011: 105) (Wong 2013: 315). The protagonist of La resa dei conti and Corri, uomo, corri, Cuchillo ‘The Knife’ Sanchez (an odd champion, an improbable educator, an unlikely hero), took on the imperialistic and capitalistic exploiters of Mexico. In La resa dei conti,

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Cuchillo takes on not only the racial profiling, the new bourgeois aristocracy, the relationship between the power-hungry and capital-driven of Mexico and the USA, he also becomes teacher, missionary, confessor, collaborator, and eventually partner to the likes of bounty hunter Jonathan Corbett (played by Lee Van Cleef). Corbett, wooed by the promise of political support as he nears retirement and considers a political career by a Texas railroad tycoon, takes on one last bounty hunt for the alleged rapist and murderer of a twelve-year-old girl. The accused, Cuchillo, is attempting to escape back to Mexico, and along the way he escapes from Corbett time and time again, each time revealing a little more of the truth behind the brutal crime and the realities of the ruthlessness of the West and its unfolding imperial paradigm. Like the pirate hero of Salgari, Sandokan, the rogue/thief/bandit/rascal Cuchillo exposes the inequities of industrialisation, the corruption of the West, the hypocrisy of the powerful, and the exoticisation of the subjugation of the peasants. In the unfolding of the complex cat-andmouse chase between Corbett and Cuchillo is revealed the fraudulent partnership between the imperial interests of the USA and the capitalistic aristocracy of Mexico. In the final scene, the big gundown (as foretold in the US title of the film), Cuchillo is the personification of anti-imperialist rhetoric, confronting these inequities as he chooses the knife as his weapon of choice against the gun: the simple, the traditional, the native weapon versus the modern, the industrial firearm. Sollima would have us read Cuchillo as the indigenous – exploited, reviled, stereotyped, indignant. He is the primitive, the organic, the noble. In his manic resolve is the steadfastness of right. He is, as Fisher terms him, a ‘trickster’ who, ‘while occupying a privileged position, is in essence a plot device, and facilitator for the conversion of the Everyman’ (Fisher 2011: 140). Fisher argues that the characterisation of Cuchillo is in fact much more nuanced, that Cuchillo ‘occupies a position of negotiation between the audience and the on-screen action, occasionally observing the narrative from [the audience’s] level’ (Fisher 2011: 140). In all this, Cuchillo speaks to the connections between the developing world and the Italian sub-proletarian, becoming, in essence, one with the viewers (Fisher 2011: 141). Cuchillo exemplifies the furbizia, or cunning/cleverness, so valued by Italians, particularly of the South, and in doing so suggests a familiarity, even a common cause between the Third World and the undervalued Italian South. Like his own heroes, Sollima rides the fine line between ethics and honour, between negotiation and realpolitik. For Sollima, the overt violence framed by his lens could also provide a redemption, a means of exculpation. He spoke of his films as tales about ‘how people could

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change their own existences’, born of his own experiences as part of the Resistance fighting fascism (Fisher 2011: 93; Zanello 2004). If the Resistance provided a sort of training ground for questioning authority, then a generation of young Italians found in that fundamental schooling a place to practise the vocabulary of politics and confrontation. Even as these young fighters matured, they found new structures and processes against which to struggle and protest. When, in the mid1960s, some Italians began to denounce the pretence and deficiencies of the Italian political system, and especially the depravity and corruption of the powerful Christian Democratic party, the radical violence of the Spaghetti Westerns’ anti-heroes seemed to both confirm and conform to the revolutionary convictions of the time (Brizio-Skov 2011: 88). Did audiences truly absorb, as Brizio-Skov argues, ‘the hegemonic message . . . to fully identify with the filmic anti-hero’ as a celebration of ‘ruthless individualism’ (Brizio-Skov 2011: 87)? After the Economic Miracle and Italian industrialisation, a man was one who was capable of standing out in a capitalist society, who [could] depend on his own resources in order to survive in a world in which technological knowledge and intelligence must be used to ‘overpower in order not to be overpowered’, and in which money equals power. (Brizio-Skov 2011: 87) But can this interpretation of masculinity be attributed even in part to the ‘message’ of the Spaghetti Western? Or more likely, were Spaghetti Westerns, rather than introducing the concept of individualism, instead riffing off a cultural paradigm that was already in play, one that spoke to honour, to omertà, to the capacity of a man to avenge his own slights? Perhaps Italians, rather than ‘absorbing’ these meanings, participated in their construction and their fluidity, by flirting with the on-screen possibilities? Salgari’s Sandokan sailed on the edges of the law, skirting the boundaries of civilised society, playing with the parameters of morality and ethics, making readers question their own understandings of honour, dignity and respectability. Similarly, Sollima’s anti-heroes in his westerns all’italiana rebel against injustice, make their own laws, define their own principles, and defend themselves and their honour through the use of necessary and inevitable violence and with their chosen weapons, rejecting the inequities of modernity for honourable tradition. Like Salgari’s books that read quickly with the glint of steel, daring speeches, and battles galore, the Spaghetti Westerns often parallel the fast-paced dynamism of the adventure tales.

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pirates, cowboys, revolutionaries: continuing radicalism in popular tv and film If parallels can be seen in the bombastic buccaneers of Salgari’s piratescapes and the laconic, eye-squinting cowboys of the westerns all’italiana, perhaps more than simple happenstance explains the fact that many Spaghetti Western directors were intimately involved in the adaptation and production of Salgari’s works or Salgari-inspired scripts into film and television. Director Umberto Lenzi (who helmed two Spaghetti Westerns) found his beginning in cinema directing such films as Sandokan the Great (Sandokan, la tigre di Mompracem, 1963), The Pirates of Malaysia (I pirati della Malesia, 1964), and other movies styled after the piratical adventures of Salgari (Syder 2009: 72–3). At the beginning of his career, a young Sergio Leone served as the assistant director for two Salgari movies directed by Mario Soldati, The Three Pirates (I tre corsari, 1952) and Jolanda, the Daughter of the Black Corsair (Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero, 1953) (D’Angelo 2011: 51; Frayling 2012: 57). I tre corsari, based on the ‘apocrifi salgariani’ (apocryphal Salgarian works), and Jolanda received mixed reviews from the demanding and faithful fans of Salgari, who wanted, in film, the same emotion, the same feeling, the same spirit they experienced from reading Salgari novels in their youth (D’Angelo 2011: 48). Some were critical and felt that these ‘inspired by’ tales betrayed their memory of the Salgarian heroes and were cheap imitations that did not meet the genius of the originals. Others were approving and believed that regardless of the authenticity of the films, nonetheless they represented ‘visually powerful [films] that disguised with extraordinary nonchalance the difficulties of their production values’ (D’Angelo 2011: 50). Both The Three Pirates and Jolanda represented the more commercial era of filmmaking, when films were made because directors needed the work, films that Soldati felt required ‘la fatica fisica, non quella mentale’ (‘physical, rather than mental, labour’) (D’Angelo 2011: 50). Perhaps this pragmatic attitude towards filmmaking explains why Soldati left Leone, despite his inexperience, in charge of both the set and ultimately the direction of these films. Soldati was not particularly interested in the production of these profit-driven films. Leone, however, found an opportunity to experiment, to create. Graphic, operatic, panoramic, playing with new visual techniques that defined the riggings of the ships, made roar the waves of the seas and blinding the sheen of exotic lands, Leone, in these two films, begins to find his own cinematic voice. He experiments with the construction of the renegade anti-hero,

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tries out different framings of battle and violence, and re-envisions the relationships between man and enemy, society and individual, empire and state. If Leone started his career as an assistant director to Soldati on two Salgari films, book-ending the relationship between Salgari’s adventure novels and the western all’italiana are the six episodes of the TV mini-series Sandokan, directed by Sergio Sollima in 1976. Interestingly, Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI), which had been keen on producing a Sandokan series for many years, had pursued three other directors of Spaghetti Westerns (Duccio Tessari, Damiano Damiani, and Leone) before approving Sollima for the mini-series (Zanello 2004). Sollima had taken on the project after Sergio Leone declined. Sollima and Leone were good friends, and during the height of the popularity of Spaghetti Westerns Leone had introduced Sollima to legendary producer Alberto Grimaldi. For a time, Sollima claimed that Leone had in fact preferred Sollima’s Westerns to his own (Sollima 2007).3 The relationship between the anti-imperialist, swashbuckling heroes of Salgari and the violent, brooding anti-heroes of the western all’italiana came full circle as Sergio Sollima, who found fame with his three Westerns, rode off into the proverbial sunset on a pirate ship originally helmed and imagined by Salgari. Produced by famed Spaghetti Western producer Alberto Grimaldi, Sollima’s series Sandokan (1976), along with the films The Black Corsair (Il corsaro nero, 1976) (based on Salgari’s novels Il corsaro nero and La regina dei Caraibi) and La tigre è ancora viva: Sandokan alla riscossa! (1977), represent the mid-life energy of the director. Indeed, even ten years before the actual television production, Sollima had already been considering the possibility of writing, producing and directing a film on Sandokan (Raiola 1975: 12). Finally in 1998, Sollima directed his last Salgarian adventure: a telefilm entitled Il figlio di Sandokan. Just as Sollima had found in the troubles of Cuchillo a socialist allegory on the subjugation of the disenfranchised and the disconnectedness of a modernising society, in the proud profile of Sandokan Sollima narrated an anti-imperialist struggle, a racialised contest between coloniser and colonised. Both these anti-heroes wielded blades, Cuchillo the knife, Sandokan the scimitar. Both were dark, ‘swarthy’, noble in their ‘primitivity’: Cuchillo short, wily, cunning, radical; Sandokan, tall, sagacious, revolutionary. In the western all’italiana, Sollima found a modern parable, a connection to the contemporary concerns on industrialisation, the exploitation of the worker, and the corruption of politics. In the Salgarian adventures, Sollima found a contemporary message, a link to modern preoccupations about capitalism,

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globalisation, and the growing divide between the privileged and the poor. Sollima ‘underlined and delineated . . . the role [of] the East India Company, ancestor, proportionally much more powerful, of the modern multinationals, a private society that had an army, a fleet, and the authorization to issue its own currency’ (Raiola 1975: 11). In the pilot of the 1976 television series Sandokan, a prologue introduced the East India Company as ‘the tool for British economic and political penetration in East Asia and India’. Reflecting the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Salgari novels, the text continues by explaining that in the middle of the nineteenth century, the transition from commercial supremacy to territorial control ‘was often the work of unprincipled men ready to use any means to grant England control over the natural resources of those territories’. Within this context, Sollima and his writers located the ‘men who entered legend as popular heroes who opposed the colonization by white men’. Among these champions is Sandokan, ‘the character invented within a real historical framework by the writer, Salgari’ (Sollima 2013). Even in all this anti-revolutionary possibility, however, Sollima admitted the difficulty in adapting so familiar a character, so popular a hero, so beloved a legend as Sandokan. As he imagined the sceneggiatura, the lensing, the scope of the series, Sollima acknowledged the complexity of the project: Millions of problems also for me, naturally. First and foremost, is the [problem] of finding a narrative thread. In fact, in its apparent simplicity, few authors are more difficult [to adapt] to cinema than Salgari. His extraordinary imaginative richness, that incredible world of facts, factoids, iterations of facts, principal characters, secondary characters, secondary characters who become principal characters, places, animals, plants, they form an incredible cauldron, fascinating for the youth exactly because it lacks an ‘adult’ logical construction, an immutable architecture; they form a world that needs to be completed, regulated in some way, by the imagination of the reader himself/herself. (Raiola 1975: 11) Sollima recognised that adapting Salgari introduced new layers in cinematic storytelling because every reader of Salgari remembered him in different ways, nostalgic ways, personal, intimate ways. Sollima described reading Salgari as ‘the product of a collaboration between the writer and the reader’ (Raiola 1975: 12). Indeed, Umberto Eco echoed this sentiment as he described his ignorance of the term paletuviere, mentioned frequently in Salgari among the mangroves and banyan

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trees, and which he understood from the context as some sort of plant or shrub. Even without knowing the exact meaning, however, Eco was able to continue reading by ‘pretending to know what they were’. Using his imagination, he was able to imagine what he had ‘glimpse[d] within the half-open box, but in fact . . . [he] was taking something on trust’. Eco explained, ‘I knew that Salgari was referring to something, and I kept the communicative interaction open, to be able to understand the rest of the story, assuming (on trust) that paletuvieri existed somewhere’ (Eco 2000: 292). The relationship, the trust between reader and author that allowed the imagination of the reader to bring to life the story of the author, was one that had been cultivated by Salgari in his innate desire to appeal to the cultural tastes of his audience. The textual interplay between writer and reader that rendered Salgari such an important figure in the Italian cultural landscape was, however, more difficult to translate into film. Sollima conceded the importance of his role as one of the writers and the director ‘in a film, especially a film destined for a television audience that counts on tens of millions of people and . . . requires an immediate response’, and argued that ‘[this] dish must be served, more or less, already flavored by the fantasy of the director’ (Raiola 1975: 11). In the Sandokan films of the 1970s, Sollima teased viewers with what had been so revolutionary decades ago – the far-off locations, the exotic sounds, perfume, sights, the anti-imperialist hero, the idioms of adventure, revolt, human dignity – and had become so familiar. In the reading of the novels, the adaptations into film, the re-interpretations in the Spaghetti Westerns, the transposition of jungle and frontier, the substitution of pirate for cowboy and cowboy for pirate, the translation of Other-ed ‘Oriental’ bravado for Other-ed American swagger, the Italian public found not the authenticity of Asia or the reality of the US West, but rather a reflection of national and cultural anxieties, hopes, illusions.

notes 1. The southern question, or ‘meridionalism’, the constructed divide between Northern and Southern Italy, plagued the nation for decades after unification, and arguably still challenges Italian unity today. The rhetoric that rendered southerners as Others, at times ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’, at other times ‘foreign’ and racially different, timbred the ways in which Italian politics, identity and culture were spoken. For more on meridionalism, see Wong (2006), Moe (2002), Dickie (1999) and Schneider (1998). 2. For more information on the influence of Emilio Salgari and the adventure story on Italian youth, see Ambrosini (2007). 3. Leone himself denied this and was in fact dismissive of political Spaghetti Westerns. See Faldini and Fofi (1981: 303).

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references Ambrosini, Richard (ed.) (2007) Emilio Salgari e la grande tradizione del romanzo d’avventura, Genoa: ECIG. Anon. (2013), ‘Emilio Salgari: Literature’s Invisible Man’ [online], (last accessed 12 October 2013). Arpino, Giovanni and Antonetto, Roberto (1982), Vita, tempeste, sciagure di Salgari, il padre degli eroi, Milan: Rizzoli. Bergfelder, Tim (2005), International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-productions in the 1960s, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Brand, Peter and Pertile, Lino (eds) (1996), The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brizio-Skov, Flavia (2011), ‘Dollars, bullets, and success: the Spaghetti Western phenomenon’, in Flavia Brizio-Skov (ed.), Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 83–106. D’Angelo, Corinne (2011), Eroi di carta sul grande schermo: Emilio Salgari e il cinema, Macerata: Edizioni Simple. De Fornari, Oreste (1997), Sergio Leone: The Great Italian Dream of Legendary America, Rome: Gremese International. De Francesco, Antonino (2013), The Antiquity of the Italian Nation: The Cultural Origins of a Political Myth in Modern Italy, 1796–1943, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dickie, John (1999), Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900, New York: Palgrave. Eco, Umberto (2000), Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, New York: Houghton-Mifflin. Eco, Umberto (2005), ‘Viaggio al centro di Jules Verne’, L’Espresso, 14 April, 226. Faldini, Franca and Goffredo Fofi (1981), L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano raccontata dai suoi protagonisti 1935–1959, Milan: Mondadori. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher (2012), Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fridlund, Bert (2006), The Spaghetti Western: A Thematic Analysis, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland. Graziano, Manlio (2013), The Failure of Italian Nationhood: The Geopolitics of a Troubled Identity, New York: Palgrave. Hom, Stephanie Malia (2013), ‘On the origins of making Italy: Massimo D’Azeglio and “Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli Italiani” ’, Italian Culture, 31: 1, 1–16. Kezich, Tullio (2007), Federico Fellini: His Life and Work, New York: Palgrave. Letourneaux, Matthieu (2007), ‘Ecrire dans un genre etranger. Emilio Salgari et le roman d’aventures geographiques a la francaise’, in Richard Ambrosini (ed.), Emilio Salgari e la grande tradizione del romanzo d’avventura, Genova: ECIG, pp. 15–30. Lucas, Ann Lawson (1995), ‘The archetypal adventures of Emilio Salgari: a panorama of his universe and cultural connections’, New Comparison, 20, 97. Lucas, Ann Lawson (2012), ‘La fortuna di Salgari: tra propaganda fascista e popolarità postbellica’, in Arnaldo Di Benedetto (ed.), La geografia immaginaria di Salgari, Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 153–67.

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Magris, Claudio (1980), ‘L’avventura di carta ci segna per la vita’, Corriere della Sera, 17 June. Milani, M. (2012), ‘Prefazione’, in Claudio Gallo and Giuseppe Bonomi (eds), Emilio Salgari: la macchina dei sogni, Milan: Rizzoli. Moe, Nelson (2002), The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nay, Laura (2012), ‘Il Ciclo del West’, in Arnaldo Di Benedetto (ed.), La geografia immaginaria di Salgari, Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 115–36. Patriarca, Silvana (2010), Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pireddu, Nicoletta (2010), ‘Introduction’ in Paolo Mantegazza (ed.), The Year 3000: A Dream, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, pp. 1–55. Raiola, Giulio (1975), Sandokan mito e realtà, Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee. Salgari, Emilio ([1904] 1969), Le due tigri, Bologna: Malipiero. Salgari, Emilio ([1900] 2005), Le tigri di Mompracem, Milan: Fabbri. Salgari, Omar (1940), Mio padre Emilio Salgari. Milan: Garzanti. Salgari, Omar and Luciano De Nardis (1939), Emilio Salgari. Documenti e testimonianze. Predappio: Faro. Schneider, Jane (1998), Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Sollima, Sergio (2007), Corri, uomo, corri, DVD extra. Medusa Video. Sollima, Sergio (2013), Sandokan, DVD extra. RAI Cinema. Syder, Andrew (2009), ‘I wonder who the real cannibals are: Latin America and colonialism in European exploitation cinema’, in Victoria Ruétalo and Dolores Tierney (eds), Latsploitation, Latin America, and Exploitation Cinema, New York: Routledge, pp. 70–86. Taibo II, Paco Ignacio (2011), Ritornano le Tigri della Malesia (piu antimperialiste che mai), Milan: Marco Tropea Editore. Thomson, Ian (2002), Primo Levi: A Life, New York: Picador. Traversetti, Bruno (1989), Introduzione a Salgari, Roma–Bari: Editori Laterza. Tropea, Mario (2012), ‘Dalle parte dei ribelli? L’ideologia anticoloniale di Salgari’, in in Arnaldo Di Benedetto (ed.), La geografia immaginaria di Salgari, Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 137–52. Troiano, Francesco (n.d.), ‘Romanzi di giungla e di mare by Emilio Salgari: Adventure is Adventure’, Rai Internazionale On-Line [online], (last accessed 28 July 2012). Wong, Aliza (2006), Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy: Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora, New York: Palgrave. Wong, Aliza (2013) ‘Italian D.O.C.: American cowboys, Malaysian pirates, and the Italian construction of Other-ed adventurers in film’, in Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds), International Westerns: Re-locating the Frontier, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, pp. 301–27. Zanello, Fabio (2004), ‘La regia come match di boxe – intervista a Sergio Sollima’. Sentieri Selvaggi [online], (last accessed 3 January 2013).

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part ii

Ethnic Identities, Transnational Politics

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chapter 4

Spectacles of Insurgency: Witnessing the Revolution as Incoherent Text David Hyman and Patrick Wynne

T

he publication in 2011 of Austin Fisher’s monograph Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema opened a new chapter in scholarship on the Spaghetti Western by foregrounding the importance of the political dimensions of the production and reception of the genre. In doing so, broader questions relating to cinema and popular art forms in general are raised. What is the nature of radical art? How do politically subversive messages manifest themselves in art forms like popular cinema that are part of the dominant commodity cultures that are being subverted? How is the reception of these messages affected by the passage of time? These questions inform what is for Fisher one of the central problems involved in understanding the politics of the Spaghetti Western, in particular those of the ‘insurgency’ variant sub-filone: how is it that the radical political content of so many of the films has apparently failed to convey their intended messages to the majority of their audiences, both at the time of release and subsequently? Drawing on Robin Wood’s notion of an ‘incoherent text’ (Wood [1986] 2003: 42), Fisher argues that this failure is partly rooted in the inconsistencies and ambiguities of many of the films themselves, a condition that frequently distracts the attention of the audience away from more subversive elements. When this occurs, the audience is left with violence decontextualised from and consequently devoid of political meaning: a cinema that can be misread as celebrating violence for its own sake. This chapter will explore the possibility that such inconsistencies need not obstruct the reception of the films’ radical themes by audiences. Rather, these ruptures in coherence allow for readings that

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address the theoretical paradox inherent in popular representation of radical political struggle by shifting the focus from revolutionary action to viewing, and ultimately interpreting, revolutionary action. Through applying concepts drawn from the literary theories of Pierre Macherey to Sergio Corbucci’s paradigmatic A Professional Gun (Il mercenario), a 1968 film that Fisher singles out as an example of incoherence in Wood’s sense, this chapter will explore the possibility that textual incoherence does not hinder, but may in fact be a key to, radical interpretation of the film and the genre to which it belongs. This revaluation leads to an appreciation of some of the more discontinuous elements of the film not as failings, but as formal elements that can be seen as integral to the film’s politics. While agreeing with Fisher that the discontinuous and ruptured narrative framework of Il mercenario obfuscates any clear political message of insurgency, we argue that the criterion of clarity does not provide an adequate standard for the success or failure of subversive filmmaking. It is our contention that the ideal of a coherent text is an illusory construct that frames the role of reader/audience as inherently passive and inert. Rather than indications of artistic and political failure, the decontextualised, transnational bricolage of references, debris, fragments, and memory-texts that compete for attention in Il mercenario are catalysts for a deeper, more complicated range of audience responses. On the diegetic level, the viewer is required to shift focus, change allegiances, reconsider motivations, question loyalties and revise expectations. This disorientation is abetted by the presence of generic material that blurs the borders between text and paratext: the slight discontinuities caused by dubbing; the budget-mindful production values; the strangeness of the score, which functions less as emotional highlighter than as parallel conveyor of meaning. The viewer of Il mercenario is thus challenged to abandon, or at least to modify, the hermeneutic act so that fluidity and rupture are collaborators in, rather than objections to, meaning-making. While this lack of clarity may hinder any consensus regarding the meaning and merit of both film and genre, it may also account for their ongoing capacity to evoke transnational and trans-temporal interest. In addition, this interpretation gestures towards a solution to the dilemma of contemporary audiences’ ability to understand the radical politics of the film as something more than an historical residue. By situating Il mercenario within a broader view of temporality based on Wai Chee Dimock’s notion of ‘diachronic resonance’, we expand upon Fisher’s historical contextualisation of the genre films within the politics

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of their time of production. Viewed in this light, understanding comes not as a result of a synchronic reconstructing of the original context of the film, but rather as an ongoing conversation between the historical pluralities that emerge each time the film is viewed, and the resulting, often contradictory reinterpretations that ensue. In common with all important works of recovery, Fisher’s study exemplifies a paradox: the more successful its arguments for the restoration of an underemphasised key to interpretation, the more it stands in need of offering an explanation for how and why this key came to be misplaced at all. In Fisher’s case, his success in persuading the reader that the radical political discourse prevalent in Italy during the 1960s is central to an understanding of the Italian Western leads to questioning how it is that this awareness can have remained absconded for so long. Part of the reason is to be found in the nature of our experience of time itself, one of the patterns of which is the ongoing process of estrangement from and reintroduction to the meanings of our own traces when viewed retrospectively. However, it is worth noting that Fisher himself reminds us that the tendency to focus on the desolation and violence for which the Italian Westerns are notorious at the expense of political contexts and purposes is not merely a contemporary phenomenon, but extends back to the films’ initial receptions and impacts. Rather than misinterpretations resulting solely from the failures of contemporary audiences to respond to the political dimensions, the films carry within themselves the seeds of such misinterpretation: ‘By transposing complex political stances advocating armed insurrection into a popular medium, they invite the viewer to interpret nothing other than advocacy of violence for violence’s sake’ (Fisher 2011: 159). Fisher’s statement pertains to the most explicitly political sub-filone of the Italian Western, which he terms ‘insurgency’ variants: those films that attempt to frame contemporaneous radical political discourse within fictional narratives set during the Mexican Revolution. Underlying his critique, and in some ways underlying the entire project of understanding radical art, is what for Fisher constitutes a defining problematic of not only the Italian insurgency films, but by extension all diegetic representations of revolution, particularly those that are expressed through popular media and genres: the possibility that popular cultural productions, by nature of their participation in the generic and stylistic tropes that make them popular, are inherently and especially susceptible to depoliticised misreadings on the part of mass audiences. If the revolution will not, or perhaps more appropriately cannot,

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be televised, all depictions of revolution within popular media are at risk of becoming complicit in the assimilation of the radical into the safe and neutered productions of dominant culture: counter-insurgency disguised as revolution. For Fisher, avoiding this interpretive fate is largely dependent on the internal construction of each individual film as a coherent and consistent whole. It is not enough to be provocative; in order to ensure the efficacy of insurgent meanings, a film must provoke the right response. Indeed, a film’s capacity to avoid co-option seems to be rooted in its aesthetic resistance to eliciting a plurality of audience interpretations. This leads in turn to the conclusion that revolutionary film is incompatible with ambiguity, whether of the art-house cinema variety or the sort presupposed by the shorthand of collaborative meaning-making between producer and consumer within a generic system of codes: ‘Insofar as readers themselves shape a text’s meaning, we can see that attempts to work within the structures of genre cinema are fraught with peril for the militant artist’ (Fisher 2011: 215). Fisher identifies the failure to avoid this peril with the lack of coherence that characterises many of the insurgency variant films. Influenced by Robin Wood’s reading of several Hollywood films of the 1970s as incoherent texts, Fisher attributes the loss of political resonance among audiences to the lack of a coherent and consistent stance towards revolutionary politics that marks not only many of the insurgency films, but the broader genre of Italian political Westerns. When discussing Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown (La resa dei conti, 1967) and Face to Face (Faccia a faccia, 1967), Fisher explicitly links Wood’s characterisation with the increased demands placed on the audience by narrative and stylistic complexity: If La resa dei conti’s engagement with audience expectation is inconsistent, Faccia a faccia’s is considerably more sophisticated, yet in its complexity jeopardises the coherence of Sollima’s intended message. Robin Wood sees in certain 1970s Hollywood films such as Taxi Driver (1976) – whose authorial vision is neither identical with, nor clearly distinguishable from, that of its central character – an incoherence arising from ideological confusions in society. (Fisher 2011: 105) While noting that this is a generic trend, Fisher singles out Corbucci’s Il mercenario as the insurgency variant paradigm of this textual incoherence: ‘Far from leading this sub-filone further down the path of committed Third Worldist militancy . . . Corbucci’s eccentric interpretations

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of the “insurgency” variant in fact lay bare the trend’s inherent weaknesses. This is most apparent in Il mercenario’ (Fisher 2011: 156). These weaknesses are manifest primarily in the film’s formal narrative structure, which excludes peon exemplar Paco Roman from any position of narrative control. Focalisation is instead achieved through the perspective of the outsider figure, Sergei Kowalski, who alternately functions as narrative catalyst and detached spectator, and whose liminal First World status as Pole waters down any critique of Western colonialism and adds a layer of distance between film fabula and historical reality: ‘The plot’s fictive qualities are emphasised by the positioning of the outsider (in this case a Pole – Sergei Kowalski – an ethnic characterisation in itself confusing any anti-‘Western’ political message) as both spectator and narrator’ (Fisher 2011: 156). This places Paco in a position of spectacular and impotent passivity, highlighted by his recurring literal and figurative portrayal as clown: ‘As we return to the circus ring, Kowalski still sits observing Paco’s elaborate tomfoolery. The gaze of the audience, through our laconic Polish conduit, remains resolutely directed at the exotic Mexican’ (Fisher 2011: 157). Ultimately, Fisher argues, the audience is prevented from identifying with Paco’s shift from bandit to revolutionary, a process which thus is perceived by the audience more as a generic than a political necessity. As a result, any continuity feels forced, the product of swiping riffs from other films rather than a committed political agenda: ‘Shorn of any meaningful shift in the audience’s perspective, Il mercenario fails to expound any political message whatsoever’ (Fisher 2011: 157). Yet the possibility that textual incoherence does not hinder, but may in fact be the key to, radical interpretation is central to the approach to literature articulated by Pierre Macherey. Terry Eagleton, an early advocate of the importance of Macherey’s work, describes the role of incoherence as the means by which literary works collaborate with critics to challenge dominant ideologies: For Macherey, ideology is in its ‘natural’ state diffuse, amorphous and decentered, the invisible colour of everyday life, less an articulated structure than a boundless medium. In entering literature, however, ideology finds itself subjected to a formalization which, strictly speaking, it cannot tolerate. The formalization exposes those limits, slips and incoherences of ideology normally concealed in everyday life; and it is for this reason that, once worked upon by the literary text, ideology begins to come apart at the seams. It is the very coherence of the textual forms which produces the incoherence of the ideological content. (Eagleton 1986: 16–17)

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The interpretive dilemma, then, involves explaining a work’s meaning without having recourse to the presumption of intrinsic qualities such as consistency and cohesion, which inevitably reinforce the illusion of ideology’s occluding totality: When we explain the work, instead of ascending to a hidden centre which is the source of life (the interpretive fallacy is organicist and vitalist), we perceive its actual decentered-ness. We refuse the principle of an intrinsic analysis (or an immanent criticism) which would artificially circumscribe the work, and deduce an image of a ‘totality’ (for images too can be deduced) from the fact that it is entire. The structure of the work, which makes it available to knowledge, is this internal displacement, this caesura, by which it corresponds to a reality that is also incomplete, which it shows without reflecting. (Macherey 1978: 79) Meaning is instead to be found in the double inscription of the historical resonances of the text’s decentered fragments, and the text’s attempt to subjugate these resonances within a coherent narrative framework: The writer, as the producer of a text, does not manufacture the materials with which he works. Neither does he stumble across them as spontaneously available wandering fragments, useful in the building of any sort of edifice; they are not neutral transparent components which have the grace to vanish, to disappear into the totality they contribute to, giving it substance and adopting its forms. The causes that determine the existence of the work are not free implements, useful to elaborate any meaning; . . . they have a sort of specific weight, a peculiar power, which means that even when they are used and blended they retain a certain autonomy; and may, in some cases, resume their particular life. Not because there is some transcendent logic of aesthetic facts, but because their real inscription in a history of forms means that they cannot be defined exclusively by their immediate function in a specific work. (Macherey 1978: 41–2) For readers in agreement with Macherey’s notion of incoherence rather than Wood’s, Il mercenario’s decentred tropes and images not only emerge as potent carriers of revolutionary ideas; when reconstituted and reassembled – they can also be seen to function as meditations on the resonances of these ideas across time. Wai Chee Dimock describes the textual method of study that explores these resonances

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as ‘diachronic historicism’: ‘This approach tries to engage history beyond the simultaneous, aligning it instead with the dynamics of endurance and transformation that accompany the passage of time’ (Dimock 1997: 1,061). From this diachronic historicist perspective, the passage of time is not seen as the cause of distorted and historically naïve misconceptions, as a problem to be overcome. Instead, the fragments that constitute Il mercenario can be seen to enact and call for an extension of interpretation that goes beyond the restoration of contexts, be they of time of origin or time of reception. When studied diachronically, Il mercenario no longer need be assessed as a failed attempt to educate and inspire revolutionaries of one era with the fictionalised exploits of another; it is better understood as a reflection on the fate of revolutions and revolutionary ideas when experienced through the harsh disenchanted lens of counterrevolutionary times. This is most apparent in the film’s introductory montage, itself a fragment composed of fragments, an incoherent text in miniature that signals to audiences the degree to which the revolutionary story to follow is both concerned with and subject to the transtemporal resonances of memory, loss, and recovery. Ennio Morricone’s propulsive overture of horns triggers a rapid succession of images of armed soldiers on horseback, firing squads, a revolutionary about to be shot with his hand on his hip in a show of defiance, overturned trains, army planes, cannons, and machine guns. These images hint at the onslaught of violence to come; they also serve as a reminder of the violence in both cinematic and real-world history that establishes a significant discourse within which the film performs. The positioning of the montage as part of the film’s opening credit sequence emphasises its status as what Gérard Genette terms ‘paratext’: Rather than with a limit or a sealed frontier, we are dealing in this case with a threshold, or – the term Borges used about a preface – with a ‘vestibule’ which offers to anyone and everyone the possibility either of entering or of turning back. (Genette 1991: 261) It both marks the figurative space that the audience must cross in order to leave their daily lives and enter the diegetic world of Il mercenario, and offers preparation and guidance for the journey to come. Even in those cases where an individual photographic image might provoke clear understanding, the percussive rapidity of their collective screen entries and exits lends an air of uncertainty and instability to the sequence. The cluster of images of which the montage is constructed telegraphs to even those viewers most unfamiliar with them the sense

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of having come from a fixed position and preys upon the limitations of a constructed cultural memory. The effect is one of Brechtian verfremdung, where recognition and unfamiliarity both are at play. That these images are taken from iconic photographs of the Mexican Revolution emphasises the montage’s dual citizenship of both sides of the narrative threshold, foreshadowing the complicated task of situating the events of the film within a broader historical and political context, while simultaneously and paradoxically highlighting the fictionality of the film’s subsequent text proper. This inherent ambiguity renders any attempt to situate meaning in the uncovering of original intentions problematic even were it desirable. Meaning instead resides in a temporal multiplicity that avoids privileging one moment in an image’s life, a point Andrea Noble emphasises in attempting to explain the role of contemporaneous photographs in enabling us to understand the Mexican Revolution: To place the emphasis on the life, the afterlife – and also, we see, pre-life – of those iconic photographs that haunt the postrevolutionary landscape, is to approach them as dynamic objects, where their rhetorical power is derived from a combination of their visual eloquence and their ability to coordinate patterns of identification with and memories of the idea of the revolution as a foundational event in Mexican history. (Noble 2010:10) Jose De la Colina makes a related point regarding Paul Leduc’s film Reed: Insurgent Mexico (1973): ‘The film sets up a dual reflection: that of John Reed on revolutionary action; that of contemporary filmmaker on John Reed. That’s why one can say that Leduc films the revolution in two periods, as a conversation between two moments in time’ (Pick 2010: 184). One might add an infinite number of third partners joining the conversation, as the gaps between the time of a film’s production and viewing become as significant as those between the time produced and the time depicted. For contemporary viewers of Il mercenario, 1968 is itself as dynamic and fluid an object as the Revolution. The resulting interplay of historical moments has more in common with the complex splicing of Eisenstein with footage of more contemporary demonstrations and riots in Chris Marker’s proto-mash-up Grin without a Cat (Le fond de l’air est rouge, 1977) than with singular, unambiguous stories of insurgency. Indeed, the great service done by Fisher’s ongoing work is that it provides the necessary foundation for audiences to hear the resonances of the radical voices of 1968 Europe as a part of the film’s ongoing story, so that this complexity does not

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lead to reductive readings based on lack of awareness. In this context, it is important to note that diachronic historicism is not ahistorical, but rather an alternative to asserting the priority of synchronic historicism, which grants interpretive priority to a singular time: within a synchronic model the search for ‘historical’ meaning is largely indistinguishable from a more old-fashioned search for ‘original’ meaning. The object of inquiry is dated. Its reference points are events that began and ended in its original context. And the task of the critic is to lock that context into place, by locating the historicity in the text and the text in history. (Dimock 1997: 1,061) What is called for is a very particular sort of negative capability, one in which ambiguity is not the result of accepting mystery, but of being able to think historically in the plural, and to recognise the multiple intersections of an image and its times. This plurality acknowledges the importance of the ongoing revisions of interpretations of tropes and themes that challenge and contest the primacy of original context, a perspective of which Fisher is well aware: Throughout [my] book, we have seen time and again that readers and audiences themselves create ‘meanings’ through the artefacts of popular culture once they enter the public domain. The ‘political Italian Western’ originates from the creative participation of one such audience, and is inescapably caught up in these ongoing processes of negotiation, appropriation and reformulation. (Fisher 2011: 215) In the case of Il mercenario, Fisher’s construction of its original context relies heavily on the precedent of two insurgency variant predecessors: Sollima’s previously mentioned La resa dei conti and Damiano Damiani’s 1966 film A Bullet for the General (Quién sabe?). The paradigmatic status of these two films establishes by contrast the main flaws in Corbucci’s film: While Damiani and Sollima incrementally shift the perspective away from the Westerner towards the peon, Corbucci instead places Columba – Paco’s lover – in a position of narrative control towards the end, as she organises Paco’s and Kowalski’s daring escape. Far from making any serious attempt to elicit our sympathy for the peon, however, her actions simply precipitate yet more violent comic action. (Fisher 2011: 157)

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Comic lack of seriousness and a peon/revolutionary protagonist who is the subject of our gaze rather than its focaliser are decried as deviations from the template created by the earlier successful insurgency films, and are emblematic of Il mercenario’s incoherence. However, if we attempt to interpret these fragments outside of this predetermined framework, Paco’s consistent lack of narrative control can be seen to redefine the film. Instead of an unsuccessfully executed bildungsroman of a revolutionary, Il mercenario is revealed as an exploration of how the incoherent spectacle of revolution affects those who attempt to observe and control it. While judged according to the political context of 1968, this perspective may indeed have seemed insufficiently committed to the revolutionary moment; for us, challenged to find meaning in revolutionary aspirations in the wake of their apparent failure, such a reading may resonate more sympathetically. The shift in emphasis from revolutionary to spectacular perspective is reflected in the film’s depiction of action as theatrical performance, particularly with regard to Paco. He is from the film’s outset an object of derision and amusement, made into a spectacle for a gathered American audience. His performance as clown both prefigures and postfigures his performance as revolutionary, occurring as a flash-forward framing device early in the film but, late in the story, an achronicism that yet again ruptures the film’s narrative flow. This identification underscores the farcical aspect of revolution, and raises questions concerning the illusory nature of its promise of political and social change. In her study of the German film theorist and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, Miriam Hansen explores his interpretation of the destabilising function of clown as circus performer: If the acrobats miraculously triumph over the laws of gravity and the human physis, the clowns point up the ‘unreality’ of that triumph . . . It should be noted that not only does the clowns’ mimicry render strange an already estranged reality but the hallof-mirrors effect also affects the self-perception of the beholder, confronting the viewing subject with its own precarious reality. (Hansen 2011: 8) Paco’s performance as clown thus not only comments on his role as revolutionary; it also foregrounds the audience’s ineluctable participation in the spectacle. The estrangement effect retroactively reshapes our understanding of the montage which preceded it. Filmed photographs of Pancho Villa on horseback and the Adelita function less as signifiers of history than as reminders of their own iconic status as images of

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revolution. They are models for the role-playing scene studies through which Paco slowly learns to look and act the part of the revolutionary, much as he has already learned to act the part of the clown; they are reminders that our position as film audience parallels our position as readers of the historical Revolution. As paratextual heralds of the characters Paco and Columba, they also foreshadow the role of Columba as Kowalski’s competition for the control of both Paco and the focalisation of the narrative. The audience meets Columba, whose father was hanged for his role in the revolution, when Paco is giving what is at that point of the narrative his standard revolutionary speech, another performance to which Kowalski stands as director and acting coach. Generic expectations created by films such as the contemporaneous Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1968) might lead us to await her to assume the role of shared woman, whose plot function is to accentuate the ties and tensions between the two male leads. Cynthia J. Fuchs explores this characteristic dynamic of Hollywood buddy films: Built on the bankability of two male stars, the buddy film negotiates crises of masculine identity centered on questions of class, race, and sexual orientation, by affirming dominant cultural and institutional apparati. (Fuchs 1993: 195) Instead of furthering this dynamic, Columba becomes a competing perspective through whose gaze we see the events of the narrative, and Paco’s evolving performance as revolutionary within it. While this fragment may in fact disrupt the aesthetic totality of the narrative, it recognises the legitimacy of a female perspective that is all too frequently lacking. Mary Anne Doane sees the absence of such perspectives as part of the powerful gender bias that frequently shapes the role of film spectator: In theories of repression there is no sense of the productiveness and positivity of power. Femininity is produced very precisely as a position within a network of power relations. And the growing insistence upon the elaboration of a theory of female spectatorship is indicative of the crucial necessity of understanding that position in order to dislocate it. (Doane 1982: 87) The destabilisation that Columba’s assertion of narrative control effects on the film’s coherence parallels this dislocation, and illustrates the power that female spectatorship is capable of manifesting. Instead

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of serving as a conduit that sharpens and foregrounds the competition between the two male leads, it is she and Kowalski who are bound by their mutual interest in Paco as they engage in a struggle for control over his revolutionary path. In this struggle, Columba is the ultimate victor; she is his teacher in the ways of the revolution, and his love for her ultimately allows him to separate from, rather than tie himself more closely to, Westerner Kowalski. Paco’s manhood becomes rooted not in the competition with Kowalski, but in his love for, and ultimately marriage to, Columba. Their marriage is a gesture of hope, of the belief in a future unplanned for by Kowalski’s script. The difference is that, unlike Kowalski, her motives are not power and profit, but rather true belief in the revolution. If both are competing to be Paco’s acting coaches, it is Columba who imparts a deeper understanding of the depth and meaning of the role. Yet Columba’s triumph is itself unsustainable, displaced by the continued presence of Kowalski as both narrator and spectator. The discontinuities that Fisher correctly identifies as textual markers resist our habitual attempts to explain them away as mere misunderstandings. The film remains stubbornly immune to such interpretive cures, calling for a hermeneutics that more resembles the interpretation of dreams than traditional textual exegesis. Eagleton has noted the similarities between Freudian dream analysis and Macherey’s approach to literature: The task of both criticism and dream-analysis, then, is to articulate that of which the discourse speaks-without-saying-it – or, more precisely, to examine the distortion-mechanisms which produce that ruptured discourse, to reconstruct the work-process whereby the text suffers an internal displacement by virtue of its relations to its conditions of possibility. (Eagleton 1976: 91) In light of this, it is important to note that the film ends with what seems to be a shift of focus from revolution itself to the dream of revolution, a transformation that underscores the film’s conflicted desire to present a revolutionary message to a radical audience while at the same time redefining what constitutes successful revolutionary action. An unspoken question that haunts the film comes closest to speech at this moment: what is the value of revolutionary action in the wake of its probable failure? We are led to believe that an answer is not to be found in the revolutionaries Paco and Columba, but in Kowalski’s response as spectator to their performances. Despite the waning of his

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influence on Paco’s actions as the film’s narrative unfolds, his function as surrogate audience remains relatively stable. Our points of entry into the story are invariably framed by his voice; his position as First World representative, anti-idealist, profit-driven figure willing and able to take advantage of situational ethics may more accurately reflect a First World audience’s values than Paco’s studied revolutionary idealism, unflattering though some may find the identification. While it would be going too far to see in Kowalski’s arc a redemptive transformation, his advice to Paco at the film’s close indicates the opening of a different spectator position, distinct from that of cynical observer and committed believer: that of having borne witness. The act of witnessing is not dependent on the success of what has been witnessed; in fact, its value is in ensuring that failure does not lead to forgetting. The situation is analogous to Macherey’s view of the text; the fragments that are the condition of the possibility of meaning need to be the critic’s main object of study so that they can be reassembled into new meanings, and new possibilities. While Paco’s story reaches some form of narrative closure, Kowalski’s, and by extension the audience’s, remains open-ended and unresolved. We know that Paco will remain a dreamer; we hope that he will keep his eyes open. The unanswered question is whether those of us whose eyes are already wide open, who have lived through failed revolutions, shattered utopias, and the ensuing pull of individual and collective disillusionment and disenchantment, can maintain a capacity to bear witness to the incoherent texts of our dreams.

references Dimock, Wai Chee (1997), ‘A theory of resonance’, PMLA, 112: 5, 1,060–71. Doane, Mary Anne (1982), ‘Film and the masquerade: theorizing the female spectator’, Screen, 23: 3–4, 74–88. Eagleton, Terry (1976), Criticism and Ideology, London: Verso. Eagleton, Terry (1986), ‘Macherey and Marxist literary theory’, in Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain, London, Verso, pp. 9–32. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Fuchs, Cynthia J. (1993), ‘The buddy politic’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 194–210. Genette, Gérard (1991), ‘Introduction to the paratext’, New Literary History, 22: 2, 261–72. Hansen, Miriam (2011), Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Macherey, Pierre (1978), A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, London: Routledge. Noble, Andrea (2010), Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pick, Zuzana M. (2010), Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Wood, Robin ([1986] 2003), Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond, New York: Columbia University Press.

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chapter 5

Emancipation all’italiana: Giuseppe Colizzi and the Representation of African Americans in Italian Westerns Lee Broughton

J

onathan Dunnage observes that, when Italy’s post-war ‘economic miracle’ came to an end in the early 1960s, it was clear that not all Italians had enjoyed the benefits equally (2002: 150–2). Harsh economic conditions experienced in the South forced around 3 million Southern Italians to migrate north in search of work during the 1950s, and the rude reception these dark-skinned southerners received in northern cities resulted in the longstanding economic, cultural and racial tensions that had traditionally existed between the North and South of Italy becoming the subject of growing public discourse. The Spaghetti Western was born out of this historic moment and, as the 1960s wore on, these films were often used to comment allegorically on the very societal tensions that would eventually result in a wave of radical political activity sweeping through Italy during 1968 and 1969. As such, the Italian Western was ideally situated to articulate ideas regarding the treatment and social standing of the racial ‘Other’, and it did so via its striking representations of Mexican and African American characters. Christopher Frayling has noted a number of recurring themes in Spaghetti Westerns that loosely relate to ‘aspects of Southern Italian life’ (1981: 61). Maggie Günsberg, by flagging up the racial and cultural differences that were perpetuated by Italy’s North–South divide, seeks to establish a theoretical link between Southern Italians and the numerous

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Mexican characters that are seen in many of these films. Indeed, Günsberg suggests that parallels can be drawn between ‘historically-specific perceptions of . . . uncivilized, Southern Italian, peasant non-whiteness’ and the Spaghetti Western’s depictions of ‘Mexican non-whiteness’ (2005: 210). As yet, nobody has sought to establish a theoretical link between Southern Italians and the African American characters that appear in Spaghetti Westerns. However, there have been moments in Italian history where parallels have readily been drawn between Southern Italians and Africans/African Americans. The Northern Italians who travelled south in order to unify Italy by force during the mid-nineteenth century were quick to cast the Southern Italians as racial and cultural ‘Others’. Indeed, numerous historical accounts exist wherein Northern Italian observers equate Southern Italy and its people with Africans and barbarism (Dickie 1996: 28–9). Unification did little to improve the social standing of most Southern Italians, and a significant number of Northern Italians continue to view the South as an inferior ‘Other’ country. Such was the lot of the Southern Italians that during the 1940s the writer Leonida Rèpaci and other Italian intellectuals promoted the idea that drawing parallels between the plight of African Americans and poor Southern Italians might actually be a way to argue for meaningful social change in post-War Italy (Leavitt 2013: 9). The shared social experiences of poverty, exploitation in the workplace and racial prejudice will thus be used in this chapter to suggest a tangible link between Southern Italian and black American identity. Although a growing body of work has detailed the ways in which the Spaghetti Western’s Mexican characters might relate to Italian history, culture and politics, nothing in this vein has thus far been written about the genre’s African American gunslingers or the films that these black characters appeared in. Indeed, it is often overlooked that Woody Strode and several other African American actors were given starring roles in a number of key Spaghetti Westerns that were produced during the late 1960s. Similarly, little significance has been attached to the fact that the characters these actors portrayed were uncommonly bold, active and assertive when compared to the few major black characters that appeared in contemporaneous American Westerns. This chapter will argue that local historical, cultural and political circumstances resulted in the Italian Western introducing progressive representations of African Americans out West that prefigured the appearance of similarly progressive representations in American Westerns. In doing so, the chapter will focus primarily on the content of two Italian Westerns directed by Giuseppe Colizzi: Ace High (I quattro dell’Ave Maria, 1968) and Boot Hill (La collina degli

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stivali, 1969). In order to demonstrate the ground-breaking nature of the African American characters that appeared in these Italian films, it is necessary to first offer a brief account of the way black people were represented in American Westerns.

the representation of blacks in american westerns Hollywood filmmakers traditionally overlooked the presence of black cowboys on America’s Western frontier. Writing in 1988, Jim Pines was able to comfortably note that ‘the Western is not a genre that one normally associates with images of black people’ (1988: 68). Indeed, the representation of black characters in American Westerns was for many years a particularly contentious aspect of the genre. Beyond the all black cast ‘race’ Westerns from the 1930s such as The Bronze Buckaroo (Richard C. Kahn, 1939) and Harlem Rides the Range (Richard C. Kahn, 1939), the majority of the black characters who appeared in Hollywood Westerns prior to the 1950s possessed stereotypical characteristics while being granted minimal screen time. R. Philip Loy notes that the popular B-Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s tended to draw upon four black stereotypes: ‘Blacks as loyal servants who want to be cared for by white people, blacks as pursuing menial occupations, blacks as naturally funny and cowardly, and blacks as dancers and entertainers’ (2001: 184). Furthermore, the onscreen activities of black characters were governed by a set of highly prescriptive race-related ‘rules’ that had their origins in America’s Motion Picture Production Code of 1930. For example, the Production Code prohibited depictions of sexual relations between blacks and whites, and black male characters in particular were denied opportunities to express their sexuality more generally. Similarly, Wayne Michael Sarf indicates that within Hollywood it was ‘taboo’ to have black characters shooting at white Americans (1983: 227). In this regard, Loy notes that black characters were occasionally allowed to impede a white villain by aiming a gun at them, but only if doing so assisted the white hero’s cause (2001: 193). In addition to displaying a lack of manly qualities, the black male characters that appeared in Hollywood Westerns at this time were also immobile individuals. Loy notes that black characters only travelled the West if they were accompanying a white hero as their loyal and subservient sidekick (2001: 190). If a black character were to transgress these ‘rules’ they would inevitably suffer some kind of narrative punishment.

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Noticeably fewer black characters appeared in Hollywood Westerns during the 1950s, but a significant new black Western archetype was born during that decade. In Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954), Archie Savage appears as a black gunslinger called Ballard. Ballard is a minor character – one man in a large gang of mercenaries who have travelled to Mexico to fight in a revolutionary war – and as such he does not receive a great deal of screen time. But he is a man of action. Close readings of the film reveal that, in order for such a figure to appear in this mainstream Hollywood Western, it was necessary to grant specific characteristics to Ballard and observe certain plot details. These characteristics and plot details would set a template that was followed by most of the 1960s American Westerns that featured major black characters. Firstly, Ballard is a former Union soldier (he still wears his uniform), which indicates that he has provided a useful service to the USA and in turn justifies his knowledge of and use of firearms. Secondly, Ballard’s free-roaming ways and displays of manly qualities take place outside the USA in Mexico, and the only adversaries he shoots at are demonised Mexican and French soldiers. Vera Cruz’s location and narrative thus allow Hollywood’s taboo concerning the onscreen depiction of black characters shooting at white Americans to remain unbroken. Subsequently, most of the major black characters who appeared in American Westerns during the 1960s would be soldiers, former soldiers or law enforcement agents engaged in fights with ‘Other-ed’ enemies (Indians, Mexicans, foreign troops or enemies of the state), quite often in Mexico. Ralph Nelson’s Duel at Diablo (1966) and Tom Gries’s 100 Rifles (1969) remain prominent examples of this trend. Evidently, Hollywood’s powers-that-be still felt that it was necessary to contain and punish assertive, gun-wielding black men like Ballard at a narrative level, because he is duly gunned down during Vera Cruz’s finale. The few black cowboys who appeared in Hollywood’s civil-rightsinflected Westerns during the 1960s still tended to have their activities constrained by the prescriptive race-related ‘rules’ outlined above. For example, in Duel at Diablo the black former soldier Toller (Sidney Poitier) only shoots at Native Americans and is never presented as a possible love interest for the film’s lead white female character, Ellen Grange (Bibi Andersson). In 100 Rifles, the black former soldier turned lawman Lyedecker (Jim Brown) only shoots at Mexicans. Lyedecker does actually get to express his sexuality, but this results in a narrative punishment being imposed: although his love interest Sarita (Raquel Welch) is a Yaqui Indian, Hollywood’s concerns about representing a black male character engaging in inter-racial sex onscreen seemingly demanded that

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Sarita be punished by death before the film’s end. Even the black gunslingers who appeared in American Westerns produced during Hollywood’s briefly pro-black Blaxploitation wave of the early 1970s were liable to suffer some sort of narrative punishment if they transgressed these ‘rules’ in overt ways. For example, in Larry G. Spangler’s The Soul of Nigger Charley (1973) the former slave Charley (Fred Williamson) shoots and kills a number of white men and he has a love interest, Elena (Denise Nicholas). However, he is punished at a narrative level when Elena dies in the closing moments of the film. In Gordon Parks Jr’s Thomasine and Bushrod (1974), the eponymous African American lovers played by Vonetta McGee and Max Julien spend much of their time shooting white characters and robbing banks. However, Thomasine and Bushrod are duly punished at a narrative level when they both die at the film’s end. As will become apparent, Italian Westerns treated their black characters very differently. The next section of this chapter will map the local cultural and political circumstances that served to position the Italian Western as a film form that was ideally situated to introduce ground-breaking representations of African Americans out West.

contemporaneous politics, notions of the ‘other’ and italian cinema’s representations of blackness Progressive social change failed to occur in Italy following World War II, and Dunnage notes that this led to a ‘desire for social, political and cultural emancipation’ which resulted in a ‘wave of mass protest that spread through many parts of the country’ during the late 1960s (2002: 148). Furthermore, Italian cinema became more forthrightly radical in 1968 when, as David Forgacs reports, ‘the filmmakers’ association ANAC (Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici) became reorganised round a core of politicised directors including [Pier Paolo] Pasolini, Elio Petri and Gillo Pontecorvo’ (Forgacs 1990: 146). Gian Piero Brunetta notes that ‘the spirit of 1968 rubbed off on directors and screenwriters’ throughout the Italian film industry, who felt compelled to make movies that were ‘in touch with the spirit of the times’ (Brunetta 2009: 178). Thus, revolutionary political ideas and symbolism were quickly incorporated into Italy’s more popular film forms. For key examples of Spaghetti Westerns that follow this trend see Sergio Sollima’s Run, Man, Run (Corri uomo corri, 1968) and Sergio Corbucci’s A Professional Gun (Il mercenario, 1968). These films were often internationalist in their approach, employing Mexican

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Revolution-related political symbols and allegories that were aimed at both Italy’s proletariat and oppressed peoples throughout the world. I would argue that Colizzi’s newly emancipated but still racially persecuted African Americans out West function as allegorical political symbols too when they are viewed within the context of seismic events such as the 1965 race riots in Watts, Los Angeles and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. Thus the struggles for equality that are depicted in the Spaghetti Westerns from the late 1960s that feature assertive and rebellious black gunslingers can be seen to resonate with contemporaneous social and political struggles that were unfolding throughout Italy and beyond. In discussing the Southern Italians who spoke local dialects and subsequently struggled to find acceptance when they moved North during the 1950s and 1960s, Austin Fisher asserts that ‘in a very real sense’ these ‘people were foreigners in their own country’ (2011: 54). The dark Mediterranean skin tones possessed by many of these Southern Italian migrants undoubtedly contributed to the northerners treating them like foreigners. Indeed, Vanessa Maher notes that Northern Italians routinely and disparagingly referred to Southern Italians as being ‘africano [African]’ at this time (1996: 162). David Forgacs indicates that when Southern Italians migrated northwards they became ‘a social underclass’ (1990: 136), usually living in isolation in ramshackle ghettoes that were located on the outskirts of big cities (1990: 12). Furthermore, Dunnage’s observation that sizeable numbers of workers were killed by the police or by landowners and their agents during demonstrations and strikes in the 1950s (2002: 156) reveals Italy’s alarming lack of civil rights at this time. The late 1960s would duly witness a demand for civil rights that would loosely link the Southern Italians’ social conditions and identity to those of contemporary African Americans. Parallels can thus be drawn between the lived experiences of Southern Italians and African Americans and the way in which the lot of the racial ‘Other’ is pointedly foregrounded in Colizzi’s Westerns. Italian cinema, both art-house and popular, holds a long tradition of providing spaces for representations of black ethnicity. This tradition is undoubtedly linked to Italy’s historical empire-building endeavours in Africa. As such, some Italian cinema’s representations of black ethnicity can be judged to be of a colonial, orientalist or even exploitative bent. James Hay notes that Italian cinema audiences were exposed to images of Africa during the 1920s and 1930s via a series of ethnographic documentaries (1987: 185) and ‘colonial’ films that celebrated Italy’s empire there (1987: 181). African imagery would

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soon become a permanent and sometimes less obviously imperialist aspect of Italy’s own cultural productions. In terms of Italian cinema, this meant a noticeable black presence in both dramatic features and documentaries. Progressive representations of black ethnicity can traditionally be found in Italian cinema’s more political film forms. For example, Italian neorealism’s attempts to represent the reality of life during and immediately after World War II resulted in several films that featured black American soldiers as sympathetic characters. Key examples of this trend include Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (Paisà, 1946) and Luigi Zampa’s To Live in Peace (Vivere in pace, 1947). Thomas Cripps notes that the Marxist ideals that underpin the narratives of these films resulted in a newfound sense of cinematic equality for their black characters: essentially, ‘the black soldier is as one with the white masses of the world’ (1993: 271). By the late 1960s, Italy’s left-wing filmmakers had progressed to producing films with hard-hitting, anticolonialist narratives that gave voices to insurgent black African and South American characters who were pitted in bitter struggles against white European oppressors. Valerio Zurlini’s Black Jesus (Seduto alla sua destra, 1968) and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! (Queimada, 1969) remain the most prominent examples of such films. Black characters also appeared with regularity in more popular Italian film forms and the historical epic and fantasy films produced in Italy during the late 1950s and early 1960s featured black actors in particularly active roles. Van Aikens appears as a brave swordsman in Giacomo Gentilomo’s Goliath and the Vampires (Maciste contro il vampiro, 1961), and Glenn Erickson (2001) notes that Archie Savage’s role in Antonio Margheriti’s science fiction film Space Men (1961) might actually be cinema’s first representation of a black astronaut. On a less celebratory note, exploitative images of black ethnicity were regularly found in the Italian mondo documentaries made during the 1960s and in a variety of Italian sexploitation films made during the 1970s. The Italian film industry’s consistent approach to providing spaces for the representation of black ethnicity onscreen would be made manifest in Spaghetti Westerns too.

the representation of blacks in italian westerns Black characters had been noticeably present in some of the earliest Italian Westerns, but these early representations tended to be stereotypical in nature. For example, a black manservant appears in Sergio

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Corbucci’s Minnesota Clay (1964) and a female ‘mammy’ domestic servant type appears in Albert Band’s The Tramplers (Gli uomini dal passo pesante, 1965). However, in 1967 more sympathetic and detailed black characters began appearing in Spaghetti Westerns. Certainly, as I have discussed in detail elsewhere, Italian Westerns such as Lola Colt (Siro Marcellini, 1967) were able to comfortably incorporate groundbreaking representations of major black female characters out West (Broughton 2015). But in terms of major black male characters who are able to defy the Western’s prescriptive race-related ‘rules’ without suffering narrative punishment, Giuseppe Colizzi’s Ace High and Boot Hill are the genre’s breakthrough titles. Ace High and Boot Hill are the final two chapters in Colizzi’s highly popular trilogy featuring the characters Cat Stevens (Terence Hill) and Hutch Bessy (Bud Spencer). In Ace High, an itinerant black street fair tightrope walker, Thomas (Brock Peters), links up with Cat, Hutch and the Greek immigrant Cacopoulos (Eli Wallach) and assists them in their struggle against a crooked casino owner, Drake (Kevin McCarthy), who is running for political office. In Boot Hill Woody Strode stars as a different Thomas. This Thomas is an itinerant black trapeze artist turned vengeance-seeker whose revenge mission sees him teaming up with Cat, Hutch and the mute strongman Baby Doll (George Eastman) in order to take on a villainous businessman, Honey Fisher (Victor Buono), who is exploiting local miners. Both of these black characters are completely independent men and they are free to act as any white character might. Having observed Woody Strode in a number of Hollywood Westerns, Sergio Leone cast him as Stony in Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, 1968). He may only feature in the opening section of the film, but Stony does leave a lasting impression. As he and two other gunmen (Jack Elam and Al Mulock) patiently wait at a desolate train station for the locomotive that is carrying Harmonica (Charles Bronson) to arrive, Leone provides a detailed visual character study of all three gunmen. The introduction of Strode’s black gunman in what is only the third shot of the film is particularly noticeable given the paucity of black characters in Hollywood Westerns at this time. Here a slow-moving upward tilt takes in all of Stony’s body before ending with an extreme close-up of his face. Many more closeups of Stony follow. Indeed, Strode observed ‘the close-ups, I couldn’t believe. I never got a close-up in Hollywood. Even in The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966) I had only three close-ups in the entire picture. Sergio Leone framed me on the screen for five minutes’ (Strode and Young 1990: 237). According to Strode, Leone had effectively set a new paradigm for the visual representation of blacks in Westerns.

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Furthermore, Stony is a villainous character, which serves as a striking reminder that no American Western from the 1960s had featured a prominent black villain. After working with Leone, Strode became a major star in the Italian film industry and he would go on to appear in a number of Italian Westerns. Later in his life the actor would reflect upon the fact that ‘the Italians could never understand why I wasn’t a star at home’ (Strode and Young 1990: 235). Furthermore, Strode experienced a kind of racial empathy with his Italian work colleagues, which led him to comment ‘I was as comfortable in Italy as I would have been with my own [African American] people . . . [The Italians are] . . . the only white group I know that act like natives’ (Strode and Young 1990: 241). While Strode’s use of the word ‘natives’ is ambiguous, his comments suggest that his Italian colleagues had more in common with minority groups than with white mainstream society. Certainly it would seem that Strode found himself working in an environment where race relations differed from those that he had encountered in America. Strode’s first starring role in an Italian Western was in Giuseppe Colizzi’s Boot Hill, and a measure of the worth that Colizzi saw in Strode is indicated in the actor’s rate of pay for the shoot. Strode reports that while he generally earned $1,000 a week when shooting American films, Colizzi offered him ‘a star’s salary . . . $75,000, the most money I had ever seen’ (Strode and Young 1990: 240–1). Brock Peters had laid the groundwork for Strode to some extent when he starred as an equally defiant black character in Colizzi’s earlier Spaghetti Western, Ace High. Interestingly, Strode had previously appeared in John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and Peters had previously appeared in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1963). Both of these Hollywood films – in which innocent black men stand accused of crimes that they did not commit – were judged to have caught the mood of the emergent civil rights movement’s calls for racial equality in America. The presence of these iconic actors in Colizzi’s Westerns thus serves to link Hollywood’s symbolic representations of contemporaneous social and political struggles to those being generated in Italy. Crucially, Strode’s Italian Westerns would have a tangible effect on those later Hollywood Westerns that possessed a politically militant outlook: the American producer-director Larry G. Spangler has confirmed that it was a conversation with Strode on the set of a Western being shot in Italy that convinced him to produce two of the Blaxploitation wave’s most controversial and hard-hitting Westerns, The Legend of Nigger Charley (Martin Goldman, 1972) and The Soul of Nigger Charley (Larry G. Spangler, 1973) (quoted in Rausch 2009:

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149–52). The fact that the Italian Western’s striking but largely overlooked black characters actually pre-dated the similarly unruly but more widely celebrated black characters that appeared in Hollywood’s later Blaxploitation Westerns ultimately serves to problematise the Western genre’s received evolutionary model (see French (1973) and Will Wright (1975) for examples of the numerous studies that choose to only take account of the influence of developments occurring in Hollywood and wider American society when charting the evolution of the Western).

finding the carnivalesque in colizzi’s films It is important to note that the active black characters that appear in Colizzi’s Westerns are itinerant circus and street fair performers since their work, and the locations in which they perform it, links them directly to the notions of egalitarianism that are traditionally associated with the carnival. In his definitive scholarly account of the significance of the medieval carnival, Mikhail Bakhtin notes that the carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions . . . all were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familial contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age. (1984a: 10) Two entertainment forms that bear the carnival’s influence are the Italian commedia dell’arte and the modern circus. Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards note that the commedia dell’arte’s egalitarian nature is reflected in the fact that its troupes consisted ‘of actors ultimately drawn from diverse social and educational backgrounds’ (1990: 40) who performed within street fairs and market places to audiences ‘drawn from all levels of society’ (1990: 80). Nicolas Bentley observes that the circus as it is known today first emerged in England during the late eighteenth century under the guidance of the equestrian expert Philip Astley (Bentley 1977: 11). However, the circus and its clowns are often positioned as being an Italian phenomenon. The names of many of the most famous clowns cited by Rupert Croft-Cooke and Peter Cotes (1976: 142–50) signal or affect an Italian heritage: the Fratellinis, Delprini, Renato, the Great Sabatini, Ron and Sandy

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Severini, et al. Moreover, Roberto Zanola reports that since 1968 the Italian state has officially recognised that the circus plays an important role in promoting the culture of Italy (2010: 160). Crucially, the egalitarian space that Bakhtin found in the carnival is also reproduced in the circus. Howard Loxton reports that during the late nineteenth century, black clowns would receive equal billing with their white partners (1997: 78) while Antony Hippisley Coxe notes the significance of the circus’s circular and elevated seating arrangements, which results in the audience holding ‘the spectacle in its midst’ and actually becoming ‘a part of the spectacle’ themselves (1980: 24). The Italian cinemagoing public’s familiarity with cinematic images of black ethnicity and the carnivalesque spaces found within Colizzi’s Westerns thus made these films ideal vehicles for the introduction of ground-breaking black characters out West. Ace High and Boot Hill both feature much in the way of carnivalesque action and happenings that can be linked back to the commedia dell’arte. However, more politically determinate understandings of the characters and other key elements found in Colizzi’s films can be achieved if the character types and activities associated more specifically with the commedia’s descendant, the modern circus, are employed in a comparative manner. The Italian director Federico Fellini was noted for incorporating clowns and circus motifs into his films – see La strada (1954) and Juliet of the Spirits (Giulietta degli spiriti, 1965) for examples of this – and their inclusion can sometimes be understood to possess a political dimension. The European circus tradition condensed the commedia’s humorous characters into two types of clowns, the bullying whiteface clown and the lowly but rebellious Auguste clown, and Fellini took a great interest in these two character types. Fellini observes that the Auguste clown ‘is an image of the proletariat: the hungry, the lame, the rejected, those capable of revolt’ (1976: 125–6). By comparison, Fellini asserts that the Auguste clown’s oppressive tormentor, the whiteface clown ‘is a bourgeois, in his appearance as in everything else. He is startlingly splendid, rich and powerful’ (1976: 125). Peter Bondanella reports that Fellini observed and identified certain people in modern Italian society who seemingly possessed ‘the same character traits as the two kinds of clowns’ found in the circus (1992: 187). Bondanella indicates that Fellini saw some unruly but sympathetic members of the provincial working classes as Auguste clowns (1992: 187). By contrast, Fellini saw figures of strict and cruel authority – ‘some of the nuns who had run nursery schools . . . [and] certain stout fascists’ – as whiteface clowns (1976: 129). Ultimately, as Tullio Kezich observes, Fellini’s theories, and quite often his films, use the

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circus as a global metaphor to divide humanity into two types: ‘the master and the slave – the arbiter of the system and the rebel, the rich and the poor’ (2007: 300). The abundance of circus-related imagery and carnivalesque occurrences found in Colizzi’s Westerns results in the stock types described by Fellini coming to the fore and the same metaphor of resistance to cruel oppression being played out. Colizzi’s protagonists effectively represent the poor and the hungry who possess the desire and the ability to rebel, just like the Auguste clown. By contrast, the films’ chief antagonists are cast in the mould of bourgeois whiteface clowns. Percy Allum indicates that ‘collective action’ was a crucial aspect of the street protests that took place in Italy during the late 1960s (2000: 26). The way Colizzi’s oppressed characters ultimately come together to partake in collective action in order to defeat corrupt and oppressive bourgeois villains thus plays like an allegory of the social and political struggles that were taking place within contemporary Italy and beyond. The remainder of this chapter will connect the carnivalesque specifically to Colizzi’s black characters while offering examples of the ways in which these characters defy the racerelated ‘rules’ that governed contemporary American Westerns. By calling both of his distinct black protagonists Thomas, Colizzi appears to be seeking to draw comparisons between his characters and the stereotypical ‘toms’ or ‘Uncle Toms’ that regularly appeared in Hollywood films. Donald Bogle observes that ‘always as toms are chased, harassed, hounded, flogged, enslaved, and insulted, they keep the faith, n’er turn against their white massas, and remain hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and oh-so-very kind’ (2001: 4–6). Bogle offers early examples of American films that feature toms – Sidney Olcott’s Confederate Spy (1910) and Harry A. Pollard’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927) – while noting that the stereotype endured for decades (2001: 6–7). Significantly, Colizzi’s Toms barely relate to Hollywood’s toms/ Uncle Toms on any level other than the colour of their skin. In both films, Colizzi’s black protagonists are coded as free spirits. Both men are itinerant performers who travel in wagons and Bakhtin describes the overt sense of freedom that this circumstance connotes (1984a: 106). Bakhtin also asserts that the itinerant performer’s wagon serves as a vehicle that ‘spreads the festive carnival atmosphere’ (1984a: 106) and the jubilant endings of both films include long shots of the black characters’ wagons as they travel off to new adventures. In this regard, Melvin Donalson’s assumptions concerning the failure of the blackoriented Hollywood Western Buck and the Preacher (Sidney Poitier, 1972) to attract a large audience and critical acclaim within America at the time of its release offer an interesting point of contrast:

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Perhaps, black cowboys and settlers were still too far removed from the traditional images of African Americans, and the sense of triumph suggested by the film’s final freeze-frame – of Buck, the Preacher, and Ruth riding into the sunset – was too foreign a concept for [contemporaneous American] audiences. (2003: 33) Donalson’s speculations are illuminating on a number of levels. Firstly, they serve to confirm just how ground-breaking the narratives of Colizzi’s films actually were. Secondly, Colizzi’s Westerns were ranked within the top twenty highest-grossing Spaghetti Westerns of all time at the Italian box office (Fridlund 2006: 263–5), which is an impressive feat given that in excess of 450 Italian Westerns were produced between 1962 and 1978. Thus it would seem that Italian cinemagoers were culturally distinctive in terms of significant numbers of them being willing to pay to watch Westerns that featured triumphant black characters. In both of Colizzi’s films, men who do not respect equal rights for all invade carnivalesque spaces and it is their very presence and actions that galvanise his black gunmen. In Ace High, Thomas is performing his act at a street fair when a group of white men in the crowd begin abusing and molesting his wife. Since these men do not attack the white women seen in the crowd, their actions must be presumed to be racially motivated, seemingly tying in with bell hooks’s observation that, historically, ‘white men continued to sexually assault black women long after slavery ended’ (1982: 52). His wife’s cries serve to make Thomas wobble on the tightrope and so the men’s actions can be construed as being designed to symbolically knock the elevated black man off of his perch. At this point, Cat and Hutch intervene and a standoff begins to take place. When black characters were slighted or racially insulted in American Westerns during this period a white associate would inevitably intervene and set the matter straight on their behalf (see Gordon Douglas’s Rio Conchos (1964) and Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965) for examples of this kind of scenario). Here, however, Thomas swings down from the tightrope and asserts ‘I’ll join you if you don’t mind’. Strapping on a gun, he lines up alongside Cat and Hutch and a close-up of his face captures his angry state. As it turns out, Thomas decides to humiliate his wife’s attackers by skilfully trick-shooting their hats off and Cat affirms Thomas’s independence and masculinity by telling him ‘you certainly didn’t need us to handle those guys’. In Boot Hill, villains invade the circus twice in quick succession while searching for Cat. A wounded Cat has hidden in one of the circus wagons and the young black trapeze artist Joe (Maurizio Monetti)

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spots his leaking blood and alerts Thomas. The short sequence that follows sets Thomas up as the most self-determinate, in-control and masterful black male character to appear in a Western during the 1960s. Thomas unwraps a hidden pistol, slots it in his waistband and assumes full responsibility in dealing with the situation. Joe asks ‘Don’t you think it would be better if we called the others too?’, to which a supremely confident Thomas replies, ‘All in good time.’ After Thomas has seen the unconscious Cat and is making his way back to his own wagon one of his white companions asks ‘What’s going on, Thomas?’, to which he replies ‘Nothing’. When three horsemen approach the circus from a distance, the circus’s clueless patriarch, Mamy (Lionel Stander), asks himself ‘What do they want?’. By contrast, Thomas instinctively knows that trouble is afoot and he tells Joe ‘You look sleepy. Get into bed and go to sleep, stay there no matter what happens . . . Don’t argue.’ The three men are looking for Cat, and when Cat shoots the one who finds him, Thomas shoots the remaining two before they have time to react. To have Thomas spontaneously and brazenly shoot two white American characters dead without a flicker of doubt or emotion is undoubtedly a first for a black character in a 1960s Western. Furthermore, Thomas does not commit this violent act in order to save a white hero figure. His primary concern here is to protect the young black boy Joe. Thomas Doherty notes that some Hollywood filmmakers began willfully breaking the rules of the Production Code during the 1960s (2007: 334), and the Code was eventually replaced by the more lenient Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings system in November 1968. However, the makers of Hollywood Westerns tended to abide by the rules of the Code for much of the 1960s, and American filmmakers in general remained reluctant to show images of black characters inflicting violence upon white characters during this period. In terms of major black male characters there were two exceptions within the Western genre, but it should be noted that these blacks only kill whites in order to save the lives of other whites. Thus their actions are merely an extension of the Hollywood ‘rule’ that allowed black sidekicks to bear arms in the white hero’s cause. In Rio Conchos the black Union soldier Franklyn (Jim Brown) spears a white enemy to death in order to save the life of a white associate, Major Lassiter (Richard Boone). Franklyn is subsequently punished at a narrative level for this act when he dies at the film’s end. In Sydney Pollack’s The Scalphunters (1968) the runaway slave Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis) accidentally kills a villainous white man (Telly Savalas) when he acts to save the life of his white friend,

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Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster). Thus, in the time that it takes to fire two rapid shots, Thomas has equalled the tally for the number of white characters killed by a major black male character in all the mainstream American Westerns of the 1960s. By the film’s end Thomas will have exceeded that tally. For the sake of completion, mention must be made of the minor black characters who appear towards the end of Lee Frost’s obscure American sexploitation Western The Scavengers (1969). Frost employs a band of free black men as a provocative deus ex machina device that initiates the resolution of the film’s central white-versus-white conflict. The former slaves elect to attack the film’s villains, namely a gang of renegade Confederate troops who are holding a Union officer (Warren James) and his fiancée (Maria Lease) as prisoners. But while the black gunmen do manage to kill a handful of Confederates, they are all punished at a narrative level: every one of them dies during the course of the attack. It should of course be noted that Italian filmmakers like Giuseppe Colizzi were able to operate without being constrained by the archaic race-related ‘rules’ that governed Hollywood productions. However, Thomas’s bold and violent actions in Boot Hill do appear to possess a political dimension as they can be linked to the wider celebrations of ethnic-underclass assertiveness that are found in Italian Westerns such as the aforementioned Run, Man, Run and Maurizio Lucidi’s My Name is Pecos (2 once di piombo, 1967). Thomas is not at this stage of the film caught up in any kind of moral struggle between good and evil. He is simply presented with a problematic set of circumstances that he has to promptly and instinctively deal with. When the circus folk subsequently crowd around Cat, a medium close-up shot has Thomas placed in a position of control, in the foreground at the head of the crowd and centrally placed, which represents a marked contrast to shots found in Hollywood Westerns such as The Professionals, where Strode’s Sharp is often placed in the background of busy shots. When a panicked Mamy asks ‘And what do we do now?’, it is Thomas who again takes control and supplies the answers. He assesses Cat’s health and supervises the burial of the three gunmen’s bodies and the disposal of their horses. Colizzi’s blocking and camera placement choices are designed to ensure that Thomas dominates most of the shots that he appears in here. Thomas’s ability to react to and take control of unforeseen circumstances contrasts sharply with those black characters from American Westerns from the 1960s who tended to rely on orders or instructions from white tacticians (see The Professionals (1966) and Arnold Laven’s Sam Whiskey (1969) for examples of this kind of behaviour).

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Soon after a barely recuperated Cat has left the circus, two more villains come looking for him and find evidence that he has been there. Looking around the big top as the trapeze artists perform their act, one gunman callously shoots one of the supporting ropes on Thomas’s swing just as the blindfolded Joe has launched himself towards him, expecting to be caught in midair. As Thomas struggles to adjust himself, Joe is sent hurtling past him to his death. The gunman’s actions are racially motivated: a close-up shows him spitting the words ‘damned monkeys’ before he shoots and shots representing his point of view reveal that only the black members of the Flying Men trapeze team are actively using the swings at that moment. Tangled in his swing’s remaining rope, Thomas is left dangling upside down and swinging out of control. When the crowd begins to panic and leave their seats, Mamy declares that ‘there’s nothing to be alarmed about, the show goes on’ before striking up the circus’s midget clown band and sending his can-can girls out to perform. The way Colizzi presents the aftermath of Joe’s murder makes it all the more horrific and upsetting. After Joe is seen struggling to gasp his last breath in a close-up shot, Mamy removes Joe’s blindfold to reveal that his eyes are still open. A long shot, taken from above, frames Joe’s crumpled body while the following shots show the can-can girls starting their routine and the panicked audience returning to their seats. Colizzi returns to a close-up of Joe’s face – with his lifeless eyes breaking the ‘fourth wall’ and staring directly out of the screen at the audience – thirteen times, intercutting the shot with images of the dancing girls, the heartbroken faces of Joe’s friends, the circus band playing and, finally, the audience who, having seemingly forgotten the tragic spectacle that unfolded before them a few moments earlier, are now rapturously applauding the dancers. Colizzi shows Joe to be a victim of racially motivated violence, an act seemingly stimulated by the white gunman taking offence at seeing two black men in an elevated position and thus seeking to symbolically knock them off of their perch. And Colizzi’s repeated return to the close-up of Joe’s face that breaks the ‘fourth wall’ urges every spectator of the film to consciously contemplate the awfulness of the young innocent’s fate. Images of black victimhood and death comparable to those that Colizzi presents here were rarely seen in American Westerns during the 1960s. However, Joe’s death scene from Boot Hill can be likened to a similarly constructed scene that is found in the Italian Western Lola Colt. Here the African American character Lola (Lola Falana) recounts a memory concerning a past encounter with murderous racists, and a close-up in which she breaks the ‘fourth wall’ precedes her flashback.

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By having Lola momentarily stare directly at the audience, director Siro Marcellini seeks to ensure that they are fully alert to the harrowing nature of the memory that Lola imparts. Interestingly, bell hooks has discussed the idea that, historically, black male slaves felt emasculated because they were roundly denied the ability to ‘assume full patriarchal responsibility for families and kin’ (1992: 90). Likewise, none of the major black characters who appeared in American Westerns during the 1960s was shown to have a wife, girlfriend or children. In effect, these free black men out West remained just as emasculated as the historical slaves that hooks refers to. But this is not the case in Ace High. Thomas has a loving relationship with his attractive black wife and thus is portrayed as having a heteronormative sexual identity. Furthermore, while it is never stated whether Thomas and young Joe in Boot Hill are related, it is clear that Thomas looks after the boy in a fatherly way and thus has a paternal identity. Both characters therefore signify a breakthrough in the way black men were represented in Westerns. Indeed, E. W. Swackhamer’s Man and Boy (1971) was the first mainstream American Western to feature a major black couple in a loving relationship and a meaningful black father–son relationship. Furthermore, there is no suggestion in either of Colizzi’s films that the black characters are ex-soldiers who have learnt their shooting skills while serving the USA in a useful and patriotic way. In fact, it is even hinted in Boot Hill that Thomas is a reformed gunfighter who might be a runaway slave. This is significant, because late entries in the American Blaxploitation Westerns wave, such as Larry G. Spangler’s Joshua (1976), were still prone to present their lead black protagonists as former soldiers.

black anti-heroes Joe’s death in Boot Hill prompts Thomas to become the first black vigilante vengeance-seeker to appear in a Western from the 1960s. The first American Western to feature a black gunman undertaking a prolonged vengeance mission was Larry G. Spangler’s aforementioned Joshua. Thomas also effectively becomes the first black Western antihero. After Joe’s death, Thomas tracks Cat and finds him camped outdoors and in a feverish state as a result of his festering wound. Once again, Colizzi presents an image of a dominant black character who is placed in a powerful and elevated position by filming Thomas, who is perched on a wall, from below. Thomas saves Cat’s life again here and Cat tells him ‘I don’t like to have to thank somebody too many times’.

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Thomas sternly replies, ‘You don’t have to . . . you’ll make good bait for my trap. That’s the only reason for me to try to keep you alive.’ It is clear that Thomas is not saving Cat for altruistic reasons this time. Cynical white anti-heroes were the norm in Spaghetti Westerns, and their presence was one of the key features that distinguished Italian Westerns from American Westerns at this time. The fact that Thomas’s skin colour does not prevent him from operating as an equally cynical black anti-hero in Colizzi’s Western serves to further highlight the differing attitudes of the Italian and American film industries when it came to representing African Americans out West. Thomas in Ace High is perhaps a more affable character. His work as a tightrope walker involves balancing, and he in turn comes to have a balancing effect when interacting with the film’s other protagonists. Cat and Hutch are angry with Cacopoulos because he stole their money, and when the duo arrive in Fair City and discover Cacopoulos, Thomas and his wife working in a saloon’s kitchen, Hutch makes to assault the Greek. It is Thomas who bravely intervenes and appeals for calm, ordering Hutch to ‘take it easy’. Thomas’s rope-artist skills prove to be very important towards Ace High’s end when he is called upon to fix an impromptu trapeze swing to his tightrope, which he then uses to swing Cat onto the roof of Drake’s casino. Once inside the casino, Thomas, Hutch and Cat discover the unscrupulous nature of Drake’s gambling operation: a spy panel in the casino’s ceiling and a communication pipe which runs into the casino’s basement, from where the underside of the roulette wheel can be accessed and its winning number fixed via the application of a magnet, has allowed Drake to cheat the locals out of huge sums of money. What follows is an extended caperlike sequence wherein Thomas, Hutch, Cat and Cacopoulos set out to defraud the casino in order to get back the money that the Greek has lost there. This acts as a reminder that no major black character in an American Western of the 1960s was ever involved in this kind of forthrightly criminal behaviour. Indeed, while the later American Western Sam Whiskey does strive to generate a comparable sense of excitement and suspense by including an extended caper-like sequence that is similar to the one found in Ace High, the scene in question is saddled with a pointedly moral dimension. Here, Ossie Davis’s black ex-soldier is part of a patriotic team of specialists that secretly breaks into the Federal Reserve in order to return gold that was previously stolen by a well-intentioned but wholly misguided public servant whose good name must be preserved. In the run up to Ace High’s denouement, Thomas is in the thick of the action, physically assaulting a number of Drake’s white henchmen,

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rigging the roulette wheel from below so that Cacopoulos wins and rescuing Hutch from a couple of Drake’s tough guys. When Cacopoulos keeps on winning, Drake is sent for and the scene is set for the film’s final showdown. Drake opts to provoke a gunfight and one of his henchmen advises Cat and company that ‘it would be better if you did leave. After all, it would be impossible for me to fight against a Negro on equal terms.’ This racial slur is followed by a snap zoom shot that ends with a close-up of Thomas’s outraged face, which is in turn followed by a close-up of his gun being aimed at his tormentor. When the film’s climactic gunfight unfolds, the casino’s roulette wheel – which is effectively a symbol of the carnival’s egalitarian games of chance that Drake has been abusing – is spun and the gunmen agree to draw when the wheel stops spinning. As the two sides prepare to fight, they arrange themselves into two opposing lines that face each other across the roulette table. Here the randomly spun roulette wheel’s ability to generate an egalitarian space is reinforced: Drake’s racist henchman will have to face a black man on equal terms. Just as when Thomas lined up alongside Cat and Hutch to take on his wife’s tormentors at the street fair, a side-angled medium long shot reveals that he is standing shoulder to shoulder with his comrades. This is a marked contrast to similarly set up scenes found in earlier American Westerns – such as Vera Cruz – wherein black team members tend to be positioned behind the lines that their white companions form. A series of close-ups and point-of-view shots reveal that Thomas is confidently facing the man who racially abused him, and Thomas subsequently kills the man. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam note that Hollywood routinely sought to avoid the representation of ‘images of racial anger, revolt, and empowerment’ (1994: 203), and the aforementioned scene from Ace High clearly represents a ground-breaking advancement in this regard. Similar scenes involving black gunmen responding violently to racial slurs would not appear in American Westerns until the emergence of Blaxploitation Westerns such as The Legend of Nigger Charley in the early 1970s. In Boot Hill, Thomas succeeds in his revenge mission. Fisher and his men and the miners that they have been intimidating, murdering and defrauding are all invited to a performance by the circus folk, who stage a commedia-like allegorical play in which a miner is abused and swindled by a businessman and his brutal cowboy henchman. Here Colizzi presents a series of clever rapid cuts, which serve to reveal that every member of the audience is imagining themselves to be a character in the performance, be it as victim or abuser. With the circus audience suitably agitated, the can-can girls, backed by the midget clown band,

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put on a song-and-dance routine that has a carnivalesque audience participation element. As the song lyrics advise them to look under their seats, the miners find guns while Fisher and his villains find rattles. A further performance becomes a eulogy to those miners killed by Fisher and his men. Dunnage observes that the ‘toll of deaths and injuries from police charges, bullets and tear gas’ during Italy’s mass demonstrations ‘escalated from the end of 1968’ (2002: 173). Parallels might thus be drawn between the film’s eulogy to the fallen miners – who died as a consequence of asserting their workplace and civil rights – and the deaths of those protesting workers and civil rights activists who died on Italy’s streets at this time. When one miner snaps and draws his gun, the same gunman who was responsible for Joe’s death shoots him. Thomas immediately emerges from behind the backstage curtain and shouts ‘hey you, murderer’ at the gunman. As the man goes for his gun, Thomas draws and shoots him dead. In terms of the Western’s traditional patterns of narrative and representation, Thomas’s actions here represent a significant moment: a black man has successfully executed a revenge mission against a white man in order to see justice done on behalf of a black victim. His mission complete, Thomas assists Cat, Hutch, Baby Doll and the two white Flying Men in the climactic battle against Fisher’s thugs. As in Ace High, when the protagonists walk towards the site of the film’s final confrontation an angled medium close-up shot reveals that Thomas is standing shoulder to shoulder with his friends, who form a perfect front-facing line. Significantly, as they draw closer to Fisher’s men the protagonists form an arrowhead-like shape and Thomas is positioned at the very front, effectively leading the film’s protagonists into battle. Bakhtin observes that the carnivalistic impulse ‘brings together, unifies, weds and combines the sacred and the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid’ (1984b: 123), while Hippisley Coxe notes that ‘those who watch [the circus] are part of the show’ (1980: 226). When a visiting judge and his officious assistant, the can-can girls, the midget clown band and the previously reluctant miners all join Cat and company in the fight against Fisher’s men, the clash becomes a patently carnivalesque example of collective action.

conclusion Boot Hill’s frenetic, acrobatic and at times slapstick finale essentially acts as a celebration and a reminder of all of the elements of the carnival, the commedia dell’arte and the circus that are found in Colizzi’s

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Westerns. It is also clear that the egalitarian nature of these entertainment forms provided Colizzi’s Spaghetti Westerns with spaces that encouraged the emergence of strong and independent black gunfighters who were able to operate on equal terms with their white counterparts and thus transcend the prescriptive race-related ‘rules’ that governed contemporary Hollywood Westerns without suffering narrative punishment. Furthermore, the way in which Colizzi foregrounds the lot of the racial ‘Other’ while presenting striking images of ethnic-underclass assertiveness allows the films to be read as allegories of the social and political struggles that were being fought on Italy’s streets at the time of their release. Jim Pines asserts that the ‘Blaxploitation Westerns [of the 1970s] attempted to recast the popular image of the West in black terms’ (1988: 70). I would conclude that the Italian Westerns discussed in this chapter had already successfully initiated such a recasting during the previous decade.

references Allum, Percy (2000), ‘Italian society transformed’, in Patrick McCarthy (ed.), Italy Since 1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 10–41. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984a), Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984b), Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emmerson, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bentley, Nicolas (1977), The History of the Circus, London: Michael Joseph. Bogle, Donald (2001), Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, London: Continuum. Bondanella, Peter (1992), The Cinema of Federico Fellini, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Broughton, Lee (2015), The Euro Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film, London: I. B. Tauris. Brunetta, Gian Piero (2009), The History of Italian Cinema, trans. Jeremy Parzen, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Cripps, Thomas (1993), Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era, New York: Oxford University Press. Croft-Cooke, Rupert and Peter Cotes (1976), Circus: A World History, London: Elek. Dickie, John (1996), ‘Imagined Italies’, in David Forgacs and Robert Lumley (eds), Italian Cultural Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–33. Doherty, Thomas (2007), Hollywood’s Censor, New York: Columbia University Press. Donalson, Melvin (2003), Black Directors in Hollywood, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Dunnage, Jonathan (2002), Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History, Harlow: Pearson Education. Erickson, Glenn (2001), ‘Vera Cruz’, DVD Savant [online], (last accessed 2 September 2015). Fellini, Federico (1976), Fellini on Fellini, trans. Isabel Quigly, London: Eyre Methuen.

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Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Forgacs, David (1990), Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880–1980: Culture Industries, Politics and the Public, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Frayling, Christopher (1981), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. French, Philip (1973), Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre, London: Secker & Warburg. Fridlund, Bert (2006), The Spaghetti Western: A Thematic Analysis, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Günsberg, Maggie (2005), Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hay, James (1987), Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hippisley Coxe, Antony (1980), A Seat at the Circus, London: Macmillan. hooks, bell (1982), Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, London: Pluto Press. hooks, bell (1992), Black Looks: Race and Representation, London: Turnaround. Kezich, Tullio (2007), Federico Fellini: His Life and Work, trans. Minna Proctor, London: I. B. Tauris. Leavitt, Charles L. (2013), ‘Impegno nero: Italian intellectuals and the African American struggle’, California Italian Studies, 4: 2, 1–23. Loxton, Howard (1997), The Golden Age of the Circus, London: Grange Books. Loy, R. Phillip (2001), Westerns and American Culture, 1930–1955, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Maher, Vanessa (1996), ‘Immigration and social identities’, in David Forgacs and Robert Lumley (eds), Italian Cultural Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 160–77. Pines, Jim (1988), ‘Blacks’, in Edward Buscombe (ed.), The BFI Companion to the Western, London: André Deutsch, pp. 68–71. Rausch, Andrew J. (2009), ‘Larry Spangler’, in David Walker, Andrew J. Rausch and Chris Watson (eds), Reflections on Blaxploitation: Actors and Directors Speak, Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, pp. 149–56. Richards, Kenneth and Laura Richards (1990), The Commedia dell’arte, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sarf, Wayne Michael (1983), God Bless You, Buffalo Bill: A Layman’s Guide to History and the Western Film, London: Cornwall Books. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam (1994), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London: Routledge. Strode, Woody and Sam Young (1990), Goal Dust: The Warm and Candid Memoirs of a Pioneer Black Athlete and Actor, Lanham, MD: Madison. Wright, Will (1975), Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zanola, Roberto (2010), ‘Major influences on circus attendance’, Empirical Economics, 38: 1, 159–70.

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chapter 6

Corbucci Unchained: Miike, Tarantino and the Postmodern Discursivity of Exploitation Cinema Mikel J. Koven

T

he term ‘postmodernism’ has become ubiquitous in popular film criticism, to the point where, as with the overuse of the word ‘cult’, the term becomes hackneyed and drained of any real meaning. Kim Newman’s feature article on Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) in Sight & Sound is a case in point: On the one hand, these borrowings add layers to the referentiality which is always an element of Tarantino’s postmodern genre cinema; on the other, it feels a little like cheating – shoring up an audience’s feelings for the present movie by reminding them how much they liked something else. (Newman 2013: 35) For a critic like Newman, postmodernism is not much more than a game of ‘spot-the-references’ or a self-indulgent mnemonic. This current chapter is an exploration of both Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) as they reference the Spaghetti Westerns, specifically the films of Sergio Corbucci. In an interview that first appeared in The New York Times, Tarantino cites the influence of Corbucci on Django Unchained; not only because he directed the Italian Western to which both Miike’s and Tarantino’s films make direct reference in their titles (Django (1966)), but also because ‘his was the most violent, surreal and pitiless landscape

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of any director in the history of the genre’ (Edwards 2012: 8). While Tarantino’s claim may be mildly hyperbolic, his citing of Corbucci as an explicit influence is what is central for the following discussion. I will, firstly, be offering a synthesis of some key ideas within postmodernism, following this by textual consideration of Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django and Tarantino’s Django Unchained as two different kinds of postmodern texts.

postmodernism redux Attempting to synthesise, to any degree, an understanding of postmodernism is a fool’s errand, and one that will inevitably leave one exposed to elements of criticism. Labyrinthian libraries are filled with book-length studies, collections and articles on the subject that appear to echo the libraries in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980). Too frequently, such studies lapse into sophistry at the expense of illumination, however, and trying to find a solid, concrete definition is next to impossible, largely owing to the intentional (and self-conscious) vagueness of postmodernism itself. This section will attempt such a fool’s errand, and illustrate various methodological considerations of postmodernism in order to apply them self-consciously to Sukiyaki Western Django and Django Unchained. To start with, and most unhelpfully, the key scholars of postmodernism rarely agree on what the term actually means. What Jean Baudrillard identifies as postmodernism Jean-François Lyotard calls modernism.1 Baudrillard sees modernism as the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment project in the nineteenth century, wherein a historical continuity and idealised sense of reality are about to be overthrown by the postmodernism of the twentieth century (Baudrillard [1981] 1994: 162). In this later era, surety of meaning is overthrown for a fetishistic obsession with appearances. Criticism, meaning, and analysis are all revealed to be empty. The hierarchies of high and low culture, of the elite and the popular, are dissolved in a rejection of such divisions. Such shattering of modernism’s plenitude results in fragmented identities, roles, purposes and ontologies. Other critics, such as Fredric Jameson (1991) and Linda Hutcheon (1988), would likely agree, at the crudest level, with Baudrillard’s characterisation of postmodernism. Both Baudrillard and Lyotard identify that in the twentieth century art began to shift away from idealist aesthetics to a greater emphasis on representation, problematising the assumptions about art as a reflection of the ‘real’ into a self-aware discursive relationship with an experience

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of reality, including the signposts of postmodernism noted above. Yet here, Lyotard saw modernism, not postmodernism; for implicit in Baudrillard’s postmodernism is not only the absence of truth, but further, an awareness that such truth still exists, even if it cannot be represented. The rules (of/for whatever) exist, even if they are ignored or subverted. Such reasoning, Lyotard suggests, is modernist; postmodernist thinking knows that the rules themselves do not exist (Lyotard 1984: 81). Lyotard proposed a greater philosophical postmodernism which eschewed pre-existing rules and norms of representation and their attendant principles (not just ignoring them). The postmodern artist must invent new forms as much as new art. Postmodernism is an oppositional discourse, which parodies modernism’s styles and forms; it makes ironic the rejected assumptions modernism is built upon. The most obvious demonstration of this discourse is the rejection of the artificial distinction made between high and low culture, between elite worlds of art and literature and the low cultures of mass and popular culture. Modernism rejects this distinction self-consciously, perhaps even in a congratulatory way, but is fully aware of its erasure. Postmodernism, by removing that distinction, creates a pluralistic anti-essentialism which refuses to recognise that any distinction could ever have been made. Herein lies the difference between modernism’s quotation of popular culture and postmodernism’s ersatz plagiarism: as Derrida implicitly suggests (1978), modernism still recognises a centre to be rejected through its absence, whereas postmodernism innocently asks ‘what centre?’. Postmodernism is that space where Spiderman can play Hungry Hungry Hippos with Odysseus, and American situation comedies plagiarise Shakespeare without citations. As praxis, postmodernism manifests itself culturally through various self-conscious textual practices; that is, the artist who has ‘assembled’ their particular text has done so largely aware of the ideological principles such assembly suggests. Postmodernist praxis clearly manifests its own aestheticism; that is, rather than subscribing to some kind of grand theoretical narrative or positivist principle, the postmodern work is concerned primarily with its own art-for-art’s-sake superficiality. This is also a facet of modernism, but postmodernism recognises that the work has been constructed to be read as surface, and resistant to assumptions of an absence of plenitude. As such the work may appear overly ‘mannered’ and morbidly obsessed with its own sense of stylisation. But that is exactly the work’s (absent) point. Key to the construction of a postmodern trinity of style are intertextuality, pastiche and bricolage. The postmodern text is intertextual; it

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refers to other texts, ‘quoting’ other previous works as its own construction. The postmodern is an intertextual pastiche of older forms; that is, such pastiche invites a kind of ‘archaeology’ of the history of particular genres (and generic forms). Postmodern filmmakers, in the instances I am discussing here, are aware of the history of particular cinemas to which their film alludes – often with a better historical knowledge than most scholars – so that history becomes a textual presence within the film. If pastiche is predicated on a historical self-awareness, bricolage comprises instruments he [the artist] finds at his disposal around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous. (Derrida 1978: 360) While both bricolage and pastiche are intertextual assemblages, they can remain either as modernist quotations or as postmodern assemblages of other texts. Either way, this process rejects elitist divisions and brings together as meaningful ‘high’ and ‘popular’ cultures.

postmodernism japanese-style Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) epitomises the Baudrillardian postmodern film. In the film, a lone gunman (Ito Hideaki) arrives in the small town of ‘Yuta, Nevata’, a town torn apart by the rivalry between the Genji and Heike clans. The gunman plays both sides off against one another while protecting a mute young boy, Heihachi (Uchida Ruka), the child of a marriage between a Heike man, Akira (Oguri Shun), and a Genji woman, Shizuka (Kimura Yoshino). Both clans are associated with colours – the Heikes in red and the Genjis in white. None too subtly, young Heihachi is cultivating roses which are both white and red, a fusion of clans which he too represents. Sukiyaki, as a stereotypical Japanese dish (here used, in part, as a cultural metonym, like the use of ‘spaghetti’ to refer to Italian Westerns), is a stew of meat and vegetables, a combination of various ingredients creating an apt metaphor for Miike’s film, which is also a combination of different ingredients (also noted by Rawle 2011: 91). Even the frontier town of Yuta (suggesting both the western American state of

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Utah and the Arizona town of Yuma, both of which have strong associations with the classic Western genre), is a combination of traditional Japanese and American frontier architecture. As the film opens, three gunmen come for dusty poncho-wearing Piringo (Pi-Ringo: a reference to another Spaghetti Western hero of many films along with Django; here played by Quentin Tarantino) in a clichéd standoff. Despite the Spaghetti Western-style costumes and the on-set properties appropriate to such a homage, the beginning of the film features Piringo reciting the opening verses of the thirteenth-century Japanese epic chronicle The Tale of the Heike, with his back to the three would-be assassins. This action is played in front of a painted backdrop depicting a Hokusailike image of Mount Fuji and a bright orange (rising) sun. The stagey mise-en-scène, juxtaposed with the reified early nineteenth-century art of the backdrop literally ‘sets the scene’ for Miike’s cinematic sukiyaki. The culturally metonymic dish of sukiyaki, that is, Japanese culture writ large as embodied by this stew, suggests a culinary simplicity of many different ingredients, of meat and vegetables, stewed together into a single one-pot meal. In addition to the pastiche of the various stewed ingredients, like the architectural styles Miike builds for Yuta, perhaps the strangest (or at least most unheimlich) component is that the Japanese cast speak English all the way through the film (and not always clearly, as many of the actors read their lines phonetically; see Rawle 2011: 92). Doing so suggests a lingua franca of English for Spaghetti Westerns themselves, the ubiquity of the Italian Westerns dubbed into English for international distribution. Tarantino’s presence, as an actor in the film, suggests allusions to Tarantino’s own cinema (discussed below) and to the self-consciousness (and awareness) of Tarantino’s limitations as an actor. The Tale of the Heike, from which Tarantino’s Piringo recites, chronicles the late twelfth-century Japanese Genpei War, wherein the ruling Taira clan was ultimately defeated by the Minamoto clan. The House of Tiara (Heike, in Japanese) and the House of Minamoto (Genji, in Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters) are appropriated as the names of Miike’s warring clans in Sukiyaki. But Miike’s film is not jidaigeki (the historical films about samurai made famous by Kurosawa Akira, among others). Miike instead recasts The Tale of the Heike in the style of Spaghetti Westerns, and with characters styled more from Manga than with verisimilitude to any of the other referenced cultural forms, thereby collapsing the high culture of the Heike with the low of Italian Westerns and Japanese popular culture. But Miike takes this further still: the Genji leader, Yoshitsune (Iseya Yusuke), is obsessed with Shakespeare, particularly the Wars of the Roses plays, and changes his

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name to Henry (either Plantagenet or Tudor: in postmodernism they’re interchangeable). The English Wars of the Roses, between the houses of Lancaster and York, suggest strong parallels with the Japanese Genpei War; the red banners of the Heike suggest the red roses of the Lancastrians, while the white banners of the Genji suggest the white roses of the Yorkists. Just to make the connection even more obvious, as noted previously, Heihachi, as the child of a Heike man and a Genji woman, is represented by the bi-coloured roses he is cultivating, much like how Henry Tudor blended the white and red roses to unify England. Miike, as the film’s author, plays the two cultural worlds off against each other, Western culture(s) against Eastern (Japanese) culture(s), erasing the distinction between high and low by conflating Shakespeare with The Tale of the Heike, jidaigeki with Spaghetti Western, Yorkists and Lancastrians with Genji and Heike. There is a historical awareness, as well, with the literary-cinematic legacies Miike evokes as pastiche. At one point in the film the lone gunman is warned off ‘playing Yojimbo’, a direct reference to Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Yôjinbô, 1961), which, famously, was the inspiration for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, 1964), the film that opened the doors for Spaghetti Westerns well into the mid-1970s. Yojimbo, in turn, was (unofficially) based on the 1929 Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest. The Yojimbo reference is a warning against playing both sides of the war off against each other – the Genji and the Heike – which makes explicit the selfconsciousness of the filmic construction, as well as an awareness of the history of those representations. Miike is clearly evoking the Spaghetti Western with the film’s title, despite avoiding name-dropping Leone and focusing more on Sergio Corbucci’s films. Specific references to Django are sparse: the Heike ambush the Genji and obtain a Gatling gun hidden in a coffin, in a clear quotation from Django’s 1966 arsenal. While the film’s narrative is clearly based on Yojimbo, Corbucci’s Django plays Rodriguez (Jose Bodalo) off against Major Jackson (Eduard Fajardo) to some extent, although the connection is dubious. At the very end of the film, we are told in an on-screen crawl, that young Heihachi later moved to Italy, became an expert gunfighter, and changed his name to ‘Django’. As the end credits crawl across the screen, the soundtrack plays Luis Bacalov’s Django theme song, sung in Japanese. But by making Sukiyaki the backstory to Django, Miike undermines any attempt at creating a sense of plenitude with regard to the entire Django mythology; by playing the hackneyed ‘and that little boy grew up to be . . .’ card, he creates an impossible continuity with the other Django films. In doing so, Miike

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rejects any attempt at an ontological meaning imposed on his film. It is, by design, meaning-less. And yet, such meaninglessness is one of the key attributes of Baudrillardian postmodernism’s obsession with surface and style, which is suspicious of any attempt at constructing a greater meaning. Herein lies postmodernism’s cynicism in the absence of plenitude or meaning; Sukiyaki Western Django suggests not only that the film is a reified aesthetic object, but that this is all art can be. All the intertextual references in Sukiyaki Western Django function as quotations; we know they are there, and, even if we’re not sure of the exact reference itself, a few minutes on Wikipedia will illuminate the quotation’s source, if not what it might mean. Both the Wars of the Roses and the Genpei War are, however, historical ‘realities’ which Miike at no point attempts to challenge; likewise, the clear references to Kurosawa’s jidaigeki and Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western are incontrovertible. While the case for seeing Sukiyaki Western Django as a postmodern film is a strong one (particularly from a Baudrillardian perspective), the structured absence of the historical texts is never interrogated; their underlying truth, while unspoken, is still present. In this regard, and from a Lyotardian perspective, Miike’s film is more modernist than postmodernist. Finally, the film’s apparent target audience, as it played at film festivals (such as the Toronto International Film Festival) and art-house cinemas around the world, is an elitist one, which aesthetically is too obviously selfconscious and knowing. I would like to suggest, however, that Quentin Tarantino’s cinema does more than play this knowing game of quotations and surface attractions.

the postmodern auteur As was noted at the beginning of the chapter, attaching the label ‘postmodern’ to Quentin Tarantino’s films is so ubiquitous as to be banal: it is probably the most obvious continuity across his oeuvre to garner him auteur status (cf. Gallafent 2006; Polan 2000). Tarantino is the key example that Susan Hayward, and others, draw on as the sine qua non of postmodern cinema (Booker 2007; Constable 2007; Hayward 2006; Hill and Every 2001). Hayward notes: While they [Tarantino’s films] appear to be a mise-en-abîme of filmic quotes, the orchestration of the quotes is so brilliantly achieved that what appears to be pastiche is in fact parody. He selects the quotes and then brutally overturns them. (Hayward 2006: 303)

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For Hayward, postmodernism – as discourse – needs to achieve more than pastiche; it must be ironic bricolage to be subversive in resisting the assumptions of underlying, even if unspoken, truth (Hayward 2006: 302). If pastiche is parody without irony and therefore not sufficiently destabilising, Sukiyaki lacks that subversive tendency to destabilise ontological categories or plenitude, and so, while still remaining postmodern, is limited by its own aestheticism. The same criticism could be levelled at Tarantino too. As Anderson et al. note: ‘Tarantino’s films are overwhelmingly celebrations of fetishistic violence, sex, and film pastiche, laden with aesthetic flourishes from the early and mid-1970s – nothing more and nothing less’ (Anderson et al. 2014: 228). Thus, Anderson et al. dismiss Django Unchained simply as pastiche: unfairly, I think, as I discuss below. Oliver Speck, in the introduction to his edited collection on Django Unchained, characterises Tarantino’s cinema as ‘mere postmodern in-jokes’ (Speck 2014: 5). In the same volume, Alexander Ornella is equally dismissive (although in a more tongue-in-cheek fashion), referring to the film as ‘Tarantino’s most recent violation of filmic style, language, and good taste’ (Ornella 2014: 93), suggesting that discussions about Tarantino’s cinema are not what film scholars are usually (or should be?) engaging in; that such topics are truly ‘paracinema’ – beyond what ‘cinema’ is (Sconce 1995). Kate Temoney refers to Tarantino’s Django as a cinematic ‘mash-up’ (Temoney 2014: 123), and Dara Waldron calls the film a ‘remix’ (Waldron 2014: 143). Dara Waldron’s discussion of Django Unchained is worth considering further. He refers to Tarantino’s cinema as ‘metacinematic’, cinema about cinema, but (echoing Anderson et al.) sees metacinema as ‘truncated postmodernism’ (Waldron 2014: 142). While Waldron sees Django Unchained as clearly postmodern, much as I argued above regarding Sukiyaki Western Django, Tarantino’s film lacked the irony, and therefore the subversion, which Hayward and others see. Waldron, for example, refers, in Django Unchained, to the ‘often-overt references to the Spaghetti Western original’ (2014: 142), which is curious. As I argue below, the references are far from overt, certainly in comparison with Miike’s film. Leon Hunt, in ‘Asiaphilia, Asianisation and the Gatekeeper Auteur’ (2008), refers to Quentin Tarantino as a self-appointed ‘gatekeeper’ who, along with French director Luc Besson, filters the diverse cinemas of Eastern Asia (Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea in particular) for Western consumption. Tarantino, in particular, Hunt suggests, plays the role of the ‘Asiaphile fanboy’ (2008: 220) who references all of his favourite films, directors and stars in his films quite explicitly.2 Tarantino, as gatekeeper, becomes a brand for accessing Eastern Asian cinema; the name ‘Tarantino’ becomes the mark of quality Eastern

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Asian movies, both those films/filmmakers he cites and those he lends his name to in ‘presenting’ their new films, like Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) (Hunt 2008: 220). Hunt bases his reading of Tarantino on, logically, the films to date (2008), with particular attention to the Kill Bill movies (2003 and 2004). Constable and Booker (both 2007) likewise discuss the Kill Bill movies. It behoves me to state the obvious: that Quentin Tarantino may have developed into a more sophisticated filmmaker across the intervening decade. While Tarantino may have set himself up as an Asiaphile gatekeeper a decade ago (or more) to champion Eastern Asian cinema in a market where DVD was just emerging and other technologies had barely been thought of, today (2015) the gates being kept appear to have been mostly knocked down. Heather Ashley Hayes and Gilbert B. Rodman, while critical of Tarantino’s auteur status, recognise the film’s ‘borrowing of shots, scenes, costuming, and characters from Blaxploitation films, martial arts films, Spaghetti Westerns, and the like. Significantly, most of those genres depend heavily on non-Western, non-white, and/or hybrid aesthetic styles’ (Hayes and Rodman 2014: 182). Their suggestion is that Tarantino’s metacinema disrupts and erases divisions between film styles, obviously, but also divisions between nationality and race (by making Django African-American, for example). Such disruptions become politicised in Tarantino’s cinema by his glorifying the paracinematic and celebrating non-normative cinemas. However, Samuel Perry, while he sees the Spaghetti Western as a constant in Tarantino’s work, reduces his intertextuality to a predictable formula: ‘x (Spaghetti Western) + y ([another] B movie genre) + z (unconventional embodiment of hero)’ (Perry 2014: 211). Perry elaborates: In the Kill Bill films, y is Kung Fu movies and z is a female character. In Inglourious Basterds, y is World War II films and television shows and z is, again, a female character. In Django [Unchained], y is Blaxploitation films and z is a black character. (Perry 2014: 212–13) What I would like to argue now is that, far from being reductive and aesthetic metacinema, Tarantino’s films, and Django Unchained in particular, reinvent cinematic language through his use of grindhouse cinema allusions, rather than direct quotations. My suggestion is that, while in some examples a direct corollary can be made between a particular Tarantino film reference and the earlier film being referenced, it is in the foggier, less concrete allusions that the true artistry (and authorship) lies. And in this respect, Tarantino’s cinema suggests the decentred simulacra of Lyotard’s postmodernism more than Miike’s film does.

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unpacking the signifying The one place where Tarantino does quote directly is in his soundtracks. The non-diegetic music he chooses for particular sequences, an eclectic range of movie soundtracks and popular music, creates direct connections: this music comes from that source. It is hardly surprising to find that Tarantino uses tracks from Luis Bacalov’s score for the original 1966 Django, including the theme song across the opening credits, in Django Unchained. Tarantino also draws from several different Spaghetti Westerns, including Bacalov’s score for His Name Was King (Lo chiamavano King, Giancarlo Romitelli, 1971), Riz Ortolani’s score for Day of Anger (I giorni dell’ira, Tonino Valerii, 1967), Franco Micalizzi’s music for They Call Me Trinity (Lo chiamavano Trinità, Enzo Barboni, 1970), and the great Ennio Morricone’s compositions for Corbucci’s The Hellbenders (I crudeli, 1967). But Tarantino also quotes, through the music, Morricone’s scores for Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and Violent City (Città violenta, Sergio Sollima, 1970), and a Jim Croce song from Lamont Johnson’s NASCAR drama The Last American Hero (1973). In addition to movie soundtracks, he also collapses the distinctions between film scores and pop (R&B, soul, hip-hop) music by using tracks by Rick Ross, James Brown, John Legend and a particularly beautiful track by Anthony Hamilton & Elayna Boynton (‘Freedom’). Unlike the allusions I will discuss below, Tarantino’s musical choices (particularly when marketed separately as an album) create direct ‘this-means-that’ connections; these are intertextual quotations typical of Baudrillardian postmodernism. However, beyond the quotation, Tarantino creates a veritable language of grindhouse cinema allusions which are much more difficult to pin down directly. Hunt suggests ‘the grindhouse is open to exotic thrills, but not sensitive to cultural difference – it literally “grinds ups” [sic] diverse cultural forms into the amorphous category of “exploitation cinema” ’ (Hunt 2008: 224). While I would agree with Hunt to some extent, I still contend that all of the ‘ingredients’ retain sufficient (cultural) identity to enjoy their combination. To understand this, we need to unpack these references. The Corbucci references in Tarantino’s film begin with, logically, the character of Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx) himself. His first name is obviously an intentional allusion to Sergio Corbucci’s Django. While Django inspired a lengthy series of unofficial sequels, Tarantino is not really drawing upon Corbucci’s film or any of those later films. There is little comparison to make between the character played by

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Franco Nero in Corbucci’s original and Jamie Foxx in Tarantino’s film.3 ‘Django’ becomes a signifier for Spaghetti Westerns as a whole, unlike Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django, where the quotations of Corbucci are explicit. There is a moment in Django Unchained, in the Cleopatra Club, where Foxx’s Django meets Franco Nero (making a cameo appearance) at the bar; the two men share a prolonged two-shot (Figure 6.1). According to the film’s credits, Nero plays a character named Amerigo Vessepi, which suggests the fifteenth-/sixteenth-century Italian explorer from whom we get the name ‘America’, Amerigo Vespucci. Nero is not playing the explorer Vespucci, or someone called Vespucci; the name is an echo, a trace, an allusion. ‘Django’, as a name, is likewise an allusion to Corbucci’s film and the many Django movies that came after. There are several character names in Spaghetti Westerns which Tarantino could have availed himself of instead of Django: Ringo, Sartana, Trinity, Sabata – all had their own serial narratives in the genre and all would have (more or less) the same resonance, although Django was the better known. While the ‘Unchained’ of the film’s title is clearly a reference to Django’s freedom from slavery, Dara Waldron further identifies Tarantino ‘breaking’ from the Django series of films (as a chain): Just like the chain found by semioticians in a series of signs, the signifiers the name attaches to, Django, is bound by name to the Django chain (or series), his status as ‘unchained’ suggesting rupture from both the series and the slavery of slavery. (Waldron 2014: 142–3)

Figure 6.1: Jamie Foxx and Franco Nero share a prolonged two-shot in Django Unchained (2012).

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Or, the ‘unchained’ signifier may be an allusion to Pietro Francisci’s 1959 peplum (popular Italian sword and sandal movie) Ercole e la regina di Lidia, released in North America as Hercules Unchained. While Tarantino is making allusions (some vague, some obvious) to Spaghetti Westerns, he is also alluding to other genres of Italian popular cinema, in this case, the peplum. In Tarantino’s film, Django is partnered with Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German dentist-cum-bounty-hunter, who purchases Django to assist him in identifying a particular family of fugitives, the Brittle Brothers. King Schultz gives Django a surname (something none of the Italian directors does), as now that Django is effectively bought by Schultz (and it was common practice for slaves to take the surname of their owners), he gives him the name ‘Freeman’ to indicate his freed-man status. The bounty hunter theme is a particular trope of the Italian Westerns (Bondanella 2009: 341), and, as I discuss below, prevalent in Corbucci’s films. The two men form an incongruous partnership (black and white riding together in the antebellum South), with Schultz mentoring Django as a bounty hunter, much like Frank Talby (Lee Van Cleef) trains the (equally) socially marginalised Scott (Gilliano Gemma) in Tonino Valerii’s Day of Anger; and Tarantino includes a track from the Valerii film in Django Unchained, as I noted above. While the Riz Ortolani music is a direct quotation of Day of Anger, the relationship between Django and Schultz is less concrete: it is allusive. Schultz agrees to train Django in becoming a bounty hunter (‘Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?’) until such time as Django can find and rescue his wife Broomhilda (Hildy, for short). While rescue plots are less prevalent in the Spaghetti Westerns, the vengeance plot is almost ubiquitous (Bondanella 2009: 342). La vendetta is alluded to in Django’s identifying the cruel taskmasters he remembers from his earlier servitude, the Brittles. Vengeance also spurs Django on as he returns to the Candieland plantation after Schultz has been killed, but he is equally motivated by the desire to rescue Hildy once and for all. While the film’s conclusion is, perhaps, prolonged, the final act is necessary to return to the Corbucci-influenced themes. Django needs to be symbolically killed – by being hung upside down in irons (like the eponymous Navajo Joe in Corbucci’s 1966 film4) and nearly emasculated, then sold off to the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company – in order for him to be resurrected as the personification of la vendetta, like any good Spaghetti Western hero. Seen in this light, Corbucci’s influences on Tarantino’s film are the allusions Django-as-hero has with other Corbucci anti-heroes: Navajo Joe (Burt Reynolds) in Navajo Joe

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(1966), Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in The Great Silence (Il grande silenzio, 1968) and the original Django. As both a freed slave and a bounty hunter, Django operates in the shadow world of nineteenth-century America, in those grey areas of legality (particularly in the antebellum South). Django inhabits a world where Caucasian-Americans are in control, and prone to killing a black man, legally or not. Big Daddy (Don Johnson) and Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), both plantation and slave owners, are the law in their respective communities. Django rides in on his horse alongside Schultz in his cart (seemingly as equals) and the two are viewed as provocations to the white population. When Django and Schultz ride onto Big Daddy’s plantation, Django, wearing an outlandish blue outfit suggesting Gainsborough’s eighteenth-century painting ‘The Blue Boy’ (Figure 6.2) is just such a provocation. ‘Boy’ is also just one of the many ways white racists condescend to black men in America; therefore Django’s provocative clothing suggests a defiant ‘Blue Boy’ to Big Daddy. Django’s antagonising of the plantation owners, particularly when he is outlandishly dressed, suggests recasting the Django character as a trickster figure, not only like Brer Rabbit from African-American folklore, but also like the Mack-Daddies and pimps of Blaxploitation cinema. Django-as-trickster is also alluded to when Django is able to talk himself out of dangerous situations, as he does in tricking the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company employees. Tarantino has shifted the Django character, quite specifically, away from the Spaghetti Western themes and into the world of Blaxploitation, where ‘stickin’ it to the Man’ (in this instance both Big Daddy and Calvin Candie are ‘the Man’) and being a fast-talking trickster figure are the norms (cf. Koven 2010).

Figure 6.2: Django’s outlandish outfit is suggestive of Gainsborough’s ‘The Blue Boy’ (Django Unchained, 2012).

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While not central to either genre, a few Blaxploitation Westerns were made; if Blaxploitation was hybridising and (post)colonising traditional American genres like the crime film, the gangster film, and the horror movie, why not also (post)colonise the Western? Tarantino directly quotes Blaxploitation by introducing ‘Mandingo fighting’ (slaves boxing one another to the death) into the film. This is a direct reference to Richard Fleischer’s highly problematic 1975 film Mandingo (based on the bestselling 1957 novel by Kyle Onstott), which also featured slave boxing. Films such as The Legend of Nigger Charley (Martin Goldman, 1972), The Soul of Nigger Charley (Larry Spangler, 1973) and Boss Nigger (Jack Arnold, 1975), all starring Fred Williamson, weren’t the most popular of the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, but at least these filmmakers were trying any and all hybrids imaginable. To further illustrate this hybridisation, in Take a Hard Ride (1975), a Blaxploitation dream-cast of Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Jim Kelly and Charles McGregor was directed by Antonio Margheriti and featured Spaghetti Western star Lee Van Cleef. The inclusion of African-American characters in Spaghetti Westerns suggests the Italians were also willing to try any hybrid form of vernacular cinema, including Blaxploitation. The Black Panthers were understood to be particularly fond of Spaghetti Westerns for their anti-Imperialist/anti-American positions (Hoberman 2012: 38). While not Blaxploitation per se, Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972) features Ivanhoe Martin (Jimmy Cliff) going to see Django at the Kingston Rialto and seeing the film as defining his own struggle against ‘the Man’. It is the film that plays in his head as he is finally gunned down by the Jamaican police. As Austin Fisher observed, the militancy expounded in some of the Italian films found an apt bedfellow in the very milieu of grindhouse cinema mentioned above. In the ‘blaxploitation’ genre, violent action similarly rubbed shoulders with belligerent ideological discourse in independent film aimed at audiences marginalised from mainstream culture. (Fisher 2011: 181) The connection between Spaghetti Westerns and Blaxploitation, then, is not a particularly new one. But it is a significant recognition of the possibilities that two different kinds of vernacular cinema can have, not just historically, but also transnationally too. Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington), Django’s wife whom he risks everything to rescue, also needs unpacking as a cluster of quotations and allusions. Her surname, von Shaft, suggests, literally, that

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the family who first owned her were German; we also find out that Hildy was taught German in the household. ‘Shaft’ is a reference to the Blaxploitation classic Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971), obviously; but the ‘von’ suggests that the von Shaft family were nobility. The construction of Hildy’s name has further allusions, which ennoble John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), the Blaxploitation character. The connection is also made explicitly that Hildy’s given name, Broomhilda, is connected to the heroine princess of German mythology, Brunhilda, and her love for the hero Siegfried. Schultz casts Django and Hildy as Siegfried and Brunhilda, as a sacred romance that he – as a German – needs to ensure continues, at least in his mind. Sometimes hairs need to be split: Broomhilda, as a name, is not Brunhilda, despite clearly being a reference to German mythology. Broom-Hilda is the name of an American comic strip syndicated since 1970, featuring a cigar-smoking witch in a parodic fairytale world, à la the Grimms. While Tarantino includes obvious quotations of high art and popular culture – Shaft, the Nibelung – he also carefully alludes to others which add texture and associative meaning for those who catch the allusions – German nobility and the Russell Myers comic strip. Hildy’s function within the Django Unchained world, apart from her rescue as Django’s central motivation, also has a suggestion of the character Pauline, from The Great Silence, played by Blaxploitation leading lady Vonetta McGee (in her first role). The Corbucci connection is rather an obtuse one, but in Tarantino’s grindhouse cinema grammatology, it all connects up. Dr King Schultz is a different case altogether. The casting of Viennese actor Christoph Waltz as a German dentist on the frontier is in keeping with the Italian Western’s international casting obligations (due to the complex international investment in these films), most notably Klaus Kinski in several. In fact, Schultz’s first name – King – is a reference to Romitelli’s His Name Was King starring Kinski as another bounty hunter (although his character isn’t the King of the title). Further to that, and in a different direction, while the film never draws attention to the fact, Schultz’s name has echoes of another Dr King: Martin Luther King, the great African American leader in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The echo is quiet and subtle, but no doubt is part of the trust we place in this character’s motivations. The role Schultz’s character plays in the film’s narrative has echoes of several other characters from Corbucci films: while Tigero (Klaus Kinski) is the villain to Silence’s hero, in The Great Silence, Schultz’s professionalism in bounty hunting has echoes of the Kinski role. In Django Unchained, during a winter montage demonstrating the increased proficiency of Django’s shooting and general bounty

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hunting, the images of Schultz and Django in the wintry mountains echo similar images from The Great Silence. Spaghetti Westerns in general, and Corbucci’s in particular, feature the kind of cross-cultural partnerships that Tarantino explores in his film. In both Compañeros (Vamos a matar, compañeros, 1970) and A Professional Gun (Il mercenario, 1968), Franco Nero plays jovial Europeans (a Swede and a Pole, respectively), both with tremendous facial hair, transplanted into the American Southwest/Mexico. In both films, Nero is paired up (sometimes begrudgingly) with Mexican revolutionaries, El Vasco (Tomas Milian) in Compañeros and Paco Roman (Tony Musante) in A Professional Gun. If Schultz is an allusion to Nero’s roles in both these films, it could be suggested that Django is likewise transformed into a revolutionary by paralleling him with El Vasco or Paco through these associative allusions to Compañeros and A Professional Gun. Furthermore, in both Compañeros and A Professional Gun the chief villain of the films is played by Jack Palance; so (stay with me . . .), in Django Unchained, the film’s key villain, Calvin Candie, is shot in the heart, through the carnation he wears in his lapel, by Schultz, just like Palance’s character, Curly, in A Professional Gun, is shot by Nero’s Sergei Kowalski (Frayling 2000: 236). Therefore, Tarantino is making a strong association between the debonair and lethal evil gentlemen played by Palance in these two Corbucci films and DiCaprio’s (underappreciated) performance as Candie, rounding off the series of associated allusions between Waltz and Nero, DiCaprio and Palance, and Musante/Milian and Foxx. And further, Tarantino is alluding to these two other Corbucci films, while referencing his Django explicitly. Shooting Candie through the heart via his lapel carnation is a direct quotation from A Professional Gun, but the rest of these connections are allusions; they are not quotations, as there is no direct object to pinpoint in reference to another specific object.

conclusions Jean-François Lyotard seems to underline what I have been arguing throughout: The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in the presentation itself . . . A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed

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by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have to be done. (Lyotard 1984: 81) In Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django, the rules of the art house, literature, history, cinema are all present, even if they are conspicuous by their absence; it is that conspicuousness which draws attention to the rules in the first place. Sukiyaki exists as a temporary distraction (pleasant and fun though it may be) for an elite audience. Its intertextuality is on the surface, making explicit the pastiche, which is its warp and woof. In its rejection of modernist ontologies, from a Baudrillardian perspective, Sukiyaki is, on its surface, anarchic and overturns cultural hostility towards popular culture by fashioning art out of popular culture. But Django Unchained does more than Miike’s film, I think. While the same arguments regarding intertextuality can be made for Tarantino’s film (Perry is even able to reduce Tarantino’s entire oeuvre to an equation), the references run deeper than that. Most commentators, such as those I have quoted here, only see the most obvious of references Tarantino is making; they are not exploring the less direct filmic allusions, moments when the film suggests a connection but not exactly, not specifically. This vagueness of allusion in Django Unchained, at least from the Lyotardian perspective, is an assemblage of filmic moments, learned from the transnational sukiyaki pot of the grindhouse cinema: Derridean bricolage. And it is this bricolage which denies even the structured absence of the sureties of the modernist age. If Sukiyaki Western Django is the epitome of postmodern cinema (according to Baudrillard; modernist according to Lyotard), then Django Unchained is something else: Baudrillard had difficulty articulating what is beyond the postmodern. It is as if Tarantino is speaking a different language from his critics; it is the language of grindhouse cinema and ersatz ‘bad movies’, but internalised in such a way as to become his own voice. The critics speak ‘cinema’ while Tarantino (and his fans) speak ‘paracinema’. Owing to the production context outside of mainstream Hollywood, the Italian Westerns were able to explore darker themes and grittier narratives, which directly challenged Hollywood’s own mythmaking heritage. As J. Hoberman noted recently, the Spaghetti Western filmmakers had ‘been weaned on [Hollywood] westerns and [had]

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internalized every genre cliché’ (Hoberman 2012: 38). Tarantino, a generation later, was weaned on the Spaghetti Westerns, as well as the other genres of the grindhouse, including Blaxploitation. He, too, has internalised all the clichés of those genres, and in his own films is able to use these exploitation colours for his palate. The irony is that the exploitation filmmakers’ reaction against the ownership of these symbolic codes is now co-opted by Hollywood hegemony through Tarantino’s work. Hoberman (2012: 40) suggests that the Spaghetti Western’s inherent anti-American or anti-Imperialist perspective is potentially echoed in Tarantino’s rejection of the semiotics of Hollywood culture for the culture of the grindhouse: of ‘official’ film culture for the paracinematic. And yet, despite Tarantino appearing to reject American imperialist cinema, he is at the same time equally part of that same cinema he appears to reject. This is how Tarantino’s cinema is subversive, how it rejects the bourgeois language of the elite cultural gatekeepers. How very postmodern.

notes 1. Modernism itself deserves a labyrinthian library where, without notice or intent, one would portal between modernism and postmodernism in a Borgesian nightmare of scholarly obfuscation. 2. In comparison to Tarantino, Hunt (2008, 220–1) discusses Luc Besson as a different kind of gatekeeper; one who allows the Asian styles to influence his EuroNorth American film, but not to reference them as explicitly as Tarantino does. 3. Austin Fisher (2013) suggests that the lack of a direct connection between Corbucci’s and Tarantino’s Djangos is a deliberate nod to the haphazard and often nonsensical attachment of the ‘Django’ name to so many Spaghetti Westerns. The difference, however, is that while the distributors and exhibitors who stuck the Django name on so many films were utilising a marketing ploy designed to generate increased business for their film, Tarantino does not need to do that (he is the brand, as Hunt argues). His use of ‘Django’ serves to connect the character with the entire Spaghetti Western traditions he is evoking. 4. Tarantino’s Django, in fact, has much in common with Corbucci’s Navajo Joe: a Native American out for vengeance against the bloodthirsty white men who massacred his village and killed his wife. Corbucci’s Django is also bent on revenge for the murder of his wife.

references Anderson, Reynaldo, D. L. Stephenson and Chante Anderson (2014), ‘ “Crowdsourcing” “the bad-ass slave”: a critique of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained’, in Oliver C. Speck (ed.), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 227–42.

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Baudrillard, Jean ([1981] 1994), Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bondanella, Peter (2009), A History of Italian Cinema, New York: Continuum. Booker, M. Keith (2007), Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why it Makes Us Feel So Strange, Westport, CT: Praeger. Constable, Catherine (2007), ‘Postmodernism and film’, in Steven Connor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 43–61. Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and Difference, London: Routledge. Edwards, G. (2012), ‘Quentin Tarantino: film-maker’, The New Review, 30: 12, 8. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Fisher, Austin (2013), ‘A cult called Django: on the controversial tail of a transnational bandito’, Cine-Excess eJournal, 1: 1 [online], (last accessed 2 September 2015). Frayling, Christopher (2000), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: I. B. Tauris. Gallafent, Edward (2006), Quentin Tarantino, London: Pearson. Hayes, Heather Ashley and Gilbert B. Rodman (2014), ‘Thirteen ways of looking at a black film: what does it mean to be a black film in twenty-first century America?’, in Oliver C. Speck (ed.), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: the Continuation of Metacinema, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 179–204. Hayward, Susan (2006), Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, London: Routledge. Hill, Val and Peter Every (2001), ‘Postmodernism and the cinema’, in Stuart Sim (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, London: Routledge, pp. 101–11. Hoberman, J. (2012), ‘In praise of da pasta: the subversive sadism of the Spaghetti Western’, Film Comment, May–June, 36–43. Hunt, Leon (2008), ‘Asiaphilia, Asianisation and the gatekeeper auteur: Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson’, in Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai (eds), East Asian Cinema: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 220–36. Hutcheon, Linda (1988), A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric (1991), Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Koven, Mikel J. (2010), Blaxploitation Films, London: Kamera Books. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowedge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Newman, Kim (2013), ‘Trail blazer’, Sight & Sound, 23: 2, 34–7. Ornella, Alexander D. (2014), ‘Bodies in and out of place: Django Unchained and body spaces’ in Oliver C. Speck (ed.), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 93–122. Perry, Samuel P. (2014), ‘Chained to it: the recurrence of the frontier hero in the films of Quentin Tarantino’, in Oliver C. Speck (ed.), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 205–25. Polan, Dana (2000), Pulp Fiction, London: BFI. Rawle, Steve (2011), ‘Transnational, transgeneric, transgressive: tracing Miike Takashi’s yakuza cyborgs to sukiyaki Westerns’, Asian Cinema, 22: 1, 83–98. Sconce, Jeffrey (1995), ‘ “Trashing” the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style’, Screen, 36: 4, 371–93.

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Speck, Oliver C. (2014), ‘Introduction: a southern state of exception’, in Oliver C. Speck (ed.), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–13. Temoney, Kate E. (2014), ‘The “D” is silent, but human rights are not: Django Unchained as human rights discourse’, in Oliver C. Speck (ed.), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 123–40. Waldron, Dara (2014), ‘Hark, hark, the (dis)enchanted Kantian, or Tarantino’s “evil” and its anti-cathartic resonance’, in Oliver C. Speck (ed.), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 141–60.

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part iii

Asian Crossovers

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chapter 7

Bounty Hunters, Yakuzas and Rōnins: Intercultural Transformations between the Italian Western and the Japanese Swordfight Film in the 1960s Thomas Klein

T

his comparative analysis is based on the assumption that the outlaw is a global figural stereotype in cinematic narratives that make use of semantic elements as well as syntactic formations of the Western genre.1 Ever since the global prevalence of the US Western began, stereotypes of Hollywood’s outlaw narratives have been appropriated in different national cinematic contexts (see Klein 2012, 2014, 2015). The outlaw is a global phenomenon, as Graham Seal (2011) has shown. In many books about both Italian Westerns and samurai films (e.g. Silver 2005: 31), the characters are called ‘outlaws’ or even ‘social bandits’ (Fridlund 2006: 173–93), but the implications of this terminology for the relationship between the two genres have not yet been explored. This chapter argues that typical figures of the Italian Western and the Japanese sword film make equivalent claims on the outlaw narrative. In the Italian Western, bounty hunters and mercenaries are often ‘nihilistic heroes’ (Barrett 1989: 36) who, although they are not outlaws in a narrow sense of the word, often act like them in an ambivalent way. Such nihilistic heroes can also be found in the Japanese ‘sword film’, a genre that came into being with Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Yôjinbô, 1961), the film famously remade by Sergio Leone with A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, 1964). The sword

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film could be considered a subgenre of jidai-geki (the Japanese expression for historical period dramas).2 Typical figures in these films are rōnins (masterless samurais) and yakuzas (gamblers), who often act as bounty hunters and mercenaries. All these figures are modelled on the stereotype of the outlaw. I argue that the swordfighter in the chanbara3 of the 1960s (and 1970s) has a strong connection with the gunfighter in the Italian Western, and that this connection represents a special reference to the outlaw myth. My comparative analysis follows Raphaëlle Moine’s ‘multiple generic identities’ approach (Moine 2008: 129). I illustrate this thesis using the first film by the genre specialist Hideo Gosha, Three Outlaw Samurai (Sanbiki no samurai, 1964), and selected episodes from the Zatoichi film series. These films will be compared with a number of Italian Westerns, in particular Blindman (Il pistolero cieco, Ferdinando Baldi, 1971), which is a kind of Zatoichi adaptation. The similarities between these modifications of the outlaw stereotype can be seen in the context of Italy’s and Japan’s experiences in and around the Second World War. Both countries, after losing the war, were occupied by the USA and thus became ‘Americanised’. The films I mention here can be read as reactions to this historical formation.4

comparing the sword film and the italian western A stranger comes to a settlement to meet a man who seems to have influence in town, but the man is not at home. The stranger is brought to a gambling room to wait, and he begins a game of dice with some other men. He wins in a sophisticated manner. The others think that he must have cheated. He is almost attacked by one of them, but he knows how to handle himself and we soon see that he is brave. He leaves and then the meeting begins. Now we are told that the gamblers work for the influential man, who reveals that the stranger is a great fighter. He invites the stranger to stay at his place. Later, in a conversation with a guest, we realise that a conflict is brewing between the boss and the leader of another gang who seems to have hired a fighter himself. But now the boss has his own fighter, too. To demonstrate this, he pleases the stranger to prove his skills with his weapon, but the stranger refuses at first. His skills are not for entertainment. Later, he demonstrates his skills and everyone, including those watching the film, are impressed.

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This might sound like the opening of a Western, but it is in fact the beginning of The Tale of Zatoichi (Zatōichi monogatari, Kenji Misumi, 1962): the first episode of the Zatoichi film series (consisting of twenty-six episodes between 1962 and 1989) and the most successful sword film production in the history of Japanese cinema (Galloway 2005: 87). I admit that in the description of the film’s beginning I have left out some important information: for example, that the stranger’s weapon is a sword. The setting also shows clearly that the story takes place in Japan, but many other ‘semantic’ elements are similar to the Western: the small town in the middle of nowhere, the professional fighter, the gambling (and as I will argue, there are also notable ‘syntactic’ equivalents). Kenji Misumi’s first Zatoichi film is reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), which was released one year earlier. Yojimbo, together with Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954), triggered a critical assumption that there could be a relationship between the samurai film and the Western. This assumption is based mostly on the Western remakes of these Japanese films: John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). J. L. Anderson (1973) was the first to compare the two genres systematically, and not only in relation to Kurosawa’s films. According to Anderson, films about swordfighters owe much to indigenous literature and theatre (for example, Kabuki), but ‘much of [their] essential form derives from the international cinema, particularly the American Western’ (Anderson 1973: 2). Anderson highlights the type scenes5 (shoot-outs, swordfights, showdowns), the protagonists and the conflicts (Anderson 1973: 3–5), since the way the protagonists act and their reasons for using violence to solve problems are quite different. In the Western, the action centres on good versus evil, but in the jidai-geki the essential conflict implicates the dialectic between giri and ninjo (Anderson 1973: 5–6). These two expressions are very important for Japanese culture, referring to both an ethical code for the samurai and people’s behaviour in society more broadly. Giri relates to socially contracted dependence and ninjo implicates human feelings. For a samurai this means that he has to consider his duties (giri) and emotions (ninjo) before taking action. The dialectic of giri and ninjo is, of course, not so far removed from European ethics, according to which each person is an individual but also a member of society with corresponding duties. Anderson’s claim that this dialectic is quite different from a ‘good versus evil’ opposition inherent in the Western genre should be queried.

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Firstly, the Western has been influentially positioned within a far more complex set of ‘antinomies’ by Jim Kitses (1969). Furthermore, questions of good and evil remained important in Japanese society, even in the twentieth century. Brian Moeran tries to demonstrate that the dialectic of good and evil was subsumed in jidai-geki films, but unfortunately refers only to televisual (rather than cinematic) productions of jidai-geki (Moeran 1985: 97). I will refer to this later. For now, it is important to stress that the dialectic between giri and ninjo does not mean that the opposition of good versus evil is unimportant in the jidaigeki genre. Part of this problem is what Sibyl Anne Thornton mentions when she speaks of the ‘orientalism informing some criticism of Japanese film’ (Thornton 2008: 4). It is often said that in understanding the samurai film appropriately the bushidô (the samurai’s code of honour), with its implications of Confucianism, Shinto and Buddhism, is necessary. Many important elements of bushidô, like the significance of death, the samurai’s duty to his master, and the behaviour in duels, are of course relevant for some films, but many films integrate these elements into the narration or even leave them out, so that audiences all over the world can understand the essence of the central conflict and why the protagonists act as they do. This has to do with the use of archetypes that are also relevant for the Western, but it also pertains to genre stereotypes6 that were known worldwide in the 1960s. Another problem with Anderson’s assumption is that his examples do not include many extremely popular chanbara films of the 1960s, which also became popular in the West. But the main problem with his text is that he always compares jidai-geki to the classic American Western, even though by 1973 the Italian Western7 was a prominent variant. The following quotation demonstrates that the comparison of the jidai-geki and a specific form of the US Western can often lead to erroneous assumptions about the relationship between the genres: The worth of a jidai-geki is not determined by absolute or internal measurement but by his visible status among a group of people. When he is a yakuza, leader, the hero relies on his loyal followers. When the swordsman is a single rōnin or a vagabond yakuza, he is then much more alone than the man with a gun. The Westerner may find allies in the law, new friends, or like-minded people. The swordsman lives in a world where such casual support is seldom available. (Anderson 1973: 10) Anderson’s comparison does not consider the Italian Western, which tends to privilege the mercenary and the bounty hunter over such figures

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as the cowboy, the sheriff or the frontier scout. The same applies to Stuart Kaminsky’s chapter on the topic in his work on American film genres, which first appeared a year after Anderson’s article (Kaminsky [1974] 1985: 63–72) and also omits the Italian Western in comparisons of the Western and Japanese genres. David Desser tried to bring a new approach to comparative studies of the Western and the jidai-geki by stressing that genres were extremely important for generating a myth about a historical past in Japanese and US cinema (Desser 1983: 13). In this context, Desser points out that jidai-geki is not a ‘genre’ in the normal sense of a formulaic form of entertainment that works through repetition and variation. He separates the samurai film from the jidai-geki to make clear that the samurai film is a Japanese form of a formulaic cinema, an entertainment cinema that had not yet been recognised by film scholars. Desser divides this genre into several sub-genres (see also Desser 1992). One of these sub-genres is the sword film, which was established with Yojimbo. For Desser, the sword film is a product of American cultural influence on Japan and therefore important elements of the Western were transformed: ‘One is the element of “sword for hire”; the other is the pivotal role of the villain’ (Desser 1983: 44). Desser, however, is imprecise, stating that ‘the hired gun is a popular formula character’ (Desser 1983: 44) in the Western, but in the 1950s the protagonist in the US Western was rarely a ‘hired gun’. When Desser writes that ‘many Westerns use the structure of hero and villain linked by their deadly skills and separated only by the one’s higher moral ethics’ (Desser 1983: 44), I wonder which ‘Westerns’ he means. Interestingly, he does not give any examples. The only figure that suits the ‘gun for hire’ description is the gunfighter who became important in the US Western in the early 1950s with films like The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950) and Shane (George Stevens, 1953) (Slotkin 1992: 379–80). According to Richard Slotkin, the gunfighter narrative is a revision of the outlaw narrative (which was introduced to the cinematic genre with Henry King’s Jesse James (1939)), transforming the outlaw into a gun for hire: ‘a killer by profession, usually for pay’ (Slotkin 1992: 383). Slotkin is right that the outlaw narrative changed in the 1950s. Nicholas Ray’s The True Story of Jesse James (1957), for example, interprets the famous outlaw as a juvenile delinquent and therefore uses the neurotic implications of the ‘rebel without a cause’ character. But this film also strongly refers to typical social bandit elements, such as the injustice that befalls the outlaw’s family and the moment when he gives money to a poor, indebted woman.8 The film makes these elements more ambivalent by stressing that Jesse is self-involved

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and hot-tempered, and the explicit social bandit narration of Jesse James did not vanish in the 1950s, as Slotkin mentions in an endnote (Slotkin 1992: 728). More important is the fact that the gunfighter, regardless of how ambivalent his use of violence in the past might have been (as in King’s The Gunfighter), is always on the right side. Or as Slotkin puts it at the end of a chapter on High Noon: ‘the only effective instrument for constructive historical action is a gun in the hands of the right man’ (Slotkin 1992: 396). This is also crucial for the sword film and the Italian Western, in which the hired gun and the hired sword become the most important figural stereotype. The US Western appropriated this stereotype, often as a metaphor for the Vietnam War as in The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966) and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969). Anderson’s and Kaminsky’s works present different (and often misleading) assumptions about the Western and jidai-geki. But what these initial approaches to a comparative study of jidai-geki and the Western have in common with the more sophisticated approach of David Desser is that the samurai film is compared with the idea of an overall Western, which is more or less the US American form. Although Desser points out that a comparison between the US and the Italian versions gives us important knowledge of the Western genre (Desser 1983: 16), he does not refer to the Italian Western in his chapter on the sword film or in his analysis of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films. This is, of course, redressed in studies about the remakes of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. Rachael Hutchinson makes it clear that the significance of Yojimbo in terms of genre transfer lies not only in Leone’s remake but also in the appropriation of the US Western by Kurosawa. Hutchinson avoids the trap of building binary structures when using the appropriation approach by combining it with questions of genre. She names similarities between the films in terms of camera aesthetic and the use of drastic violence, but the ‘most powerful element of these films is their emphasis on liminality’ (Hutchinson 2007: 180). Hutchinson does not reflect upon the anthropological expression ‘liminality’, but what she means is that both films work decidedly with ambivalences. The binary oppositions that arguably shaped the US Western (see Wright 1975) cannot explain Kurosawa and Leone’s films. This especially concerns the plot structures that use what Christopher Frayling called the ‘Servant of Two Masters-plot’ (Frayling 2006: 51), in which the protagonist is positioned in a conflict ‘between two opposing poles’ (Hutchinson 2007: 181). But what does this really mean in relation to the character types used in both genres, beyond the hero and villain terminology?

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outlaw transformations At the beginning of this chapter I used the expression ‘nihilistic heroes’, who can be seen as products of the Second World War and the subsequent ‘Americanisation’ of Italy and Japan. Now I will explain this in more detail, to explore how this context was both reflected and resisted in the late 1950s and the 1960s. In both the Italian Western and the chanbara, new stereotypes of the outlaw, the mercenary and the bounty hunter become symptomatic figures9 of a world that is coming apart at the seams. Seen in this light, the central figures of the Italian Western and the sword film are symptoms of the after-effects of World War II: a war whose dimensions of evil and destruction could perhaps only be addressed by the intervention of a powerful nation and an effective propaganda campaign for a mission to save the world. The US occupation of Italy and Japan (and also Germany) changed these nations in a way Roland Kelts explains for Japan: ‘America has a position as a role model for the postwar generation. The Japanese who had survived the bombs and heard their emperor declare defeat sought to rise from the ashes of World War II’ (Kelts 2006: 4). From these ashes arose new cinematic superheroes, who were influenced by the Cold War. In Germany the Karl May films referred to America’s mythical past, and featured a Native American in the role of a martyr and a German-born frontiersman, both of whom were morally perfect. In Italy and Japan, the superheroes of the Western and the sword film are more ambivalent. Their task is to survive in a sick, violent world and their weapons (guns and swords) are the symbols of this world (see Thornton 2008). The protagonists in the Italian Westerns and sword films on which I focus here are bounty hunters who kill for money, but they still have morals and a strong sense of justice beyond official laws that are often corrupt. The bounty hunter in Italian Westerns can be seen as the continuation of a protagonist in the US Western, who has lost his faith in mankind. Similarly, the rōnin in the sword film is a samurai who has lost his faith in society. The rōnins, the masseur and yakuza in Zaitochi, like the gunfighters in the Italian Western, have become alienated because they do not want to be and cannot be part of the society that they are damned to live in. But these figures also have characteristics of the outlaw as a social bandit. For Graham Seal, ‘at its most fundamental, the outlaw hero tradition is invoked when a criminal robs the rich and powerful, sharing the

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proceeds with the poor and oppressed who, in return, provide sympathy and active support’ (Seal: 2011: 2). He continues: The power conflicts that underlie outlaw heroism ensure that the hero of the underdogs is generally provoked or forced into defying the law. Outlaw heroes do not simply take up arms one day and ride off to rob banks, trains or homesteads. They are instead seen and portrayed by those who support them as the victims of official persecution, police corruption, state coercion or some other form of oppressive activity. (Seal 2011: 8) It is not without reason that Moeran names the protagonists of the television jidai-geki ‘Robin-Hood-type heroes who perform miraculous deeds for the benefit of society’ (Moeran 1985: 98). The outlaws in the sword film and in the Italian Western still have a remaining code of honour according to which the oppressed need to be helped. This context is rarely mentioned in works on the Italian Western and the jidai-geki. In his book Bandits, Eric Hobsbawm mentions the ‘roving sword-fighters’ in Japanese cinema as a form of social bandit myth (Hobsbawm [1969] 2000: 166).10 As Bert Fridlund points out, some Italian Westerns, especially those that explicitly refer to the Mexican Revolution like A Professional Gun (Il mercenario, Sergio Corbucci, 1968), Compañeros (Vamos a matar, compañeros, Sergio Corbucci, 1970) and Run, Man, Run (Corri uomo corri, Sergio Sollima, 1968) use social bandit figures and plots (Fridlund 2006: 173–93). However, Fridlund does not define the expression ‘social bandit’ and focuses on relating the social bandit plots to other plot structures in the Italian Western, which are very similar to those in Will Wright’s (1975) structural analysis of the US Western. If we refer to Seal’s definition, there is no need to relate the social bandit and the outlaw only to revolutionary narratives. One of the most pessimistic Italian Westerns that is not set during the Mexican Revolution, Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence (Il grande Silenzio, 1968), works with a social bandit figure. The mute hero Silence/Silenzio fights bounty hunters because they cut his vocal chords when he was a child. Now that he is a gunfighter, he helps poor people pursued by bounty hunters such as the infamous Loco. When Silence is killed in the shootout because he can’t use his smashed hands, the scenario provides a pessimistic continuation from Corbucci’s Django (1966), in which the title character still triumphs in the shoot-out although he is also wounded like Silence. The ending of The Great Silence is therefore an extreme variation of what many Italian Westerns are about: a world that is totally corrupt, a world without hope for the oppressed. Therefore,

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only gunfighters can survive and prevent mankind from total control by ruthless power seekers. These gunfighters are professional killers, who control their own feelings, but they are outcasts and they act beyond the law. This type of outlaw can also be found in the sword film.

Three Outlaw Samurai Hideo Gosha’s Three Outlaw Samurai is a variation on Seven Samurai. Authorities oppress peasants and the outlaws decide to help them. The film was released in 1964 (the same year as Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars), and resulted from a television series of the same title created by Gosha and broadcast from 1963. Unfortunately, the first seasons, which Gosha was in charge of, appear to have been lost (Ebiri 2012).11 A person seems to be on the road somewhere in the country, but in fact there is no road, just mud. In terms of the use of landscape, these opening shots of Three Outlaw Samurai are analogous to Django and to such Hollywood revisionist Westerns of the 1970s as McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971). At first, the camera focuses on the man’s feet. We can’t see who he is and we can’t see the surrounding landscape. Then the man stops for a rest and we see his weapon and we realise that he must be a swordfighter. He comes to a farmhouse, where he finds three peasants taking a young woman of higher social ranking hostage. The peasants tell him that their victim is the magistrate’s daughter. Bad harvests have plunged the peasants into misery and the magistrate has turned a deaf ear to their pleas, so the peasants kidnap his daughter to force him to negotiate. Later, one of them writes a petition. Although the stranger at first gives the impression that he could not care less about the peasants’ problems, we know from the narrative common to these kinds of stories that he will help the peasants sooner or later. We also feel that the unkind treatment of the young woman was a last resort for the peasants. This exposition leads to the central conflict and the three outlawed samurais’ fight for justice on behalf of the peasants. The constellation with three outlaws is analogous to that in Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966). Even the characterisations have some similarities. Tetsurô Tanba plays Sakon Shiba as the cool good guy in the style of Eastwood, and Isamu Nagato and Mikijirô Hira play their characters Kyôjûrô Sakura and Einosuke Kikyô as the more ambivalent rōnins who have no problem killing Shiba on the authorities’ orders at first, but here the similarities end. Shiba convinces Sakura during their first confrontation that fighting for the peasants makes more sense. Shiba says: ‘It’s a case of three peasants fighting for justice.’ Sakura quits his job and tells Kikyô (who

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still refuses) that he originally comes from a farm himself. Sakura is the ‘ugly’ Tuco who suddenly becomes aware of his peasant roots and gives up his selfishness. Kikyô begins to question his mercenary work for the authorities when he witnesses Shiba being punished with one hundred strokes, and we can tell from his face that he really thinks Shiba is a hero. But he has not yet decided to change sides. He takes this step when the magistrate orders three other killers to eliminate him. Kikyô wins the fight, in the course of which his girlfriend is killed. Now revenge becomes his motivation and he joins the other two outlaws. As Silver points out, the ‘most pervasive metaphor of the entire film . . . [is] darkness’ (Silver 2005: 155). This noir style signifies the darkness of the historical age: a corrupt world in which bushidô is worthless. Therefore, the central values for the rōnins have removed them from their social caste. Now the way of the warrior is to help the oppressed peasants. To make this attitude more comprehensible, their own origins are peasantry too. That is what they identify with and what they have to fight for. Even the cynical Kikyô finally understands this. The showdown signifies that the outlaws are men who have to fight (Figure 7.1). Sakura wants to leave with a woman he loves, but the need to help others is stronger. An international audience can easily read this attitude in a general context of comradeship, which is of course important for the Western as well. Sakura joins the fight because he is ashamed, and together the three succeed. Nevertheless, the ending is pessimistic. Shiba wants to give the petition to the peasants but they are too scared to act (Figure 7.2). Therefore, Three Outlaw Samurai still owes much to the classic outlaw, but at least formulates the social bandit’s failure. By this time, however, another outlaw hero had already captured cinema screens.

Figure 7.1: Shiba and Kikyô prepare for the showdown in Three Outlaw Samurai (1964).

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Figure 7.2: Shiba stands in front of the peasants, who are powerless to do anything, with the petition in Three Outlaw Samurai (1964).

Zatoichi Zatoichi (also called Ichi) is a mixture of different figure types in jidaigeki. He is a masseur, a yakuza12 and a superhuman swordsman, and, crucially, he is blind.13 In the first episode of the film series he tells someone that he learned sword fighting three years previously. Alain Silver writes that alienation is Ichi’s crucial character trait. Apart from that, he has attributes that suit the outlaw in Seal’s sense: He retains certain scruples and a sense of justice and judges his own behaviour in relation to those. He has an obvious soft spot for widows and orphans, for anyone he considers a victim, like himself of shushigaku, feudal classic structure, or some unspecified quirk of fate. (Silver 2005: 108) He is a variation on the outlaw in that he has a strong awareness of justice, what is wrong and right, and helps those oppressed by the power-hungry and the villainous. This status is also reinforced by his handicap. Blind people belonged to the lowest social class at the end of the Tokugawa period (Silver 2005: 107). Being a gambler qualifies him as an outlaw as well. At the beginning of episode seventeen, Zatoichi Challenged (Zatōichi chikemuri kaidô, Kenji Misumi, 1967), Ichi’s status in society is explained in the voice-over: ‘Gamblers like me are always traveling the back roads of the law. The entire world regards us as a curse.’ The first Zatoichi film, the exposition of which I described at the beginning of this chapter, is very similar to Yojimbo.14 Zatoichi arrives in a town where two yakuza gangs are at war with each other. One

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gang leader, Sukejoro, wants to hire Zatoichi but he refuses to be a mercenary. The other side wants to hire a swordfighter too. This opponent, Hirate, is a rōnin who is suffering from pneumonia. Hirate is characterised as a pessimist who drinks to forget the problems of the world around him. Neither he nor Ichi agree fully to the proposals. They respect each other, they drink together and they might have become friends, but eventually they fight. The reason for this swordfight showdown at the end of the film is ultimately a battle between two clans. Hirate fights for the one clan because otherwise they would pick up a rifle to gun down Ichi. He wants to prevent Ichi’s death by a bullet. Ichi has already left the other clan, and before leaving to go back on the road he visits Hirate. But there, a boy tells him that Hirate has gone to war to protect Ichi. Clearly, Hirate insists on the eventual duel because he wants to die from Ichi’s hand and not from the ‘scoundrels’, as he says after Ichi deals him the deadly blow. The narrative of a gunfighter caught between two opposing gangs was appropriated in the Italian Western beginning with A Fistful of Dollars. If we leave out the very special handicaps of Ichi, the narrative of the first Django film (1966) is quite similar (and Django is also endowed with ‘otherness’, by his dragging a coffin with him for much of the film). In the second episode, The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (Zoku Zatōichi monogatari, Kazuo Mori, 1962), Ichi is more immersed in the role of an outlaw. Hired by a lord to give him a massage, Ichi discovers that the lord is a mentally disabled man. This knowledge turns Ichi into a wanted man. His first opponents are three samurais, but Ichi kills them easily. Whereas in the first Zatoichi film the hero wins in a longer showdown against one samurai, he now has to fight all three of them simultaneously. This construction of the fight scenes with the protagonist and many opponents is a further foreshadowing of the Italian Western. Django’s first opponents are four men, and in the final showdown he defeats six enemies even though he has sustained serious wounds to his hands, which prove an extreme handicap. In a precursor to the extremely fast draws in the Italian Western, it takes just a split second for the Japanese sword to prove deadly. From the third episode onwards – New Tale of Zatoichi (Shin Zatōichi monogatari, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1963) – the Zatoichi series was filmed in colour, and the widescreen images bear a resemblance to those of the Italian Western (Figures 7.3, 7.4). In the third episode, Ichi returns to his home village, meets an old friend and invites him and his wife to an inn. The inn or the gambling room is often a space of action in Zatoichi films akin to the saloon (which is also the gambling place) in the Western. There he plays the shamisen (a Japanese lute), when

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Figures 7.3 and 7.4: The widescreen composition as the hero arrives in town in Zatoichi on the Road (1963) (7.3) foreshadows that of Django (1966) (7.4).

bandits burst in to rob the mostly poor people in the inn. The next day, Ichi finds the robber and demands that he gives back the stolen money. This is Ichi’s first typical social bandit act in the series. In episode five, Zatoichi on the Road (Zatōichi kenka-tabi, Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1963), Ichi helps a girl escape from a feudal lord and get to Edo. In the end, there is an interesting showdown, which is typical of this outlaw character’s construction. Again he is involved in gang warfare and one gang hires him, but just before the fight he changes sides because the other gang has kidnapped the girl and if Ichi fights for them, they will free her. In the final fight of the showdown, he kills all the gang bosses because of their lack of humanity. Two of the best examples of Ichi helping those who cannot help themselves are in the eighth episode, Fight, Zatoichi, Fight! (Zatōichi kesshō-tabi, Kenji Misumi, 1964), in which he protects a baby, and in the seventeenth episode Zatoichi Challenged (1967), in which he protects a young boy. Ichi seems to be a bounty hunter and all the bosses in the films think he kills for money, but in fact he kills to protect himself and those who need his help. Ichi is an outlaw in the real sense of the word because he is placed outside the law. There is no law that protects him, but he protects the weak from stronger people. In contrast to Three Outlaw Samurai, the importance of samurais for protecting the oppressed is gone. What they learn in a long procedure one blind masseur can learn more or less alone.

Blindman The Italian Western’s gunfighter protagonist often has seemingly miraculous shooting skills. One example comes in the Trinity series – They

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Call Me Trinity (Lo chiamavano Trinità . . ., Enzo Barboni, 1970) and Trinity Is Still My Name (Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità, Enzo Barboni, 1971) – in which Terence Hill plays a gunfighter who shoots so well that we cannot imagine that he will ever be defeated. It is therefore unsurprising that many Italian Westerns fall under Paul Green’s category of ‘Weird Westerns’, defined as those that incorporate ‘horror, supernatural and fantasy elements and themes’ (Green 2009: 3). Accordingly, besides Yojimbo, sword films with miraculous elements were also adapted in the creation of Italian Westerns. Blindman (1971) was loosely adapted from two Zatoichi films: episode fifteen, Zatoichi’s Cane Sword (Zatōichi tekka-tabi, Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1967), and the aforementioned episode seventeen, Zatoichi Challenged (Silver 2005: 107). Tony Anthony plays the blind gunfighter and was also co-producer of the film. In 1966, he became known with A Stranger in Town (Un dollaro tra i denti, Luigi Vanzi, 1967) that marked the start of the ‘stranger’ series. The second was The Stranger Returns (Un uomo, un cavallo, una pistola, Luigi Vanzi, 1967) and the third The Stranger in Japan (Lo straniero di silenzio, Luigi Vanzi, 1968), which can be seen as the first ‘real’ hybrid of Western and samurai film.15 Like so many Italian Westerns, Blindman begins with the stranger who arrives in a town. He does not look for a job because he already has one. He has a contract to bring fifty white women to the mining town Lost Creek in Texas. Three scoundrels, who seem to have stolen the women from him, tell him that a Mexican called Domingo has the women now. The scoundrels underestimate the blind man and they pay the price for their mistake with their lives. He blows them up in a house using dynamite and rides from Oklahoma, where the story begins, to Mexico. The film has already demonstrated that Blindman is a tough guy and that his weapon is not a Colt but a rifle, but the next serious confrontation shows him in shooting action. Four Mexican bandits, handymen of Domingo’s brother Candy, think that they can have fun with the blind man. They try to make him dance by shooting at the ground in front of him. He does indeed ‘dance’ from one handyman to the other, gets a feel for their positions and eventually shoots them dead. Now, we know that this blind man can overcome several opponents at once, just like Ichi. We also know that this man helps others because he originally got into trouble when the four handymen humiliated an old man whose daughter was abducted by Candy. Yet this remains the only action that can be linked to an outlaw narrative and to the Zatoichi character. The plots of the Zatoichi

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episodes fifteen and seventeen mentioned earlier are barely adapted. What is adapted is the character: a handicapped man who nevertheless is a deadly hero. After some plot twists (Blindman is captured by Domingo, then gets free again), Blindman defeats Domingo and the Mexican bandits with the help of an officer from the Mexican army. This help by a repugnant officer who represents the authorities seems to adapt the final fight of Ichi and Master Akatsuka in Zatoichi Challenged. Akatsuka is a samurai who, by order of the authorities, seeks to kill the father of the young boy whom Ichi protects. At the end he could kill Ichi and the father but suddenly he spares their lives. He seems to become aware that Ichi’s altruism in protecting the boy’s father has such strong moral implications that he is not able to kill this extraordinary man. Such an ethical act is left out of Blindman’s adaptation of Zatoichi Challenged. Here, the protagonist is unable to help most of the women, who are slaughtered by Domingo and his henchmen. Of course, he is shocked by this violence, but he remains interested in his money as well. Blindman is therefore a considerably more ambivalent hero than Zatoichi, if he can be considered a hero at all.

conclusion In both the Italian Western and the chanbara, new outlaw stereotypes can be seen as symptoms of post-war crisis. The myths, which both the American Western and the pre-war jidai-geki (such as the ‘nostalgic samurai drama’; Desser 1983: 32–6) transported, have been deconstructed. The bounty hunters and mercenaries, who inhabit a world of corruption and money, are nihilistic, selfish and sometimes cynical, but they feature enough character traits with which the audience can identify and empathise. Often they act as social bandits. Zatoichi or the rōnins in Hideo Gosha’s Three Outlaw Samurai, along with many Italian Western heroes, help the oppressed. They often hesitate at first because their interests are monetary, but they never join those characters whose actions are not supposed to be tolerated by the audience. The experience of World War II underlies both the Italian Western and the chanbara. In the world of many Italian Westerns and sword films, only those who are able to kill madmen bereft of humanity survive. The gunfighter outlaw has to take matters of law and order into his own hands. The samurai Akatsuka in Zatoichi Challenged articulates what the outlaw film is about: ‘The law has no mercy’, he says, and this means

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that the law does not take moral and ethical choices into account. If a man has to be punished, there is no alternative. Akatsuka would even kill a woman or a child to enforce the law. The outlaw, especially in the form of the man who is not part of an oppressed community but a stranger (just like Shane and Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985)), is the one who fights for a moral justice, which supersedes the official law. The fight with Akatsuka is one of the longest duels in the Zatoichi series and Ichi wins as always, but he does not kill his opponent. When the injured Akatsuka says to Ichi that he has won, this means that Ichi hit him and that Ichi’s moral decision is the right one. Many Italian Westerns feature narratives in which the outlaw fights to protect himself at first, but if injustice and cold-blooded murder become too extreme, when innocent women and children are in danger, he helps and risks his own life as well (this is the case in A Fistful of Dollars, when Eastwood’s stranger helps Marisol and her child and says that he cannot stand injustice). Similarly, Zatoichi Challenged is a good example of how giri and ninjo are used in the chanbara films (and in a way that people can understand without specific knowledge of Japanese culture). Ichi is a free vagabond, who does not answer to authorities, and demonstrates that fighting skills must be invested in a free will that does not follow orders. Post-war Japanese society had to follow new codes or a combination of traditional and new codes. Ichi is characteristic of this task: a man who is able to be a superhero even if he is blind and only a masseur. The reciprocal influence of the Italian Western (and the transformed Hollywood Western) on the sword film became evident in the 1970s. In the Lone Wolf and Cub film series (adapted from the popular manga of the same name and also produced as a television series), a former Kogi Kaisashakunin (the shogun’s official executioner) roams through an infernal world with his little son and a baby carriage seeking revenge for the murder of his wife. This carriage is full of weapons, even guns (the times in which rōnins refuse to use firearms are over). The story takes place in the seventeenth century, but the historical past is vague as well. In the third episode, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (Kozure Ôkami: Shinikazeni mukau ubaguruma, Kenji Misumi, 1972), there is even a Western gunfighter. It is no wonder that Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel The Road (2006) and John Hillcoat’s adaptation for the cinema (2009) use a similar structure: in a society that has collapsed after a catastrophe, a man and his son travel the wasteland on foot and only with a shopping trolley. In the 1960s, genre film in many national contexts entered a new stage (comparable to the art-house film). The Japanese sword film and

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the Italian Western played a crucial role in this process as cinematic genres became explicitly globalised. Aesthetics of the Italian Western, the swordfight film and martial arts films interchanged and spread in other national cinemas as well, paving the way for further genre mixes and transmedia stories in the 1970s like Lone Wolf and Cub. This also influenced the development of hybrid genre films combining the Western and the chanbara, culminating in the twenty-first century with films like Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007).

notes 1. I refer here to Rick Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach. Altman categorised the approaches developed so far in genre analysis in a semantic and a syntactic dimension: ‘The semantic approach . . . stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged’ (Altman 1984: 10). Altman advocated a combination of both approaches. 2. The expression ‘jidai-geki’ was introduced by the film industry for commercial reasons (Nolletti and Desser 1992: 129). 3. Chanbara is the Japanese expression for the sword film. As Standish explains: ‘Chanbara is [an] onomatopoeic expression denoting the rhythm of the climactic sword-fight scenes as expressed by children of the period mimicking the musical accompaniment, “chan, chanbara, chanbara” ’ (Standish 2005: 84). 4. By ‘Americanisation’, I mean a broad influence of American culture (including politics and economy) on other cultures and nations. I do not use it here to denote a negative influence, which is often part of discourses surrounding Americanisation (see Fisher 2011: 14). 5. I use the expression ‘type scene’ following Thornton (2008: 141). Other expressions are ‘stock situations’ (Anderson 1973: 20) and ‘formulaic patterns of action’ (Cawelti 1999: 45). The current term in German genre theory is ‘standard situation’ (see Klein 2015; Schweinitz 2011: 58). 6. On genre stereotypes see Schweinitz 2011. 7. I use the expression ‘Italian Western’ even if the films are European or international co-productions. 8. On typical social bandit elements in the filmic Jesse James myth in a global context, see Klein 2015, Klein 2014. 9. The ‘symptomatic’ meaning of a figure lies in the underlying causes and effects to which that figure is connected (Eder 2008: 141). 10 Hobsbawm also mentions Seven Samurai as an example of the typical form of fighting men being hired not only by village communities but also by rulers and lesser lords before the nineteenth century (Hobsbawm [1969] 2000: 16). National police forces were rare in those times. 11. It is interesting that the chanbara was popular in both Japanese cinema and on Japanese television. The Italian Western was mostly a cinematic genre, although television was increasingly important from 1954 onwards with the founding of the state broadcaster RAI.

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12. For the yakuza genre see McDonald 1992; for a yakuza history see Kaplan and Dubro 2012. 13. ‘Zatoichi is a cross between the exile and the vagabond’ (Barrett 1989: 84). 14. Not surprisingly, the two mythical figures clash in the twentieth episode, Zatoichi meets Yojimbo (Zatōichi to Yōjinbō, Kihachi Okamoto, 1970). 15 Other titles of this film include The Silent Stranger and Horseman and the Samurai.

references Altman, Rick (1984), ‘A semantic/syntactic approach to film genre’, Cinema Journal, 23: 3, 6–18. Anderson, J. L. (1973), ‘Japanese Swordfighters and American Gunfighters’, Cinema Journal, 2, 1–21. Barrett, Gregory (1989), Archetypes in Japanese Film. The Sociopolitical and Religious Significance of the Principal Heroes and Heroines, London: Associated University Press. Cawelti, John G. (1999), The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Desser, David (1983), The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Research Press. Desser, David (1992), ‘Toward a structural analysis of the postwar samurai film’, in Arthur Nolletti and David Desser (eds), Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 145–64. Ebiri, Bilge (2012), ‘The disloyal bunch’, in Booklet of the Criterion Collection release of Three Outlaw Samurai. Eder, Jens (2008), Die Figur im Film, Marburg: Schüren. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western. Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher (2006), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: I. B. Tauris. Fridlund, Bert (2006), The Spaghetti Western: A Thematic Analysis, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Galloway, Patrick (2005), Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook, Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Green, Paul (2009), Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hobsbawm, Eric ([1969] 2000), Bandits, New York: The New Press. Hutchinson, Rachael (2007), ‘A fistful of Yojimbo: appropriation and dialogue in Japanese cinema’, in Paul Cooke (ed.), World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 172–87. Kaminsky, Stuart ([1974] 1985), American Film Genres, Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall. Kaplan, David E. and Alec Dubro (2012), Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kelts, Roland (2006), Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kitses, Jim (1969), Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship within the Western, London: Thames & Hudson. Klein, Thomas (2015), Geschichte – Mythos – Identität: Zur globalen Zirkulation des Western-Genres, Berlin: Bertz + Fischer.

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Klein, Thomas (2014), ‘Imagining Jesse James and Ned Kelly: how historical outlaws are remembered as Western heroes’, in Melvyn Stokes and Zeenat Saleh (eds), Cinéma et mémoire dans le cinéma Anglophone – Memory of/in English speaking Cinema, Paris: Houdiard, pp. 240–51. Klein, Thomas (2012), ‘Outlaws, Sozialbanditen und der Western: Zur Interkulturalität eines generischen Figurenstereotyps am Beispiel ausgesuchter filmischer Repräsentationen des mexikanischen Charros’, in MEDIENwissenschaft 03/12, 274–86. McDonald, Keiko Iwai (1992), ‘The yakuza film: an introduction’, in Arthur Nolletti and David Desser (eds), Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 165–92. Moeran, Brian (1985), ‘Confucian confusion: the good, the bad and noodle Western’, in David Parkin (ed.), The Anthropology of Evil, London: Blackwell, pp. 92–109. Moine, Raphaëlle (2008), Cinema Genre. London: Blackwell. Nolletti, Arthur and David Desser (eds) (1992), Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Schweinitz, Jörg (2011), Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Seal, Graham (2011), Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History, London: Anthem Press. Silver, Alain (2005), The Samurai Film, New York: The Overlook Press. Slotkin, Richard (1992), Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America, New York: Atheneum. Standish, Isolde (2005), A New History of Japanese Cinema, New York: Continuum. Thornton, Sybil Anne (2008), The Japanese Period Film: A Critical Analysis, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Wright, Will (1975), Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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chapter 8

Spaghetti Westerns and Asian Cinema: Perspectives on Global Cultural Flows Ivo Ritzer

If this is so for the age of imperialism, how much more must it hold for our own moment, the moment of the multinational network . . . a moment in which not merely the older city but even the nationstate itself has ceased to play a central functional and formal role in a process that has in a new quantum leap of capital prodigiously expanded beyond them, leaving them behind as ruined and archaic remains of earlier stages in the development of this mode of production. (Fredric Jameson 1991: 412)

basic considerations

T

his chapter aims to undertake a consideration of Italian Westerns from the perspective of theories of cultural globalisation, emphasising the fact that Italian Westerns never were exclusively an Italian product. Not only with regard to the argument of their diverse ‘cultural roots’ already made by Christopher Frayling (2006: 121–37), but also in their historical production context, Italian Westerns transgressed borders. From the beginning, they figured as a project of transnational co-operation, mainly between different European countries: Italy, Spain, Germany and France. Thus, the Italian Western has to be seen as a hybrid product, reminding us that the local always has to be seen against the background of the global. This chapter will focus on connections between the Italian Western and Asian cinema, tracking the cultural flows of creative staff, generic traits, cinematic devices,

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financescapes, and narrative constructions. Since the transcultural genealogy of the Italian Western is well covered by scholars of both Asian and European cinemas nowadays, the chapter will shed light on an under-researched area. On the one hand, it recapitulates the Italian Western’s representation of Asian protagonists, in European and in transcontinental (co-)productions alike.1 On the other hand, an analysis of the transcultural afterlife of Italian Westerns in the popular cinemas of Asia is to be undertaken. The recent success of Asian films like Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah talai jone, Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000; Thailand), Sukiyaki Western Django (Miike Takashi, 2007; Japan), The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Choŭnnom, Nappŭnnom, Isanghannom, Kim Jee-woon, 2008; South Korea) or The Warrior’s Way (Sngmoo Lee, 2010; New Zealand/South Korea) has led several scholars to reconsider the significance of the Western, and the Italian Western in particular: hardly surprising considering the direct allusions made by the titles of Sukiyaki Western Django and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. Scholars such as Ed Buscombe (2012), Leon Hunt (2011) and I myself (Ritzer 2012) have questioned notions of national specificity within both the US and the Italian Western. For example, it is now a well-researched fact that the Italian Western built upon the Japanese ‘sword film’.2 Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, 1964) was based on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Yôjinbô, 1961), which on the other hand was influenced by American Westerns like Shane (George Stevens, 1953) and their topoi of a silent stranger coming to a remote frontier town (Frayling 2006: 141–3; Hutchinson 2007: 172–87). Therefore, one should not speak of a one-way cultural transfer, but of a multidimensional correlation between the USA, Japan and Italy. The aesthetic closeness and combinability of the Italian Western and the Japanese sword movie might not only demonstrate that the local always has to be seen in a global context. It also gives weight to the fact that the Italian Western can be considered not as a national, but as a fundamentally transnational genre, undermining the 1960s project of nationalist film policies meant to strengthen cultural homogeneity.3 With the term ‘transnational’ I refer to films produced by multinational finance arrangements, featuring personnel from different nations and addressing an international audience.4 Discourses of ‘transnational cinema’ might not resolve reductive binaries between ‘global Hollywood’ and a narrowly defined ‘national cinema’, but they help to characterise the Italian Western as an innately hybrid genre constituted by decentralised modes of production, mobility of filmmakers and fluid exhibition networks. Italian Westerns travel across national boundaries, working as a junction in a global network of cultural exchange.

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Italian Westerns have responded to the economic development of transnationalisation by adopting global cultural transfers. The aesthetic effect is a cinema of hybridity between cultural references to the alien and to cultural self-affirmation, between identity and otherness. The concepts mirror one another, referring to each other not in a hierarchical, but in a symmetrical way. Identities as well as alterities are cultural constructs, composed of heterogeneous elements that undergo historical changes, thus forming fragile, fluid categories. In what ways and through what influences identity and alterity are constituted are therefore crucial considerations. For this purpose, the Italian Western and its transformation of generic elements from Asian cinemas will be taken as an example of how ‘Asian’ forms of representation are loaded with aesthetic difference. On the other hand, the Italian Western has itself been appropriated in new cultural and national contexts. It is that perspective which will become central in the discussion of the transcultural afterlife of Italian Westerns in the popular cinemas of Asia.

orientalism and asiaphilia The Italian Western’s initial encounter with Asian cinema between 1966 and 1975 manifests itself in films starring an Asian protagonist or antagonist (though not necessarily played by an Asian actor).5 All of these movies are co-productions, with many different nationalities – Italian, other European, and non-European – contributing to the final artefact. Thus they can count as representatives of a new post-national system as outlined by David Harvey: ‘of production and marketing, characterized by the more flexible labour processes and markets, of geographical mobility and rapid shifts in consumption practices’ (Harvey 1990: 124). However, only two of the films in question, The Stranger and the Gunfighter (Là dove non batte il sole, Antonio Margheriti, 1973) and Kung Fu Brothers in the Wild West (Kung Fu nel pazzo West, Yeo Ban-Yee, 1973), figure as Italian-Asian co-productions. All the other Westerns are European collaborations, sometimes with US involvement. Therefore, the representation of ‘Eastern’ identity through ‘Western’ images seems of particular interest as this representation gives some indication of how, in Homi Bhabha’s words, ‘cultures recognize themselves through their projections of “otherness” ’ (Bhabha 1994: 12). The question arises if there is a merging of the national and the generic or simply an incorporation

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of the Other’s discourse: how are ‘Eastern’ genres like the sword film and the martial arts movie fused with the Italian Western? Regarding the text as reflections of their transnational modes of production, they appear just as hybrid as the global imaginary giving rise to them. Thus, competing subject positions will come into view, assessing where the ‘West’ produces the ‘East’ as a ‘fixed reality which is at once an “other” and yet entirely knowable and visible’ (Bhabha 1996: 93). Nonetheless, the texts are deeply open to ambivalence. All the Italian Westerns featuring Asian heroes or villains fall within familiar plot constructions, as prefigured in films like A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più, Sergio Leone, 1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Sergio Leone, 1966).6 However, while staying true to the narrative conventions of the Italian Western, the films featuring Asian protagonists significantly differ in their iconography, initiating a hybrid process of yielding (see my in-depth discussion in Ritzer 2014). They create a ‘synthesis which transcends both the self and the Other’ (Lii 1998: 134). The Italian Westerns featuring Asian villains almost consistently apply racial stereotypes orientalistically discriminating against the ‘Asian’, in order to advance the Caucasian hero. The Stranger in Japan (Lo straniero di silenzio, Luigi Vanzi, 1968), Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die! (Oggi a me . . . domani a te!, Tonino Cervi, 1968) and Have a Good Funeral, My Friend . . . Sartana Will Pay (Buon funerale amigos! . . . paga Sartana, Giuliano Carnimeo, 1970) all codify ‘White’ sovereignty at the expense of the ethnic Other. The Westerns featuring Asians as their heroes are often highly incoherent texts. Although sympathetic to the interests of marginalised ethnicities on a textual level, the contextual level shows that in Death Walks in Laredo (Tre pistole contro Cesare, Enzo Peri, 1966) a Japanese is played by a Hawaiian, in The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe (Il mio nome è Shangai Joe, Mario Caiano, 1973) a Chinese is played by a Japanese, and in The White, the Yellow, and the Black (Il bianco il giallo il nero, Sergio Corbucci, 1975) a Japanese is played by a Cuban. A more progressive movie in this regard seems to be Kung Fu Brothers in the Wild West, in which Chinese star as Chinese and also fight for their rights in the diegesis. Therefore, this movie refuses to simply give a new face of the old orientalist hegemony, denying white hegemony dressing itself up ‘in a new representation of its own self and of the world’ (Lo 2005: 171). Whereas Karate, Fists and Beans (Storia di karatè, pugni e fagioli, Tonino Ricci, 1973) uses the Japanese character only as a figure of fun, The Stranger and the Gunfighter deploys the

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Chinese hero to debunk stereotypes by ironically replaying them. In Return of Shanghai Joe (Che botte ragazzi!, Bitto Albertini, 1975) and The Five Man Army (Un esercito di cinque uomini, Don Taylor, 1969), the ethnic origins of the Asians are no longer of any interest. They just do what they have to do, and they do it well. Of particular interest in this respect is Return of Shanghai Joe, as Joe’s ‘Asian’ origins do not play an ‘exotic’ role any more. He appears to be just another Western hero. Here, ‘Chineseness’ does not have to be pointed out with ostentation; it is an intrinsic trait of the protagonist’s appearance, but is never explicitly emphasised. Therefore it is possible to reverse one of the most striking elements of ethnic discrimination in genre cinema. Instead of the Asian character being reduced to a funny sidekick for the Caucasian hero, Joe gets a funny sidekick who is Caucasian: a corpulent rowdy modelled after the image of Bud Spencer. As Dimitris Eleftheriotis has shown, the Italianness of the Italian Western lies precisely in its attempt to weaken the ‘national’. This happens through ‘the erasure of the national identity of the heroes’ (Eleftheriotis 2004: 321), who are mostly neither Italians nor Americans, but Chicanos (as in Run Man Run (Corri, uomo, corri, Sergio Sollima, 1968)), Mexican half-breeds (as in Ringo and His Golden Pistol (Johnny Oro, Sergio Corbucci, 1966)) or Europeans (as in Man of the East (E poi lo chiamarono il magnifico, Enzo Barboni, 1972)). However, notions of the nation do matter in Italian Westerns with Asian protagonists. The trans-Pacific cultural transfers between the Italian Western and Asian influences draw attention to the European appropriation of generic traditions that contradictorily fetishise the ‘Orient’ on the one hand and affirm ‘yellow peril’ stereotypes on the other hand – even within the very same movie. Italian Westerns with Asian protagonists show, despite their at times outright orientalism, the genre’s severe ideological contradictions constituted by multiple competing discourses. These are responsible for the infusible tension of a drive split between exotist stereotypes and the playful deconstruction of these very stereotypes. With regard to Maggie Günsberg’s work on the Italian Western that stresses the contradiction between the genre’s stereotyped depictions of non-white, especially Mexican characters and its popularity in Southern Italy, providing parallels for Southern Italian audiences of their own stereotypes of the South as Other, one might speak of an appeal of ‘masquerade’: Italian Westerns with Asian characters could be regarded as offering fluid spectatorial positions involving both ‘non-whiteness and a considerable degree of wish-fulfilment in identifying with white

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superiority’ (Günsberg 2005: 210–11).7 Destabilising coherent ethnic identities through bricolage, the Italian Western functions to reinforce orientalist views, which are nevertheless repudiated. The genre’s discourse – in particular in the films featuring Asian heroes – fetishises the Other in an Asiaphilist way, which projects not loathing, but longing onto the Other. This longing seems to be part of a larger cultural trend towards cultural globalisation through the weakening of national reference points and the transnational distribution patterns of popular cinematic products.

early asian appropriations The last wave of Italian Westerns produced in the early to mid-1970s was influenced by Asian cinema to a far greater degree than merely by Japanese sword movies like Yojimbo. From the late 1960s onwards, Italian Westerns were joined by a new kind of generic exploitation at the box offices of Europe and the USA, illustrating once again that ‘Americanization cannot be the only embodiment and carrier of cultural power’ (Ching 2001: 195). This new genre of exploitation was Asian martial arts cinema, first and foremost from Hong Kong. David Desser has called the cultural climate enabling the economic success of these films the ‘kung fu craze’ (2000), which also included a fascination with and an enthusiasm for all kinds of ‘Asian’ forms of spirituality. One of the first ‘kung fu craze’ blockbusters was a now mostly forgotten film which broke box-office records worldwide: Five Fingers of Death (Tian xia di yi quan, Chang-Hwa Jeong, 1972) starring Lieh Lo, who later would appear alongside Lee van Cleef in the Italian–Hong Kong co-production of The Stranger and the Gunfighter. In the USA just as in Italy, Five Fingers of Death, produced by the highly influential Hong Kong production studio Shaw Brothers, mostly played in second- or third-run cinemas, which were also the places to show Italian Westerns.8 Martial arts movies and Italian Westerns frequently appeared on the same double-bills, since many distribution companies had the rights to films from both genres, and the same spectators were enjoying martial arts movies and Italian Westerns: a predominantly male audience consisting mostly of middle- and working-class youth.9 Aesthetically, martial arts cinema is closely related to Italian Westerns, too. For one thing, the Italian Western strongly influenced later martial arts movies through its audio-visual conventions: the use of deep focus cinematography, zooming lenses, close-ups, and

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music (which was often lifted directly from Italian films). Furthermore, both Italian Westerns and martial arts cinema employ similar protagonists. They are constructed around physically active, decisive heroes in mythical surroundings, who practice their rigid codes of virtue through physical violence. The martial arts heroes’ ethics often arise from a Taoist code of behaviour, which can mean that they see themselves forced to stand up against government and act as revolutionary subjects like peons in the Italian Western. Apart from the Italian co-productions of The Stranger and the Gunfighter and Kung Fu Brothers in the Wild West, Hong Kong martial arts cinema fashioned several movies according to the tropes of the Italian Western, both in a semantic and a syntactic manner.10 Invincible Fist (Tie shou wu qing, Cheh Chang, 1969) starred Lieh Lo as an honourable constable who goes after a gang that had robbed a large gold shipment. Semantically, the movie features a lot of close ups, sweaty faces, and long moments of delay before the numerous martial arts fights, as well as a syntactic structure woven around the motif of vengeance. The Anonymous Heroes (Wu ming ying xiong, Cheh Chang, 1971) presented David Chiang, Lung Ti and Li Ching as three friends who secretly steal guns and ammo for Chinese revolutionaries, including a spectacular train heist sequence. The film is modelled very closely according to ‘revolutionary’ Italian Westerns like A Bullet for the General (Quién sabe?, Damiano Damiani, 1966), A Professional Gun (Il mercenario, Sergio Corbucci, 1968) or Duck, You Sucker (Giù la testa, Sergio Leone, 1971), both in its semantic iconography of weapons and gun fights and its syntactic element of an adventure in the turmoil of revolutionary times. The Savage Five (Wu hu jiang, Cheh Chang, 1974) shows five unlikely heroes who get together to save a town from a brutal band of killers who have stolen a safe. This story is certainly modelled after Japanese sword movies and follows Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954), but the film is closer to the Italian Western in its semantic structure: a small peaceful town disrupted, a locked safe, and a main bad guy, whose weapons of death are not his hands, feet, knife or sword, but a pair of pistols. Gun power also plays an explosive part in the film’s climax, while the soundtrack contains snippets of Ennio Morricone’s score from the Italian Western Death Rides a Horse (Da uomo a uomo, Giulio Petroni, 1967). Finally, the story of The Fugitive (Wang ming tu, Tseng-Chai Chang, 1972) is very similar to The Hills Run Red (Un fiume di dollari, Carlo Lizzani, 1966), in that two bank robbers split, one taking the loot and running while the other one goes to jail. The robber

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possessing the loot successfully changes his identity, setting himself up in a life of luxury as a corrupt patriarch running a town. The robber in jail (Lieh Lo again) is betrayed by his partner by being left to rot and is further double-crossed once he does manage to escape. Of all 1970s martial arts movies, The Fugitive probably aligns itself most closely with the Italian Western, with semantic elements such as windswept landscapes and sound effects, shoot-outs with automatic pistols (à la The Great Silence (Il grande Silenzio, Sergio Corbucci, 1968)), crushed and broken gun hands and the obligatory final duel. Accompanying all of this is a pirated score comprising Ennio Morricone’s music from The Return Of Ringo (Il ritorno di Ringo, Duccio Tessari, 1965), Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, Sergio Leone, 1968) and Duck, You Sucker. A consideration of movies like The Fugitive, which shows semantic elements somehow drained of meaning, provides a useful background for reconsidering the significance of the Italian Western. This is due to the movie’s complete lack of interest in the ideological baggage of the American Western: no frontier, no community, no male soul-searching at all. These movies create a purely allegorical space dealing with questions of good and bad, abstracted from any historical reference to the so-called Old West. As Leon Hunt (2011: 108) has suggested, maybe the Italian Western subverted its US reference most of all when it paved the way for other cinemas appropriating the Western in different cultural and ideological contexts. Through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004), the Italian Western could thus be described as the spark of a never-ending process that decontextualises a set of relations, rendering them virtual and preparing them for ever more distant actualisations. It not only traverses distinct national boundaries; in doing this, it also develops global cinematic flows superseding separate spaces of discourse. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense, the Italian Western demonstrates that dominant power ‘can no longer be content to over-code territorial elements that are already coded, it must invent specific codes for flows that are increasingly deterritorialised’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 238). This notion of uncontrollable flows of desire is set in direct relation to phenomena of globalisation by Arjun Appadurai. Without a doubt, martial arts cinema’s mode of genre hybridisation immediately evokes connotations of Appadurai’s ‘loosening of bonds between people, wealth and territories [that] fundamentally alters the basis of cultural reproduction’ (Appadurai 1996: 49). It certainly bears witness to the ‘complex overlapping, disjunctive order’

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described by Appadurai, ‘that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre–periphery models’ (Appadurai 1996: 32). Appadurai’s model of a global cultural economy proposes five dimensions of global cultural flows for exploring such disjunctures, all of which are at work in the Italian Western’s exploits: ‘(a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) financescapes; and (e) ideoscapes’ (Appadurai 1996: 33). Italian Westerns and Asian martial arts cinema alike clearly work across ideoscapes (i.e. narrative constructions), and technoscapes (i.e. cinematic devices), and, often being transnational co-productions, they also fuse different financescapes. Stars such as Lee van Cleef and Lieh Lo are themselves part of an ethnoscape forming a personal link between the Italian and Hong Kong motion picture industries. Last but not least, as I have demonstrated, martial arts cinema hybridises various mediascapes by merging the Italian Western’s generic traits with local traditions into unstable clusters. From this perspective, the recent renaissance of Asian appropriations of Italian Westerns, even more forceful with productions such as Sukiyaki Western Django, The Good, the Bad, the Weird and The Warrior’s Way, might point to the ongoing importance of the Italian Western’s deterritorialising force.11 I will now turn to these contemporary tendencies.

contemporary tendencies Sukiyaki Western Django, The Good, the Bad, the Weird and The Warrior’s Way all show complex processes of hybridisation at work that may find their most advanced point in the movie The Warrior’s Way, a South Korean–New Zealand co-production released in 2010. The Warrior’s Way was filmed in Auckland, following Peter Jackson’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings (2001–3), and shot in the English language by South Korean director Lee Sngmoo for international distribution. Playing the lead is South Korean superstar Jang Dong-gun, supported by Hong Kong martial arts legend Ti Lung, well known from several crucial Shaw Brothers movies from the 1970s, as well as US actors like Kate Bosworth and Danny Huston, and Australians such as Geoffrey Rush. This production context already makes The Warrior’s Way a prime example of cultural hybridity. The Warrior’s Way doubtless occupies a fluid space, gathering personnel from all over Asia, New Zealand, Australia, and the USA. This fluid space challenges the ‘very concepts of homogenous national cultures’,

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according to a process defined by Homi Bhabha, putting ‘the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or “organic” ethnic communities – as the grounds of cultural comparativism – . . . in a profound process of redefinition’ (Bhabha 1994: 5). Whereas Sukiyaki Western Django stages another remake of Yojimbo, but now set in a ‘Wild West’ populated by English-speaking Japanese, and whereas The Good, the Bad, the Weird revives the Korean tradition of the ‘Manchurian Western’ (Hunt 2011: 105–7), The Warrior’s Way even further complicates the question of cultural ‘authenticity’ and cultural ‘origin’. The film opens in a medieval Japan where different clans fight against each other. It therefore might be called a chanbara eiga, further featuring a sword-fighting hero with a katana blade, the icon of chanbara par excellence.12 However, the hero of The Warrior’s Way, simply called Yang (the ‘masculine principle’ in Chinese cosmology), is also highly evocative of the wuxia tradition.13 He aims to be the world’s greatest fighter and, unlike the Japanese swordsmen in chanbara eiga, can conquer gravity through his inner body-energy. In a cinematographic sense, according to conventions of wuxia pian in Chinese cinema, these trans-human abilities are realised through the use of wire work: a method allowing the exaggeration of actual martial arts with the aid of special tightrope techniques. Actors are thereby manoeuvred through space with ropes to give their movements a superhuman resemblance. Yet, Yang is played neither by a Japanese nor by a Chinese actor: instead, Korean star Jang Dong-gung takes the lead. After the opening in Japan, The Warrior’s Way transfers the movie’s narration completely to frontier-era USA, where Yang becomes a hero according to Western tropes. A lone, cynical figure coming to a remote town on the outskirts of civilisation just like Clint Eastwood’s protagonist ‘Joe’ in Sergio Leone’s pivotal A Fistful of Dollars, Yang reluctantly helps the defenceless by protecting their place against a ruthless gang of bandits. Finally, in the film’s epic showdown an army of demonic swordsmen appears, designed after the ninja of chanbara eiga like Ninja Band of Assassins (Shinobi no mono, Satsuo Yamamoto, 1962), yet led by iconic Chinese wuxia star Ti Lung, known from martial arts classics such as Clans of Intrigue (Chu Liu Xiang, Yuen Chor, 1977), The Sentimental Swordsman (To ching chien ko wu ching chien, Yuen Chor, 1977) or Avenging Eagle (Long xie shi san ying, Chung Sun, 1978), further emphasising the basal hybridity of genres at work. Thus, The Warrior’s Way demonstrates that regarding genres like Western, chanbara or wuxia as nationally and culturally specific genres perpetuates a dangerous cultural essentialism. No culture can ever

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really succeed in being identical with itself, as scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Jacques Derrida have argued. They stress that cultures ‘are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in the relation of Self to Other’ (Bhabha 1994: 36). According to Said, all cultures necessarily ‘are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic’ (Said 1993: xxv). Derrida argues in a very similar way when he denies the possibility of a singular provenance of cultures. For him, what is proper to a culture is for it to not be identical to itself: ‘There is no culture or cultural identity without this difference with itself ’ because, as Derrida argues, subjectivity always relates to its other. The question is not about a culture not having an identity, but instead about one unable to identify itself, to be able to say ‘me’ or ‘we’; to be able to take the form of a subject only in the non-identity to itself or, if you prefer, only in the difference with itself. (Derrida 1992: 9) Cultural identity and alterity are thus inextricably connected. By an erasure of the national identity of the heroes through hybridisation of generic traditions, The Warrior’s Way weakens any notion of national cinema and cultural homogeneity. Instead of merging the disparate generic codes at work, they are exposed in their specific aesthetic difference. In contrast to the ever-present hybridisation of genres in ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema’ (Altman 1999; Grant 2007; Langford 2005; Moine 2008; Neale 2000; Staiger 2003) that aims to lay out its material functionally for storytelling, no coherence is produced by The Warrior’s Way. Rather, the attraction of the diegesis results exactly from its ostensive artificiality. It is exactly this fragmentary side-by-side of disparate and seemingly incompatible generic elements that is supposed to make the shown world unique and attractive to viewers. Hence, the movie may count as a paradigm of bricolage storytelling being ‘the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 17). From this perspective, the hybrid diegesis functions as an element of originality, creating difference within the aesthetic repertoire of genres like the Italian Western, chanbara, and wuxia. Indeed, everything seems to stress variation of well-known elements. The Warrior’s Way is set in a hardly definable cosmos, a fluid no-time and a no-place. Just as curiously as the film hybridises

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generic structures of Italian Westerns, chanbara and wuxia, it handles physical dimensions. There is no material referent in the picture’s limbo-like state of uncertainty. The atemporal location of the action correlates with this hybrid space. The Warrior’s Way looks neither for general verisimilitude nor for a specific grounding in US, Italian, Japanese or Chinese history. The movie is structured by generic setpieces which are familiar through conventionalised use. It sets a game in motion that uses the audience’s media-cultural knowledge as its horizon of expectation. Hybridity also manifests itself in the movie’s mediality and technological-aesthetic spatial structure. Though partly shot in Auckland, most of the film is staged before green-screen, with the background of the image as well as many objects, bodies and movements digitally created in post-production. The Warrior’s Way therefore does not so much conventionally place digital elements into an analogue world, as seen in The Lord of the Rings, but also The Good, the Bad, the Weird or Sukiyaki Western Django. On the contrary: The Warrior’s Way puts its bodies into a completely artificial environment. This hybridity between digital background and analogue actors could be read just as allegorically as the fusion of genres regarding the film’s hybrid status from the perspective of production. The Warrior’s Way is defined by what new-media theoretician Lev Manovich has termed ‘digital compositing’: the possibility of fluid control over disparate visual effects that were generated at different times and at different places: ‘[W]here old media relied on montage, new media substitutes the aesthetics of continuity. A film cut is replaced by a digital morph or digital composite’ (Manovich 2001: 143). This digital control allows a fine-grained co-ordination of the effects, which constitutes itself through stratifications and interferences. The Warrior’s Way’s work with digital aesthetics is characterised not by the search for a single vantage point but by a piling up of images, just as the movie puts generic layers one on top of the other. The structure of its images appears exactly as overdetermined as its combination of genres. On both a micro and a macro level The Warrior’s Way can thus count as a genuinely hybrid product. The aesthetic of digital compositing travels across national boundaries; it works as a junction in a global network of cultural exchange. This set of connections forms a manifestation of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call the post-postmodern condition: the infinite circulation of capital, information and pictures. In their influential model, governance is subject to a permanent blending of power and

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culture, and the nation state a mere instrument of transnational money flows. According to Hardt and Negri, multinational corporations directly structure and articulate the territories and populations. They seem to make nation states merely instruments to record the flows of commodities, money and populations that they set in motion: ‘The transnational corporations directly distribute labour power over various markets . . . and organise hierarchically the various sectors of world production. The complex apparatus that selects investments and directs financial and monetary manoeuvres determines the new geography of the world’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 31–2). The arising hybridities are seen not to abolish power monopolies but to constitute a new flexibility through which the global capital operates: ‘The end of the dialectic of modernity has not resulted in the end of the dialectic of exploitation. Today nearly all of humanity is to some degree absorbed within or subordinated to the networks of capitalist exploitation’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 43). The agent of this exploitation is discussed as an anonymous capital, which negates every notion of the nation. It creates a subject-less uncanny. In the words of Slavoj Žižek, its ‘true horror does not reside in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital, but rather in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course’. In this sense, there is no particular agent animating capital flows, but only ‘the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost’ (Žižek 1999: 218). This globalising development no longer knows an outside but only an inside. It veers away from abstract, imagined communities, in Benedict Anderson’s definition of them as an ‘imagined political community . . . because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson 1991: 6). The concept of the nation state is being replaced by a new transnational globalised system. While traditional forms of governance, incorporated through nation and European colonial power, have always relied on borders, the hegemony of the new Empire as diagnosed by theorists such as Hardt, Negri and Žižek flourishes in permanent movement. Governance is being transformed into a dynamic model of communication, which redefines cultural practice through the production of hybrid transnational systems. It is exactly such a system that lies at the heart of current productions like The Warrior’s Way and the Italian Western’s contemporary renaissance in an Asian context.

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conclusion What does this fluid hybridity mean for the allegedly culturally specific mythical structures? Certainly, we have to discard the conception of a polarity between East and West. According to The Warrior’s Way, generic conventions and their mythical complexes always serve as a frame of reference that allows a more ‘universal’ stage in which spectacular violence is performed. They constitute formulaic universes as reduced microcosms, making it possible to abstract from a concrete setting, and giving way to phantasms in which intense spectacle can be played out without restraint. The Italian Western, the Japanese chanbara eiga, or the Chinese wuxia pian are all concerned with violent conflicts centred on strong male heroes whose affective images translate easily into different national and cultural contexts. By its hybridisation of genres, The Warrior’s Way does not so much cause changes of narrative conventions as it manifests itself in different constructions of iconography. Thus the movie produces hybrid cultural identities from their own dissemination: ‘as a “production” which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’ (Hall 1994: 392). This brings us to the crucial point that media do not passively reflect cultural images but instead determine them in an active manner. This is a twofold process which involves on the one hand their work with the collective imagery, and on the other their negotiation of economic framework requirements in the context of a globalised industry. By hybridising generic traditions, movies like Sukiyaki Western Django, The Good, the Bad, the Weird and The Warrior’s Way in particular hint at the ambivalent third space on which cultural identity has to be based. It is this contradictory space that gives birth to the meaning of culture: The productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory . . . may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multiculturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. (Bhabha 1994: 38) Hybridity lies at the centre of The Warrior’s Way. As a sign of the productivity of globalised genres, their ‘shifting forces and fixities’

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(Bhabha 1994: 157), the movie produces deterritorialisations: making borders ostensively felt instead of smoothly synthesising them. Of course, every border crossing implies a referencing of that border, but, rather than stress the fluidity of genre systems, The Warrior’s Way highlights their difference. In hybridising Italian Westerns, Japanese chanbara eiga and Chinese wuxia pian, the film combines generic traditions while simultaneously underlining their different cultural contexts. As a result, it does not hint at an ease of mobility, but instead gives weight to a feel of radical foreignness’, in an Asian as well as a European context. Generic hybridity thus deconstructs the putative universality of Empire, disturbing dominant notions of authenticity and purity that Italian Westerns have always so prominently challenged. The Warrior’s Way is connected in equal parts to diverse genres like the Italian Western, the Japanese chanbara and the Chinese wuxia. Instead of assimilating the conventions of US and Asian genres, the film rewrites them, working them over through processes of cultural translation, which accept incongruities and harsh ruptures. The Warrior’s Way, as one might say quoting Ulf Hannerz, takes its time ‘reshaping metropolitan culture to its own specifications’ until ‘the metropolitan forms are somehow no longer so easily recognizable – they become hybridized’ (Hannerz 1991: 124). Ostentatiously flaunting rather than hiding their multiple generic borrowings, recent Asian Westerns such as Sukiyaki Western Django, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, and, above all, The Warrior’s Way show the filmmakers’ cultural knowledge of different Asian as well Italian genre traditions. Their cinematic cosmopolitanism is defined by a sense of control and self-consciousness that exceeds the earlier Asian appropriations of the 1970s, and, in contrast to the Italian Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s, respects peculiarities yet knows no hierarchies. It remains to be seen how this hybrid impulse will affect other cultural borrowings in our globalised popular culture.

notes 1. For an in-depth discussion of this aspect, see Ritzer 2014. 2. One has to be aware of the fact that the term ‘samurai film’ belongs to a non-Japanese context, as Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro has shown: ‘commonly used by American critics, but not much by Japanese’. He continues: ‘If the use of swords is the only crucial factor in determining the identity and coherence of the samurai film as a genre, then why not call it, for instance, a sword film?’ (Yoshimoto 2001: 212-13). It is indeed

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10

11.

12.

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striking that since the 1960s there are almost no samurais to be found in the so-called ‘samurai film’ – but only swordfighters. Therefore, I will not speak hereafter of a ‘samurai film’, but of a ‘sword film’. For more on this discourse, see Eleftheriotis (2001: 25–45). On discussions of the notion of transnational cinema see Ezra and Rowden (2006), Ďurovičová and Newman (2010), and Higbee and Lim (2010). The chapter which follows revisits conclusions from my previous essay on the discourse on ‘Asianness’ in Italian Westerns (Ritzer 2014). On the plots in Italian Westerns see Wright (1975) and Fridlund (2006). For a useful survey on the issue of ‘Mexicanness’ in the Italian Western see also Frayling (2006: 217–44) and Fisher (2011). On the Shaw Brothers see, among others, Hunt (2003), Wong (2003) and Fu (2008). David Desser has outlined the appeal of martial arts to a young audience quite convincingly in terms of their aesthetics (2000: 38); for an analysis of audience structures regarding the Italian Western see Wagstaff (1992). According to Rick Altman’s influential model, a genre’s semantic elements address its ‘building blocks’, while its syntactic patterns point to the ‘structures into which they are arranged’ (1984: 10). Both Sukiyaki Western Django and The Good, the Bad, the Weird are discussed intensively (and brilliantly) by Hunt (2011). I will therefore concentrate my following analysis on The Warrior’s Way. Chanbara, or alternatively chambara, is an onomatopoetic expression denoting a swordfight. Eiga is the Japanese word for ‘film’. Chanbara eiga usually denotes films that show swordsmen and warrior clans fighting it out through the Japanese Tokugawa period from 1603 up to 1868 (see Yoshimoto 2001; Standish 2005). Wuxia is a Chinese term made up of the parts wu (= martial) and xia (= hero). Wuxia pian are films that feature gallant knights roaming a fictitious romantic world, any time between 200 and 300 bc. Not all martial arts films are wuxia, yet all wuxia are martial arts films. Stephen Teo has pointed out the subtle, yet significant differences in martial arts cinema, concerning parameters of fighting style (wuxia’s swordplay versus kung fu’s use of legs and fists) as well as generic verisimilitude (wuxia’s emphasis on supernatural skills versus kung fu’s emphasis on the trained body) (Teo 2009: 4). Furthermore, there are important differences in setting. Whereas kung fu films can take place in almost every diegesis (any time and anywhere), wuxia is by definition situated in a mythical version of ancient China, reaching back from the Qing dynasty to the Ming, Song, Yuan, Tang, and Qin dynasties. Historically, the kung fu film evolved out of wuxia in the early 1970s, yet both subgenres of martial arts cinema since have overlapped quite a bit, especially in terms of their common theme of chivalry (xia).

references Altman, Rick (1984), ‘A semantic/syntactic approach to film genre’, Cinema Journal, 23: 3, 6–18.

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Altman, Rick (1999), Film/Genre, London: BFI. Anderson, Benedict (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. (1996), ‘The other question: difference, discrimination, and the discourse of colonialism’, in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg (eds), Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 87–106. Buscombe, Edward (2012), ‘Is the Western about American history?’, in Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter Schulze (eds), Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western, Marburg: Schüren, pp. 13–24. Ching, Leo (2001), ‘Globalizing the regional, regionalizing the global: mass culture and Asianism in the age of late capital’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), Globalization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 279–306. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004), Anti-Oedipus, New York: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques (1992), The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Desser, David (2000), ‘The kung fu craze: Hong Kong cinema’s first American reception’, in Poshek Fu and David Desser (eds), The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–43. Ďurovičová, Nataša and Kathleen E. Newman (2010) (eds), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, New York: Routledge. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris (2001), Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks, London: Continuum. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris (2004), ‘Spaghetti western, genre criticism and national cinema: re-defining the frame of reference’, in Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 309–27. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden (eds) (2006), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, London: Routledge. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher (2006), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: I. B. Tauris. Fridlund, Bert (2006), The Spaghetti Western: A Thematic Analysis, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Fu, Poshek (ed.) (2008), China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Grant, Barry Keith (2007), Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology, London: Wallflower. Günsberg, Maggie (2005), Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Stuart (1994), ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 392–403. Hannerz, Ulf (1991), ‘Scenarios for peripheral cultures’, in Anthony D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization, and the World-System, London: Macmillan, pp. 107–28.

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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell. Higbee, Will and Song Hwee Lim (2010), ‘Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies’, Transnational Cinemas, 1: 1, 7–21. Hunt, Leon (2003), Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger, London: Wallflower. Hunt, Leon (2011), ‘The good, the bad, and the culturally inauthentic: the strange case of the “Asian Western” ’, Asian Cinema, 22: 1, 99–109. Hutchinson, Rachael (2007), ‘A fistful of Yojimbo: appropriation and dialogue in Japanese cinema’, in Paul Cooke (ed.), World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 172–87. Jameson, Fredric (1991), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Langford, Barry (2005), Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966), The Savage Mind, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lii, Ding-Tzann (1998), ‘A colonized empire: reflections on the expansion of Hong Kong films in Asian countries’, in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 122–41. Lo, Kwai-Cheung (2005), Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Manovich, Lev (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moine, Raphaëlle (2008), Cinema Genre, Oxford: Blackwell. Neale, Steve (2000), Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge. Ritzer, Ivo (2012), ‘When the West(ern) meets the East(ern): the Western all’italiana and its Asian connections’, in Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter Schulze (eds), Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western, Marburg: Schüren, pp. 25–57. Ritzer, Ivo (2014), ‘Strangers in town: on discourses of “Asianness” in the Italian Western’, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 2: 1, 75–90. Said, Edward (1993), Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf. Staiger, Janet (2003), ‘Hybrid or inbred: the purity hypothesis and Hollywood genre history’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader 3, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 185–99. Standish, Isolde (2005), A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film, London: Continuum. Teo, Stephen (2009), Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wagstaff, Christopher (1992), ‘A forkful of Westerns: industry, audiences and the Italian Western’, in Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), Popular European Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 245–61. Wong, Ain-ling (ed.) (2003), The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive. Wright, Will (1975), Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro (2001), Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1999), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso.

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chapter 9

Cowboys and Indians: Transnational Borrowings in the Indian Masala Western Iain Robert Smith

Mera Joota hai Japani // My shoes are Japanese, Yeh Patloon Inglistani // These trousers are English, Sar pe lal topi Rusi // The red hat on my head is Russian, Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani // And yet my heart is still Indian.

T

he above song lyrics, from the oft-quoted Hindi film song ‘Mera Joota Hai Japani’, were first heard in the Raj Kapoor classic Shree 420 (Mr 420, 1955). At that historical juncture, eight years after India became a sovereign nation, the song was celebrated as a patriotic ode to India’s national and cultural identity; an anthem of ‘national belonging in a globalising world’ (Varma 2004: 71). In subsequent years, the song has taken on a life of its own, being used in a wide variety of cultural contexts – from providing the title of the Shah Rukh Khan film Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (Aziz Mirza, 2000) through to its brief appearance in Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) when the Indian astronaut Shariff hums the melody in outer space. While the song is often framed merely as a patriotic anthem – Anandam P. Kavoori has observed that the lyrics have become something of a ‘catch phrase for Indian essentialism’ (Kavoori 2009: 40) – it is also evocative of the cultural negotiations underpinning cosmopolitan identity. In Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satantic Verses (1988), the fictional Bollywood star Gibreel Farishta sings ‘Mera Joota Hai Japani’ as he falls out of the clouds over the English Channel – gesturing towards the ways in which the song has functioned as a ‘theme song of migrants

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who cross oceans only to discover that their hearts remain inviolably Indian (Varma 2004: 65). This tension within the global cosmopolitan figure of Gibreel Farishta is part of a broader investigation of migration and syncretism within Salman Rushdie’s novel as he explores the negotiations through which cultures overlap, and the transformations that result from ‘new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs’ (Rushdie 1991: 394). It is worth noting one passage in the novel in particular, which addresses this phenomenon in relation to Indian cinema: Bombay was a culture of re-makes. Its architecture mimicked the skyscraper, its cinema endlessly re-invented The Magnificent Seven and Love Story, obliging all its heroes to save at least one village from murderous dacoits and all its heroines to die of leukaemia at least once in their careers, preferably at the start. (Rushdie 1988: 64) Rushdie is here drawing attention to the ways in which Indian popular culture, and cinema in particular, is known for engaging in a process of remaking, mimicking and re-inventing imported sources. As Rosie Thomas has noted, this has traditionally been one of the ways in which Indian cinema has been denigrated: ‘the films are said to be nightmarishly lengthy, second-rate copies of Hollywood trash, to be dismissed with patronising amusement or facetious quips’ (Thomas 1985: 117). However, it is important that we recognise that this paragraph from The Satanic Verses is not simply an example of critical discourse berating popular Indian cinema for being derivative. Rushdie’s choice of example, The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), is itself famously a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954) and forms part of a long history of borrowings and exchanges across national contexts. Bombay cinema may indeed be part of a ‘culture of re-makes’, Rushdie is implying, but this is not to say that the sources that they draw upon can be taken as wholly ‘original’ either. This chapter will investigate the cultural politics of transnational borrowings through an analysis of the ‘Masala Western’ – a cycle of Indian films that began in the early 1970s which borrowed and recombined tropes from American Westerns, Italian Westerns, Japanese sword films, and the South Asian ‘dacoit’ (bandit) films, among other influences. While the genre is more often referred to as the ‘Curry Western’, I believe that Masala – the South Asian term for spice mix – more

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clearly evokes the cultural mixing and blending at the heart of this phenomenon. Masala has long been a term used to refer to the mixing of genres within Indian cinema and, as Rashna Wadia Richards has recently posited, the notion of the ‘glocal masala film’ is a useful way to frame film productions that are ‘neither fully rejecting “local” Hindi cinematic traditions nor wholly imitating dominant “global” Hollywood conventions’ (Richards 2011: 349). Importantly, however, the local/global framework that I am investigating here will not be centred on the relationship between India and Hollywood, but instead the under-researched influence of Italian cinema on Indian cinematic traditions. While Rushdie cites the Hollywood film The Magnificent Seven as the inspiration for the Indian Western, it was actually the Italian ‘Spaghetti’ Western that was the predominant model, and there is evidence of further influence from a number of national and regional cinemas. By interrogating the ways in which these films incorporate elements from the various transnational manifestations of the Western, this chapter will argue for an understanding of the Western genre, and generic categories more broadly, that goes beyond unidirectional models of cross-cultural influence. Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975) is certainly the most celebrated example of the genre (ranked first in the BFI’s 2002 list of Greatest Indian Films), although there are actually a significant number of Indian films that borrow tropes from the international Western genre. The focus of this chapter will be on the Hindi industry, yet it should be noted that many of the regional cinemas within India produced their own reworkings of the Western genre over this period, including Telugu Westerns such as Mosagallaku Mosagaadu (B. Vittalacharya, 1971) and Irumbukkottai Murattu Singam (Chimbu Deven, 2010), Malayalam Westerns such as Adima Changala (A. B. Raj, 1981) and Thazhvaram (Bharathan, 1990) and Tamil ‘Idli’ Westerns such as Ganga (M. Karnan, 1972) and Quick Gun Murugun (Shashanka Ghosh, 2009). While I refer to these films in order to set out the wider context within which the Masala Western has developed, my primary focus will be on the Hindi industry, with specific attention paid to four titles that are particularly representative of the form: Khote Sikkay (Narendra Bedi, 1974), Kaala Sona (Ravikant Nagaich, 1975), Wanted: Dead or Alive (Ambrish Sangal, 1984) and, of course, Sholay. As I will outline in the next section, the predominant academic approach to this kind of cross-cultural borrowing has been to position it as an act of translating an internationally circulating genre to conform to local cultural practices. While there is certainly merit in such

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an approach, especially given that it tends to focus attention on the specificities of the local context, it is my contention that the national and transnational dynamics of the Masala Western are more fluid and porous than such a model of localisation would imply. Instead, this chapter will examine the Masala Western utilising a memetic model of cultural hybridisation. ‘Meme’ is a term coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to refer to ideas and cultural phenomena which are spread from person to person, and which evolve and mutate as they travel (Dawkins 1989: 192). As I have argued elsewhere,1 this concept can be useful as a model for understanding processes of cultural hybridisation, since it provides a lens through which to focus on the specific ways in which cultural ideas are spread and transformed across national contexts. By identifying the ways in which tropes from the Western are circulated and adapted across American, Italian and Indian cinematic traditions, this memetic model allows me to interrogate the distinctly transnational nature of the Masala Western. Moving us away from an explanatory framework which – like the lyrics to ‘Mera Joota Hai Japani’ – asserts an Indian national essence in the face of globalisation, I will instead investigate the ways in which the numerous transnational borrowings underpinning this genre complicate any notion of cultural production as being nationally specific.

theorising the national/transnational dynamics of the western genre While academic scholarship on the Western has largely focused on the North American and Western European variants of the genre, it is notable that recent years have seen a number of publications attempting to map out the various reworkings of the genre that have appeared beyond these contexts. Frames Cinema Journal, for example, published a special issue in 2013 entitled ‘Commies and Indians: The Political Western Beyond Cold War Frontiers’ (Iverson 2013), while Transformations published a special issue on ‘The Other Western’ that sought to investigate ‘the international spread and re-use of the Western’ (Cooke, Mules and Baker 2014). These journal issues have been accompanied by two recent book collections that explore similar terrain, with Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter W. Schulze’s Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western appearing in 2012 and Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper’s International Westerns: Re-Locating The Frontier following in 2014. Throughout these four

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publications, the authors engage with a wide variety of under-explored generic cycles, including Westerns produced in Australia, Japan, South Korea, India, Hungary, Mexico, Turkey, Denmark, Brazil and the former Soviet Union. This attention to Westerns beyond North America and Western Europe is part of a broader transnational turn within film scholarship, although it is notable that the predominant theoretical model is still resolutely tied to the national. The majority of these studies of international Westerns frame their case studies as national variations on an international theme – as specifically local incarnations of a global genre – rather than attempting to grapple with the more complicated transnational dimensions of the genre.2 I would argue that this is very much related to what has come to be known as the ‘cultural roots’ controversy within the reception of international Westerns. As Christopher Frayling identified, when the Sergio Leone Westerns were first released internationally, they were dismissed as cheap imitations of American Westerns – critics arguing that ‘given the fact that the Westerns made at Cinecittà Studios, Rome, had no “cultural roots” in American history or folklore, they were likely to be cheap, opportunistic imitations’ (Frayling 2006: 121). This led to the derogatory term ‘Spaghetti Western’ being used to dismiss Italian Westerns, and subsequently to similar appellations appearing for other national variations on the genre: Borsch Westerns, Camembert Westerns, Chop-Suey Westerns, Curry Westerns, Kebab Westerns, Noodle Westerns, Paella Westerns, Roast Beef Westerns and Sauerkraut Westerns. Inspired by the popular currency of the Spaghetti Western label, these terms signalled the implicit inauthenticity of these variations on the Western genre – in each case utilising stereotypical foodstuffs as a synecdoche for a distinct national culture. Moreover, while many films were being dismissed for their lack of engagement with the American historical context, the hybrid nature of these Westerns meant that they were simultaneously being critiqued for making little sense in their new cultural context. Glauber Rocha, a key figure of the 1960s Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, famously condemned the imitative nature of the Brazilian Western, arguing that the film O Cangaceiro (Lima Barreto, 1953) ‘transposes a North American cowboy “western” plot to the middle of the cangaço (badlands) and thus distorts the entire social significance of the sertanijo (the sertão is the north-east, and poorest, region of Brazil)’ (Rocha 1970: 144). Not only were these films being dismissed as imitations that lacked ‘cultural roots’ in American history, but they were also being criticised for the ways in which these

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borrowings distorted the social reality of the nation in which they were produced. One of the methods, therefore, through which scholars have attempted to challenge this kind of dismissal has been to draw attention to the ways in which these reworkings actually draw upon specific cultural roots within the local context. Lee Broughton, for example, posits that ‘rather than being failed copies of Hollywood Westerns . . . British Westerns are hybrid texts that infuse the genre with local cultural characteristics (the British music hall and gothic traditions) and concerns (Britain’s ongoing crises of masculinity)’ (Broughton 2014a: 137). Similarly, when Edward Buscombe defends the European Western against accusations of being inauthentic copies, his argument rests on the proposition that they ‘display specific European features which make them more than just imitations of the American originals’ (Buscombe 2012: 22). To combat accusations that these international Westerns are merely ‘failed copies’ or ‘imitations of American originals’, these scholars are emphasising features from the films that could be framed as locally and culturally specific. Consequently, the films are often positioned as expressions of a national or continental identity, with their reworkings of the genre framed as distinctive to that particular context, and any differences from the established generic conventions explained through the prism of this context. While I am sympathetic to this desire to assert cultural specificity in the face of accusations of inauthenticity, I am concerned that this tactical emphasis upon local cultural characteristics and specific national features can itself become reliant upon quite a problematic formulation. When we seek out the specific ‘Italian-ness’ of the Spaghetti Western, or the ‘British-ness’ of the Roast Beef Western, or indeed the ‘Indian-ness’ of the Curry Western, we need to be careful that we are not relying upon essentialist notions of national and cultural identity to make those claims. It is important that we are paying close attention to the specifics of historical context, but there is a danger that the privileging of national signifiers is misrepresenting the complex negotiations with global cultural flows and exchanges that are taking place. These problems are not limited to the scholarship on international Westerns. The assertion of a distinctive national identity to combat the perceived inauthenticity of imitative works is also something that we see in scholarship on cross-cultural adaptations within Indian cinema more broadly. Sheila Nayar, for example, in her article on Bollywood reworkings of Hollywood cinema, argues that despite ‘the

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filmmakers’ borrowing, stealing and blatant plagiarism, these finished products are indisputably Indian’ (Nayar 1997: 75). Similarly, Mira Reym Binford posits: The present-day Indian commercial film is the end result of a lengthy process of imitation, adaptation, and indigenisation. Confronted with challenges from abroad, Indian society has often responded by indigenising invasive foreign cultural elements and creating a new synthesis that is fundamentally Indian. (Binford 1988: 78) This notion of a synthesis that is ‘fundamentally’ or ‘indisputably’ Indian clearly relies on a framework of cultural essentialism – a conceptualisation of culture that downplays the deeply hybrid nature of culture and cultural forms in order to assert a distinct and coherent national identity. I think it is important that we unpack these claims of discrete national cultures and instead investigate the overlapping, intersecting nature of these processes of hybridisation. My position here is closer to Ivo Ritzer, who asserts that ‘the western all’italiana never exclusively was a western all’italiana . . . [it] is a highly hybrid product reminding us that the local always has to be seen against the background of the global’ (Ritzer 2012: 25). In the rest of this chapter, therefore, I will investigate the Masala Western and draw out the ways in which it can function as a privileged site for investigating transnational processes of cultural hybridisation. Of course, as Dimitris Eleftheriotis reminds us, the idea that all cultural forms are hybrid ‘should not be a point of arrival but a point of departure in the investigation of the different conditions and forms of hybridisation’ (Eleftheriotis 2001: 100). It is not my intention to merely assert that the Masala Western is a hybrid cultural form that combines elements from a variety of national and cultural contexts, but to investigate the specific conditions and forms underpinning this hybridisation. Utilising my memetic model of cultural hybridisation, I will trace the ways in which tropes from the genre are adapted within Indian cinema, and investigate how their textual strategies relate to national and international historical contexts. This approach will help illuminate the nature of the Masala Western, but I believe it will also help illuminate the transnational circulation and influence of the Spaghetti Western. While both the Masala and Spaghetti Westerns are often framed as local variations of an ostensibly American genre, I instead wish to explore the under-researched

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history in which elements from the Italian genre made their way to India and were adapted and transformed by filmmakers in the Hindi industry.

the masala western in context A number of popular Hindi films in the 1950s were influenced by the Italian neorealist films that were screened in India earlier that decade (Biswas 2007), but it was the ‘peplum’ sword-and-sandal genre, in the early 1960s, that represented the crucial moment when Italian cinema began to hold a significant position on Indian screens. As Valentina Vitali has identified, ‘in the Indian and in other markets, Italian peplums preceded Italian Westerns, James Bond, Hammer, and other exploitation imports by several years’ (Vitali 2010: 147). In 1961 alone, the peplums Goliath and the Dragon (La vendetta di Ercole, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1960), Carthage in Flames (Cartagine in fiamme, Carmine Gallone, 1960), The Last Days of Pompeii (Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, Mario Bonnard, 1959), David and Goliath (David e Golia, Ferdinando Baldi, 1959) and Hercules Unchained (Ercole e la regina di Lidia, Pietro Francisci, 1958) all appeared on Indian screens, and not only were these films relatively successful with the Indian audiences, but they also inspired local producers to create their own sword-and-sandal films such as Samson (Nanabhai Bhatt, 1964) and Hercules (Shriram, 1964). This cross-cultural influence was not limited to Italian works. Anustup Basu argues that Indian cinema has an extensive tradition of ‘cannibalising narratives, genres and spectacular set pieces from Hollywood, Europe and Hong Kong’ with local variations of James Bond-style spy films, martial arts films, safari adventures and science fiction films appearing from the 1970s onwards (Basu 2010: 62–3). Indeed, the choice of which titles were imported and appeared on Indian screens helped shape the kinds of borrowings that took place, and it is significant that the Italian Westerns that had the most success in India were those directed by Sergio Leone and those starring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer rather than the other cycles of Spaghetti Westerns (Prasad 1998: 156).3 As we will see, it was these films that were to have the most influence on the subsequent development of the Hindi-language Masala Western. The initial signs of influence from the Italian Western were in the ‘dacoit’ genre (a cycle of films focused on rural villages defending themselves against groups of armed robbers), taking its name from

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the shared Hindi, Urdu and Bengali word for bandit. While a series of dacoit films appeared throughout the 1960s, including Raj Kapoor’s Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai (1960), Dilip Kumar’s Gunga Jumna (1961) and Sunil Dutt’s Mujhe Jeene Do (1963), it was the Dharmendra star vehicle Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971) that was to signal a shift towards a new generic structure that combined elements from the dacoit genre with tropes borrowed from the imported Spaghetti Westerns. While the plotline was relatively standard ‘dacoit’ territory, with Ajit (Dharmendra) tasked with protecting a village from the malevolent bandit Jabbar Singh (Vinod Khanna), it is notable that it was the soundtrack from the Leone Westerns that was being reworked rather than any distinctive iconographic or narratological elements. Although the soundtrack contained five songs written by composers Laxmikant–Pyarelal and sung by Lata Mangeshkar that fit with the dominant Hindi filmsong conventions of the period, the incidental music within the film was modelled more closely on Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks to the Dollars Trilogy. Combining the distinctive guitar strumming, church bells, and strings arrangement established by Morricone as a recognised signifier for the Spaghetti Western, the incidental soundtrack to Mera Gaon Mera Desh signalled the introduction of tropes from the Spaghetti Western into Indian cinema. It was to be three years later, when the low-budget B-Western Khote Sikkay was released, that these transnational borrowings from the Italian genre would start to become more firmly established within the Indian context.

Khote Sikkay (1974) While still dealing in many of the recognised tropes of the dacoit genre, director Narendra Bedi’s Khote Sikkay went further in incorporating narrative and stylistic elements from the Spaghetti Western, and especially the Sergio Leone Dollars Trilogy. Lalitha Gopalan has noted that the Indian Westerns from Khote Sikkay onwards paid ‘extensive homage to Leone by borrowing from the soundtrack and mise-en-scène of his films’ (Gopalan 2002: 73), and it is significant that Bedi not only re-creates plotpoints from the Leone Western but also emulates their distinctive visual aesthetic. As we can see in Figure 9.1, the characteristic staging and composition that marked Leone’s cinematography and became synonymous with the Spaghetti Western genre were adopted by Bedi – incorporating close ups of foreground objects, such as the legs of a gunslinger, to frame the ensuing action.

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Figure 9.1: Khote Sikkay (1974) adopts Sergio Leone-style composition.

We should be clear, however, that there were some significant differences between these Masala Westerns and the model offered by the Dollars Trilogy. While the Spaghetti Western was often critiqued for being decontextualised and dehistoricised – lacking ‘cultural roots’ in the American historical context – Frayling and others have emphasised the depth of Sergio Leone’s research into American history and the ways in which the films were even ‘concerned with aspects of American history in which Hollywood had rarely shown interest’ (Frayling 2006: 127). On the other hand, the Masala Western borrows much of the iconography of the American West – from Stetson hats and ponchos through to saloon bars and desert ranches – yet it utilises these tropes within a decidedly different context. There is no attempt to refer to American frontier history – Khote Sikkay, as with all the Masala Westerns discussed in this chapter, is set in present-day India – and these symbols of the West are used in a manner far removed from their nineteenthcentury American history. In this respect, the Masala Western is comparable to the Soviet genre of the ‘Eastern’ – ‘a film of the Western genre set in Central Asia’ (Bohlinger 2014: 378) that incorporates tropes from the Western genre but transposes them into another quite distinct historical context. Unlike with the majority of the Italian Westerns, there is little attempt to re-create the imagery of the American West or indeed to

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create implicit connections to the American production context through the use of American actors. These Masala Westerns were not designed for the export market but instead were aimed at domestic audiences, and this plays a structuring role in shaping the kinds of borrowings they incorporate. On a plot level, Khote Sikkay certainly supports Salman Rushdie’s description of Indian cinema endlessly reinventing The Magnificent Seven. The film focuses on a rural village that is being threatened by a dacoit gang led by Janga (Ajit). The villagers decide to recruit a group of five petty criminals to band together and help defend the village. As with the many variations of this story, from Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai through to Sammo Hung’s Seven Warriors (1989), the group of men help the villagers to prepare for battle and, working together, finally manage to defeat the dacoits. Khote Sikkay does make some changes to this plot structure, yet it is significant that the majority of these changes are less about localising the content to fit with Indian cinematic conventions than incorporating additional elements appropriated from Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più, 1965). The mysterious and enigmatic character Dilbar (Feroz Khan) joins forces with the villagers in order to get his own revenge against Janga, who, we learn early in the film, had murdered his father. Throughout the film Dilbar is carrying his father’s musical pocketwatch, and the film concludes with a re-creation of the finale from For a Few Dollars More where Colonel Douglas Mortimer enacts revenge for the death of his sister while the music from the pocket-watch plays. Played by Feroz Khan, who had earlier appeared in the Indian ‘peplum’ Samson, the central character of Dilbar is modelled on a combination of Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’ and Lee Van Cleef’s ‘Man in Black’ – both in terms of costuming with his distinctive black poncho, and also in his characterisation as an enigmatic revenge-driven gunslinger. Feroz Khan would subsequently build up a reputation for playing variations on this character in his following films Kaala Sona (1975), Chunaoti (Satpal, 1980) and Kachche Heere (Narendra Bedi, 1982), and it was these roles that would help establish him as the actor most clearly associated with the Masala Western genre. Beyond the narrative and iconographic borrowings evident in Khote Sikkay, perhaps the most significant way in which the film incorporates tropes from the Leone Western is in the soundtrack. While the earlier Laxmikant–Pyarelal score for Mera Gaon Mera Desh had paid homage to Morricone in the incidental music, the soundtrack for Khote Sikkay used the original Morricone compositions themselves.

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Despite Indian composer Rahul Dev Burman being credited for the music in the film, director Jawani Diwani elected to supplement the original Burman compositions such as ‘Jeevan Mein Tu Darna Nahi’ with appropriated sections from the For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly soundtracks.4 This is relatively rare within Indian cinema – many melodies in Hindi filmsongs are clearly inspired by imported film soundtracks and pop songs, but there are not many films that actually incorporate the music itself. This practice is closer to a phenomenon that Lee Broughton describes in Turkish popular cinema of the 1970s, where very few films had original scores and directors ‘would instead simply employ music appropriated from earlier films’ (Broughton 2014b: 109). Just as a Turkish film like Korkusuz Kaptan Swing (Tunç Basaran, 1971) utilises the Riz Ortolani soundtrack from Day of Anger (I giorni dell’ira, Tonino Valerii, 1967), director Narendra Bedi made use of the actual Morricone soundtracks from the Dollars Trilogy to accompany his Masala Western Khote Sikkay. It would be tempting to dismiss this as a purely cynical and imitative act – freely appropriating the narrative, iconography and soundtrack from imported Westerns with little regard for originality or copyright – but it is important that we recognise the meanings that these borrowed tropes had within that historical moment. Madhuja Mukherjee has argued that these revenge-driven Westerns had a particular cultural resonance at that time in India: ‘These films were premised on questions of justice, which, as apparent from other Indian films produced between the 1950s and 1980s, was essentially denied by the newly instituted secular law of the country’ (Mukherjee 2014). While Khote Sikkay is adapting borrowed tropes from the Spaghetti Western, this is not to say that the film avoids dealing with the political ramifications that these images and themes had within their Indian context. Indeed, the fact that the film is set in present-day India rather than nineteenth-century America meant that it could utilise these generic tropes to comment indirectly on the contemporary situation. When Dilbar is asked whether he thinks the villagers themselves will help defend their village, he frames his response in relation to India itself: India’s greatest virtue is altruism, and her greatest shame is discord . . . When our country is attacked, they say the army is there. When there is hooliganism in cities and banditry in villages, they say the police are there. Their own lives are dearer to them than their country’s life.

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Released during a period of unrest within India marked by ‘communal riots, police brutality and violent secessionist movements’ (Gopalan 2002: 9), Dilbar’s speech functions to link the communitarian principles underpinning the adapted Seven Samurai narrative structure with the broader crisis of legitimacy within the Indian state. During the period leading up to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a ‘state of emergency’ in 1975, Khote Sikkay is not only adapting and reworking elements borrowed from the Western genre but is self-consciously drawing attention to the resonances between these imported texts and the political dynamics within the contemporary context. Austin Fisher has argued that the Spaghetti Western ‘takes aspects of the Hollywood genre with appeal to local tastes – banditry, stylish gunfighters, disrespect for authority and explosive violence – and enlarges them, while dispensing with their ideological accompaniments’ (Fisher 2011: 73). What we see in Khote Sikkay are the ways in which these tropes from the Spaghetti Western, uncoupled from their ideological associations with the American frontier, are then free to be taken up by filmmakers within other contexts and used for other purposes. It is important that we recognise the ways in which these borrowed tropes are being invested with meanings that resonate with the particularities of that specific historical moment. Nevertheless, there is a balance to be struck here. Khote Sikkay is not an ‘inauthentic’ imitation of the Western, but neither can it convincingly be described as an ‘Indian-isation’ of the genre. It is very much a hybrid cultural product that is structured by the presence of Italian and American cinemas on Indian screens at that historical moment, and it makes use of narratives, iconography and music borrowed from a range of imported sources. Drawing attention to the fluid ways in which cultures adapt and rework circulating cinematic tropes, investing them with new and unanticipated resonances, we see here the complexities underpinning the Masala Western genre, and cross-cultural exchange more generally.

Kaala Sona One year later, Khote Sikkay was followed by Kaala Sona – another B-Western featuring Feroz Khan alongside Danny Denzongpa. While Khote Sikkay had taken The Magnificent Seven and For a Few Dollars More as its primary models for adaptation, Kaala Sona incorporated elements borrowed from a wider selection of imported genres including Italian Westerns, spy films and surrealist fantasy. Director Ravikant Nagaich is perhaps best known for his James Bond-style spy films such as Farz (1967), Keemat (1973) and Surakshaa (1979), and

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here he elected to integrate elements from the imported Westerns and spy films together into a B-movie pulp hybrid. The film opens as a light comedy set in present-day India centred on Rakesh (Feroz Khan), a wealthy bachelor playboy who is fending off various female admirers. Ten minutes into the film, however, the genre abruptly shifts and Rakesh discovers that his father was murdered by a notorious dacoit named Poppy Singh and so he puts on his cowboy hat, mounts his horse and heads off to the rural mountains of Himachal Pradesh to enact revenge. Joining forces with the rival gang leader Shera (Danny Dezpongpa), Rakesh finally tracks down Poppy Singh’s compound – which is designed like a Bond villain lair complete with an underground bunker – and the genre shifts again to a spy film, concluding with a series of spectacle-filled action sequences. Reminiscent of Anil Saari’s claim that the popular Indian film is ‘an eclectic, assimilative, imitative and plagiaristic creature that is constantly rebelling against its influences’ (Saari 1985: 16), Kaala Sona adopts much of the iconography from the Western but transforms and recontextualises it. As we can see in Figure 9.2, the pairing of Feroz Khan and Danny Dezpongpa evokes the relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto yet in a markedly different context. Within the narrative, Rakesh is not an American cowboy but a wealthy playboy in mid-1970s India, and while Shera is dressed to resemble a Native

Figure 9.2: Shera (Danny Dezpongpa) and Rakesh (Feroz Khan) evoke the Tonto–Lone Ranger relationship in Kaala Sona (1975).

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American and referred to as ‘chief’, it is clear that this is simply a mode of dress and he is actually ethnically Indian. Unlike other international westerns (such as the East German DEFA-Indianerfilm) that feature Native Americans prominently, it is noticeable that the Indian Westerns actually rarely feature Native American ‘Indians’ as characters. Shera in Kaala Sona is one of the few characters in a Masala Western to adopt Native American dress and it is telling that no narrative justification is provided for this aesthetic choice. Moreover, while the film borrows many of the stylistic and thematic tropes associated with the Western genre – the ‘banditry, stylish gunfighters, disrespect for authority and explosive violence’ cited earlier by Fisher – there is a gendered aspect to these borrowings as the female characters in the Masala Westerns rarely adopt the clothing associated with the American frontier and are instead framed as more traditionally ‘Indian’. Indeed, while Feroz Khan may be dressed as a gunslinger and Danny Dezpongpa may be dressed as a Native American, it is notable that female characters such as Bela (Farida Jalal) are dressed in a sari and headdress, and even those female characters that do adopt the clothing of the American West, such as Durga (Parveen Babi), generally change into traditional Indian dress during the song sequences. Tejaswini Ganti has noted that the three main ways in which Indian filmmakers adapt plotlines from imported films is by ‘adding “emotions”, expanding the narrative, and inserting songs’ (Ganti 2004: 77). These three strategies are very much connected in Kaala Sona as the central revenge narrative is supplemented by two romance subplots where Rakesh falls in love with Durga, and Shera falls in love with her sister Bela. These expansions to the narrative allow for the inclusion of a series of romance songs, including ‘Sun Sun Kasam Se’ in which Bela attempts to seduce a reluctant Shera, and ‘Naacho Nashemein Chur’, which incorporates an elaborate song-and-dance routine featuring all four leads. Unlike the Italian Western, which Dimitris Eleftheriotis has noted often relies on an ‘erasure of the national identity of the heroes’ (Eleftheriotis 2001: 126), the characters in the Masala Western are always Indian – even when they are dressed as a cowboy or a Native American. One of the key factors here is that the majority of Masala Westerns, especially B-Westerns like Kaala Sona, were designed largely for audiences in India with little attention to potential export markets. Similar to the Westerns produced in contexts such as Brazil and Turkey, the Masala Western was intended primarily for the domestic market and this dynamic shaped the methods through which certain elements from

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the Western genre were incorporated or disregarded. Unlike the Italian Spaghetti Western, which was often designed with an export market in mind, the Masala Western was less concerned with erasing the national signifiers of its production context.

Sholay While Kaala Sona and Khote Sikkay were both low-budget B-Westerns, the genre was to be incorporated into a major release with Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975). This was India’s first 70 mm film with stereophonic sound, and while the official budget has never been confirmed, it is estimated to have been nearly 30 million rupees – many times larger than the average budget at the time (Chopra 2000: 143). The film took two and half years to produce and brought together established star Dharmendra with emerging talent Amitabh Bachchan in iconic roles that would help define their screen personas for decades to come. On its initial release the film was dismissed by many leading Indian critics as a ‘curry Western’ and criticised for being ‘superficial, puerile, sentimental and trivial’ (Dissanayake and Sahai 1992: viii), yet it has subsequently developed into one of the most financially successful and critically acclaimed Indian films of all time. The film is centred on two criminals, Veera (Dharmendra) and Jai (Amitabh Bachchan), who are hired by retired police officer Thakur to capture the dacoit Gabbar Singh, who has been threatening the small village of Ramgarh. Alongside a romance subplot in which Veera and Jai flirt with the villagers Basanti (Hema Malini) and Radha (Jaya Bhaduri), the film moves towards a climactic showdown in which Jai is killed and Veeru and Thakur get their revenge on the villainous Gabbar Singh. As should be clear, Sholay shares a similar narrative structure to Khote Sikkay, Kaala Sona and other B-Westerns of the period, although we should remember that many of these elements were themselves borrowed from their shared sources in the Italian Spaghetti Western and the earlier dacoit films. For many critics it was precisely this generic and cultural hybridity that explained its appeal: reworking ‘a number of elements – romance, comedy, feudal comedy drama – drawn from diverse sources – Japanese samurai epics, American and Italian westerns, Indian B-movies – into a scattered, shattered epic’ (Banerjea 2005: 180). Although Sholay is the most widely-seen Masala Western, it is notable that the film does not include much of the recognised imagery from the Western genre. Unlike Khote Sikkay and Kaala Sona in

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which we have characters dressed in clothes appropriated from the American West, Sholay downplays this iconographic connection and instead locates the film within the mountainous region of Ramanagara, outside of Bangalore, and incorporates more distinctly localised elements into its reworking of Western tropes – such as the villagers celebrating the Holi festival of colours in the extravagant song sequence ‘Holi Ke Din’ before the arrival of the dacoit gang. Given the lack of visual signifiers of the American West, it is arguable that the film more closely resembles the earlier dacoit films such as Mera Gaon Mera Desh – which tells the story of a one-armed retired military man who reforms a petty criminal and uses him to protect the village against dacoits – than the emerging Masala Western genre. Nevertheless, it is notable that the film still incorporates elements borrowed from a range of international Westerns. The broader narrative structure is drawing on the model established in The Magnificent Seven, where our protagonists are hired to defend a rural village against bandits, and the film explicitly incorporates the cinematography and structure of the train robbery sequence from North West Frontier (J. Lee Thompson, 1959), models the villain Gabbar Singh on El Indio from For a Few Dollars More (see Figure 9.3), and, in the flashback to the massacre of Thakur’s family, closely re-creates the massacre of the McBain family in Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, Sergio Leone, 1968) right down to the shot composition and framing.5 Despite these intertextual borrowings, the film is nevertheless positioned by critics and fans as a specifically ‘Indian’ variation on the

Figure 9.3: The villain in Sholay (1975), modelled on El Indio from For a Few Dollars More (1965).

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Western genre. As with the wider critical strategy discussed earlier in this chapter, this ‘curry Western’ has been defended against claims of inauthenticity through reference to its perceived national qualities. For example, in their series of interviews with audiences for the film, Wimal Dissanayake and Malti Sahai cite a number of fans who celebrate the film for its ‘Indian-ness’, asserting: ‘Some of the ideas and episodes in Sholay are definitely borrowed but the end product is very Indian’ (Dissanayake and Sahai 1992: 125). While Dissanayake and Sahai themselves note that there is actually ‘very little social specificity inscribed in the filmic text’ (Dissanayake and Sahai 1992: 26), it is clear that Sholay is nevertheless framed as specifically ‘Indian’ owing to its mobilisation of the formal conventions of the Indian Masala film. Through the integration of song sequences, the development of romance subplots, and the expansion of backstory elements – especially in relation to family dynamics – the film balances the formal conventions of Hindi cinema with the narratological and iconographic elements borrowed from the American and Italian Western traditions. Sholay is perhaps best understood as engaging in what Vivian Lee has termed the ‘global vernacular’ – a mode of cinema ‘through which the lingua franca of popular cinema is no longer the uncontested property of Western (American) cinema’ (Lee 2011: 120). Incorporating influences from a range of sources and adapting them together into a hybrid cultural form, Sholay may be utilising elements commonly associated with an American genre, yet the series of intertextual borrowings underpinning this hybridity complicates any claims of national affiliation. Sholay itself went on to be very influential within the Indian industry. This was not only in terms of its influence on subsequent Masala Westerns such as Joshilaay (Sibte Hassan Rizvi, 1989) and China Gate (Rajkumar Santoshi, 1998), but also in the manner in which the film engaged in processes of cultural exchange and transformation. As Lalitha Gopalan notes, the film ‘spurred an entire generation of film-makers to borrow from globally circulating genres, yet also to reincorporate conventions from Indian popular cinema’ (Gopalan 2002: 11). Sholay, therefore, functioned not only as an iconic Masala Western but also as a model for Indian cinema to combine elements borrowed from international genres with the established formal conventions of Indian cinema.

Wanted: Dead or Alive This dynamic between transnational borrowings and local conventions was further complicated in subsequent years. After the considerable

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success of Sholay, the Masala Western developed in a number of different directions, and while it did not flourish in a manner comparable to the Spaghetti Western – in either number of films or in the variety of subgenres – the Masala Western nevertheless offered a pool of generic elements that could be drawn upon and adapted by subsequent filmmakers. Carrying on the processes of hybridisation I have been describing in this chapter, the generic tropes of the Western were often combined with other popular genres to create new hybrid forms. A clear example of this is the 1984 ‘Disco-Western’ Wanted: Dead or Alive. Starring Mithun Chakraborty, who was at the peak of his career following the global success of Disco Dancer (Babbar Subhash, 1982), the film capitalises upon the trend in the early 1980s for Hindi films that incorporate elements of the disco sound and aesthetic. Composer Bappi Lahiri had earlier produced disco soundtracks for the spy film Surakksha (Ravikant Nagaich, 1979), the martial arts film Karate (Deb Mukherjee, 1983) and the family melodrama Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki (Babbar Subhash, 1984),6 and it is notable that all of these films starred Mithun Chakraborty in the lead role. At this point in their respective careers, Chakraborty and Lahiri were both very much associated with the introduction of disco music into the Hindi filmsong, and Wanted: Dead or Alive allowed them the opportunity to incorporate this synthesised disco sound into the Masala Western genre. Although the predominant source material for the early Masala Westerns was the Dollars Trilogy, Wanted: Dead or Alive was modelled more closely on the popular Terence Hill and Bud Spencer cycle. This was to be the first pairing of Mithun Chakraborty with Bollywood legend Shammi Kapoor – a pairing that would continue in the following years with Baadal (Anand Sagar, 1985) and Karamdaata (Shashilal K. Nair, 1986) – and their relationship in the film re-creates the distinctive Hill and Spencer comedic dynamic. Moreover, while the majority of Masala Westerns freely adapt and rework the iconography and plot from a range of films, Wanted: Dead or Alive takes almost all of its source material from a specific film: God Forgives . . . I Don’t! (Dio perdona . . . Io no!) – the 1967 Spaghetti Western directed by Giuseppe Colizzi. The film opens with the dacoit Kehar Singh (Om Shivpuri) on the run after murdering all the passengers on a train and stealing a fortune in gold. Gunslinger Arjun Vikram (Mithun Chakraborty) and undercover police officer Bheem Singh (Shammi Kapoor) are each attempting to track down Kehar Singh through their own methods, yet in the end join forces in order to defeat Singh and recover the gold.

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Although some minor changes are made to the narrative structure to incorporate a love triangle storyline with Neeta (Tina Munim), the film otherwise closely follows the plot of its source text. Furthermore, the film incorporates many of the specific iconographic details from God Forgives . . . I Don’t!, including Singh’s desert hideout which is modelled on a Mexican border village, the early card game sequence which takes place in a darkened saloon bar, and the ways in which villain Kehar Singh (Om Shivpuri) is made up to closely resemble Bill San Antonio (Frank Wolff) from the earlier film. If this had been purely a study of narrative structure and iconography, Wanted: Dead or Alive would very much resemble a shot-forshot remake of God Forgives . . . I Don’t!. Yet the incorporation of Lahiri’s disco soundtrack changes things markedly. In the first song sequence in the film, the love interest Neeta sings ‘Koi Lutera Dil Le ke Mera’ in an item number that combines tropes from the Western genre with disco iconography. Neeta is dressed in a denim shirt, scarf and cowboy boots and is dancing beneath a disco ball while behind her is a team of synchronised dancers in Stetson hats (Figure 9.4). In this case, the song has been worked into the plot so there is a narrative rationale for the sequence (Neeta is performing on stage in a saloon bar), yet the majority of the other song sequences more clearly break with a realist aesthetic of plausibility. The concluding song, ‘Jaani Jaani’, which functions almost as a dream sequence for the

Figure 9.4: Neeta (Tina Munim) performs in Wanted: Dead or Alive (1984).

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central characters, is representative of this shift. While Arjun is tied to a cross within the walls of Kehar Singh’s ranch, and all hope appears lost, Bheem and Neeta arrive together on a horsecart to rescue him. Playing guitar, trumpet and even a drumkit from the back of their horsecart, Bheem and Neeta sing a duet while Kehar Singh’s henchmen break into a synchronised dance routine. Framed as a fantasy sequence in which Arjun is able to escape, the song includes numerous changes of costume and instantaneous shifts of location, and while this is not unusual within popular Hindi cinema it is certainly at odds with the attempts at verisimilitude established earlier in the film. 7 Tejaswini Ganti has noted that ‘popular Indian cinema is very open and comfortable with the artifice that is at the heart of feature filmmaking. The visual style of popular Hindi films departs from continuity editing, naturalistic lighting, and realist mise-en-scene conventions’ (Ganti 2004: 84). It is precisely this departing from the realist conventions of Hollywood, and indeed Italian, cinema to incorporate song sequences such as ‘Jaani Jaani’ that most clearly marks the adaptation choices in Wanted: Dead or Alive as local. Yet it is somewhat ironic that the elements that most clearly evoke an Indian localisation of the Western genre – the song-and-dance sequences that break with verisimilitude – are themselves modelled on the imported genre of disco music and therefore form part of yet another transnational history of cultural borrowings and reworkings. Reflecting the intrinsically hybrid nature of all cultural production, these exchanges point to the necessity of a transnational perspective that attends to the diverse ways in which cultural forms travel and are made use of across a range of contexts.

conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have proposed that the Masala Western, and the Western genre more generally, function as a privileged site for interrogating transnational processes of cultural hybridisation. Utilising my memetic model, I have traced the ways in which specific tropes from the Western genre – especially those associated with the Spaghetti Western – have been adapted and transformed across this Hindi cycle, and I have argued for an approach to film genre that engages with what Robert Stam describes as ‘the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin’ (Stam 2000: 66).

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There is a danger that such an approach can become something of an intertextual parlour game in which scholars attempt to map out all of these endless references and borrowings, so this method needs to be balanced with close attention to the ways in which these strategies relate to specific industrial and cultural contexts. These processes of hybridisation are complex, overlapping and fluid, so it is important that we grapple with both the macro- and micro-level contexts within which these borrowings take place. Perhaps we are condemned, as James Clifford suggests, to ‘oscillate between two metanarratives: one of homogenization, the other of emergence; one of loss, the other of invention’ (Clifford 1988: 17). Nonetheless, this chapter has attempted to utilise the case study of the Masala Western in order to complicate the ways in which we frame the analysis of international genres. To return to the ‘Meera Joota Hai Japani’ song with which I started, there is often an implicit claim underpinning discussions of Westerns produced in India that the stories may be Japanese, the iconography may be American, the music on the soundtrack may be Italian, and yet, at heart, these films are still Indian. Despite the overlapping, intersecting history of cultural hybridisation underpinning this cultural form, there is a desire to frame these films as expressions of a distinctive national identity. As I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter, these transnational processes of borrowing and exchange are more complex than such a nation-centric framework would suggest.

notes 1. In my monograph The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations of American Film and Television (Smith 2015), I provide further explication of this analytical model. 2. This is certainly not the case with all contributors (the respective chapters by Ivo Ritzer and Chelsea Wessels both grapple with these transnational complexities), yet it is the dominant trend. 3. I should note here that American Westerns were also distributed in India – indeed, Mackenna’s Gold (J. Lee Thompson, 1969) was one of the top-grossing Hollywood films at the Indian box office – yet nevertheless it was the Spaghetti Western that was to have the most influence on the development of the Masala Western genre. 4. These were not the only borrowings within the soundtrack as the incidental music in the penultimate sequence also reworks Nino Rota’s Love Theme from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972). 5. In addition to these iconographic borrowings, the item number ‘Mehbooba Mehbooba’ adapts the melody from the Greek singer Demis Roussos’ pop hit ‘Say You Love Me’.

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6. Bappi Lahiri’s soundtrack to Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki (1984) was particularly notorious as the filmsong ‘Jeena Bhi Kya Hai Jeena Teri’ reworked from Michael Jackson’s ‘Billy Jean’, while the dance sequence re-created John Landis’s music video for Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. 7. It should be noted that there is a break with verisimilitude halfway through the film when Shammi Kapoor sings the love song ‘Tumsa Nahin Dekha’ – a clear intertextual reference to his earlier ‘Chaahe Koyi Mujhe’ from the film Junglee (Subodh Mukherjee, 1961) – as the location shifts from a dusty desert to a snowy mountain in order to better replicate the aesthetics of that earlier filmsong.

references Banerjea, Koushik (2005), ‘Fight club: aesthetics, hybridisation and the construction of rogue masculinities in Sholay and Deewaar’, in Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha (eds), Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, New Delhi: Sage, pp. 163–85. Basu, Anustup (2010), Bollywood in the Age of New Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Binford, Mira Reym (1988), ‘Innovation and imitation in the contemporary Indian cinema’, in Wimal Dissanayake (ed.), Cinema and Cultural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India and China, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 77–92. Biswas, Moinak (2007), ‘In the mirror of an alternative globalism: the neorealist encounter in India’, in Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson (eds), Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, pp. 72–90. Bohlinger, Vincent (2014), ‘ “The East is a delicate matter”: White Sun of the Desert and the Soviet Western’, in Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds), International Westerns: Re-Locating The Frontier, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, pp. 373–93. Broughton, Lee (2014a), ‘Upsetting the genre’s gender stereotypes: Ramsbottom Rides Again (1956) and the British out West’, in Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds), International Westerns: Re-Locating The Frontier, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, pp. 121–41. Broughton, Lee (2014b), ‘Captain Swing the Fearless: a Turkish film adaptation of an Italian Western comic strip’, in Lucia Nagib and Anne Jerslev (eds), Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 102–18. Buscombe, Edward (2012), ‘Is the Western about American history?’, in Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter Schulze (eds), Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western, Marburg: Schüren. Clifford, James (1988), The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chopra, Anupama (2000), Sholay: The Making of a Classic, New Delhi: Penguin. Cooke, Grayson, Warwick Mules and David Baker (eds) (2014), ‘The other Western’, Transformations, 24 [online], (last accessed 2 September 2015). Dawkins, Richard (1989), The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Dissanayake, Wimal and Malti Sahai (1992), Sholay: A Cultural Reading, New Delhi: Wiley. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris (2001), Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks, London: Continuum. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher (2006), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: I. B. Tauris. Ganti, Tejaswini (2004), Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, London: Routledge. Gopalan, Lalitha (2002), Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema, London: BFI. Iverson, Heath (ed.) (2013), ‘Commies and Indians: the political Western beyond Cold War frontiers’, Frames Cinema Journal, 4 [online], (last accessed 2 September 2015). Kavoori, Anandam P. (2009), The Logics of Globalization: Studies in International Communication, Plymouth: Lexington Books. Klein, Thomas, Ivo Ritzer and Peter Schulze (eds) (2012), Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western, Marburg: Schüren. Lee, Vivian P. Y. (2011), ‘J-Horror and Kimchi Western: mobile genres in East Asian cinemas’, in Vivian P. Y. Lee (ed.), East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 118–44. Miller, Cynthia and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds) (2014), International Westerns: Re-locating the Frontier, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Mukherjee, Madhuja (2014), ‘The singing cowboys: Sholay and the significance of (Indian) curry Westerns within post-colonial narratives’, Transformations, 24 [online], (last accessed 2 September 2015). Nayar, Sheila (1997), ‘The values of fantasy: Indian popular cinema through Western scripts’, Journal of Popular Culture, 31: 1, 73–90. Prasad, M. Madhava (1998), Ideology of the Hindi Film, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Richards, Rashna Wadia (2011), ‘(Not) Kramer vs. Kumar: the contemporary Bollywood remake as glocal masala film’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 28: 4, 342–52. Ritzer, Ivo (2012), ‘When the West(ern) meets the East(ern): the western all’italiana and its Asian connections’, in Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter Schulze (eds), Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western, Marburg: Schüren. Rocha, Glauber (1970), ‘Beginning at zero: notes on cinema and society’, The Drama Review: TDR, 14: 2, 144–9. Rushdie, Salman (1991), Imaginary Homelands, New York: Viking. Rushdie, Salman (1988), The Satanic Verses, London: Vintage Books. Saari, Anil (1985), ‘Concepts of aesthetics and anti-aesthetics in the contemporary Hindi film’, in Beatrix Pfleiderer and Lothar Lutze (eds), The Hindi Film: Agent and Re-agent of Cultural Change, New Delhi: Manohar, pp. 16–28. Smith, Iain Robert (2015), The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations of American Film and Television, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stam, Robert (2000), ‘Beyond fidelity: the dialogics of adaptation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 54–76.

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Thomas, Rosie (1985), ‘Indian cinema: pleasures and popularity’, Screen, 26: 3–4, 116–31. Varma, Rashmi, ‘Provincializing the global city: from Bombay to Mumbai’, Social Text 22: 4 (2004): 65–89. Vitali, Valentina (2010), Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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part iv

Routes of Relocation, Transition and Appropriation

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chapter 10

For a Few Comic Strips More: Reinterpreting the Spaghetti Western through the Comic Book William Grady

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ffering a punchy satire on the racism prevalent in America’s colonial past, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) bound Blaxploitation cinema with the Spaghetti Western. The titular hero is rooted in Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), while Tarantino’s violent and parodic style draws upon the vision of the Old West derived from these Italian Westerns. However, drawing upon the outrageous hyperviolence and audacious humour of this film, one reviewer noted that it resembled a ‘comic book nightmare’ (Bradshaw 2013). What is interesting in this fleeting analogy is the implicit link drawn between the Spaghetti Western and the comic book. Indeed, critical approaches to the Spaghetti Western have often highlighted the presence of the comic in the make-up of these films. This correlation between forms was a binary underscored in the opening to Christopher Frayling’s book Spaghetti Westerns (1981). Focusing upon the visual style of the Spaghetti Western, Frayling concedes: ‘Many of the films, and especially those directed by Sergio Corbucci, relied on cutting effects derived from comic-strip graphics’ (Frayling 2006: viii). Likewise, he suggests that Spaghetti Western icons, like bizarre looking gunslingers, could be located in earlier comics such as ‘Hah Noon’, from Mad #9 (1954). Closing this brief analysis, Frayling highlights how the character of the Spaghetti Western has since become subsumed into later Western comic books, evidenced

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through the Lee Van Cleef-like bounty hunter featured in Morris and Goscinny’s bande dessinée (French comic) Lucky Luke: The Bounty Hunter (1972). Drawing upon this relationship, this chapter will take a similar approach to Frayling, who mediates between comic book influences upon the Spaghetti Western and the later reciprocal impact of these Westerns upon the comic book. It will open by demystifying some of the tacit references to the comic-like qualities of the Italian Westerns. This will provide context for the chapter’s exploration of the impact of these films upon the Western comic book, primarily achieved through a case study of the bande dessinée series, Blueberry (1963–2005), by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud. In a collection that looks to map the relocation and appropriation of the Spaghetti Western, this chapter will reinterpret these Italian productions through the comic book. It will elaborate upon the Spaghetti Western as a visual and thematic language that can be understood in relation to the comic book. Moreover, when considering how this language is replicated through the comics medium, the chapter will suggest that there is a form of transcultural adaptation at play, with certain non-Italian comics having reappropriated the anarchic spirit of these films to speak to a different nation’s socio-political milieu.

the spaghetti western and the comic book For the USA, the aspirational and heroic ideals of the Western genre had held a powerful rhetoric in culture.1 However, these very tenets of the Western would be challenged in the 1960s, which had seen the race riots, and the development of youth movements and counter-cultures at home, alongside the emergence of post-colonial nation states across the globe, and a war in Vietnam. In these complex and changing times the ideals and mythic concerns of the Western became deeply problematised, and a backlash ensued in various popular forms. First manifested in Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man (1964), this was joined by the liberal rethinking of the history of the West in Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), and in American films like The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) and Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson, 1970). This stark depiction of the brutality of the Old West was an emphatic reaction against the conservative mythology of the Western, which had become unpalatable for the nation in this period, ultimately fading away into the 1970s.2 However, these conditions were pertinent in setting a framework for the emergence of the Spaghetti Western.

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Largely popularised by Sergio Leone and his ‘Dollars Trilogy’, the Spaghetti Westerns offered a vision of the Old West unseen on its native shores. Replacing the geographical American West of Hollywood film, and instead shot in the barren Spanish desert, these Westerns provided a strange and alien vision of the Frontier terrain. At a basic level, these films reappropriated key icons, plots, and situations from the genre, draining them of their moral and mythic significance. However, through the foregrounding of parody, violence and sadism, which were meticulously detailed through intricate cinematic framing, an often-saturated and overloaded soundtrack and a motley crew of bizarre characters, the Spaghetti Westerns proved a distinct version of the genre. Of interest to this chapter is how both critics and scholars alike responded to certain facets of the Spaghetti Western, reading comiclike qualities in their presentation. As noted previously, Frayling briefly touched upon the cross-pollination between the comic book and the Spaghetti Western, at one point terming the violence of the Italian Westerns ‘comic strip’, and further analysis of the films of Corbucci read as offering a ‘comic-strip style’ (Frayling 2006: xv, 236). Beyond the work of Frayling, however, other studies into the Italian Western have noted a similar comic book nature. Jim Kitses describes the style of Sergio Leone’s Westerns as ‘comic-book-like’ (Kitses 2004: 253). Austin Fisher at times uses the term ‘comic book’ to describe both the violent nature of these films, or rather the ‘violent comic action’, as well as their slapstick humour, or ‘comic book exuberance’ (Fisher 2011: 157, 117). Gaston Haustrate locates the comic strip ‘fêtes sanglantes’ (celebration of blood/gore) in the Italian Western, suggesting such violence provided a counter-myth of the American Western (Haustrate 1971, cited in Frayling 2006: 125), whereas Sergio Corbucci’s films were described as ‘jokey, comic-strip movies’ when reviewed in Cahiers du Cinéma, emphasising the shallowness of Corbucci’s work next to the emergent politically infused ‘Zapata Spaghetti’ (Frayling 2000: 309–10). Alongside the aforementioned analogy drawn in a review of Tarantino’s film, these comments seem superficial, and somewhat abrasive, without getting to the core of the relationship between comics’ form and the Spaghetti Western. Yet the use of the term ‘comic’3 as a descriptive raises the question, what is comic book about the Spaghetti Western? What is apparent is that there are two variations in these comments – one that suggests visual or stylistic similarities between the forms, and one that notes comic book influences upon the content of these films (such as violence and humour). Therefore, it may be instructive to dwell upon these two notions in negotiating an answer to the question above.

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Considering first of all the visual style of these films, Frayling touches upon visual similarities between ‘cutting effects’ in the Spaghetti Western and comics sequencing, evidenced through four panels from an Italian Western comic strip (Frayling 2006: viii). The extract depicts a villain who is shot by a six-shooter as he looms menacingly over his female victim. While Frayling does not explicitly engage with the strip, it can be argued that through the image sequence which details close-ups of faces and actions (such as the grasping hand of the villain, and the firing six-shooter), combined with minimal dialogue which dictates a fast reading pace from panel to panel, parallels can be drawn between the cuts and visual layout of the Spaghetti Western and the composition of the comic book. Such a notion will be returned to when reading the impact of the Spaghetti Western upon the comic; however, the distinct visual style of the Spaghetti Western and its correlation with the comic may be explored further through the work of Leone. Leone’s cinematography spoke of his penchant for spectacle, and effected intricate spatial strategies and highly conscious framing of the action surrounding his gunfights. The director’s lens would hold everything within the shot in deep focus, a token of his fastidious eye for detail. However, one could certainly draw parallels between his deep focus lens and the comic book – a perspective that is put forward by the assistant director on Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966), Fabrizio Gianni. Gianni suggests that comics in Italy were a hugely popular source of reading material, especially the Italian Western comic, Tex Willer (from 1948). He conceded that in spite of the filming difficulties on set, Leone tried to replicate the comic book through the capture of wide landscapes with everything set in focus.4 Indeed, the visual language of the comic had been ingrained in Leone from an early age. As Frayling notes in his biography of the director, the stories in the comics were secondary to the ‘graphics’, which were always found to be ‘much more interesting’ (Frayling 2000: 6). The influence of comics on the Spaghetti Western can be felt in other respects. After meeting with Sergio Leone, Jijé, creator of the noted French Western comic Jerry Spring (1954–77), would be a regular visitor to the set of My Name is Nobody (Il mio nome è Nessuno, Tonino Valerii, 1973), and even tasked with making a comic version of the film – a project soon abandoned (Hamann 2002: 24). Moreover, the form became an influential source material in other filmmakers’ work. As noted previously, some critics make references to Sergio Corbucci’s ‘comic-strip’ style, but the comic book was also a key influence

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on the content of his films too. Indeed, the taciturn hero who drags a coffin behind him in Django (1966) was an idea taken from a comic book that Corbucci had picked up from a newsstand in Rome.5 However, this unusual comic book gunslinger can be read as an extension of Corbucci’s weird vision of the Old West, as the director often pronounced a taste for bizarre elements in his films. For instance, Django foregrounded a type of hyperbolic violence, seen as the comic-bookinspired hero pulls out a Gatling Gun from the coffin he drags around, wiping out a full army platoon, all the while remaining unscathed. Likewise, Corbucci’s use of parody was taken to extremes, with Western clichés like the taciturn gunslinger becoming a mute with a scarred neck in The Great Silence (Il grande Silenzio, Sergio Corbucci, 1968). The eccentric dark humour and the exaggerated violence that mark Corbucci’s work, and, more broadly, other Spaghetti Westerns are often bound to comic book analogy (see the aforementioned quotations from Fisher, Frayling and Haustrate). The use of ‘comic book’ as a descriptive in such cases can be understood as a throwaway reference to the simplicity of the comics form. Indeed, the American newspaper strips of the nineteenth century were known for their caricature/cartoon style, slapstick humour, and marginally intelligible pidgin English, which appealed to an emerging literate lower class. From this, the comics form would grow to become inherently subversive and hyperbolic as the narrative form developed in the twentieth century.6 While the form’s history was marked by periods of decline and renewed innovation (especially in the final quarter of the twentieth century through adult underground comix and the birth of the graphic novel), comics until the late 1960s were produced almost exclusively for children.7 The comics’ ‘innocuousness, naivety and juvenility’, Sabin generalises, are ‘characteristics that most people associate with them today’ (Sabin 2010: 23). Therefore, critics’ use of the term ‘comic’ to describe elements of the Spaghetti Western may draw upon such characteristics – a reference to the form’s tendency to deal with hyperbolic violence and audacious humour on a level of childlike simplicity, often drained of moral complexity. However, drawing such comic book analogies with instances of absurdity that mark the Spaghetti Western does not grasp at the core of a more interesting connection the Italian Western bears with the comic. At a basic level of comparison, this connection can be read through the distinction between Hollywood’s West and the West of the comic book and the Spaghetti Western. As Lusted suggests, Hollywood’s ‘popular representation of the West is The West to most people’ (Lusted 2003: 9). Indeed, while the Western is a fictional landscape of stories

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with a resonant vocabulary which refers to a historical moment – filmed on location in the American West, and complete with American actors, and authentic attire and props – the Hollywood Western delivered a photorealistic vision of America’s mythic past. However, in contrast with the Hollywood Western, even in the case of the most detailed and realistic comics artist’s illustrated imaginings of the genre, the artwork is intruded upon with speech balloons, and comics’ language such as the ‘BLAM’ from the six-shooter, and the ‘SMACK’ from the cowboy fistfight. Such language can impeach the artist’s vision, drawing the reader’s attention to the fictional and constructed Western space of the comic book.8 Likewise, the Spaghetti Westerns, which were often made up of an international cast, and shot in the Spanish desert, provided an unfamiliar vision of the American West. This was heightened further by stylistic elements, such as the swooping zoom-in shots from the camera, alongside obvious over-dubbing of the foreign cast members, which could arguably remind an audience of the artificiality of these Western productions. These formal details highlight the hollow façade of this reconstructed Western space that both forms of the genre inhabit. However, beneath the façade of this imagined Western space, comics creators and Italian filmmakers alike were able to infuse revisions and embellishments into the formal vocabulary of the genre, making this reconstructed Western space much more alien than the traditional West. Regarding the Spaghetti Western, Jim Kitses loosely touches upon this kind of bizarre Old Western space through his study of Sergio Leone’s films. He picks upon Leone’s disorientating extreme and dreamlike contrasts in his cinematography; an iconic style which creates an expressionist spectacle for the taciturn hero, the hysteric villains, and other absurd characters which frequent the film world (Kitses 2004: 255), continuing that such a surreal vision of the American West ‘keeps the audience off balance, making the familiar genre strange’ (Kitses 2004: 253). While Kitses focuses upon Leone’s West, which he describes as a form of ‘making strange’, this can readily be extended to more broadly incorporate the world that the Spaghetti Western inhabits. This is a world that is awash with absurdity, bizarre characters, and resistant visions that challenged the status quo of the traditional Western. Building upon the aforementioned exaggerated violence and dark humour of Corbucci’s films, instances of hyperbole marked other Spaghetti Westerns. The ‘Sartana’ Westerns were known for their trick weaponry and gadgets. Light the Fuse . . . Sartana is Coming (Una nuvola di polvere . . . un grido di morte . . . arriva Sartana, Giuliano Carnimeo, 1970), sees a full-size church organ transform into a cannon. The subsequent artillery fire from the organ pipes massacres a regiment of Mexicans. Sergio Leone’s gunfights were also often marked by peculiar

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sequences, from the duel in For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più, 1965) in which Mortimer is able to shoot Manco’s hat from his head from a long distance, to Cheyenne comically luring a villain to his death by shooting at him through his own boot which he lowers from above the train window in Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, 1968). Moreover, the various ‘Trinity’ Westerns (which starred Terence Hill and Bud Spencer) heavily foregrounded the eccentric humour that the Spaghetti Westerns were known for. For instance, in Trinity Is Still My Name (Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità, Enzo Barboni, 1971), the barroom standoff scene descends into a humorous slapping match between Trinity and his foe. However, this unusual vision of the American West was nothing new, and long before the Spaghetti Western the comic book had already detailed its own peculiar vision of the Old Frontier. Maurice Horn argues that ‘if the medium is the message, then the message of the comics, with their flouting of the rules of traditional art and of civilized language, can only be subversion’ (Horn 1976: 50). Indeed, in the hands of the comic book creator, the Western became a site of surreal and anarchic possibilities. As early as the 1930s, the comic strip vehemently parodied the genre’s reliance on racial stereotypes. Strips like Little Joe (Ed Leffingwell, 1933–72), often humorously characterised the archetypal white cowboy as moronic next to the cunning Native American, who often outwitted these would-be exploiters on each encounter. These instances of Western parody and satire could be located in later strips like Stan Lynde’s Rick O’Shay (1958–81), which continued this humorous tradition with characters like the banker, Mort Gage, and a child named Quyat Burp (an obvious play on Frontier hero Wyatt Earp). Yet the illustrated nature of the comic opened up the form to eccentricity, allowing for the exploration of wacky possibilities unexplored in other forms of the genre. For instance, T. K. Ryan’s irreverent anti-Western strip, Tumbleweeds (1965–2007), located the iconoclastic fervour surrounding the genre in the 1960s through burlesque humour and a caricatured Old West, whereas Magazine Enterprises’ Ghost Rider (Dick Ayers, 1950–4) provided supernatural visions of the Frontier through the adventures of a phantom gunslinger. Meanwhile, Charlton Comics extended this use of unlikely protagonists with Black Fury (1955–6), which narrated adventures in the Old West from the perspective of a horse. Such subversions to the generic space may draw upon Verano’s suggestion that the comic book inhabits the world of the ‘fictional signifier’, which can offer hyperbolic possibilities unfixed from our own reality (Verano 2006: 326). However, such subversions may also be read in tandem with Kitses’ ‘making strange’. This may take away from the

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throwaway description ‘comic’, and point at a more interesting connection between both forms of the genre, which inhabit the West of the imagination – a strange and exotic Western space rich in an unusual mix of parody, eccentricity, melodramatics, and unrealistic action and bizarre violence. In these terms, phantom gunslingers can exist, church organs can second as cannons, and it is possible to shoot a hat from someone’s head from a distance. With this context in mind, it can then be argued that there is a much more vital negotiation between the comic and the Spaghetti Western than what critics in the past have tacitly referred to – from informing visual style (as Gianni suggests about Leone’s deep focus lens), to its hyperbolic content (in the case of Corbucci’s unusual comic book inspired gunslinger). Critics have at times likened such eccentric content to the moral simplicity of the comic, such as in the aforementioned review in Cahiers du Cinéma (referenced in Frayling 2000: 309–10), which criticised Corbucci’s bizarre Westerns as being jokey ‘comicstrip movies’. Nevertheless, such analogies fail to grasp at a more solid connectivity of forms, which divert from the traditional Western and instead foreground a peculiar and absurd vision of the Old West. Such absurdities that mark the West of both the Spaghetti Western and the comic book can be understood through Kitses’ concept of the ‘making strange’ – offering pronounced subversions of the Western, and inviting a resistant reading. However, in developing upon the cross-pollination between both forms of the Western, it is instructive to begin to look at the reappropriation of the Spaghetti Western, and chart the impact of these Italian productions upon the Western comic book.

reading the spaghetti western in comics The Spaghetti Western would become an iconic version of the genre, its reverberations felt through future Western productions. This is most clearly evidenced in the subsequent Westerns of Clint Eastwood, such as High Plains Drifter (1973). However, this impact was not felt just in cinema, and later Western comic books found ways of replicating the visual lexicon and character of these films onto the page. Such influence upon the comic book can be evidenced through a number of titles, with the illustrated nature of this literary form allowing for the register of visual references to the Spaghetti Western; apparent in culturally disparate comics traditions, from Yves Swolfs’s Belgian title Durango (from 1980) to Min-Woo Hyung’s manhwa (Korean comic) Priest (1998–2007). One example of this in practice can be seen in Figure 10.1, an extract from Azzarello and Frusin’s violent Western, Loveless (2005–8). The sequence emphatically replicates the distinct formal layout surrounding

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Figure 10.1: Loveless replicates the form of a Spaghetti Western showdown. From ‘Loveless’ #1 ™ and © Brian Azzarello and Marcelo Frusin. Courtesy of DC Comics. Available in Loveless: A Kin of Homecoming

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the gunfights of the Spaghetti Western for dramatic effect. In Leone’s films, before the quick violent denouement to these sequences, they were characterised by glacially slow tension–building close-ups of details, eyes and faces. Leone suggested that these long preambles were to reflect ‘the last gasps that a person takes just before dying’ – a space to invite his audience to contemplate the moment of death (Frayling 2000: 291). Kitses describes such jarring shots as producing a ‘fragmenting and abstracting effect’ (Kitses 2004: 253). Arguably, the fragmented panels of this static printed medium conjure a similar effect. Frusin’s artwork meticulously reconfigures the tension-building close-ups into a series of panels, which dwell upon details, from the hand that hovers over the holstered gun, to facial features and gritted teeth. The turn of the page culminates in a series of splash panels depicting gunslinger Wes Cutter quickly dispatching his would-be-killers – a bloody climax to the tense previous page. While film and comics are separate and unique forms, it is apparent that the iconic cinematic style of the Spaghetti Western can be reproduced through the specifics of comics composition.9 Leone used the ‘fragmenting and abstracting’ close-up to other effect. For instance, the eyes of a character could act as a window into the past. In Once Upon a Time in the West, the meeting of Harmonica and Frank’s eyes in the final showdown allows the characters to share a memory of a previous encounter in which Frank murders Harmonica’s brother. However, in his previous film, For a Few Dollars More, Leone had embellished this device with visual effects. In one scene where the antagonist, Indio, smokes marijuana, the camera closes in upon the character’s intoxicated eyes, with the shot’s fade quickly followed by a flash of red which signals the film’s jump to a past memory of rape and murder that haunts the character. The camera effects and the use of the colour red are underscored with a twinkling soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, which turns more shrill and piercing as the horrific scene unfolds.10 Such an expressionistic vision of murder can be seen reinterpreted in Figure 10.2, an extract from Jodorowsky and Boucq’s Bouncer: Raising Cain (2004). We see the young character Seth finally come face to face with the villains who murdered his family. As his eyes meet with the murderers’, we are transported to Seth’s memory of these villains slaughtering his dog, beheading his father, and raping his stepmother. These memories of murder, coloured red, provide visual clues to the language of the Spaghetti Western. Lacking a surreal soundtrack, Jodorowsky provides the mantra ‘murderers’, repeated through each red-coloured panel to create an equivalent jarring effect. These sequences are just some examples elaborating upon how creators of the Western comics have since absorbed the visual language of the Spaghetti Western into their own visual storytelling. However, this

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Figure 10.2: Alejandro Jodorowsky and François Boucq’s Bouncer: Raising Cain utilises the visual language of the Spaghetti Western’s flashback sequences. Courtesy of ©2014 Humanoids, Inc. Los Angeles.

raises the question, why, or to what purpose, is the Spaghetti Western reappropriated and reinterpreted for the comic book? Through a case study of the French bande dessinée series, Blueberry, by writer JeanMichel Charlier and artist Jean Giraud, the chapter will now seek to distil a broader range of examples of the intertextual negotiations at play. Using close textual analysis, the chapter will examine references to the Spaghetti Western apparent in the Blueberry series, and attempt to place its significance within the publication context.

case study:

BLUEBERRY

Beyond the Italian Westerns, many other countries held an obsession for the Western. Jean Giraud suggests ‘the Western is perceived as something extremely exotic’ and that its ‘story takes place in a society with few rules, and in a framework where there is always more open, unexplored space ahead. This is something very powerful and appealing to a European’ (Charlier and Giraud 1991: dust jacket). Such allure would encourage local versions of the genre to emerge in

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various national comics traditions long pre-dating the Spaghetti Western, and even pre-dating the advent of mainstream narrative cinema.11 Indeed, for France, the Western was a feature in bande dessinée as early as 1889 when Christophe, in his La Famille Fenouillard, would confront the titular family with Native Americans. In the twentieth century, notable Western bande dessinée series included Marijac’s Jim Boum (from 1934), Morris’s Lucky Luke (from 1946) and Jijé’s Jerry Spring (from 1954). However, a law passed in 1949 – Loi du 16 juillet 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse – drafted between the French Communist Party and Catholic pressure groups prohibited the depiction of violent and licentious material from the pages of bande dessinée out of fear of its corrupting effects upon juveniles. Thus, these French Western comics bore hallmarks of the 1949 censorship law, which limited creative freedom through dictating content to be geared towards a young readership. This would change in the 1960s owing to an emergent young adult and student readership, and with the form keeping pace with developing textual formats – an emerging magazine culture led to comic magazines like Pilote (from 1959). Such titles, typically sold on newsstands, bypassed the restrictive nature of the 1949 law, allowing for more mature themes and content to be explored in the pages of bande dessinée. This fundamental renewal of the medium which was taking place allowed for a more serious handling of the Western genre for bande dessinée, realised through titles such as the Blueberry series, which made its first appearance on the pages of Pilote in 1963.12 Charlier and Giraud’s Blueberry centres upon the undisciplined army lieutenant Mike ‘Blueberry’ Donovan and his adventures in the Old West. The series can be understood as a Western epic of the comic book form, spanning some twenty-eight albums (until 2005), and traversing various epochs in post-Civil War American history: from the coming of the railroad, to the Indian Wars. The earlier part of the series is set amid the American Southwest, where Blueberry has been stationed at an isolated Fort in Arizona, tasked with maintaining relations with the surrounding Native Americans. Throughout the 1960s, the Blueberry albums were greatly preoccupied with the Indian Wars: a plot focus that can be likened to a traditional Western narrative of cowboys and Indians. Regarding such a vision, Giraud concedes that early influences upon his work included directors of the classic Hollywood Western, like John Ford and Anthony Mann (Thompson 1987: 93). These influences can be seen in Giraud’s artwork, and his highly detailed rendering of the Frontier (see Figure 10.3). Commanding a

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Figure 10.3: Jean Giraud’s Blueberry artwork registers the influence of Hollywood landscapes. From La piste des Sioux, 1971. © DARGAUD, by Charlier and Giraud.

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powerful vision of the West, his work can be likened to the cinematic idealisation of the Frontier landscape found in Hollywood Westerns. For example, John Ford’s magnificent desert scenes, which often saw stagecoaches or galloping horses framed against the immense buttes of Monument Valley, provided a phantasmagorical image of America’s mythic past. Giraud can be seen directly referencing this powerful landscape at certain points in the first Blueberry album, Fort Navajo (1965). Here, similar buttes from Monument Valley can be found in the background of desert sequences (see for instance Charlier and Giraud 1965: 6). Despite referents to its Hollywood counterpart, the Blueberry series also encapsulated an emerging cultural resistance in France and offered a commentary on contemporary issues. One case in point could be the uncomfortable retelling of Manifest Destiny in Blueberry, a bleak depiction of American imperialism culturally removed, yet read in tandem with, France’s recent colonial past.13 Blueberry himself is another marker of this resistant inclination, a character who is visually modelled upon the Nouvelle Vague anti-hero Jean-Paul Belmondo. His character in films like Breathless (À bout de souffle, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) came to represent the modern loner paradigm, and the anarchist (Nochimson 2010: 54). His childlike emulation of Humphrey Bogart’s performance through his character in the film can be read as a critique upon the hollow façade of Hollywood cinema through these empty gestures. This visual mockery of American icons and his anarchic disposition can also be discerned through Blueberry. He is a character who does not represent the classic Western hero, but is instead an undisciplined and cynical soldier who hates authority. When we are first introduced to the character in the opening pages of Fort Navajo, we find him cheating at a gambling table (Charlier and Giraud 1965: 1–3). This conflation of American archetypes with an emerging resistant French culture was a tendency that would heighten later into the 1960s. The social and political upheavals that came about surrounding the riots of May 1968 had a profound impact upon French culture.14 This insurrection Caute describes as generating ‘radical chic’ (Caute 1988: 227). In cinema, this is apparent in the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who broke with the classic rules of filmmaking in favour of revolutionary and propagandist collages in his films. In the case of bande dessinée, in the aftermath of 1968 the medium became more socially and politically subversive, pushing the boundaries of subject matter. The medium was vital in providing alternatives to the mainstream and formed the first main channel of youth protest in late 1960s France (Baetens and Surdiacourt 2013: 356). Artists nurtured earlier in Pilote magazine now felt

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that the severe editorial style was placing a restraint upon work, and a rebellion ensued with emergent counter-culture publications. Bande dessinée heroes like Hergé’s Tintin, seen shooting up with heroin in one feature, were treated with derision in these comics (see Fluide Glacial #21, 1978). Indeed, adult themes were now being foregrounded in the pages of bande dessinée, mostly achieved through overt sexual content and violent gory sequences. In the case of Blueberry, this context can be read through the character’s Belmondo looks, which began to fade and become more rough-hewn. More broadly, the series would shed its classic Hollywood Western façade, heading south of the border and into Spaghetti Western-tinged adventure. In an interview, Giraud recounts: ‘Watching Leone’s movies gave me a big visual shock, and totally impacted my own vision of the American West’ (Charlier and Giraud 1991: dust jacket). Indeed, in the aftermath of 1968, Giraud’s vision of the West began to change, becoming more violent and surreal. ‘Apaches? Bandits?’, Blueberry questions as he hears distant gunshots while making his patrol through the desert, soon realising: ‘Mexicans! But what the hell . . .’ (Charlier and Giraud 1989).15 This encounter with the Mexican army occurs in the opening pages of Chihuahua Pearl (Charlier and Giraud 1973): an album which would begin the longest cycle of the series. It tells the fictional tale of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, who fled to Mexico after the Civil War. Smith is said to have hidden Confederate gold somewhere in Mexico, and Blueberry is hired to track down this bounty. The titular hero still plays out his French anarchic tendencies, falling from grace with the American authorities in this cycle. He becomes a fugitive accused of the attempted assassination of President Ulysses S. Grant, and repeatedly attempts to clear his name. More significant is how the series’ traditional Western bearings began to be swept aside. The thriving prairies and the focus on the Native American, which can be summarised through Figure 10.3, began to be replaced by a more arid and surreal tone. Figure 10.4 visually hints at this new tone, articulated through the establishing of markers of setting, including barren deserts, cemeteries, and desecrated churches. Even the clashing colour definition in which this extract (and the title more broadly) is painted – shades of yellows and oranges, alongside purples and blues – was indicative of a more bizarre detour for the series. These iconographic inclusions may draw upon the Spaghetti Western vision, but narrative clues work in unison to aid this atmosphere. The series’ overt disillusionment with how the West was won was sidelined with a quest for gold in Mexico. This is heightened further through Smith’s gold being buried in an unmarked grave, in an abandoned ghost town – a clear nod to Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

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Figure 10.4: The more surreal and arid imagery of later Blueberry comics. From Ballade pour un cercueil, 1974. © DARGAUD, by Charlier and Giraud.

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Beyond iconography and narrative focus, other parallels can be drawn with the Spaghetti Western. A significant element of the Italian Western was the means by which they detached the genre’s innate violence from its moorings in US national identity, dealing with it in much more amoral terms. A screen ostentatiously crammed with dead bodies, alongside the brutality enacted upon characters, were commonplace in these Westerns. Such violent scenes in Leone’s work were condemned as ‘downright sadism’ in one review (Clapham 1974: 146). The work of Corbucci also favoured bloody violence – often to a more bizarre effect. Beyond the infamous ear-severing scene in his Django, which would earn the film a ban in Sweden, the violence of the film was inscribed with Corbucci’s dark humour. For instance, the gruesome denouement of the film, where Django’s hands are brutalised by soldiers forcing a new shooting method – using a gravestone to aid the firing of his weapon – is said to be a joke in reference to jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, who invented a new playing style when some of his fingers were paralysed in a fire. Violence was always present in the Blueberry series. However, through the maturation of the form in the years after May 1968 the series became respondent to bande dessinée’s counter-cultural tendencies. In a similar manner to the Spaghetti Western, the Blueberry series began to foreground a type of violence unfamiliar to the genre. The kind of en masse indiscriminate killing depicted in these films can be evidenced in the album, Ballade pour un cercueil (Charlier and Giraud 1974a). When Blueberry and his motley group find the gold, they take refuge in an abandoned church surrounded by the Mexican Army. In a sequence reminiscent of Giulio Questi’s Django Kill . . . If You Live, Shoot! (Se sei vivo, spara!, 1967), their escape plan capitalises upon horses strapped with dynamite, which are sent out into the Mexican line of fire first, with brutal consequences. Giraud graphically details the exploding animals, the blood and bones gruesomely blown from the horses’ flesh, while the flames from the blasts force Mexican troops into the line of fire from Blueberry’s gang (Charlier and Giraud 1974a: 31–2). Beyond these bloody sequences, Sergio Corbucci’s unusual conflation of dark humour and violence can be read through the series. For instance, in the album Angel Face (1975), the titular assassin, whose effeminate beauty allows him to pass as a woman, meets a grisly end at the hands of Blueberry. After Angel Face frames Blueberry for the attempted murder of President Grant, Blueberry confronts him on a steam train. This fight sequence ends with Angel Face falling face first into the hot coals of a train’s engine. ‘What’s your name, son?’ the

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Sheriff asks the terribly burned assassin, whose face is bloody and blistered beyond recognition. ‘Angel–Angel F–Face!’ he replies (Charlier and Giraud 1990). Beyond the dark humour and violence that enriched these films, the other distinct aspect of the Spaghetti Western was the garish and surreal tone they presented. Most of these films were shot in Spain, allowing desert settings to appear as disturbing alien terrains for the taciturn heroes and the bizarre villains to inhabit. Leone provided disorienting contrasts in his cinematography through glacial set pieces, jarring closeups, and vast panoramas of the desolate landscape. Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack worked in unison, applying sonically bizarre effects to the often loud and saturating music, creating an analogy with the violent action, or complementing the strange dreamlike sequences. To evidence this surreal feel to Leone’s cinematic language, the Baxter massacre scene from his A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, 1964) is a useful example. The close-ups of the sweating and scarred faces of the Rojos are quickly cut with images of their many victims being shot to death. The fire from the burning Baxter residence dramatically lights the faces of these murderers, and their maniacal laughter haunts the scene. The quick to and fro between images of death and maniacal faces makes for a disorienting and nightmarish vision of murder. Such haunting scenes are balanced with Leone’s dreamlike sequences. The aforementioned scene from For a Few Dollars More, where we see Indio transported to a past memory of rape and murder, showcases a variety of camera effects, a jarring soundtrack, and the use of colour to create a discomforting set piece. This combination of effects from the film language illustrates the surreal tone that marked the Spaghetti Western. However, attempting to extrapolate this into the Blueberry series may seem difficult considering how facets of this atmosphere, such as the sonically bizarre soundtrack, would be lost through the printed comics medium. Instead, this language can be read through other elements of comics form such as colour. In the early albums of the Blueberry series, Giraud honed a naturalistic palette in keeping with this traditional vision of the Old West. However, in the surrounding milieu of 1968, Giraud began experimenting with subjective colours, rejecting the former naturalistic approach. For instance, scenes of heavy dialogue can see characters in one panel marked in natural tones of colour, only to be painted in bright pastel colours in a following panel. This psychedelic quality marked not only characters, but the scenery also. For example, in Ballade pour un cercueil, bizarre-shaped boulders are seen in pinks and blues, and there are rivers of red and yellow, alongside instances where prairies and brush

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have been rendered in shades of blue. This bizarre use of tonal shades also helped define time and place, from desert landscapes set in blazing oranges and yellows to define the perishing heat of the midday sun to nighttime sequences in dreamlike purples. This bizarre use of colour is certainly medium-specific, and beyond the use of red to mark the past memories of murder in the Spaghetti Western it was not commonplace in Western films. However, the hallucinatory effect that the colour provides in the comic can be bound to some sequences in the Spaghetti Western. For instance, in Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Eastwood’s character, ‘Blondie’, is subjected to cruel torture, held captive and dragged through the desert by Tuco. Leone uses fades between each shot, not only to suggest a sense of time unfolding, but also to create a surreal and delirious tone, delineating the harsh and exhausting heat of the desert. Leone shoots the desert not to appear like the American West, but like a nightmarish terrain, while Tuco’s pink parasol that decorates some shots adds a bizarre twist to this long torture scene. Figure 10.5 is taken from the album Le hors-la-loi (Charlier and Giraud 1974b), and a scene where the US Army has imprisoned Blueberry. In a similar manner to ‘Blondie’, Blueberry has been forced to march in the blazing heat of the desert by his captors. Giraud’s artwork offers a similar hallucinatory effect to the scene from Leone’s film, but achieved through specifics of form. Painted in tones of orange and yellow, the extract emphasises the desert heat. Giraud replaces the traditional use of panels, and instead each instance in the sequence of Blueberry’s torture is pieced together through smoky waves from the desert’s dust clouds. This delirious effect works in unison with Blueberry’s thought bubbles, which start out as a tangible sentence indicating his plan to kill Kelly (the Commanding Officer who has ordered this cruel torture), but end in ‘W . . . water kill’ as the character breaks under the sun. This effect is intensified by the two orthodox square panels in the top right corner, which depict Commander Kelly watching Blueberry’s torture from the safety of the indoors (and painted in cool shades of blue). This juxtaposition of the hallucinatory desert panel, broken up through smoky waves, and the more rigid panels of the indoor scene suggests a separation between reality and Giraud’s surreal and nightmarish desert. In an interview regarding the Western, Giraud dramatically asserted that ‘Leone changed everything’ (Thompson 1987: 93). Indeed, Leone and his fellow directors of the Spaghetti Western revised the genre for the cinematic frontier. However, in a similar manner, it could be suggested that Charlier and Giraud’s Blueberry was making dramatic revisions to the genre in comics form. While this may certainly be

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Figure 10.5: The hallucinatory artwork of the 1974 Blueberry album, Le hors-la-loi. © DARGAUD, by Charlier and Giraud.

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owed to the Spaghetti Western, since the series borrowed facets of these films, arguably, these were reworked to become form-specific. For instance, the oppressive sonically bizarre soundtrack of the Spaghetti Western now became unusual psychedelic colours and hallucinatory panel composition. Unlikely sources, such as the war film Kelly’s Heroes (Brian G. Hutton, 1970) and the comedy film The ’Burbs (Joe Dante, 1989), featured sequences which looked to replicate Leone’s cinematic lexicon (from a Morricone-like soundtrack, to close-ups of the eyes, or the tank’s gun turret with regard to Kelly’s Heroes). These inclusions can be considered a form of homage, reappropriating the Spaghetti Western’s language to humorous effect. However, Charlier and Giraud’s inclusions of icons, themes and aesthetics of the Spaghetti Western may have moved beyond basic homage. The Blueberry series throughout the 1960s was largely bound to its classic Western influences. Yet in the intense political and social upheavals surrounding 1968, bande dessinée took on an iconoclastic fervour, while foregrounding social and political subversions. Blueberry can be read as a product of this discord. Through the reappropriation of the shock violence and the surreal edge of the Spaghetti Western, Charlier and Giraud allowed their traditional series to keep pace with the developments of the medium, which was itself becoming more surreal, violent and licentious. However, amid the harsh atmosphere that the creators were foregrounding, the series spoke of the revolutionary zeitgeist that was occurring in France. Strong female figures in the series were pronounced, such as Chihuahua Pearl, which reflected the improved status of women in post-1968 France. Meanwhile, the series espoused anti-militarist sentiment, which was lodged deep in anarchist ideology surrounding 1968. Figure 10.5 is useful in representing this warning of military power, as a fellow officer is seen to question Commander Kelly’s brutal torture of Blueberry: ‘Isn’t the punishment you’re giving that man, er, a little, er, uh . . .?’ (Charlier and Giraud 1989).

conclusion Through the broad overview that this chapter has provided, it is clear to see the vital interplay between the comics form and the Spaghetti Western that has emerged. Detailing a number of perspectives in which comic book influences can be read through these films – from informing visual style, to co-inhabiting a similar bizarre Old Western space – makes it apparent that the comic book has played a greater

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role within the Spaghetti Western than the one scholars and critics have fleetingly referred to in the past. Furthermore, inclusion of the Spaghetti Western’s cinematic language into later Western comic books highlights the ongoing iterative nature of cultural developments. The comics form is an eminently suitable visual narrative form with which to replicate the cinematic language in which the Italian Western spoke. Moreover, as the case study of Blueberry elaborated, the Spaghetti Western can arguably be framed as an accessible, visual and thematic language that can be repurposed to respond to different cultural dynamics, and to social and political discord in other countries.

notes 1. The Western in many ways defined the nation in the years before the 1960s. The haunting schemas of the myth of the West were able to trigger a yearning for the idealised past lodged deep in the American psyche. In politics, the term ‘Frontier’ marked John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech in 1960, whereas the term ‘cowboy diplomacy’ could be used to understand the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. In advertising, the Western became a powerful image to sell to America through idealised images of a mythic past – the Marlboro Man (the smoking cowboy) is indicative of this. Most significant, however, was how political discourse and ideology could be grafted onto commanding visions of the Old West in various popular narrative forms. For instance, the film Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) used the powerful vistas of Monument Valley to narrate the mythic narrative of regeneration through the challenge of the wilderness, whilst effecting a pro-interventionist position in the run-up to World War II. Such mythic potential highlighted a precedent for the Western of popular culture, and how it could speak to American hopes and fears. 2. In terms of the number of Western films being produced, Table 1 in Buscombe’s The BFI Companion to the Western indicates the dwindling production figures of the genre into the 1960s and 1970s (1990: 426). Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation (1998), Coyne’s The Crowded Prairie (1998) and Corkin’s Cowboys as Cold Warriors (2004) are just some examples among many cultural histories of the Hollywood Western, exploring how the genre’s narrative conflicts and thematic tensions corresponded with issues in twentieth-century US society – from the idealised Western of the post-war years to the anti-Westerns and subsequent waning of the genre in the 1960s. 3. In etymological terms, ‘comic’ grew out of the comical drawings and amusing short essays and droll verse offered in Life, Puck, and Judge – dubbed ‘comic weeklies’ (Harvey 2009: 36). While the medium developed in both form and content from out of this precursory material, the term ‘comic’ to describe the medium remains.

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4. Personal correspondence with John McShane (email, 24.3.2014). McShane is co-founder of www.scottishscreenwriters.co.uk, is on the committee of the Glasgow International Film Festival, and is a comics historian – his research is largely concerned with the first Scottish comic, The Glasgow Looking-Glass (1825). 5. Ruggero Deodato, assistant director on Django, recounts this anecdote in the documentary ‘Django: The One and Only’ – a special feature attached to the Blue Underground DVD version of Django (Blue Underground, 2007). 6. Some examples of early newspaper comic strips include Richard F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid (from 1895), Rudolph Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids (from 1897), or Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan (from 1900). For an overview of the subversive and resistant nature of comics from their late nineteenth-century newspaper strip roots to their status in post-World War II America, see Wright (2001), Hajdu (2008) and Sabin (1996, 2010), the latter of which offers some interesting parallels through the study of British comics. 7. It was the form’s nature as juvenile, ephemeral reading material – with its subversive and undermining demeanour, crass humour and stark depiction of violence – which was the impetus for the censorship of comics in the 1950s: an attempt to sanitise the medium of violent and licentious material. For studies of comic book censorship in the USA, see Nyberg (1998), Wright (2001: 109–79) and Hajdu (2008); and for Britain see Barker (1984) and Sabin (2010: 23–35). 8. Christine Bold further argues that such comics language not only serves to remind readers ‘of comics’ artifice and their melodramatic absurdities’, but that in the Western comic ‘these textual gestures can be interpreted as inviting a resistant reading of the plot, thereby undermining the narratives of law and order’ (Bold 1996: 38). 9. For a more rigorous engagement with the workings of the comics’ form see McCloud (1994) and Groensteen (2007). 10. Director Giulio Petroni would develop upon this effect in Death Rides a Horse (Da uomo a uomo, 1967). Here, the protagonist is haunted by the memory of his family being massacred, which is presented superimposed over the character’s eyes. The flashback scene is coloured in red, with a bombastic soundtrack by Morricone adding to this haunted, sadistic scene on screen. Petroni’s take on this effect was more recently reused in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003). 11. Maurice Horn provides an overview of Western comics from South America, Europe and Asia (Horn 1977: 137–74). Randall W. Scott (2007) provides a closer look at Western comics from Europe (particularly France, Germany and Italy). 12. A concise overview of this period of bande dessinée’s history can be found in Miller (2007: 15–24). For a mediological account of bande dessinée’s development as a medium, see Baetens and Surdiacourt (2013). 13. The Algerian War (1954–62), only a few years behind the Blueberry series, was still an uncomfortable referent in culture. The film The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) would be banned for five years by the French government upon its release, highlighting that the country was still attempting to escape its recent colonial past. A similar affair took place in bande dessinée: McKinney notes that ‘from the outbreak of the Algerian War until 1979, [colonialism] was almost

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william grady non-existent as a theme in French comics . . . By contrast, French cartoonists [had] often emphasized the preceding period of colonial rule as a time of exotic adventure’ (McKinney 2013: 146).

14. The protests of May 1968 in France were a series of escalations led by students and workers, espousing left-wing causes, communism or anarchism. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake up society in many aspects, including methods of education, the improved status of women, and sexual freedom. For a summary of the events of 1968 France and their later impact upon culture, see Caute (1988: 183–239). 15. When referencing the collections of Blueberry that have been translated into English through Graphitti Designs (these are unpaginated), I have tried for the sake of clarity to include a reference in text to the original French album in which these quotations/references originally appear.

references Azzarello, Brian and Marcelo Frusin (2006), Loveless – Volume 1: A Kin Homecoming, New York: DC Comics. Baetens, Jan and Steven Surdiacourt (2013), ‘European graphic narratives: toward a cultural and mediological history’, in Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon (eds), From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 347–62. Barker, Martin (1984), A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign, London: Pluto Press. Bold, Christine (1996), ‘Malaeska’s revenge: or, the dime novel tradition in popular fiction’, in Richard Aquila (ed.), Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 21–42. Boucq, François and Alejandro Jodorowsky (2004), Bouncer: Raising Cain, New York: Humanoids/DC Comics. Bradshaw, Peter (2013), ‘Django Unchained – review’, The Guardian, 18 January. Buscombe, Edward (1990), The BFI Companion to the Western, London: BFI. Caute, David (1988), Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricade, London: Paladin Books. Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1965), Fort Navajo, Paris: Dargaud. Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1971), La piste des Sioux, Paris: Dargaud. Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1973), Chihuahua Pearl, Paris: Dargaud. Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1974a), Ballade pour un cercueil, Paris: Dargaud. Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1974b), Le hors-la-loi, Paris: Dargaud. Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1989), Moebius 4: Blueberry, Anaheim, CA: Graphitti Designs. Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1990), Moebius 5: Blueberry, Anaheim, CA: Graphitti Designs. Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1991), Moebius 9: Blueberry, Anaheim, CA: Graphitti Designs.

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Clapham, Walter C. (1974), Western Movies, London: Octopus. Corkin, Stanley (2004), Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Coyne, Michael (1998), The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western, London: I. B. Tauris. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher (2006), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher (2000), Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death, London: Faber & Faber. Groensteen, Thierry (2007), The System of Comics, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Hajdu, David (2008), The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Hamann, Volker (2002), ‘Jijé’, Reddition 38, Barmstedt: Edition Alfons. Harvey, Robert C. (2009), ‘How comics came to be: through the juncture of word and image from magazine gag cartoons to newspaper strips, tools for critical appreciation plus rare seldom witnessed historical facts’, in Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (eds), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 25–45. Haustrate, Gaston (1971), ‘Faut-il brûler les Westerns Italiens?’, Cinema 71, 154. Horn, Maurice (1976), The World Encyclopedia of Comics, Volume 1, New York: Chelsea House Publications. Horn, Maurice (1977), Comics Books of the American West, New York: Winchester Press. Kitses, Jim (2004), Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood, London: BFI. Lusted, David (2003), The Western, Harrow: Longman. McCloud, Scott (1994), Understanding Comics, New York: HarperCollins. McKinney, Mark (2013), Redrawing French Empire in Comics, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Miller, Ann (2007), Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip, Bristol: Intellect. Nochimson, Martha (2010), World on Film: An Introduction, Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Nyberg, Amy Kiste (1998), Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Codes, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Sabin, Roger (1996), Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels, New York: Phaidon. Sabin, Roger (2010), Adult Comics: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Scott, Randall W. (2007), ‘European Western comics: a kind of round-up’, International Journal of Comic Art, 9: 2, 413–24. Slotkin, Richard (1998), Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Thompson, Kim (1987), ‘Interview with Jean Giraud by Kim Thompson’, The Comics Journal, 118.

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Verano, Frank (2006), ‘Invisible spectacles, invisible limits: Grant Morrison, situationist theory, and unreal realities’, International Journal of Comic Art, 8: 2. Wright, Bradford W. (2001), Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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chapter 11

Transit to East Germany: The Distribution and Reception of Once Upon a Time in the West in the German Democratic Republic Rosemary Stott

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his chapter provides a critical account of the relocation, transition and appropriation of the Spaghetti Western in a hitherto under-researched context: the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), prior to its unification with the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1990. The Western in East Germany has received scant attention, but the genre was of significant film historical interest there. Prior to unification, this lacuna was due to the practical barriers to research combined with Cold War ideology and attitudes, which resulted in a lack of knowledge of or interest in the films produced in East Germany, its film industry, and audiences on the part of West German researchers. The majority of German film histories published in the Federal Republic of Germany did not deal with film in East Germany.1 When East German cinema was discussed, the predominant auteur paradigm was applied, with little attention paid to popular genres such as the East German Westerns, for example in the volume Film in der DDR (Blum 1977). Import films were also not mentioned in film histories, with the exception of Heinz Kersten’s inclusive study not only of DEFA production but of the whole film industry in East Germany (Kersten 1963). Moreover, seminal works on Spaghetti Westerns published prior to 1990, such as Christopher Frayling’s book Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (1981), did not investigate the Spaghetti Westerns that were produced in Eastern

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Europe, and the word ‘European’ in its title referred primarily to Western Europe. (Frayling did discuss the Eastern European contribution to the genre, but only with respect to the transnational collaboration of Yugoslavia with Western European partners in the production of the so-called Karl May Westerns.) Following the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, it became easier to explore the cultural histories of these countries, owing to the newly acquired accessibility of films, related materials and government archives. Initially, East German film scholarship focused on national film production;2 more recently, however, transnational perspectives have uncovered how socialist film cultures were much less isolated and insular than earlier accounts had implied.3 This chapter continues this trajectory by bringing into view a specific case of how the circulation of and dialogue around film crossed the ideological divide between East and West at the time of the Cold War. The chapter will focus on the reception of Spaghetti Westerns in cinemas in East Germany, and place them in the context of national filmmaking and national film distribution and exhibition of the genre as a whole. As Kersten had indicated in his 1963 publication, East German film distributors prided themselves on the internationalism and diversity of the film industry. Both feature films and documentaries from around the world, including western European countries and the USA, were distributed by a nationally owned monopoly company, DEFA Film Distribution (DEFA Film Verleih), and exhibited in the exclusively state-owned cinemas. The active distribution networks also consisted of Third World countries and of other ‘brotherly’ nations such as Cuba or Vietnam. Between 1971 and 1990, 38 per cent of the total number of films imported to East Germany were imports from outside the communist bloc.4 The import films exhibited in East Germany between 1949 (the year the country was officially founded) and 1990 (the year of German unification) create a specific and unique body of films, which can be read as a barometer of the subtle shifts in national cultural politics during the period of the Cold War, and to some extent as instruments of cultural diplomacy, reflecting the political relations with individual film-producing nations and constructing images of those nations which corresponded with the dominant ideology of the GDR. Using Janet Staiger’s context-activated theory of film reception as a framework (1992: 75), this chapter explores the selection, distribution and reception of Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, Sergio Leone, 1968) in the German Democratic Republic as a case study of how international cultural transfer causes objects of

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cultural production to be repositioned as they enter a new reception context. It also examines the ideological, economic and sociological concerns underpinning the decisions of those who facilitated the movement of film across the political, cultural and linguistic boundaries of nation states. In East Germany, the facilitators involved in the selection, censorship, dubbing and promotion of films were mainly government administrators rather than film business professionals, because film was a state-controlled industry. The chapter will focus on the ‘official’ reception of the film on the basis of available censorship protocols and government policy papers, as well as print media sources. The broader audience reception context will be examined, but it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore in detail the reception of the film by actual spectators at the time.

east german film import: selection, distribution and exhibition Film distribution in the GDR and the other Eastern Bloc countries was first and foremost a politically determined process. Commercial factors played a secondary, though still significant, role for the DEFA Film Distribution, mostly with respect to the costs of licences for imports from the West. Indeed, one justification for the release of Once Upon a Time in the West given in the East German press was that the licence had become affordable (Holland-Moritz 1981). East Germany was not considered to be a worthwhile market for film distribution companies based in capitalist countries, and therefore the East German distribution company approached western distribution companies with licence requests rather than being targeted by them. In the 1980s, business contacts grew, with western agents negotiating sales of licences for ‘packages’ of film. The films were chosen by the agents with East Germany in mind and consisted of films which had already reached saturation in the western markets and which could therefore be offered at reasonable cost. Consequently, it could be considered more appropriate to use the term ‘selection’ than the term ‘censorship’ in the case of import of films from the West; however, I propose to use both terms to refer to the processes under discussion in this chapter. Just as the traffic of people across the border between West and East was difficult, so the transit of films made in capitalist countries to East Germany was politically sensitive and bureaucratic. A board of film censors based in the Film Department of the

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Ministry of Culture, and composed mainly of government officials, met regularly to view foreign films and decide which were suitable for exhibition, and foreign films were also viewed at film festivals by the same group of selectors. Overall, very few films were deemed suitable and the import quota for western imports was approximately thirty films out of a total of 120 new licences per year (Stott 2012: 26), meaning that the chances of an individual film being exhibited in East Germany were slim. When it came to the selection of films from western countries, those with which East Germany had good foreign relations were favoured and hence Italy, with its influential communist party, was an important source of imports. Moreover, in the 1960s and 1970s, left-wing politics and a degree of critical self-examination influenced filmmaking there in a way that was fortuitous for the East German censors. If we look at the films imported in the 1970s and 1980s, we can see that Italy was a more significant import country, at least in terms of numbers of imports, than the Federal Republic of Germany.5 The number of Italian imports overall was comparable with those from Bulgaria, which was one of the socialist ‘brother countries’.6 By the time Once Upon a Time in the West was released in 1981, audiences were familiar with a range of Italian films, with one of the most popular genres for selectors and spectators alike being the political thrillers based around the corruption of the Mafia and the police movies of the anni di piombo (leaden years).7 West German television played an important role for East German citizens too, as it could be received in the majority of households. It provided access to international films and West German television culture. It was only tolerated by the East German authorities from the 1970s onwards and was not publicly acknowledged or debated. The imports in the cinema, by contrast, were part of the official cinema circuit and were selected and mediated by the film authorities to form part of the official cultural offering. From the point of view of the audience, the appeal of the cinema imports from capitalist countries was high (Wiedemann 1992: 78). Despite the fact that the GDR was geographically and culturally so close to Western Europe and West Germany in particular, travel to the west was prohibited, so the chance to have a collective experience in common with global youth via cinema was seized upon by the audience. In a climate of political oppression, the audience greeted enthusiastically the few films from the otherwise ‘forbidden’ west that were exhibited by the government as markers of the limits of their censorship regime (Meurer 2000: 163–4).

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ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the best-known Spaghetti Westerns (though as Frayling has indicated ([1981] 2012: 194), it had ‘little or no impact on the Cinecittà production of Westerns’) and was an international co-production between Sergio Leone’s own production company Rafran, the Italian production company San Marco and the American Paramount Pictures. The film was premiered in the GDR on 24 July 1981, thirteen years after its original production in 1968 and twelve years after its premiere in West Germany on 14 August 1969. It was not unusual for films to be released in East Germany with a considerable time lapse following their original production, but the average delay was two to three years (Stott 2012: 37–8; Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR 1967–89). The longer gap in the case of this film already suggests that its release marked the breaking of a taboo in this new exhibition context. All foreign language film releases in the GDR were dubbed rather than subtitled and the East German dubbing studios were an important part of the national film production company DEFA. Approximately 50 per cent of western import films were dubbed in East Germany, while the remainder were exhibited using West German dub copies, as was the case for Once Upon a Time in the West. Films that were dubbed in the GDR had more of an East German inflection, as the dubbing voices were familiar to East German audiences; the German titles were created in the DEFA dubbing studios and occasionally some cuts were made. The East German release of Once Upon a Time in the West, by contrast, bore similarities with the West German viewing release of the late 1960s. The film title was also the same as it had been in West Germany: Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod (‘Play Me the Song of Death’), which gave the film an emphasis towards the story of Harmonica (‘Play me the Song of Death’ are the words spoken to Harmonica by Frank in the flashback scene in the German dubbed version) over the more overarching title of Once Upon a Time in the West, which favoured the interpretation of the film as parody of the founding mythology of the USA. The emphasis of the title ‘Play Me the Song of Death’ was reinforced by the East German poster for the film, which featured a surrealist-inspired cartoon image of Harmonica, foregrounding that character, the musical leitmotif associated with him and above all the theme of death, seeing as the image calls to mind the human skull (Figure 11.1). The posters that were commissioned to advertise films in the GDR were part of the official reception and

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Figure 11.1: East German poster for Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod/Once Upon a Time in the West. © DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Schleusing.

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provide a revealing visual expression of the film authorities’ intended reading. The emphasis on the macabre and self-destructing elements of Once Upon a Time in the West expressed in this image are emblematic of the aggressive imperialism that the East German ideologues intended the audience to associate with the Western genre. In the following, I show that the film’s release marked a shift in the selection criteria for foreign imports. Once Upon a Time in the West conformed just enough to these criteria and to the patterns of distribution to justify the censorship decision, but it was nevertheless a choice that did not fit easily into the official cinema culture of the GDR in a number of respects. In particular, its release marked a break with the existing parameters of official programming policy of the Western and, more specifically, the Italian Western. To commence the analysis, I provide an overview of the role of the Western in East German film programming prior to the release of Once Upon a Time in the West. I proceed by outlining the reasons for this release, and finally, I review the developments in the programming of the Western subsequent to the film’s release.

programming of the western prior to 1981 The classical American Western did not find favour with the film selectors in the GDR, above all because the Native Americans were portrayed as savage and inferior, to be vanquished by the heroic white settlers: a theme which was reversed in the East German-produced Westerns, known as Indianerfilme or ‘Native American films’, for which the DEFA studios developed an expertise in producing. Indianerfilme were born out of the government’s political imperatives but came to serve a commercial function for the East German film industry as they had a strong appeal for the audience. The run of films began in the mid1960s and were made in contradistinction to the Karl May Westerns8 produced by the West German Constantin film company. East Germany was not the only film-producing nation that was inspired by the West German success with the genre. As Christopher Frayling has outlined, the same West German films ‘created a commercial context which made the Italian Westerns possible’, and he quotes Sergio Leone himself in this regard: ‘it was because of the success of the German Winnetou series, directed by Harald Reinl, that the Western began to interest Italian producers’ (Frayling [1981] 2012: 115). The brand of Western that emanated from Italy was to be very different in tone and style from its West

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German precursors and indeed from the East German Westerns under scrutiny here. A wide range of styles came to be associated with the Italian Western, as the discussion of the imports to East Germany in this chapter will show. Like the Italians, the East German production studios, known as DEFA,9 were impressed by and wanted to emulate the audience appeal of the Karl May Westerns, but nonetheless to stamp their own brand of culture and ideology onto their variation of the genre. There was a strong motivation for them to do so. In the 1950s, East Germans, particularly those living in East Berlin, had become fans of the American Westerns and the first Karl May Westerns, which they could view in the cinemas ‘on the other side’.10 Following the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the fortification of the German/German borders, East Germans could no longer travel to the West. While this was a tragic development for many ordinary East Germans, as it resulted in families being separated and life opportunities being closed down, there was a renewed confidence on behalf of the government that East Germany could now shape its own future, including its cultural output, whilst unification with West Germany was now removed from the political agenda. The East German government wanted to counter the influence of western imports generally and invest more in popular genres with a socialist inflection. Karl May was not part of the official literary canon as defined by the gatekeepers of socialist culture, despite the author’s origins in Saxony, part of East German territory (Borries and Fischer 2008: 18–19). In the early years of the GDR, May was associated strongly with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich (Hitler had even declared that Karl May was his favourite author). The consensus in East Germany was that May’s novels were stylistically and ideologically suspect; for example, he was described as a ‘precursor of fascist values. His German super men . . . encouraged youth to develop anti-humanist, barbaric attitudes’ (Bronnen 1956). The East German studios therefore looked for more ‘suitable’ socialist literary inspiration to differentiate their films from those produced by the ‘class enemy’ of West Germany. In the case of the first Indianerfilm, this was the East German author Liselotte Welskopf Heinrich, the first of whose cycle of novels was published in the GDR in 1951. The first Indianerfilm was released in 1965: The Sons of Great Mother Bear (Die Söhne der großen Bärin, Josef Mach), based on Heinrich’s eponymous novel and scripted by the novelist herself. The story of a Native American hero who fights against the forces confining his people to a reservation presented a ‘conflict best described as the struggle for nation against

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the forces of partition’ (Dika 2008: 2), and as such carried symbolic meaning for the East German audience and made the intended identification with the ethnic hero happen more readily. The Sons of Great Mother Bear reached an audience of over 10 million (Dika 2008: 3) (in a country of only 17 million people, this meant that almost every adult went to see it) and commenced a run of the genre in the national studios, produced at a rate of approximately one per year. The East German Westerns, like Welskopf Heinrich’s novels, focused on the Native Americans, their lifestyle, their culture, and their struggles against the white settlers. They aimed to present a historically accurate depiction of the Native Americans, who were considered to be an oppressed minority and as such were granted a privileged status in official history-making in the GDR. The majority of the sixteen Indianerfilme produced in total between 1965 and 1985 featured one of the most prominent stars produced by DEFA: Gojko Mitić, a Serbian national who had started his career acting in the West German Karl May productions (Fisher 2014: 192–3). In the East German Westerns, he always played the ‘goodie’: the heroic, Native American chief who has to avenge his tribe against the ‘baddies’: the colonising white Americans, who took various evil guises as ‘greedy white settlers, treaty-breaking Army colonels, corrupt sheriffs, imperialist oil magnates and despicable plantation owners’ (Gemünden 1998: 399). In Figure 11.2, an original East German poster for Osceola (Konrad Petzold, 1971),11 the image of Gojko Mitić as lone rider, silhouetted against the sunset, alludes to the standard tropes of the genre of the Western, but represents an inversion of them, in that the lone white cowboy is replaced with a heroic Native American defending his rights and land. Despite the selectors’ aversion to the classical American Western, the Western still became established as one of the most significant genres in East German cinemas. This was due to the growing number of Westerns produced internationally, which challenged the traditional codes of the fictional genre and which complemented the anti-imperialist messages of the East German Indianerfilme. A variety of international anti-Westerns were selected and released in East German cinemas on a regular basis from the mid-1960s onwards, satisfying the audience’s passion for the genre, which the Indianerfilme could not do alone. Sharing with the Spaghetti Westerns a predilection for parody of the classical American genre and subversion of its triumphalist themes, New Hollywood anti-Westerns, such as Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), predominated and gold-digger

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Figure 11.2: Poster for Osceola, featuring Gojko Mitić. © DEFA-Stiftung.

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Westerns, such as Mackenna’s Gold (J. Lee Thompson, 1969), were also popular, both with the censors and with audiences. Even John Ford, the best-known director of the classical American Western, was represented, although significantly this was with the film Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which was untypical of his authorship and suited the East German selection criteria because of its focus on the Native Americans and because it was produced in 70 mm format, a technology that the GDR had invested in heavily at the time of its release in 1968 (Schenk 2013: 233). Some of the Westerns produced in Italy matched the requirements of the East German censors and hence the Spaghetti Western was not a completely new departure when Once Upon A Time in the West was released in 1981. While the Italian Western remained absent at the height of its production and success in Italy itself, a few were selected for exhibition in the 1970s. The lighter, comic versions of the genre were selected, while the more politically engaged Spaghetti Westerns, such as those directed by Sergio Sollima or Damiano Damiani, were not.12 Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity Is Still My Name, Enzo Barboni, 1971) was the first Spaghetti Western to be released in November 1973, using the West German title Der kleine und der müde Joe (Diddy and Tired Joe). The film starred Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, who were already popular stars in West Germany. Terence Hill was half German and had acted in some of the Karl May Westerns, including Winnetou: The Red Gentleman (Winnetou. 2. Teil, Harald Reinl, 1964), and is likely to have been familiar to East German audiences at the time via West German television or through their having seen the Karl May Westerns in other socialist countries with more liberal film programming policies, in particular Czechoslovakia or Hungary, which were popular holiday destinations for East Germans. Hill’s star appeal provided continuity with the subsequent Italian Western release: Man of the East (E poi lo chiamarono il magnifico, Enzo Barboni, 1972), released one year later with an East German title Ein Gentleman im Wilden Westen (A Gentleman in the Wild West). The West European co-production Cipolla Colt (Enzo G. Castellari, 1975) was dubbed by the DEFA film studios in 1977 and released the same year at the height of the popular summer season with the new title Zwiebel-Jack räumt auf (Onion Jack Clears Up). In 1978, Henry Fonda was seen alongside Terence Hill in My Name is Nobody (Il mio nome è Nessuno, Tonino Valerii, 1973), another West European co-production, for which Sergio Leone appeared on the credits. The film was itself a commentary on the clash between

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the traditional American and the European Western and was greeted most enthusiastically by East German audiences, becoming the second most popular film of 1979 (Meurer 2000: 291). The goodlooking, laid-back Hill had huge popular appeal, as did the more gauche and long-suffering brother Bambino, played by Bud Spencer, who was also familiar to East German audiences as ‘Flatfoot Rizzo’ in the popular police inspector film series, some of which were also released in the GDR.13 Hill and Spencer were established stars in West Germany too. Officially, film programmes in East Germany were shaped in contradistinction to those of the Federal Republic of Germany, but increasingly during this period they mirrored popular trends there (Stott 2012: 143–4). One year before the release of Once upon a Time in the West, another Italian Western was shown with a long time lapse since its first production: Alive or Preferably Dead (Vivi o preferibilmente morti, Duccio Tessari, 1969). The characteristic shared by all six Spaghetti Westerns discussed here was their humour, an element which contrasted greatly with the earnest tone of the DEFA Indianerfilme and which endeared them greatly to East German audiences (Wehrstedt 1996: 58). ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

and

east german censorship Once Upon a Time in the West’s Italian origins stood it in good favour with the censors and provided continuity with the popular genre of the Western, as outlined above. The subject matter of a film was the first priority for the film selectors, and consequently all films chosen contained a ‘progressive message’ that contributed to the formation of the ‘socialist personality’ of the citizens (Knietzsch 2005: 38). In the case of this film, the censors found a politically leftist message which fulfilled their selection requirements in the depiction of the railroad developer Morton. This figure is exaggerated to the point of parody, which the selectors interpreted as a militant attack upon the greed, brutality and corruption of capitalism, which was consistent with their communist anti-capitalist ideology. In this respect, the film also corresponded with the villains in the indigenous Westerns. As Frayling outlined, the film used the Iron Horse formula from the classical American Western, but, unlike Hollywood, employed it ‘to criticise technological progress per se, for the socio-economic values it represented, and for its disjunction with the fiction’ ([1981] 2012: 194): a reversal of a classical Western

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paradigm that technology represented progress and civilisation which satisfied the East German censors. In most other respects, Once Upon a Time in the West marked a clear departure from the previous Italian Westerns released in the GDR. It was a much more serious and brutal film than the comic versions of the genre selected previously. With respect to its stars, it marked continuity with My Name is Nobody in that it starred Henry Fonda as Frank. But the co-star and focus for audience identification was Charles Bronson, who had not been seen in a Western in East German cinemas since 1963, when he starred in the first ever American Western to be released in the GDR: The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960). This film’s release was striking, as it was a failed experiment for the East German selectors before the programming of the anti-Western began. For The Magnificent Seven was not an antiWestern at all, but a glamorous and star-studded film, released during a relatively liberal period in cultural politics in East Germany. The release caused a sensation, with crowds queuing to see it and even some riots in East German cinemas. Such mass events caused great unease for a regime which forbade any public gathering or demonstration. Hence the film was subsequently withdrawn by the authorities, making it possibly the first ‘banned’ import film in the GDR (Wehrstedt 1996: 57). It was not only Bronson who created continuity between the release of the The Magnificent Seven and Once Upon a Time in the West: their cult status globally, the artistry and high production values of the two films and the fact that they were released with no precedent create further links. Once Upon a Time in the West’s connection with the notorious import of The Magnificent Seven from the 1960s was not referred to in the official censorship protocols or in the press, but it may have added to the glamour and appeal of Leone’s film for the East German audience, many of whom used cinema as a connection with global culture that was otherwise closed off to them. As the contemporary filmmaker Andreas Dresen, who grew up and went to film school in the GDR, has stated, theatre, literature and cinema had a special status there, representing ‘the most open forms of the closed society’ (Schütt 2013: 198). With respect to violence, Once Upon a Time in the West surpassed the levels set by previous Western imports or by the nationally produced Westerns. The scene in which McBain and his family, including his young son, are murdered in cold blood had the power to shock a 1981 East German audience, who had effectively missed out on the more brutal and hard-hitting versions of the Spaghetti Western

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for which Leone became famous in western countries in the 1960s. Though not bloody or overly explicit and with elements of parody, such scenes stood out more prominently in a cinema culture defined by humanism and social commitment and in a society in which art and culture had an educational role to fulfil. Indeed, violence was one of the most significant obstacles to a film being granted a release in the GDR. When excisions were made to film imports, in itself a fairly rare occurrence, it was often extremes of violence that were cut. In the case of Once Upon a Time in the West, there is no evidence of cuts. The film authority records show that the film licence was from West Germany and that the West German version was shown in its entirety. The most unusual aspects of the film in the East German context were its formalism and modernist experimentation. In the cinema culture of East Germany, socialist realism was the dominant aesthetic in the early years and this was gradually replaced by a more subtle, but still realist aesthetic in the 1970s and 1980s, referred to by scholars as ‘documentary realism’ (Berghahn 2005: 38). Priority was always given to the subject matter of the film above issues of style. For national film production, too much formal experimentation was discouraged and met with mistrust and disapproval from the film censors.14 What resulted from the strict censorship of national films was a conventional aesthetic, dialogue-heavy, with the long shot dominating. Ambiguity or openness in a narrative, which might give the audience opportunities for reading against the grain or for approaching the subject matter in a critical fashion, were avoided by filmmakers or altered during the censorship processes. The same criteria were applied to the selection of films for import. For example, the British film The White Bus (Lindsay Anderson, 1967) was viewed by the selection committee in Berlin in March 1970. The protocol recorded one of the justifications for its rejection as follows: ‘This critique of society is not always clearly recognisable, which is partly due to the fact that the film is embellished with pointless formal tricks.’15 Thus a consistent film culture emerged in the GDR, which spanned both national and import film, regardless of the country of origin. In the case of Once Upon a Time in the West, that consistency was not adhered to. The framing of the shots in Once Upon a Time in the West, for example the use of extreme close-up to express the drama of the emotional states of the characters, the dreamlike quality of its narrative, its grandiloquent style which borrows from opera, its use of space and its slow pacing, marked a notable turning point

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not just in the censorship of the genre of the Western but also in the censorship of film more generally. Its postmodern allusions to other seminal American Westerns would also have been novel in a cinema context, which permitted only certain forms of self-reflection. Moreover, these allusions would not have been lost on the East German audience. For example, High Noon, one of the first Westerns to be referenced in the film, was an anti-McCarthy allegory that was promoted strongly as such when it was released in the GDR in 1965 and rereleased in 1977.

cultural politics and

ONCE UPON

A TIME IN THE WEST

So why was Once Upon a Time in the West released in the early 1980s, so long after its original production and with features that did not conform to the established selection criteria for the Spaghetti Western? The timing of the release of the film – during the summer festival season when box-office takings reached a peak – combined with the fact that it was circulated with a large number of prints (thirty five) were indications that the film authorities were anticipating its appeal to a wide audience. It seems that the authorities used the political acceptability of the ‘progressive message’ they found in the film as a pretext for releasing a film that was a guaranteed hit with the audience. For not only did it contain a polemical political message, but it was also a highly entertaining, artistically impressive and engaging Western. Once Upon a Time in the West’s release in the German Democratic Republic came at a time when the film authority was making some concessions to the established selection criteria in a conscious effort to inject some controversy and interest into the film programmes to maintain the popularity of cinemas, particularly for the largest sector of the audience: young people. The appointment of a new film minister, Horst Pehnert, in 1976 had resulted in a pragmatic turn in film politics. Pehnert commissioned a small number of surveys, including one called ‘Cinema 1980’ from the Leipzig Institute for Youth Research, to look into the character and behaviours of the cinema audience – something that was uncommon in a society which placed little value on understanding its citizens as consumers, but viewed them instead as socialist citizens for whose political and moral education the state was responsible. The surveys revealed that audiences

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were drawn to the cinema primarily for entertainment and that the use value of education played only a minor role. The most popular films were Western imports, followed by national films if they were engaging and relevant to the audience. Imports from socialist countries were the audience’s least favoured films despite their being by far the largest share of films exhibited: approximately 72 per cent of imports were from other socialist countries (Wiedemann 1983: 30). Evidence from government archives16 shows that film selectors treated the results of the surveys extremely seriously and that policy changes were made, such as the growing emphasis on the ‘Millionfilm’: films which, like Once Upon a Time in the West, reached an audience of a million or over (Stott 2012: 85–6). Whilst it was not possible for the film authorities to dispense entirely with the political criteria for film selection, they did increasingly look for import films that fulfilled the required political message while still being of high entertainment use value. Once Upon a Time in the West was the first Italian Western directed by Sergio Leone to be released in the GDR. Although selection choices were never solely determined by auteurist principles, in this case the reputation of the director and the collaborators on the film was a factor in the decision to exhibit it. In the same way that the authorities wished to appear internationalist in matters of culture, so they wished to represent as wide a selection of well-known directors in the cinema programmes, with the proviso that their personal politics were acceptable and that the subject matter of the chosen film had the required ‘progressive message’. In the case of Once Upon a Time in the West, both conditions were fulfilled.17 Further evidence that the director had gained favour in the Eastern Bloc was provided a few years later when the decision was taken to release Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, which was an even more controversial choice. Initially, the latter film was rejected by the censors in July 1984, with the justification that there were ‘hardly any social references’.18 In August 1985, the decision was reversed.19 Some critics interpreted the film as anti-American,20 but otherwise the film still caused controversy with the party faithful and in the press.21 The focus of the criticism was its violence, particularly with regard to women, and its amoral tone, despite the fact that some excisions had been made with regard to the violence in the film, which were personally approved by Leone.22 Newspaper reviews of the film confirmed that Leone had been in discussion with the Soviet authorities

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regarding a possible film collaboration about the siege of Leningrad (Schenk 1986; see also Frayling [1981] 2012: 215), and Leone also visited East Germany shortly after Once Upon a Time in America was released (F.K. 1986). It is likely that the Soviet approval further endorsed the director’s films in all the satellite communist states during this period.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST :

the

audience perspective If we consider the top fifteen most popular films in 1981, Once Upon a Time in the West is at the top of the table, reaching an audience of over 1.5 million (Meurer 2000: 291). The East German Western Sing Cowboy Sing (Dean Read, 1981), one of the few indigenous Westerns to be produced in the 1980s (Fisher 2014: 193), appeared the same year. Although just outside the top ten films, it was still the most popular DEFA film that year, evidencing the enduring appeal of the genre of the Western, regardless of its origin. Nevertheless, the audience statistics for the two films emphasise the cultural politics of an era in which the national cinema struggled to compete and was even usurped by high profile international imports. The social and cultural impact of Once Upon a Time in the West was not officially acknowledged; for example, its success or the reasons for its appeal were not discussed in the East German media. It is symptomatic of the propaganda strategies of both East and West Germany at the time that such cultural trends were ignored by the official media in the East, but were considered significant by the West German media. For instance, the West German national newspaper Die Zeit took up the story of the release of Once Upon a Time in the West and the impact it was having on the East German audience. The box-office statistics quoted by the author related to one cinema only: the premiere cinema Kosmos, which was located in Karl-Marx Allee in East Berlin. The film was in its sixth week of exhibition at the cinema, with three sold-out screenings a day, making a total of 40,000 viewers at this cinema alone. The author accompanied East German friends to the screening, recounting how the audience were in awe of the film, watching it with cultish attention to detail and rating it more highly than the DEFA Westerns or Westerns produced in communist countries (Menge 1981).

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reappraisal of karl may westerns Shortly after Once Upon a Time in the West was released in the GDR, a further taboo was broken with the reappraisal of the original West German Karl May Westerns, referred to earlier in this chapter, and the novels upon which they were based. The gap between their original production and their release in the GDR was almost twenty years. In the same way as for Once Upon a Time in the West, the long gap highlighted the magnitude of the reversal in policy. The publication of the Karl May novels from 1982 onwards and the release of the films on East German television marked the beginning of the shift in the reception of Karl May in the GDR and resulted in the lifting of the taboo on the screening of the films in East German cinemas. Old Surehand (Alfred Vohrer, 1965), produced at the same time as The Son of Great Bear, was exhibited in 1983, the same year that one of the final East German Westerns and the last starring Mitić, Der Scout (Dshamjangijn Buntar, Konrad Petzold, 1983), was released. Thus the release of the Karl May Westerns came to signify the film authority’s final act of compromise and acknowledgement that the original justification for production of the home-grown Western – a communist alternative to the Westerns produced in the ‘other Germany’ – was no longer valid. Subsequently, seven Karl May films were released at regular intervals. The significant cultural policy revision that this represented was anticipated in the review of Once Upon a Time in the West in the ruling Communist Party newspaper, Neues Deutschland, as follows: Karl May is responsible for this film. At the beginning of the 1960s, none of the Italian film producers would have had the idea of competing with American Westerns if it hadn’t been for the existence of the lowbrow, commercially successful West German adaptations of the fairytale adventure stories of the author from Saxony. At the beginning of our century, he was the most popular German children’s author. (Knietzsch 1981) Although Karl May’s association with the films appears to be used as a criticism of them by Knietzsch, the fact that the author’s origins in East German territory were acknowledged (Saxony being a region in East Germany) in the party organ amounted to a tacit indication of his official reinstatement. The release of Once Upon a Time in the West appeared to be a one-off experiment with the harder brand of Spaghetti Western, as it

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was followed by a brief return to the comic Spaghetti Western starring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. Boot Hill (Hügel der Stiefel, Giuseppe Colizzi, 1969), again dating from the late 1960s, was released in the GDR in 1983, building on the popularity of its stars and marking a return to the lighter strand of satirical Spaghetti Westerns outlined earlier. Continuity of programming for Once Upon a Time in the West was therefore created by authorial rather than genre principles, as Once Upon a Time in America was released in 1985.

conclusion The exhibition of Once Upon a Time in the West reflected a new turn in the programming policy of East Germany, fulfilling the leisure and entertainment requirements of the young audience as opposed to the political education of the socialist citizen, the proviso that had reigned supreme in the past. While the entertainment value of import films had always been an important criterion, the brand of entertainment in this film was new. Public statements by the film authorities in the 1980s were open about the fact that the entertainment needs of the audience were the main determining factor in film selection. The attractiveness of the imported films increased overall: in particular, the selectors aimed to inject some excitement and controversy into the cinema programmes. In the case of Once Upon a Time in the West, this was achieved via the shocking violence, the artifice and the experimentation in the text. The import choices began to reflect the real interests of the people, rather than the staged or censored themes in the DEFA film, which did not seem authentic to the majority of the audience (Wiedemann 1983). With this in mind, one could say that a film such as Once Upon a Time in the West reflected the degree to which western counter-culture had penetrated the Eastern Bloc. As Josie McLellan has identified, recent historical research has uncovered this phenomenon, with respect to musical subcultures in particular. East German youth, through the decades, identified with music and lifestyles encompassing beat and rock’n’roll (1960s), blues and hard rock (1970s) and punk (1980s) (McLellan 2011: 45). The rebellious, hard-edged narrative and characters in Once Upon a Time in the West were chosen deliberately to placate the audience, who were growing increasingly disillusioned with the ‘real existing socialism’, and to appeal particularly to young people, who found ways to play out alternative lifestyles despite the constraints of a regimented and ordered society under constant surveillance. Notwithstanding that

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there was an urgent need to make more fundamental political and social changes than film programming to increase the freedom and well-being of a public who were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with East German everyday life, the official release of Once Upon a Time in the West was a cultural and political landmark in the film history of East Germany.

notes 1. For example, see Bredow and Zurek (1975). 2. Examples in English are Allan and Sandford (1999), and Berghahn (2005). 3. The following recent publications have all taken a more international perspective on East German cinema: Stott (2012), Silberman and Wrage (2014), Allan and Heiduschke (2015). 4. Calculation made from an analysis of films listed in the annual film distribution publications: Filmobibliografische Jahresberichte: 1971 to 1989. 5. The number of film imports from West Germany/West Berlin 1970–89 was 84 (including co-productions). During the same period, the total number of film imports from Italy was 105 (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR 1967–1989). 6. The overall import figure for Bulgaria during the period 1970–89 was 108 (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR 1967–1989). 7. Confessione di un Commissario di Polizia al Procuratore della Repubblica (Das Geständnis eines Polizeikommissars vor dem Staatsanwalt der Republik, Damiano Damiani, 1970) and Cadaveri Eccellenti (Die Macht und ihr Preis, Francesco Rosi, 1975) were exhibited in the GDR in 1972 and 1978 respectively. 8. Karl May was a nineteenth-century German writer of popular adventure fiction set in the American West. 9. The acronym stood for ‘German Film Limited’, although the company was publicly owned. 10. The term ‘on the other side’ was sometimes used as a euphemism in official documents and in the press in East Germany when referring to the Federal Republic of Germany. The use of the term and the refusal to actually name the FRG symbolised the degree of mistrust towards the German neighbor, as well as the ideological threat it posed to the smaller German Democratic Republic. 11. For an analysis of the film, in particular its representation of race, see Torner (2011). 12. For an in-depth analysis of the politically engaged Spaghetti Westerns, see Fisher (2011). 13. Piedone lo sbirro (Steno, 1973) was released in 1977 and Piedone d’egitto (Steno, 1980) in 1982.

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14. There are many examples of this in DEFA film history, but the most notorious were the twelve films banned in 1965–6, regarded retrospectively by scholars as a nascent East German ‘New Wave’ (Berghahn 2005: 170). 15. Protocol number 172 (The Red Bus) of the Preliminary Selection Committee, 3 March 1970, in File 82 (1 March 1970–30 April 1970) of the ‘DEFA-Aussenhandel’ files, German Federal Film Archive. 16. One example is the paper ‘Das Kinopublikum in der DDR’, marked VD 207 and dated 27.5.82. Private archive of Erhard Kranz, Berlin. 17. As Frayling noted, the film was made by four Italian intellectuals, two of them known to be left-wing (Frayling [1981] 2012: 195). Bertolucci worked on the screenplay and 1900 (Parts 1 and 2, 1976) were exhibited in the GDR in 1978. 18. C Protocol, dated 23.7.1984. German Federal Film Archive, HV 5826C. 19. C Protocol, dated 23.8.1985. German Federal Film Archive, HV 5826C. 20. Michael Hanisch wrote in the East German film magazine Filmspiegel that the film explored a ‘male friendship, a love–hate relationship between two gangsters, similar to the relationship that Leone has to America’ (Hanisch 1986). 21. A complaint about the release of the film was received from Gotthold Müller, living in Frankfurt on the Oder on 27 August 1986. German Federal Film Archive, HV5826. 22. Letter to Dr Kranz from Bulla, dated 29 April 1985. German Federal Film Archive, HV5826.

references Allan, Seán and John Sandford (eds) (1999), DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992, New York: Berghahn. Allan, Seán and Sebastian Heiduschke (eds) (2015), Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Context, New York: Berghahn. Berghahn, Daniela (2005), Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Blum, Heiko R. et al. (1977), Film in der DDR, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. Borries, Friedrich von and Jens-Uwe Fischer (2008), Sozialistische Cowboys. Der Wilde Westen Ostdeutschlands, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Bredow, Wilfried von and Rolf Zurek (1975), Film und Gesellschaft in Deutschland: Dokumente und Materialien, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. Bronnen, Arnolt (1956), ‘Karl May. Leser und Lästerer’, Berliner Zeitung, 18 October. Dika, Vera (2008), ‘An East German Indianerfilm: the bear in sheep’s clothing’, Jump Cut, 50. F. K. (1986), ‘Leone in Berlin. Der italienische Regisseur im Gespräch mit Zuschauern’, Tribüne, 3 July.

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Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Fisher, Jamie (2014), ‘A late genre fade: utopianism and its twilight in DEFA’s science fiction, literary and Western films’, in Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage (eds), DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 177–96. Frayling, Christopher ([1981] 2012), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: I. B. Tauris. Gemünden, Gerd (1998), ‘Between Karl May and Karl Marx: the DEFA Indianerfilme (1965–1983)’, Film History, 10: 3, 399–407. Hanisch, Michael (1986), ‘Ein großer Spät-Gangsterfilm? Es war einmal in Amerika, Filmspiegel, 14. Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR (1967–1989), Filmobibliografische Jahresberichte, Berlin: Henschel. Holland-Moritz, Renate (1981), ‘Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod’, Eulenspiegel, 33. Kersten, Heinz (1963), Bonner Berichte aus Mittel- und Ostdeutschland. Das Filmwesen in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands, Bonn: Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen. Knietzsch, Horst (1981), ‘Nicht hoch im Anspruch, aber perfekt im Handwerk’, Neues Deutschland, 29 July. Knietzsch, Karl (2005), ‘Kino in den Nachkriegsjahren’, in Hans Peter Lühr, Kinos, Kameras und Filmemacher – Filmkultur in Dresden, Dresdener Hefte, 23: 2, 34–8. Imre, Anikó (ed.) (2012), A Companion to Eastern European Cinema, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. McLellan, Josie (2011), Love in the Time of Communism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Menge, Marlies (1981), ‘Ein Spielzeug für Erwachsene’, Die Zeit, 38, 11 September, 54. Meurer, Hans Joachim (2000), Cinema and National Identity in a Divided Germany 1979–1989: The Split Screen. New York: Edwin Mellen. Schenk, Ralf (1986), ‘Ein Mythos, ein Märchen. Sergio Leone über “Es war einmal in Amerika” ’, Filmspiegel, 15. Schenk, Ralf (2013), ‘Ein indisches Abenteuer. Die DEFA, das 70mm-Kino und Alexander der Grobe’, in Michael Wedel et al. (eds), DEFA International. Grenzüberschreitende Filmbeziehungen vor und nach dem Mauerbau, Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 233–48. Schütt, Hans-Dieter (2013), Andreas Dresen. Glückspiel, Berlin: be.bra verlag. Silberman, Marc and Henning Wrage (eds) (2014), DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture, Berlin: De Gruyter. Staiger, Janet (1992), Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stott, Rosemary (2012), Crossing the Wall: The Western Feature Film Import in East Germany, Oxford: Peter Lang. Torner, Evan (2011), ‘The red and the black: race in the DEFA Indianerfilm Osceola’, New German Review: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 25: 1, 61–81. Wehrstedt, Norbert (1996), ‘Indianerwestern made in GDR’, in Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann and Lothar Wolf (eds), Zwischen Marx und Muck. DEFA Filme für Kinder, Berlin: Henschel, pp. 54–69.

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Wiedemann, Dieter (1983), ‘Zur sozialen Funktion des Kinos in den achtziger Jahren. Empirische Tatsachen und theoretische Überlegungen zur gesellschaftlichen Bedeutung des Films im Kino’, Aus Theorie und Praxis des Films, 1. Wiedemann, Dieter (1992), ‘Der DEFA-Spielfilm im Kontext gesellschaftlicher Kommunikationsprozesse in den achtziger Jahren’, in Peter Hoff and Dieter Wiedemann (eds), Der DEFA-Spielfilm in den 80er Jahren – Chancen für die 90er?, Berlin: Vistas, pp. 67–86.

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chapter 12

Spaghetti Westerns and the ‘Afterlife’ of a Hollywood Genre Pete Falconer

T

he Western is no longer a major genre in contemporary Hollywood cinema. How long this has been the case is the subject of some debate; there is no definitive moment at which the Western ‘fell’ out of the mainstream. Michael Walker argues that ‘The Western as a genre all but disappeared around 1977’ (1996: 284), while J. Hoberman (1998: 91) proposes 1973 as the first year in which the diminished profile and more marginal popular status of Westerns could be clearly felt. Other potential candidates for such a moment might include the immediate critical and subsequent commercial failure of Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino) after its release in 1980. It is clear that the popular decline of the Hollywood Western has been registered in different ways at different times. It is equally clear, however, that there has been no significant or sustained return to the regular production of Westerns in Hollywood since the 1970s. This is not to claim that the genre has disappeared entirely. Westerns are still occasionally made, and characteristic images and motifs from the genre survive elsewhere, too – for example, Jim Kitses (1998: 17) notes the continuing prevalence of Western iconography in the road movie. Nonetheless, in the past few decades the Western genre seems to have entered what we might call its ‘afterlife’: a more marginal, residual mode of generic existence in which older meanings and resonances face very different conditions of popular interest and understanding.

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The Western is no longer assumed to be familiar either to Hollywood filmmakers or to their audiences. There are undoubtedly exceptions in both cases, but this seems to be the prevailing view. John Anderson’s remarks in an article for Variety about the recent version of The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013) express some aspects of this contemporary perspective: ‘As Verbinski puts it, making Westerns in general is “really hard”. But so is the task of making them relevant to generations whose frame of reference doesn’t include masked men, horses, shootouts at the local saloon’ (Anderson 2013: 60). The Western has come to be associated with a sense of uncertainty – uncertainty about the commercial viability of Western productions, and about contemporary audiences’ capacity to understand and appreciate the Westerns that do get made. This chapter forms part of my ongoing efforts to reflect on the implications of this situation – to think about how Western movies (and their attendant themes and tropes) have functioned since the genre ceased to be a major part of mainstream American cinema, and how these changed generic conditions have affected the ways in which Westerns are produced and understood. In this chapter, I will compare the contemporary situation outlined above with another historical moment in which the conventions of the Western genre found themselves transformed by a different set of surrounding contexts: the Italian adoption of the Western in the 1960s. Both the Spaghetti Western and the afterlife of the Western can be thought of as moments of transposition, in which aspects of the Western genre have been subject to a fundamental shift in context. In the case of Spaghetti Westerns, this shift occurred across national cinemas and film cultures, from the USA to Italy. For the various films and other works that I take to be examples of the afterlife of the Western, the transposition is across time, from a period in which the genre was a current and familiar popular form to one in which the place of Westerns in popular culture is much less prominent. I will consider the extent to which these two transpositions are comparable to each other and the ways in which works from each context reflect and respond to similar conditions. The cultural shift constituted by the Spaghetti Western can perhaps be said to anticipate aspects of the later situation, but there are also important differences, particularly in the level of assumed familiarity with the genre and its tropes. I am conscious that framing these two contexts as moments of transposition involves implicitly positing an earlier version of the Hollywood Western as the norm or template for the genre. It is certainly important to acknowledge that there is no original or definitive version

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of the Western genre, no single object or feature that is being transposed in all cases. The Westerns made during the Hollywood studio era, for example, are themselves made up of an array of transposed elements, from popular literature, theatre and painting, as well as from other movie genres. Although I would argue that the proliferation of feature Westerns in Hollywood between the late 1930s and the early 1960s was a time of great richness within the genre, I have no interest in promoting any particular example from that period as the model for how Westerns should be. Indeed, the quantity of Hollywood Westerns produced in these decades resulted in an extraordinary variety within the genre – from the subversive comedy of Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) to the grim futility of The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943), from the vivid social renderings of John Ford to the isolated ensembles of Budd Boetticher. As Tag Gallagher (2003: 264) has pointed out, the notion of the ‘classic’ Western as a coherent and identifiable form against which deviations can be measured is highly problematic. However, it is still legitimate to consider the ways in which movies relate to and make use of their influences and predecessors within a generic tradition. The presence of elements from earlier incarnations of the genre in very different surrounding conditions makes the Spaghetti Western and the afterlife of the Western particularly interesting contexts in which to reflect on such relationships. It is also important to acknowledge that there are differences in each case in the generic forms and conventions that are being transposed. Crucially, the loose composite definition of the Western genre that we find at work in its afterlife has come to include the Spaghetti Western (or at least a particular view of it) quite prominently. I will return to the place of the Spaghetti Western within the afterlife of the genre at the end of this chapter. Thinking about the Spaghetti Western and the afterlife of the Western as moments of transposition allows us to identify and examine some of the parallel ways in which the genre is treated in the two contexts. Perhaps the most significant similarity between many Italian Westerns and a range of examples from the afterlife of the genre is the sense of the West as a foreign or alien environment, a place that is understood to be distant or different from an implied norm. In both cases, the generic world of the Western is treated as belonging to another culture – the culture of another country, or of another time. The distinctive locations seen in many Spaghetti Westerns are often described in terms that emphasise their geographical (and implicitly cultural) remoteness. Hoberman makes reference to ‘landscapes of Martian desolation’

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(2012: 38) in the films of Sergio Leone and likens some of the settings used in Death Rides a Horse (Da uomo a uomo, Giulio Petroni, 1967) to ‘the middle of the Gobi Desert’ (41). In this way, the American West as portrayed in Italian movies is figuratively framed as a different world. Christopher Frayling’s remark, made when applying Umberto Eco’s structural model of the Superman comics to Spaghetti Westerns, that ‘the superman of the Italian Western does not come from a different planet (rather, from a different culture)’ (2006: 78) seems to imply that the perceived distances involved are comparable, if not strictly equivalent. The representation of the West as an alien world is most apparent in movies from the early years of the Spaghetti Western boom, after the commercial success of A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, Sergio Leone, 1964). At this point, the Western had established itself as a currently popular filone (generic cycle or strand) within Italian popular cinema. As Austin Fisher notes, ‘filoni relied on rapid repetition and imitation of successful formulae’ (2011: 36). The perspective on the world of the Western taken in Leone’s film seems to have been one of the characteristics that was repeated in the movies that initially followed it. Past a certain point – certainly by 1967, ‘the peak production year of the Spaghetti Western’ (Frayling 2006: 78), when it was ‘a firmly established and flourishing filone’ (Fisher 2011: 45) – it seems as if enough Italian Westerns had been made to have collectively established a familiar generic world of their own. Prior to this point, however, the outsider perspective of A Fistful of Dollars was prevalent. The sense of foreignness and distance attached to the Western milieu in many of the earlier Spaghetti Westerns can be seen in the films’ characteristic approaches to narration and point of view. The settings in which the narratives of these movies take place are typically explored and revealed to us by one or more outsiders, who enter the world of the film from elsewhere. This model is established in A Fistful of Dollars and can be seen to a greater or lesser extent in several other key films from the 1964–6 period: For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più, Sergio Leone, 1965), A Pistol for Ringo (Una pistola per Ringo, Duccio Tessari, 1965), The Return of Ringo (Il ritorno di Ringo, Duccio Tessari, 1965) and Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966). The notion of an outsider protagonist riding into the story from somewhere else is hardly unfamiliar to Westerns of any period; Shane (George Stevens, 1953) is a famous example. In a number of the major early Spaghetti Westerns, however, this already recognisable trope is

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inflected in ways that stress the centrality of the outsider perspective. The degree to which the narrative world of these movies is shown to us through the explorations and investigations of the outsider figure is particularly emphatic. This is at its most pronounced in A Fistful of Dollars, in which Joe (Clint Eastwood) spends much of the early part of the film looking around and assessing the state of affairs in the town of San Miguel, asking questions and familiarising himself with the world into which he has entered. Pausing to drink from the well at the edge of town, Joe observes the plight of Marisol (Marianne Koch) and her family, the film repeatedly cutting back to the image of him looking on, as if to show him taking in the relevant details one by one. Subsequently, Joe will go up to the balcony of the saloon (‘Things always look different from higher up’) and survey the shape and structure of San Miguel while Silvanito (José Calvo) explains about the two powerful families vying for control of the town. We are closely aligned with Joe’s perspective; we explore with him and receive a great deal of information as he does. The world of the Western in A Fistful of Dollars is shown to us through Joe. In The Return of Ringo, Ringo/Montgomery Brown (Giuliano Gemma) returns to his home town of Mimbres, having fought on the Union side in the American Civil War. Although Ringo already knows the town, the situation there has changed so much that he spends much of the movie refamiliarising himself with Mimbres and learning about what has happened there. The returning Civil War veteran is another well-established trope within Hollywood Westerns, The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) being perhaps the most widely cited example, but again we can see this convention being used in a way that particularly emphasises the outsider perspective. Like Joe, Ringo spends a lot of time exploring and looking around – in the streets, in the town’s church and saloon, and even at his former house where he happens upon his sleeping daughter (Mónica Sugranes) while snooping around in the dark. Ringo has been to these places before (we are shown that he knows his way around his house, even when he cannot see clearly), but the effect is still comparable to that in A Fistful of Dollars, with the protagonist’s explorations mapping the world of the film for us. The setting and its associated milieu are so central to the Western (consider the name of the genre) that the central characters’ relationship to the towns that they enter feels closely connected to each film’s broader relationship to the genre itself. Even in films where we are less overtly or consistently aligned with the perspective of the protagonist, like A Pistol for Ringo or Django, there is still an emphasis on the outsider figure’s deepening relationship

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with the setting. The titular heroes in these two movies become more and more able to make effective use of the spaces that they occupy. Ringo (Giuliano Gemma), having been without a gun for much of the movie, is finally able to retrieve a hidden weapon from the fireplace of the besieged ranch house towards the end, while Django (Franco Nero) compensates for his injured hands by resting his gun on a cross in a graveyard in the film’s final shoot-out. Although the characters remain outsiders, their gradual integration into the world of their respective films is shown by their increased ability to utilise and manipulate elements within it. The persistence in earlier Spaghetti Westerns of the trope of the outsider discovering or becoming accustomed to the world of the movie (and, by extension, the world of the Western) can be seen in A Bullet for the General (Quién sabe?, Damiano Damiani, 1966). The film’s narrative, as Fisher (2011: 137) has argued, is based in part around an eventual shift in viewpoint from one character (and the values he embodies) to another – from the American assassin Tate (Lou Castel) to the Mexican bandit and revolutionary Chuncho (Gian Maria Volonté). Nonetheless, even this movie, which ends up very much on the side of the oppressed Mexicans against the imperialist agitators, starts with our perspective aligned with that of the outsider, Tate. Fisher observes that we are encouraged (to begin with) to ‘accept him as the primary point of contact with the on-screen action’ (2011: 137). However much the film will subsequently depart from Tate and the perspective he represents, the character retains his conventional function as our initial point of entry into the film’s generic world. If many of the early Spaghetti Westerns present the foreign world of the genre as something to be explored and discovered, the equivalent trope in the afterlife of the genre is that of reconstruction. The Western, in its afterlife, has acquired double connotations of the past – it is associated both with its historical setting and with earlier periods of American filmmaking. There is an established tradition within the genre of paying homage to previous forms and styles – from the clips of John Wayne’s earlier roles in The Shootist (Don Siegel, 1976) to the evocation of silent cinema in the opening scene of Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959). A distinctive feature of the afterlife of the Western, however, is the increased sense of separation between the contemporary situation and previous eras in which the genre, as Hollywood producer Jim Jacks puts it, was ‘the staple’ (quoted in Harris 2004: 7). Contemporary incarnations of the genre often seem compelled to address this increased perception of historical distance.

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One characteristic way in which many afterlife Westerns respond to the relative unfamiliarity of the genre and its world to contemporary audiences is to show them as much of that world as possible. A world that belongs to the past is rebuilt for us in extensive, painstaking detail. Richard Combs points to the prevalence of ‘lengthy landscape studies’ in recent Westerns, along with ‘a pleasingly diverse, intense, sensuous lighting style, which emphasises the minutiae of commodities and the freshness of the carpentry in these frontier towns’ (2009: 46). The camera lingers on period details – props, costumes, sets – as if trying to bring substance and texture back to a forgotten generic universe. In Appaloosa (Ed Harris, 2008), for example, the film’s ‘classical’ style (favouring wide shots, long takes and deep focus) and relatively slow pace give us the opportunity to contemplate a range of elaborate historical details. These details include weaponry (the enormous 8-gauge shotgun belonging to Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen)), technology (the telescope used by Virgil Cole (Ed Harris), and later his leg brace) and even facial hair (Everett’s beard and a selection of other fine Victorian moustaches and whiskers throughout the film). As some of these examples suggest, the emphasis given to such details can actually amplify the alien quality of the world of the Western in these movies. This is especially apparent in films like the remake of True Grit (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2010). At various points in the movie, the attention devoted to unusual period details produces heightened, surreal effects. One particularly striking example is the scene in the woods, in which Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) and Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) encounter a bearskin-wearing itinerant dentist named Forster (Ed Lee Corbin). Suspecting that they are being followed, Mattie and Cogburn stop and turn round to wait for whoever is on their trail. A tableau-like long shot of the pair sitting on their horses, neither speaking nor moving as the falling snow blows around them, gives the impression of a momentary pause in the action of the movie. Forster is first seen from a distance, where he resembles a bear on horseback, accompanied by the insistent clank of something metallic hanging from his saddle. Cut-aways to shots of Mattie and Cogburn looking perplexed confirm this as a strange and unexpected sight. As the dentist approaches, it gradually becomes apparent that he is human – his beard becomes visible under the head of the bearskin, its grey colour is more clearly distinguishable from the brown fur underneath, and we are eventually able to see his face. When Forster arrives at the two waiting characters, there is a brief moment of uncertain silence and then a curious and protracted exchange in which Forster introduces

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himself, explains how he acquired the dead body he is carrying with him (a hanged man that the pair had encountered in a previous scene) and answers Cogburn’s enquiry about shelter nearby. The scene’s slow pace, gradual revealing of details and its framing as a temporary interruption to the main characters’ journey result in a self-contained episode apparently dedicated to the extended contemplation of Forster’s strangeness. The film seems almost to stop to allow us to take in the eccentric details of his speech and appearance. The strangeness of Forster is bound up in a sense of the archaic – he seems both primitive (wearing a bearskin and bartering for a corpse in order to harvest its teeth) and oddly formal (speaking, like many of the characters in the film, in conventionally ‘old-fashioned’ language). The ‘Bear Man’, as he is called in the film’s end credits, gives the impression of coming from a distant and alien past. The episode with Forster is a rather extreme example, but it illustrates the extent to which the highlighting of idiosyncratic period details in afterlife Westerns can be taken. The effect of this emphasis on historical trappings is rarely as outré as it is in that particular instance – although Combs describes the level of such detail in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007) as ‘hallucinatory’ (2009: 46) – but the density of the period mise-en-scène in afterlife Westerns often produces a more subtle strangeness. Remaining with True Grit, an example of this can be found in the first of two early scenes in the office of Colonel Stonehill (Dakin Matthews), in which Mattie shows her formidable negotiating skills. The period details are not given much in the way of direct emphasis – the spaces behind Mattie and the Colonel are not fully in focus once their negotiations are in progress. However, the objects and textures within these spaces do start to feel quite insistent as the scene goes on. A large part of this effect seems to come from the quantity of material on display. The Colonel’s office, while not cluttered, contains a variety of historical props and fixtures: wooden chairs (six, only two of which are of the same design), desks and cabinets, and a pot-bellied stove, as well as many smaller items and desk accessories. All of this remains mostly in the background, but as the scene settles into a steady pattern of shot/reverse shot (reflecting the back and forth of the negotiations) the repetitions come to quietly reassert the presence of all of these objects. The procession of distinctive, carefully rendered historical details in many afterlife Westerns ultimately seems to emphasise the effort that has gone into the reconstruction of (a particular version of) the period. Vivid though the results may

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sometimes be, the relationship that this suggests to the genre remains one of retrospection and historical remove. The two tropes discussed above, exploration and reconstruction, are appropriate to the different forms of cultural and generic distance that we see in each of the two moments of transposition: geographical distance in the case of Spaghetti Westerns, temporal distance in the case of the afterlife of the genre. The ways in which the foreign or alien dimension to the Western is managed in each instance, however, are also indicative of another key difference between the two moments. This difference can be thought of in terms of the relative levels of familiarity and immediacy associated with the genre. This may seem incongruous, given the emphasis I have placed on a conception of the Western as an alien world in both contexts, but Spaghetti Westerns demonstrate the extent to which the iconography and milieu of a genre can be understood as both foreign and familiar. In the historical context he establishes for his discussion of the more overtly political Spaghetti Westerns, Fisher illustrates the popularity and impact of Hollywood Westerns in post-war Italy and throughout Europe. Fisher notes that, by the late 1940s, ‘the vast landscapes of the American West were . . . indelibly etched into the popular imagination on both sides of the Atlantic’ and that ‘the myth of the Wild West remained highly attractive throughout Europe during the 1950s’ (2011: 25). Even before the commercial explosion of the Spaghetti Western, Stetsons, six-shooters and the like were part of the repertoire of images that Italian audiences expected to see at the movies. After the Second World War, Italy, like a number of other European countries, saw the release of a ‘backlog of Hollywood films’ (Fisher 2011: 16), including Westerns, which would continue to feature among the American films distributed abroad in the decades that followed. By the time Italian Westerns started to be produced in quantity in the 1960s, the opportunities for domestic audiences to familiarise themselves with the genre had already been extensive. As Frayling remarks, ‘your average low-budget Spaghetti played to audiences which went to the pictures several times a week’ (2006: xiii). The Italian filmmakers who made Spaghetti Westerns, themselves part of this wider popular film culture, had also in many cases had first-hand experience of Hollywood conventions and practices, having ‘learned their trade, Hollywood-style, side by side with American directors’ (Frayling 2006: 66) in the 1950s, when a number of major US film companies had worked extensively in Rome. One of the defining features of the afterlife of the Western seems to be the absence of this sort of widespread familiarity with the genre.

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Over the past few decades, the production of Westerns in Hollywood and elsewhere has been so sporadic that the genre has come to seem rather obscure. This is a matter of cultural capital – most contemporary audiences do not have the experience, and thus the understanding, of the Western genre that they once did. This proposition (although I take it to be broadly accurate) involves too many variables and intangibles to demonstrate with any real precision. We can certainly say, however, that many recent Westerns seem to assume a relative lack of familiarity with the genre on their audiences’ part. In my own article on the two versions of 3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957 and James Mangold, 2007), I observed that the approach taken to the conventions of the genre in the twenty-first-century remake of the movie involved ‘both highlighting iconographic elements, and delimiting their significance’ (Falconer 2009: 64). The iconography of the Western – the examples I focused on were ‘hats, horses and guns’ (Falconer 2009: 62) – is emphasised in the 2007 film, but also given very specific and localised meaning. Jim Kitses’ remarks, made in the late 1960s, about the accumulated meanings of iconography in Westerns provide a useful point of comparison: To see a church in a movie – any film but a western – is to see a church; the camera records. By working carefully for it a filmmaker can give that church meaning, through visual emphasis, context, repetitions, dialogue. But a church in a western has a priori a potential expressiveness rooted in the accretions of the past. (Kitses 1969: 21) Putting aside the slightly curious example of the church and the apparent assumption that the Western is the only genre that works in this way, the contrast is still telling. The handling of Western iconography in the 2007 3:10 to Yuma – for example, the gun belonging to outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) which is carefully established as ‘unique and distinctive’, with suggestions of supernatural properties (Falconer 2009: 63) – seems much closer to that in Kitses’ ‘any film but a western’, with the meaning of key elements achieved by ‘working carefully for it’, rather than by building on existing associations. The film’s approach seems to be based on the assumption that these associations will not be strong or consistent enough to work for its audience. A lack of familiarity with the genre, real or perceived, was not a problem that the Spaghetti Western faced. The Western may have been foreign to Italy, but its profile and presence within Italian popular culture were well-established. Returning to the tropes of exploration and

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reconstruction, a significant difference, relating to relative levels of apparent familiarity, can be seen in the types of character often associated with each activity. One of the recurring ways in which the world of the Western is reconstructed in works from the afterlife of the genre is through retrospective narration. In the Coen brothers’ True Grit, the story is framed as the recollections of Mattie Ross later in life (Elizabeth Marvel). Mattie is a relatively rare female example – the narrating figure is more often male, as in two movies from 2007: No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen) and Ghost Rider (Mark Steven Johnson). Neither movie is a Western per se, but both reflect aspects of the genre’s afterlife in a number of ways, some of which are surprisingly similar. Each film establishes its connection to the Western genre in its opening sequence. Both openings include a darkened Western landscape and retrospective voice-over narration from an older man – Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) in No Country for Old Men and the Caretaker (Sam Elliott) in Ghost Rider. The use of the older man’s introductory narration suggests a specific perspective on the genre. In both movies, the Western comes to us as if from a distance. Our access to the genre is mediated, associated with memory rather than with present experience. The choice of showing us the Western landscape at night or in the early morning adds to the sense of remoteness and separation. In full daylight, the spaces we see might seem more open, more amenable to being traversed and explored. Our impression of these spaces might involve more of the characteristic associations of landscape in the genre – of freedom and hardship, danger and possibility. Instead, the Western environment as we first see it in both movies seems mysterious and distant. That two such disparate films – an Oscar-winning adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel and a Marvel superhero movie starring Nicholas Cage – should share such specific features suggests something about the contemporary status of the Western. The implication seems to be that the genre needs to be retrieved for us from the obscurity of the past by an individual more closely connected to its world than we are assumed to be. The association of the Western with older men has its own history within the genre, for example in films like Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958) and Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962), which connect the ageing of their protagonists (played by established Western stars) to the passing of the Old West itself. This association, however, is extended in No Country for Old Men and Ghost Rider, where the West itself is presented as more

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distant, and the older men are offered as points of partial, retrospective access. These older narrating figures can be contrasted with the often strikingly youthful protagonists that we can see exploring the world of the Western in a number of the Spaghettis mentioned above, played by young stars such as Clint Eastwood, Giuliano Gemma and Franco Nero. In these examples, our access to the genre is still in some sense mediated, but through a figure that suggests more of a connection to the here and now. The Western itself, as a quintessential Hollywood genre, had its own associations with youth and the contemporary in 1960s Italy – in the post-war period, as Fisher points out, ‘Americana became a touchstone for European youth culture’ (2011: 22). In Europe during the era of the Spaghetti Western, the Western still felt much more like something that a young man could gain access to and inhabit. As I have already suggested, the relationship of the Italian Western to its Hollywood predecessors is one of both familiarity and distance. In the most interesting and successful Spaghetti Westerns, it is the balance between these elements that produces such a fascinating engagement with the genre. The Western is familiar enough for its conventional generic language to be used clearly and effectively, but the lack of investment in some of the cultural assumptions and narratives that surround the genre provides considerable scope for novelty and invention (as well as for more extensive political and ideological reworkings). Spaghetti Westerns often use the iconography of the genre in an engagingly casual and offhand way. An entertaining example of this is the abandoned covered wagon by the riverside in The Hills Run Red (Un fiume di dollari, Carlo Lizzani, 1966), on and around which Jerry Brewster (Thomas Hunter) fights off some of the villain’s henchmen. The primary purpose of the wagon is to add another dimension to the staging of the fight (and to provide the hero with a selection of hard objects and surfaces to hit his opponents with). We are offered no explanation for why the wagon might be there – it is simply an object that could plausibly be found in this generic environment. Its presence is established in the previous scene, in which Brewster meets his long-lost son (Loris Loddi), but its introduction is given no significant emphasis. Indeed, once the wagon has been used as the basis for a few athletic stunts and moments of comic violence, it recedes from the scene and the final stages of the fight take place splashing around in the river. The wagon’s function as part of an effective, comically inflected action scene depends on its simultaneous familiarity and disposability as an iconographic object – its presence needs to be able to be readily

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accepted without drawing too much specific attention. The scene would be almost unthinkable in an afterlife Western – either the presence of the wagon would require too much explanation and context, or the lack of such explanation and context would be treated emphatically, as a reflection of the strangeness of the generic world. The capacity of Spaghetti Westerns to employ the iconography of the genre in an almost throwaway fashion also produced some sharp and economical storytelling. This can be seen in the series of short scenes in Face to Face (Faccia a faccia, Sergio Sollima, 1967) in which the band of outlaws known as the Wild Gang get back together. Each scene introduces a new gang member by evoking a familiar character type: the horse thief, the guard riding shotgun on the mail coach and, finally, the post-Civil War Southerner. Each type is established via clear, simple actions and images – Vance the horse thief (Nello Pazzafini), for example, is shown watching a group of horses and then lassoing one. The film moves from type to type with speed and confidence, using the language of the genre to deliver narrative information efficiently. The use of generic tropes and motifs in the Spaghetti Western can also, of course, go a long way beyond the strictly functional. In a film like The Great Silence (Il grande silenzio, Sergio Corbucci, 1968), the sustained engagement with the conventions surrounding violence in the genre, its moral and legal justifications and the issues that arise out of it – honour, justice, revenge, cruelty, individualism, legalism – achieves a level of complexity comparable to that of some of the best Hollywood Westerns. The film juxtaposes the approaches to violence taken by the hero Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant), the villain Tigrero (Klaus Kinski) and the sympathetic but ineffectual bureaucrat Sheriff Gideon Burnett (Frank Wolff) in ways that allow them to reflect aspects of one another without becoming overly schematic. Silence’s insistence on drawing second, in the honourable tradition of the Western gunfighter, is framed as both a mark of heroic distinction and a pretext for deadly violence (‘Maybe it’s a good way to kill’, remarks a lawman in an early scene). The contrast with the sadistic and self-satisfied Tigrero emphasises both the nobility of Silence’s code and its obvious limitations. Tigrero, too, is happy to play by Silence’s rules when it suits him, to deny Silence the opportunity of goading him into a duel or to justify the killing of Regina (Marisa Merlini) – ‘You saw she shot first.’ The film maintains its sense of complexity in Silence’s death, which is presented both as a kind of apotheosis (Silence falls in slow motion, with an almost Christ-like trickle of blood from the top of his head) and as a futile gesture, which fails to prevent the massacre of the unarmed,

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starving outlaws at the hands of Tigrero and his fellow bounty hunters. Silence’s death recalls Robert Warshow’s remarks on the Western hero: that ‘the image the Westerner seeks to maintain can be presented as clearly in defeat as in victory’ (1954: 111) and that ‘the Westerner comes into the field of serious art only when his moral code, without ceasing to be compelling, is seen also to be imperfect’ (112). The pertinence of Warshow’s observations, made over a decade earlier in reference to Hollywood Westerns, reflects the film’s complex engagement with established traditions within the genre. The depth and diversity of Italian incarnations of the Western, however, have not always been recognised. As Fisher notes, when Spaghetti Westerns were exported to the US, they were often regarded by critics as interchangeable, as ‘not only a sadistic, but a homogeneous, mass of low-budget trash’ (2011: 176). This lack of differentiation bears an interesting resemblance to the situation that can be observed in the afterlife of the Western genre. In recent Westerns and Western hybrids, we frequently see tropes, images and situations from many different styles and periods brought together. This often takes the form of wide-ranging episodic narratives, consisting of sections reminiscent of different Westerns or types of Western. I noted this tendency in my discussion of the 2007 3:10 to Yuma, both in relation to that film and to Appaloosa, referring in the latter case to ‘the episodic sprawl of its plot incorporating situations recalling Westerns from Rio Bravo to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ (Falconer 2009, 66). In these and other examples, very different strands and aspects of the genre are treated, in their revived incarnations, as historically and aesthetically equivalent. The history of the Western is condensed and flattened – the genre as a whole is treated as belonging to a generalised past, formed out of those tropes from different periods that are still remembered. As I mentioned at the start of the chapter, this fragmentary retrospective definition of the genre includes aspects of the Spaghetti Western. Academic discourses still tend to contrast Italian Westerns with ‘classical’ examples of the genre, placing them in what William McClain, writing about the critical reception of Leone’s movies, refers to as ‘the now sturdy family tree of post-studio revisionist Westerns’ (2010: 52). In the afterlife of the Western, however, Spaghettis have been incorporated into the disparate assemblage of elements that are understood to be the genre’s inheritance. Indeed, a number of the most prominent Westerns in popular memory are now Spaghettis, and these movies have come to play an increasingly central role in how the genre is defined. Spaghetti Westerns are

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often the main point of reference in broader allusions to the genre in areas such as journalism. A Variety article from 2009 about negotiations between the major US television networks and their advertisers likened the situation to a Western ‘standoff’, but specifically to ‘the last 20 minutes of a spaghetti Western’ (Littleton 2009: 3). In a critical review in praise of the Australian movie The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005), which draws heavily on the Western, Philip Cenere states that the movie ‘fiercely resists the trappings of its genre’ (2006: 40). Elaborating on this point, Cenere specifies that ‘The Proposition successfully side-steps the spaghetti-western clichés made famous by Sergio Leone’ (2006: 40). To indicate the centrality of the Spaghetti Western to the frame of reference in these examples, the titles of the two articles discussed here are ‘Fistful of Tension’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and The Proposition’. Across a range of contemporary popular culture, elements from or reminiscent of Italian Westerns are often used as shorthand for the Western as a whole. In the animated film Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011), the mythical Spirit of the West, the embodiment of all things Western, is presented as a Clint Eastwood-like figure, dressed like the characters he played in the Dollars trilogy. The tendency for the Spaghetti Western to stand in for the whole genre can even be seen in recent British television. The CGI animated ident (directed by Juan Jesus Garcia) used for films shown on ITV4 between 2007 and 2013 featured the channel’s logo, a silver digit ‘4’, in situations evoking movie genres, including the Western. The individual sections were sometimes used on their own as shorter idents. The Western section featured swinging batwing doors, a low looming camera angle reminiscent of Leone and a tiny snatch of Morricone-esque music (little more than rattling percussion and an ominously tolling bell). The whole ident is thirty seconds long, and the Western section of it takes up little more than five seconds. The use of Spaghetti Western elements suggests that these are seen as the aspects of the Western genre most likely to be recognised in such a short space of time. Similarly, in an episode of the competitive cooking show The Great British Menu (BBC, 2006–present), a chef serving a Western-themed main course provided the judges with Eastwood-style ponchos to wear while eating the dish. As the above examples suggest, the Spaghetti Western elements that continue to appear in contemporary popular culture predominantly consist of a few flourishes and motifs associated with the films of Sergio Leone. Fisher refers to ‘the phenomenal achievements of Sergio Leone in the international marketplace’ (2011: 167), which led to ‘the generic

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dominance of Leone’ (178) in perceptions of Italian Westerns, especially in the USA and the UK. If the Spaghetti Western is now often used to represent the entire Western genre, Leone frequently seems to fulfil the same function for the Spaghetti Western itself. We may lament the extent to which a rich and varied body of films has been reduced in popular memory to a scattering of recognisable motifs from a couple of specific examples. In the afterlife of the Western, it would appear that Spaghetti Westerns are subject to the same fragmentation and condensation as other versions and periods of the genre. Despite these shared conditions, however, the Spaghetti seems to remain one of the more prominent and widely recognised forms of the Western. As Frayling noted in the early part of this century, ‘Italian Westerns are probably more fashionable worldwide in 2005 than their American counterparts’ (2006: ix). This continuing situation may be partly due to the relative freshness of Italian Westerns in popular memory – they still number among the last Westerns to enjoy large-scale mainstream success. Perhaps, though, the emphasis on distinctiveness, immediacy and impact that we often see in Spaghetti Westerns has also made them better equipped to endure the latter-day conditions of the genre. The strategies employed in Italian Westerns to ensure that transposed generic elements still have meaning and power in a foreign cultural context may continue to serve them well in a subsequent moment of transposition.

references Anderson, John (2013), ‘Bruckheimer: a “lone” stab at reviving the Western’, Variety, June 18–24, 58–60. Cenere, Phillip (2006), ‘The good, the bad and The Proposition’, Metro Magazine, 148, 38–40. Combs, Richard (2009), ‘Broken trail super-Westerns: new whiskey in old bottles’, Film Comment, 45: 1, 45–7. Falconer, Pete (2009), ‘3:10 again: a remade Western and the problem of authenticity’, in Rachel Carroll (ed.), Adaptation in Contemporary Culture, London: Continuum, pp. 61–71. Fisher, Austin (2011), Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Frayling, Christopher (2006), Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: I. B. Tauris. Gallagher, Tag (2003), ‘Shoot-out at the genre corral: problems in the “evolution” of the Western’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader III, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 262–76. Harris, Dana (2004), ‘H’wood hot for horse operas’, Variety, 19–25 April: 7.

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Hoberman, J. (1998), ‘How the Western was lost’, in Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (eds), The Western Reader, New York: Limelight Editions, pp. 85–92. Hoberman, J. (2012), ‘In praise of da pasta: the subversive sadism of the Spaghetti Western’, Film Comment, 48: 3, 36–43. Kitses, Jim (1969), Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship within the Western, London: Thames & Hudson. Kitses, Jim (1998), ‘Introduction: postmodernism and the Western’, in Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (eds), The Western Reader, New York: Limelight Editions, pp. 15–31. Littleton, Cynthia (2009), ‘Fistful of tension’, Variety, 13–19 July, 3, 34. McClain, William (2010), ‘Western, go home! Sergio Leone and the “death of the Western” in American film criticism’, Journal of Film and Video, 62: 1–2, 52–66. Walker, Michael (1996), ‘Dances with Wolves’, in Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (eds), The Movie Book of the Western, London: Studio Vista, pp. 284–93. Warshow, Robert (1954), ‘Movie chronicle: the Westerner’, in Robert Warshow (2002), The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 105–24.

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Filmography

100 Rifles, directed by Tom Gries. USA: Marvin Schwartz Productions / Twentieth Century Fox, 1969. 3:10 to Yuma, directed by Delmer Daves. USA: Columbia Pictures, 1957. 3:10 to Yuma, directed by James Mangold. USA: Lionsgate / Tree Line Film, 2007. A Bullet For the General / Quién sabe?, directed by Damiano Damiani. Italy: MCM, 1966. A Fistful of Dollars / Per un pugno di dollari, directed by Sergio Leone. Italy / Spain / West Germany: Jolly Film / Ocean Films / Constantin Film, 1964. A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe / Un genio, due compari, un pollo, directed by Damiano Damiani. Italy / France / West Germany: Rafran Cinematografica / AMLF / Rialto Film Preben-Philipsen, 1975. A Pistol for Ringo / Una pistola per Ringo, directed by Duccio Tessari. Italy / Spain: Balcázar Producciones Cinematográficas / Produzioni Cinematografiche Mediterranee, 1965. A Professional Gun / Il mercenario, directed by Sergio Corbucci. Italy / Spain: Produzioni Europee Associati / Produzioni Associate Delphos / Profilms 21, 1968. A Stranger in Town / Un dollaro tra i denti, directed by Luigi Vanzi, Italy / USA: Primex Italiana, 1967. Ace High / I quattro dell’Ave Maria, directed by Giuseppe Colizzi. Italy: Crono Cinematografica / Finanzia San Marco, 1968. Adima Changala, directed by A. B. Raj. India: Sree Sai Productions, 1981. Alive or Preferably Dead / Vivi o preferibilmente morti, directed by Duccio Tessari. Italy / Spain: Hesperia Films S.A. / Ultra Film, 1969. Alvarez Kelly, directed by Edward Dmytryk. USA: Columbia Pictures, 1966. Appaloosa, directed by Ed Harris. USA: New Line Cinema, 2008. Billy the Kid / Fuera de la ley, directed by Léon Klimovsky. Spain: Carthago Coop. Cinematográfica, 1964.

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filmography

Black Jesus / Seduto alla sua destra, directed by Valerio Zurlini. Italy: Ital-Noleggio Cinematografico / Castoro, 1968. Blindman / Il pistolero cieco, directed by Ferdinando Baldi. Italy / USA: ABKCO Music and Records / Primex, 1971. Boot Hill / La collina degli stivali, directed by Giuseppe Colizzi. Italy: San Marco S.P.A. / Crono, 1969. Boss Nigger, directed by Jack Arnold. USA: Dimension Pictures, 1975. Buck and the Preacher, directed by Sidney Poitier. USA: Belafonte Enterprises / Columbia Pictures / E & R Productions Corp., 1972. Buffalo Bill / Buffalo Bill, l’eroe del far west, directed by Mario Costa / John W. Fordson. Italy / Spain / West Germany: Filmes Cinematografica / Gloria-Film GmbH / Les Films Corona, 1964. Bullets Don’t Argue / Le pistole non discutono, directed by Mario Caiano. Italy / Spain / West Germany: Jolly Film / Constantin Film Produktion / Trío Films, 1964. Burn! / Queimada, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Italy / France: Produzioni Europee Associati / Les Productions Artistes Associés, 1969. Cheyenne Autumn, directed by John Ford. USA: Warner Bros., 1964. China 9, Liberty 37 / Amore, piombo e furore, directed by Monte Hellman. Italy / Spain: Aspa Producciones / Compagnia Europea Cinematografica, 1978. China Gate, directed by Rajkumar Santoshi. India: Santoshi Productions, 1998. Chisum, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen. USA: Warner Bros., 1970. Cipolla Colt, directed by Enzo G. Castellari. Italy / Spain / West Germany: CIPI Cinematografica S.A. / Compagnia Cinematografica Champion / TIT Filmproduktion GmbH, 1975. Compañeros / Vamos a matar, compañeros, directed by Sergio Corbucci. Italy / West Germany / Spain: Tritone Cinematografica / Terra-Filmkunst / Atlántida Films, 1970. Cowboy, directed by Delmer Daves. USA: Columbia Pictures, 1958. Day of Anger / I giorni dell’ira, directed by Tonino Valerii. Italy / West Germany: Sancrosiap / Corona Filmproduktion / Divina-Film, 1967. Death Rides a Horse / Da uomo a uomo, directed by Giulio Petroni. Italy: PEC, 1967. Death Walks in Laredo / Tre pistole contro Cesare, directed by Enzo Peri. Italy / Algeria: Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica / Casbah Film, 1966. Der Scout, directed by Dshamjangijn Buntar and Konrad Petzold. East Germany / Mongolia: DEFA / Mongolkino, 1983. Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegel. USA: Warner Bros., 1971.

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Divorce Italian Style / Divorzio all’italiana, directed by Pietro Germi. Italy: Lux Film / Vides Cinematografica / Galatea Film, 1961. Django, directed by Sergio Corbucci. Italy / Spain: B.R.C. Produzione Film / Tecisa, 1966. Django Kill . . . If You Live, Shoot! / Se sei vivo, spara!, directed by Giulio Questi. Italy / Spain: GIA Società Cinematografica / Hispamer Films, 1967. Django Unchained, directed by Quentin Tarantino. USA: The Weinstein Company / Columbia Pictures, 2012. Don’t Turn the Other Cheek / ¡Viva la muerte . . . tua!, directed by Duccio Tessari. Italy / West Germany / Spain: Hercules Associated Entertainment / Juan de Orduña, P.C. / Terra-Filmkunst / Tritone Cinematografica, 1971. Duck, You Sucker / Giù la testa, directed by Sergio Leone. Italy / Spain: Rafran Cinematografica / Euro International Films, 1971. Duel at Diablo, directed by Ralph Nelson. USA: Cherokee Productions, 1966. Face to Face / Faccia a faccia, directed by Sergio Sollima. Italy / Spain: Produzioni Europee Associati / Arturo Gonzales, 1967. Fight, Zatoichi, Fight! / Zatōichi kesshō-tabi, directed by Kenji Misumi. Japan: Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1964. Find a Place to Die / Joe . . . cercati un posto per morire!, directed by Giuliano Carnimeo. Italy: Aico Films / Atlantis Film, 1968. Five Fingers of Death / Tian xia di yi quan, directed by Chang-Hwa Jeong. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1972. For a Few Dollars More / Per qualche dollaro in più, directed by Sergio Leone. Italy / Spain / West Germany: Produzioni Europee Associati / Arturo Gonzales / Constantin Film, 1965. Fort Apache, directed by John Ford. USA: Argosy Pictures, 1948. Four of the Apocalypse / I quattro dell’apocalisse, directed by Lucio Fulci. Italy: Coralta Cinematografica, 1975. Ganga, directed by M. Karnan. India: Indhrani Films, 1972. Ghost Rider, directed by Mark Steven Johnson. USA / Australia: Columbia Pictures / Vengeance Productions, 2007. God Forgives . . . I Don’t! / Dio perdona . . . Io no!, directed by Giuseppe Colizzi. Italy / Spain: Cronocinematografica S.p.a. / Productores Exhibidores Films Sociedad Anónima, 1967. Goliath and the Vampires / Maciste contro il vampiro, directed by Giacomo Gentilomo. Italy: Ambrosiana Cinematografica, 1961. Gone with the Wind, directed by Victor Fleming. USA: Warner Bros., 1939. Harlem Rides the Range, directed by Richard C. Kahn. USA: Hollywood Productions, 1939.

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filmography

Have a Good Funeral, My Friend . . . Sartana Will Pay / Buon funerale amigos! . . . paga Sartana, directed by Giuliano Carnimeo. Italy / Spain: Flora Film / Hispamer Films, 1970. Heaven’s Gate, directed by Michael Cimino. USA: Partisan Productions, 1980. Hercules Unchained / Ercole e la regina di Lidia, directed by Pietro Francisci. Italy / France / Spain: Galatea Film / Lux Film / Urania Film, 1959. High Noon, directed by Fred Zinnemann. USA: Stanley Kramer Productions, 1952. High Plains Drifter, directed by Clint Eastwood. USA: Universal Pictures / The Malpaso Company, 1973. His Name Was King / Lo chiamavano King, directed by Giancarlo Romitelli. Italy: Foro Film, 1971. Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo / The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo, directed by Pietro Germi. Italy: Lux Film, 1952. In nome della legge / In the Name of the Law, directed by Pietro Germi. Italy: Lux Film, 1949. Invincible Fist / Tie shou wu qing, directed by Cheh Chang. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1969. Irumbukkottai Murattu Singam, directed by Chimbu Deven. India; AGS Entertainment, 2010. Jesse James, directed by Henry King. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1939. Jolanda, the Daughter of the Black Corsair / Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero, directed by Mario Soldati. Italy: Lux Film, 1953. Joshilaay, directed by Sibte Hassan Rizvi. India: New World Enterprises, 1989. Joshua, directed by Larry G. Spangler. USA: Po’ Boy Productions, 1976. Juarez, directed by William Dieterle. USA: Warner Bros., 1939. Juliet of the Spirits / Giulietta degli spiriti, directed by Federico Fellini. Italy / France: Rizzoli Film / Francoriz Production, 1965. Kaala Sona, directed by Ravikant Nagaich. India: Shilpkar / Vision Universal, 1975. Karate, Fists and Beans / Storia di karatè, pugni e fagioli, directed by Tonino Ricci. Spain / Italy: National Cinematografica / Producciones Cinematográficas Balcazar, 1973. Khote Sikkay, directed by Narendra Bedi. India, 1974. Kill Bill: Vol. 1, directed by Quentin Tarantino. USA: Miramax / A Band Apart / Super Cool ManChu, 2003. Kill Bill: Vol. 2, directed by Quentin Tarantino. USA: Miramax / A Band Apart / Super Cool ManChu, 2004.

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Kung Fu Brothers in the Wild West / Kung Fu nel pazzo West, directed by Yeo Ban-Yee. Italy / Hong Kong: Golden Harvest Company / Yangtze Film Company, 1973. La strada, directed by Federico Fellini. Italy: Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica, 1954. La tigre è ancora viva: Sandokan alla riscossa!, directed by Sergio Sollima. Italy: Leone Film / Rizzoli Film, 1977. Light the Fuse . . . Sartana is Coming / Una nuvola di polvere. . . un grido di morte . . . arriva Sartana, directed by Giuliano Carnimeo. Italy / Spain: Copercines, Cooperativa Cinematográfica / Devon Film, 1970. Little Big Man, directed by Arthur Penn. USA: Cinema Center Films / Stockbridge-Hiller Productions, 1970. Lola Colt, directed by Siro Marcellini. Italy: Cines Europa, 1967. Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades / Kozure Ôkami: Shinikazeni mukau ubaguruma, directed by Kenji Misumi. Japan: Katsu Production Co. / Toho Company, 1972. Lost Youth / Gioventù perduta, directed by Pietro Germi. Italy: Lux Film, 1947. Mackenna’s Gold, directed by J. Lee Thompson. USA: Columbia Pictures / Highroad Productions, 1969. Major Dundee, directed by Sam Peckinpah. USA: Columbia Pictures / Jerry Bresler Productions, 1965. Man and Boy, directed by E. W. Swackhamer. USA: J. Cornelius Crean Films, Inc. / Jemmin Inc., 1971. Man of the East / E poi lo chiamarono il magnifico, directed by Enzo Barboni. Italy / France / Yugoslavia: Jadran Film / Les Productions Artistes Associés / Produzioni Europee Associati, 1972. Man of the West, directed by Anthony Mann. USA: Ashton Productions / Walter Mirisch Productions, 1958. Mandingo, directed by Richard Fleischer. USA: Dino De Laurentiis Company / Paramount Pictures, 1975. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, directed by Robert Altman. USA: David Foster Productions / Warner Bros., 1971. McLintock!, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen. USA: Batjac, 1963. Morgan, the Pirate / Morgan il pirate, directed by Primo Zeglio / André De Toth. Italy / France: Adelphia Compagnia Cinematografica / Compagnie Cinématographique de France / Lux Film, 1960. Mosagallaku Mosagaadu, directed by B. Vittalacharya. India: Padmalaya Studios, 1971. My Darling Clementine, directed by John Ford. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1946.

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filmography

My Name is Mallory / Il mio nome è Mallory . . . M come morte, directed by Mario Moroni. Italy: Cervo Film, 1971. My Name is Nobody / Il mio nome è Nessuno, directed by Tonino Valerii. Italy / France / West Germany: Rafran Cinematografica / Les Films Jacques Leitienne / Rialto Film Preben-Philipsen, 1973. My Name is Pecos / 2 once di piombo, directed by Maurizio Lucidi. Italy: Italcine, 1967. Navajo Joe, directed by Sergio Corbucci. Italy / Spain: Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica / C.B. Films S.A., 1966. New Tale of Zatoichi / Shin Zatōichi monogatari, directed by Tokuzo Tanaka. Japan: Daiei Studios, 1963. No Country for Old Men, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. USA: Miramax / Paramount, 2007. North West Frontier, directed by J. Lee Thompson. UK: The Rank Organisation, 1959. O Cangaceiro, directed by Lima Barreto. Brazil: Vera Cruz Studios, 1953. Old Surehand, directed by Alfred Vohrer. West Germany / Yugoslavia: Jadran Film / Rialto Film, 1965. Once Upon a Time in America, directed by Sergio Leone. Italy / USA: The Ladd Company / Embassy International Pictures / PSO International, 1984. Once Upon a Time in the West / C’era una volta il West, directed by Sergio Leone. Italy / USA / Spain: Rafran Cinematografica / Finanzia San Marco / Paramount Pictures, 1968. Osceola, directed by Konrad Petzold. East Germany / Bulgaria / Cuba: DEFA / Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos / Kino-Zentrum, 1971. Paisan / Paisà, directed by Roberto Rossellini. Italy: Organizzazione Film Internazionali, 1946. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, directed by Sam Peckinpah. USA: MGM, 1973. Pursued, directed by Raoul Walsh. USA: United States Pictures, 1947. Quick Gun Murugun, directed by Shashanka Ghosh. India: Fox Star Studios / Phat Phish Motion Pictures, 2009. Rango, directed by Gore Verbinski. USA: Paramount / Nickelodeon Movies, 2011. Return of Shanghai Joe / Che botte ragazzi!, directed by Bitto Albertini. Italy / West Germany: C.B.A. Produttori e Distributori Associati / DivinaFilm, 1975. Ride the High Country, directed by Sam Peckinpah. USA: MGM, 1962. Ringo and His Golden Pistol / Johnny Oro, directed by Sergio Corbucci. Italy: Sanson-Film, 1966.

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285

Rio Bravo, directed by Howard Hawks. USA: Warner Bros. / Armada, 1959. Rio Conchos, directed by Gordon Douglas. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1964. Run, Man, Run / Corri, uomo, corri, directed by Sergio Sollima. Italy / France: Chretien / Mancori, 1968. Salvatore Giuliano, directed by Francesco Rosi. Italy: Galatea Film / Lux Film / Vides Cinematografica, 1962. Sam Whiskey, directed by Arnold Laven. USA: Brighton Pictures / Levy– Gardner–Laven, 1969. Sandokan the Great / Sandokan, la tigre di Mompracem, directed by Umberto Lenzi. Italy / France / Spain: Comptoir Français du Film Production / Filmes S.A. / Ocean Films, 1963. Seduced and Abandoned / Sedotta e abbandonata, directed by Pietro Germi. Italy / France: Lux / Ultra / Vides, 1964. Sergeant Rutledge, directed by John Ford. USA: Warner Bros., 1960. Seven Samurai / Shichinin no samurai, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Japan: Toho Company, 1954. Shaft, directed by Gordon Parks. USA: MGM, 1971. Shane, directed by George Stevens. USA: Paramount Pictures, 1953. Sholay, directed by Ramesh Sippy. India: United Producers / Sippy Films, 1975. Shree 420 / Mr 420, directed by Raj Kapoor. India: R.K. Films, 1955. Sing Cowboy Sing, directed by Dean Read. East Germany: DEFA, 1981. Soldier Blue, directed by Ralph Nelson. USA: AVCO Embassy Pictures / Katzka–Loeb, 1970. Son of Jesse James / Solo contro tutti, directed by Antonio del Amo. Italy / Spain: Apolo Films / Produzioni Europee Associati, 1965. Space Men, directed by Antonio Margheriti. Italy: Titanus / Ultra Film, 1960. Stagecoach, directed by John Ford. USA: Walter Wanger Productions, 1939. Sukiyaki Western Django, directed by Miike Takashi. Japan: Sedic International / Geneon Universal Entertainment / Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2007. Take a Hard Ride, directed by Antonio Margheriti. Spain / USA / Italy: Bernsen–Ludwig–Bercovici Production / Cine Y Television / Euro International Productions, 1975. Tears of the Black Tiger / Fah talai jone, directed by Wisit Sasanatieng. Thailand: Five Star Production, 2000. Thazhvaram, directed by Bharathan. India: Anughraha Cini Arts, 1990. The Anonymous Heroes / Wu ming ying xiong, directed by Cheh Chang. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1971.

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filmography

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, directed by Andrew Dominik. USA / Canada / UK: Virtual Studios / Scott Free Productions / Plan B Entertainment, 2007. The Big Gundown / La resa dei conti, directed by Sergio Sollima. Italy / Spain: Produzioni Europee Associati / Tulio Demicheli S.L., 1967. The Black Corsair / Il corsaro nero, directed by Sergio Sollima. Italy: Rizzoli Film, 1976. The Bronze Buckaroo, directed by Richard C. Kahn. USA: Hollywood Productions, 1939. The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe / Il mio nome è Shangai Joe, directed by Mario Caiano. Italy: C.B.A. Produttori e Distributori Associati / Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, 1973. The Five Man Army / Un esercito di cinque uomini, directed by Don Taylor. Italy: Tiger Film, 1969. The Fugitive / Wang ming tu, directed by Tseng-Chai Chang. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1972. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, directed by Sergio Leone. Italy / Spain / West Germany / USA: Produzioni Europee Associati / Arturo González Producciones Cinematográficas / Constantin Film Produktion, 1966. The Good, the Bad, the Weird / Choŭnnom, Nappŭnnom, Isanghannom, directed by Kim Jee-woon. South Korea: Barunson Co. / Grimm Pictures, 2008. The Great Silence / Il grande silenzio, directed by Sergio Corbucci. Italy / France: Adelphia Compagnia Cinematografica / Les Films Corona, 1968. The Gunfighter, directed by Henry King. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1950. The Guns of Navarone, directed by J. Lee Thompson. UK / USA: Columbia Pictures / Highroad Productions, 1961. The Hallelujah Trail, directed by John Sturges. USA: The Mirisch Corporation, 1965. The Harder They Come, directed by Perry Henzell. Jamaica: International Films / Xenon Pictures, 1972. The Hellbenders / I crudeli, directed by Sergio Corbucci. Italy / Spain: Alba Cinematografica / Productores Exhibidores Films Sociedad Anónima / Tecisa, 1967. The Hills Run Red / Un fiume di dollari, directed by Carlo Lizzani. Italy: C.B. Films S.A. / Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, 1966. The Informer, directed by John Ford. USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1935. The Iron Horse, directed by John Ford. USA: Fox Film Corporation, 1924. The Legend of Nigger Charley, directed by Martin Goldman. USA: Paramount Pictures, 1972.

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filmography

287

The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges. USA: The Mirisch Company, 1960. The Pirates of Malaysia / I pirati della Malesia, directed by Umberto Lenzi. Italy / Spain / West Germany / France: Euro International Film / La Société des Films Sirius / Lacy Internacional Films, 1964. The Price of Power / Il prezzo del potere, directed by Tonino Valerii. Italy / Spain: Patry Film / Films Montana, 1969. The Professionals, directed by Richard Brooks. USA: Pax Enterprises / Columbia Pictures, 1966. The Proposition, directed by John Hillcoat. Australia / UK: Jackie O Productions / UK Film Council, 2005. The Quiet Man, directed by John Ford. USA: Argosy Pictures, 1952. The Return of Ringo / Il ritorno di Ringo, directed by Duccio Tessari, Italy / Spain: Balcázar Producciones Cinematográficas / Produzione Cinematografica Mediterranee / Rizzoli Film, 1965. The Return of Sabata / È tornato Sabata. . . hai chiuso un’altra volta!, directed by Gianfranco Parolini. Italy / France / West Germany: Artemis Film / Jadran Film / Les Productions Artistes Associés / Produzioni Europee Associati, 1971. The Savage Five / Wu hu jiang, directed by Cheh Chang. Hong Kong: Shaw Brothers, 1974. The Scalphunters, directed by Sydney Pollack. USA: Bristol Films / Norlan Productions, 1968. The Scavengers, directed by Lee Frost. USA: Cresse–Frost Productions, 1969. The Searchers, directed by John Ford. USA: Warner Bros., 1956. The Secret of Captain O’Hara / El secreto del capitán O’Hara, directed by Arturo Ruiz Castillo. Spain: Lacy Internacional Films, 1965. The Shootist, directed by Don Siegel. USA: Paramount Pictures, 1976. The Sons of Great Mother Bear / Die Söhne der groβen Bärin, directed by Josef Mach. East Germany / Yugoslavia: DEFA / Bosna Film, 1965. The Soul of Nigger Charley, directed by Larry G. Spangler. USA: Paramount Pictures, 1973. The Stranger and the Gunfighter / Là dove non batte il sole, directed by Antonio Margheriti. Spain / Italy / Hong Kong / USA: Champion films / Shaw Brothers / Midega Film, 1973. The Stranger in Japan / Lo straniero di silenzio, directed by Luigi Vanzi, Italy / USA / Japan: Primex Italiana / Reverse, 1968. The Stranger Returns / Un uomo, un cavallo, una pistola, directed by Luigi Vanzi, Italy / West Germany / USA: Juventus Film / Primex Italiana / Reverse, 1967. The Tale of Zatoichi / Zatōichi monogatari, directed by Kenji Misumi. Japan: Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1962.

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filmography

The Tale of Zatoichi Continues / Zoku Zatōichi monogatari, directed by Kazuo Mori. Japan: Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1962. The Three Pirates / I tre corsari, directed by Mario Soldati. Italy: Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica, 1952. The Tramplers / Gli uomini dal passo pesante, directed by Albert Band. Italy / France: Mancori / Chretien, 1965. The True Story of Jesse James, directed by Nicholas Ray. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1957. The Warrior’s Way, directed by Sngmoo Lee. New Zealand/South Korea: Fuse Media / Sad Flutes / Relativity Media, 2010. The White, the Yellow, and the Black / Il bianco il giallo il nero, directed by Sergio Corbucci. Italy / Spain / France: Filmel / Mundial Film / Tritone Cinematografica, 1975. The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah. USA: Warner Bros., 1969. The Witness / Il testimone, directed by Pietro Germi. Italy: Orbis Film, 1946. The Wrath of God, directed by Ralph Nelson. USA: Cineman / MGM / Rainbow Releasing, 1972. They Call Me Trinity / Lo chiamavano Trinità . . ., directed by Enzo Barboni. Italy: West Film, 1970. Thomasine and Bushrod, directed by Gordon Parks Jr. USA: Columbia Pictures, 1974. Three Outlaw Samurai / Sanbiki no samurai, directed by Hideo Gosha. Japan: Samurai Productions, 1964. To Kill a Mockingbird, directed by Robert Mulligan. USA: Universal International Pictures, 1963. To Live in Peace / Vivere in pace, directed by Luigi Zampa. Italy: Lux Film, 1947. Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die! / Oggi a me . . . domani a te!, directed by Tonino Cervi. Italy: PAC / Splendida Film, 1968. Trinity Is Still My Name / Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità, directed by Enzo Barboni. Italy: West Film, 1971. True Grit, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. USA: Paramount Pictures / Skydance Productions, 2010. Two Mules for Sister Sara, directed by Don Siegel. USA / Mexico: Universal Pictures / The Malpaso Company / Sanen Productions, 1970. Vera Cruz, directed by Robert Aldrich. USA / Mexico: Hecht-Lancaster Productions, 1954. Violent City / Città violenta, directed by Sergio Sollima. Italy / France: Fono Roma / Target Associates / Unidis / Universal Pictures France, 1970.

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289

Viva Maria!, directed by Louis Malle. France / Italy: Nouvelles Éditions de Films / Les Productions Artistes Associés / Vides-Film, 1965. Viva Villa!, directed by Jack Conway. USA: MGM, 1934. Viva Zapata!, directed by Elia Kazan. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1952. Wanted: Dead or Alive, directed by Ambrish Sangal. India: Murghan Enterprise, 1984. White Apache / Bianco Apache, directed by Bruno Mattei. Italy / Spain: Beatrice Film / Multivideo, 1987. Winnetou: The Red Gentleman / Winnetou. 2. Teil, directed by Harald Reinl. West Germany / France / Italy / Yugoslavia: Atlantis Film / Jadran Film / Rialto Film Preben-Philipsen / Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie, 1964. Yojimbo / Yôjinbô, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Japan: Kurosawa Production Co. / Toho Company, 1961. Young Guns, directed by Christopher Cain. USA: Morgan Creek / Twentieth Century Fox, 1988. Zatoichi Challenged / Zatōichi chikemuri kaidô, directed by Kenji Misumi. Japan: Daiei Studios, 1967. Zatoichi on the Road / Zatōichi kenka-tabi, directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda. Japan: Daiei Studios, 1963. Zatoichi’s Cane Sword / Zatōichi tekka-tabi, directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda. Japan: Daiei Studios, 1967.

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Notes on the Contributors

Lee Broughton is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds where he is working on a research project titled ‘Interpreting Representations of “North” and “South” in the Spaghetti West’. He is the author of The Euro Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film (2015). Other publications include ‘Western’ in Directory of World Cinema: Germany 2, edited by Michelle Langford (2013). Pete Falconer is a Lecturer in Film at the University of Bristol. His work revolves primarily around the forms and genres of popular cinema. He has published writing on Westerns, on horror movies and on other aspects of popular culture including country music. He is currently working on a book about the ‘afterlife’ of the Hollywood Western since the 1980s. Austin Fisher is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Bournemouth University. He is author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western and founding co-editor of the ‘Global Exploitation Cinemas’ book series. He is also Co-Chair of the SCMS ‘Transnational Cinemas’ Scholarly Interest Group, serves on the Editorial Board of the [in]Transition and Transnational Cinemas journals, and is founder of the Spaghetti Cinema festival in the UK. Christopher Frayling was until recently Rector of the Royal College of Art and Chair of Arts Council England. An historian and award-winning broadcaster on network radio and television, he has written extensively on art, design and popular culture, including the biography of Sergio Leone and a pioneering full-length analysis of Spaghetti Westerns. He is Professor Emeritus of Cultural History at the RCA, a Visiting Professor at Lancaster University and a Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge. William Grady is working towards his PhD in English at the University of Dundee. His research is primarily concerned with the subversive qualities of the Western genre in comics and his doctoral study looks to map a cultural history of the Western in American and Franco-Belgian comic traditions. He has

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previously taught film history, media theory and comics studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. David Hyman is a Professor of English at Lehman College. His authored works include ‘Revision in the Multiversity: What Composition Can Learn from the Superhero’ and ‘With a Little Help from our Friends: Collaboration and Student Knowledge-Making in the Composition Classroom’. He is currently working on a book-length study of subversive revisionary narratives in the American comic book. Pasquale Iannone is a film academic and critic based in Edinburgh. His research interests include European cinema (Italian and French in particular), film aesthetics (sound, music and widescreen) and childhood on film. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh where he has taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. He is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound and his broadcasting work includes various film features for BBC Radio. Thomas Klein received his post-doctoral qualification in Media Studies from Hamburg University in 2014 and his PhD in Film Studies from the University of Mainz in 2004. From 2010 to 2013, he coordinated the ‘Global Western’ project at Mainz. He was Assistant Professor for Film Studies/Media Dramaturgy at Mainz from 2001 to 2008. He has co-edited, among other books, Subversion zur Prime-Time: Die Simpsons und die Mythen der Gesellschaft (2012). Mikel J. Koven is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Worcester. He is the author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (2006), Film, Folklore and Urban Legends (2008) and Blaxploitation Films (2010). He contributed ‘The Giallo and the Spaghetti Nightmare Film’ to the BFI’s Italian Cinema Book and his essays have appeared in journals and edited collections around the world. When not thinking about the Spaghetti Western, he’s thinking about zombies. Doctors are concerned. Ivo Ritzer is junior professor at the University of Bayreuth. His publications include multiple essays and several monographs and edited books, with topics such as media and globalisation, media and genre theory, and media and philosophy. He has given talks at conferences all around the world and is editor of the series ‘New Perspectives on Media Aesthetics’. Current research interests focus on media archaeology and media anthropology. Iain Robert Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. He is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations of American Film and Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and co-editor with Constantine Verevis of Transnational Film Remakes (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). He is co-investigator on the AHRCfunded research network ‘Media Across Borders’ and Co-Chair of the SCMS ‘Transnational Cinemas’ Scholarly Interest Group.

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notes on the contributors

Rosemary Stott is Associate Dean for the School of Content at Ravensbourne. She is an experienced academic in the fields of film, television and communication studies and has published widely on the topic of German film. Her main specialism is the film industry in the former East Germany and her book Crossing the Wall: The Western Feature Film Import in East Germany was published in 2012. Aliza S. Wong is associate professor of history and associate dean of the Honors College at Texas Tech University. She is a specialist in modern Italian history who has published on race, identity and nation in the context of the southern question. A two-time Fulbright scholar and an award-winning teacher, she is currently working on a manuscript on Italian constructions of the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Patrick Wynne is an independent scholar and has worked with the poor and marginalised for close to thirty years in Appalachia, on the Bowery, in the Bronx, as well as in Cork City. In addition, he helped found a nonprofit to support Guatemalan worker-owned coffee cooperatives in solidarity with former guerrillas. He is a proud member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981.

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Index

100 Rifles see Gries, Tom 1860 see Blasetti, Alessandro 1900 see Bertolucci, Bernardo 3:10 to Yuma see Daves, Delmer 3:10 to Yuma see Mangold, James A Bullet For the General / Quién sabe? see Damiani, Damiano A Fistful of Dollars / Per un pugno di dollari see Leone, Sergio A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe / Un genio, due compari, un pollo see Damiani, Damiano A Pistol for Ringo / Una pistola per Ringo see Tessari, Duccio A Professional Gun / Il mercenario see Corbucci, Sergio A Stranger in Town / Un dollaro tra i denti see Vanzi, Luigi Ace High / I quattro dell’Ave Maria see Colizzi, Giuseppe Adima Changala see Raj, A. B. Albertini, Bitto, 170 Return of Shanghai Joe / Che botte ragazzi!, 170 Aldrich, Robert, 32, 106 Vera Cruz, 32, 106, 121 Alfredo Alfredo see Germi, Pietro Alive or Preferably Dead / Vivi o preferibilmente morti see Tessari, Duccio Altman, Robert, 155 McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 155 Alvarez Kelly see Dmytryk, Edward Anderson, Lindsay, 252 The White Bus, 252

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Appaloosa see Harris, Ed Argento, Dario, 25, 27 Arnold, Jack, 138 Boss Nigger, 138 Avenging Eagle / Long xie shi san ying see Sun, Chung Baadal see Sagar, Anand Bacalov, Luis, 130, 134 Baldi, Ferdinando, 1, 148, 192 Blindman / Il pistolero cieco, 148, 159–61 David and Goliath / David e Golia, 192 Ban-Yee, Yeo, 168 Kung Fu Brothers in the Wild West / Kung Fu nel pazzo West, 168, 169, 172 Band, Albert, 110 The Tramplers / Gli uomini dal passo pesante, 110 Barboni, Enzo, 22, 134, 160, 170, 249 Man of the East / E poi lo chiamarono il magnifico, 170, 249 They Call Me Trinity / Lo chiamavano Trinità . . ., 22, 134, 159–60 Trinity is Still My Name / Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità, 160, 219, 249 Barreto, Lima, 189 O Cangaceiro, 189 Basaran, Tunç, 196 Korkusuz Kaptan Swing, 196 Bedi, Narendra, 187, 193, 195, 196 Kachche Heere, 195 Khote Sikkay, 187, 193–7, 200–1

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294

index

Bergman, Ingmar, 51 Through a Glass Darkly / Såsom i en spegel, 51 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 25, 27, 259n 1900, 259n Besson, Luc, 132, 142n Bharathan, 187 Thazhvaram, 187 Bhatt, Nanabhai, 192 Samson, 192, 195 Bicycle Thieves / I ladri di biciclette see De Sica, Vittorio Billy the Kid / Fuera de la ley see Klimovsky, Léon Bitter Rice / Riso amaro see De Santis, Giuseppe Black Jesus / Seduto alla sua destra see Zurlini, Valerio Blasetti, Alessandro, 55 1860, 55 Blindman / Il pistolero cieco see Baldi, Ferdinando Blood Feud / Il sicario see Germi, Pietro Boetticher, Budd, 264 Bogdanovich, Peter, 32 Bonnard, Mario, 192 The Last Days of Pompeii / Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, 192 Boorman, John, 38–40, 45n Deliverance, 38 Excalibur, 40 Hell in the Pacific, 38 Point Blank, 38 Zardoz, 40 Boot Hill / La collina degli stivali see Colizzi, Giuseppe Boss Nigger see Arnold, Jack Break Up the Chain / Yonghwa chusik hoesa see Manhee, Lee Breathless / À bout de soufflé see Godard, Jean-Luc Brooks, Richard, 31, 110, 152 The Professionals, 31, 110, 117, 152 Buck and the Preacher see Poitier, Sidney Buffalo Bill / Buffalo Bill, l’eroe del far west see Costa, Mario Bullets Don’t Argue / Le pistole non discutono see Caiano, Mario Buntar, Dshamjangijn, 256 Der Scout, 256 Burn! / Queimada see Pontecorvo, Gillo Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid see Hill, George Roy

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Caiano, Mario, 21, 169 Bullets Don’t Argue / Le pistole non discutono, 21 The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe / Il mio nome è Shangai Joe, 169 Cain, Christopher, 19 Young Guns, 19 Carnimeo, Giuliano, 22, 169, 218 Find a Place to Die / Joe . . . cercati un posto per morire!, 22 Have a Good Funeral, My Friend . . . Sartana Will Pay / Buon funerale amigos! . . . paga Sartana, 169 Light the Fuse . . . Sartana is Coming / Una nuvola di polvere . . . un grido di morte . . . arriva Sartana, 218 Carthage in Flames / Cartagine in fiamme see Gallone, Carmine Castellari, Enzo G., 249 Cipolla Colt, 249 Castillo, Arturo Ruiz, 20 The Secret of Captain O’Hara / El secreto del capitán O’Hara, 20 Cervi, Tonino, 169 Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die! / Oggi a me . . . domani a te!, 169 Chabrol, Claude, 25 Chang, Cheh, 172 Invincible Fist / Tie shou wu qing, 172 The Anonymous Heroes / Wu ming ying xiong, 172 The Savage Five / Wu hu jiang, 172 Chang, Tseng-Chai, 172 The Fugitive / Wang ming tu, 172–3 Charlier, Jean-Michel and Giraud, Jean, 214, 223–33 Cheyenne Autumn see Ford, John China 9, Liberty 37 / Amore, piombo e furore see Hellman, Monte China Gate see Santoshi, Rajkumar Chisum see McLaglen, Andrew V. Chor, Yuen, 175 Clans of Intrigue / Chu Liu Xiang, 175 The Sentimental Swordsman / To ching chien ko wu ching chien, 175 Chunaoti see Satpal Cimino, Michael, 262 Heaven’s Gate, 262 Cipolla Colt see Castellari, Enzo G. Clans of Intrigue / Chu Liu Xiang see Chor, Yuen

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index Coen, Ethan and Joel, 10, 268, 272 No Country for Old Men, 272–3 True Grit, 10, 268–9, 272 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 16 Cold War, 4, 9, 153, 239–40 Colizzi, Giuseppe, 1, 8, 104, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114–15, 117, 118, 119–23, 203, 257 Ace High / I quattro dell’Ave Maria, 104, 110, 111, 113, 115, 119, 120–1, 122 Boot Hill / La collina degli stivali, 104–5, 110, 111, 113, 115–18, 119–20, 121–3, 257 God Forgives . . . I Don’t! / Dio perdona . . . Io no!, 203–4 Compañeros / Vamos a matar, compañeros see Corbucci, Sergio Confederate Spy see Olcott, Sidney Confessions of a Police Captain / Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica see Damiani, Damiano Conway, Jack, 31 Viva Villa!, 31, 45n Coppola, Francis Ford, 206n The Godfather, 206n Corbucci, Sergio, 1, 76, 90, 92, 97, 107, 109–10, 125–6, 130, 131, 134–5, 136, 139, 140, 142n, 154, 169, 170, 172, 173, 213, 215, 216–17, 218, 220, 229, 265, 274 A Professional Gun / Il mercenario, 7, 90, 92, 94–101, 107, 140, 154, 172 Compañeros / Vamos a matar, compañeros, 140, 154 Django, 125, 130, 134–5, 137, 138, 140, 142n, 154, 155, 158, 159, 213, 217, 229, 235n, 265, 266–7 Minnesota Clay, 110 Navajo Joe, 136–7, 142n Ringo and His Golden Pistol / Johnny Oro, 170 The Great Silence /Il grande silenzio, 137, 139–40, 154, 173, 217, 274–5 The Hellbenders / I crudeli, 134 The White, the Yellow, and the Black / Il bianco il giallo il nero, 169 Costa, Mario, 20 Buffalo Bill / Buffalo Bill, l’eroe del far west, 20

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295

Cottafavi, Vittorio, 192 Goliath and the Dragon / La vendetta di Ercole, 192 Cowboy see Daves, Delmer Crossfire see Dmytryk, Edward Cuarón, Alfonso, 185 Gravity, 185 Damiani, Damiano, 4, 52, 76, 81, 97, 172, 249, 258n, 267 A Bullet For the General / Quién sabe?, 4, 52, 97, 172, 267 A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe / Un genio, due compari, un pollo, 52 Blood Feud / Il sicario, 52 Confessions of a Police Captain / Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica, 258n Lipstick / Il rossetto, 52 Dante, Joe, 233 The ’Burbs, 233 Daves, Delmer, 20, 271 3:10 to Yuma, 271 Cowboy, 20 David and Goliath / David e Golia see Baldi, Ferdinando Day of Anger / I giorni dell’ira see Valerii, Tonino De Santis, Giuseppe, 49 Bitter Rice / Riso amaro, 49 De Sica, Vittorio, 65n Bicycle Thieves / I ladri di biciclette, 65n Death Rides a Horse / Da uomo a uomo see Petroni, Giulio Death Walks in Laredo / Tre pistole contro Cesare see Peri, Enzo del Amo, Antonio, 21 Son of Jesse James / Solo contro tutti, 21 Deliverance see Boorman, John Deodato, Ruggero, 235n Der Scout see Buntar, Dshamjangijn Destry Rides Again see Marshall, George Deven, Chimbu, 187 Irumbukkottai Murattu Singam, 187 Dieterle, William, 31 Juarez, 31, 45n Dirty Harry see Siegel, Don Disco Dancer see Subhash, Babbar Divorce Italian Style / Divorzio all’italiana see Germi, Pietro

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296

index

Django Kill . . . If You Live, Shoot! / Se sei vivo, spara! see Questi, Giulio Django Unchained see Tarantino, Quentin Dmytryk, Edward, 18, 43 Alvarez Kelly, 43 Crossfire, 18 Dominik, Andrew, 269 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 269 Donati, Sergio, 33, 37, 38 Don’t Turn the Other Cheek / ¡Viva la muerte . . . tua! see Tessari, Duccio Douglas, Gordon, 115 Rio Conchos, 115, 116 Duck, You Sucker / Giù la testa see Leone, Sergio Duel at Diablo see Nelson, Ralph Dutt, Sunil, 193 Mujhe Jeene Do, 193 Eastwood, Clint, 20, 38, 59, 162, 175, 195, 220, 231, 266, 273, 276 High Plains Drifter, 220 Pale Rider, 162 Eisenstein, Sergei, 96 Excalibur see Boorman, John Face to Face / Faccia a faccia see Sollima, Sergio Fanon, Frantz, 16 Farz see Nagaich, Ravikant Fellini, Federico, 50–1, 53, 72, 113–14 Juliet of the Spirits / Giulietta degli spiriti, 113 La strada, 113 Fight, Zatoichi, Fight! / Zatōichi kesshōtabi see Misumi, Kenji Find a Place to Die / Joe . . . cercati un posto per morire! see Carnimeo, Giuliano Five Fingers of Death / Tian xia di yi quan see Jeong, Chang-Hwa Flatfoot / Piedone lo sbirro see Steno Flatfoot in Egypt / Piedone d’Egitto see Steno Fleischer, Richard, 138 Mandingo, 138 Fleming, Victor, 28 Gone with the Wind, 28–9 Flight into France / Fuga in Francia see Soldati, Mario

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For a Few Dollars More / Per qualche dollaro in più see Leone, Sergio Ford, John, 7, 14, 18, 23, 25–7, 28, 32, 36–7, 42, 50, 57, 59, 62, 64, 65, 76, 111, 224, 226, 234n, 249, 264, 266 Cheyenne Autumn, 25, 42, 249 Fort Apache, 28, 62, 64 How the West Was Won, 42 My Darling Clementine, 25, 27, 28, 64 Riley the Cop, 18 Sergeant Rutledge, 25, 111 Stagecoach, 25, 234n The Grapes of Wrath, 28 The Informer, 36 The Iron Horse, 25, 27, 250 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 25, 26 The Quiet Man, 23, 25, 27, 32, 36–7 The Searchers, 25, 27, 266 Two Rode Together, 25 Wagon Master, 25 Young Mr. Lincoln, 28 Fort Apache see Ford, John Four of the Apocalypse / I quattro dell’apocalisse see Fulci, Lucio Four Ways Out / La città si difende see Germi, Pietro Francisci, Pietro, 136, 192 Hercules Unchained / Ercole e la regina di Lidia, 136, 192 Friedkin, William, 38 The French Connection, 38 Frost, Lee, 117 The Scavengers, 117 Fulci, Lucio, 23 Four of the Apocalypse / I quattro dell’apocalisse, 23 Gallone, Carmine, 192 Carthage in Flames / Cartagine in fiamme, 192 Ganga see Karnan, M. Gentilomo, Giacomo, 109 Goliath and the Vampires / Maciste contro il vampiro, 109 Germi, Pietro, 7, 49–65, 65n Alfredo Alfredo, 50 Divorce Italian Style / Divorzio all’italiana, 50, 51, 56 Four Ways Out / La città si difende, 51 In the Name of the Law / In nome della legge, 7, 49–50, 54–5, 56–61, 62, 63, 64

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index Lost Youth / Gioventù perduta, 56 Man of Straw / L’uomo di paglia, 52 Seduced and Abandoned / Sedotta e abbandonata, 50, 52, 56 The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo / Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo, 7, 49–50, 54, 55, 59, 60, 61–4 The Birds, the Bees and the Italians / Signore & signori, 50, 52 The Facts of Murder / Un maledetto imbroglio, 52 The Path of Hope / Il cammino della speranza, 51, 53 The Railroad Man / Il ferroviere, 52 The Witness / Il testimone, 52, 56 Ghosh, Shashanka, 187 Quick Gun Murugun, 187 Ghost Rider see Johnson, Mark Steven God Forgives . . . I Don’t! / Dio perdona . . . Io no! see Colizzi, Giuseppe Godard, Jean-Luc, 16–17, 25, 34, 226 Breathless / À bout de soufflé, 226 Pierrot le Fou, 34 Goldman, Martin, 111, 138 The Legend of Nigger Charley, 111, 121, 138 Goliath and the Dragon / La vendetta di Ercole see Cottafavi, Vittorio Goliath and the Vampires / Maciste contro il vampiro see Gentilomo, Giacomo Gone with the Wind see Fleming, Victor Gosha, Hideo, 148, 155, 161 Three Outlaw Samurai / Sanbiki no samurai, 148, 155–7, 159, 161 Gravity see Cuarón, Alfonso Gries, Tom, 106 100 Rifles, 106–7 Grin Without a Cat / Le fond de l’air est rouge see Marker, Chris Gunga Jumna see Kumar, Dilip Harlem Rides the Range see Kahn, Richard C. Harris, Ed, 10, 268 Appaloosa, 10, 268, 275 Have a Good Funeral, My Friend . . . Sartana Will Pay / Buon funerale amigos! . . . paga Sartana see Carnimeo, Giuliano Hawks, Howard, 76, 267 Rio Bravo, 267, 275

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297

Heaven’s Gate see Cimino, Michael Hell in the Pacific see Boorman, John Hellman, Monte, 23 China 9, Liberty 37 / Amore, piombo e furore, 23 Henzell, Perry, 138 The Harder They Come, 138 Hercules see Shriram Hercules Unchained / Ercole e la regina di Lidia see Francisci, Pietro Hero see Yimou, Zhang High Noon see Zinnemann, Fred High Plains Drifter see Eastwood, Clint Hill, George Roy, 99 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 99, 275 Hill, George W., 38 The Callahans and the Murphys, 38 Hillcoat, John, 162 The Proposition, 276 The Road, 162 His Name Was King / Lo chiamavano King see Romitelli, Giancarlo Hitchcock, Alfred, 25 How the West Was Won see Ford, John Hung, Sammo, 195 Seven Warriors, 195 Hutton, Brian G., 233 Kelly’s Heroes, 233 Illustrious Corpses / Cadaveri eccellenti see Rosi, Francesco In the Name of the Law / In nome della legge see Germi, Pietro Invincible Fist / Tie shou wu qing see Chang, Cheh Irumbukkottai Murattu Singam see Deven, Chimbu Jee-woon, Kim, 4, 167 The Good, the Bad, the Weird / Choŭnnom, Nappŭnnom, Isanghannom, 4–5, 167, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181n Jeong, Chang-Hwa, 171 Five Fingers of Death / Tian xia di yi quan, 171 Jesse James see King, Henry Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai see Kapoor, Raj Johnny Guitar see Ray, Nicholas Johnson, Lamont, 134 The Last American Hero, 134

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298

index

Johnson, Mark Steven, 272 Ghost Rider, 272–3 Jolanda, the Daughter of the Black Corsair / Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero see Soldati, Mario Joshilaay see Rizvi, Sibte Hassan Joshua see Spangler, Larry G. Juarez see Dieterle, William Juliet of the Spirits / Giulietta degli spiriti see Fellini, Federico Junglee see Mukherjee, Subodh Kaala Sona see Nagaich, Ravikant Kachche Heere see Bedi, Narendra Kahn, Richard C., 105 Harlem Rides the Range, 105 The Bronze Buckaroo, 105 Kapoor, Raj, 185, 193 Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, 193 Shree 420 / Mr 420, 185 Karamdaata see Nair, Shashilal K. Karate see Mukherjee, Deb Karate, Fists and Beans / Storia di karatè, pugni e fagioli see Ricci, Tonino Karnan, M., 187 Ganga, 187 Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki see Subhash, Babbar Kazan, Elia, 31 Viva Zapata!, 31, 45n Keemat see Nagaich, Ravikant Kelly’s Heroes see Hutton, Brian G. Khosla, Raj Mera Gaon Mera Desh, 193, 195, 201 Khote Sikkay see Bedi, Narendra Kill Bill: Vol. 1 see Tarantino, Quentin Kill Bill: Vol. 2 see Tarantino, Quentin King, Henry, 151, 152 Jesse James, 151 The Gunfighter, 151, 152 Klimovsky, Léon, 20 Billy the Kid / Fuera de la ley, 20 Korkusuz Kaptan Swing see Basaran, Tunç Kumar, Dilip, 193 Gunga Jumna, 193 Kung Fu Brothers in the Wild West / Kung Fu nel pazzo West see Ban-Yee, Yeo Kurosawa, Akira, 65, 129, 130, 131, 147, 149, 152, 167, 172, 186, 195 Seven Samurai / Shichinin no samurai, 149, 152, 155, 163n, 172, 186, 195, 197

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Yojimbo / Yôjinbô, 130, 147, 149, 152 157, 160, 167, 171, 175 La strada see Fellini, Federico La tigre è ancora viva: Sandokan alla riscossa! see Sollima, Sergio Last Year at Marienbad / L’année dernière à Marienbad see Resnais, Alain Laven, Arnold, 117 Sam Whiskey, 117, 120 Lean, David, 41 Ryan’s Daughter, 41 Leduc, Paul, 96 Reed: Insurgent Mexico, 96 Lee, Sngmoo, 8, 167, 174 The Warrior’s Way, 8, 167, 174–7, 178, 179–80, 181n Lenzi, Umberto, 80 Sandokan the Great / Sandokan, la tigre di Mompracem, 80 The Pirates of Malaysia / I pirati della Malesia, 80 Leone, Sergio, 1, 7, 9, 21, 22, 25–30, 31–3, 34, 35–7, 38–40, 41, 42, 45n, 49, 52, 57, 59–60, 65, 72, 76, 80–1, 110, 130, 147, 149, 152, 155, 167, 169, 172, 173, 175, 189, 192, 193–4, 195, 215, 216, 218, 220, 222, 227, 229, 230, 231, 233, 240, 243, 245, 249, 251–2, 254–5, 259n, 265, 275, 276–7 A Fistful of Dollars / Per un pugno di dollari, 21, 25, 38, 42, 59–60, 130, 147, 149, 155, 158, 162, 167, 169, 175, 230, 265, 266 Duck, You Sucker / Giù la testa, 7, 22, 26, 29–31, 32, 33–42, 44n, 45n, 172, 173 For a Few Dollars More / Per qualche dollaro in più, 22, 42, 169, 195, 196, 197, 201, 219, 222, 230, 265 Once Upon a Time in America, 22, 254–5, 257 Once Upon a Time in the West / C’era una volta il West, 9, 25, 26, 27–9, 30, 37, 44n, 110–11, 173, 201, 219, 222, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243–5, 249, 250–4, 255–8 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 22, 34, 52, 155–6, 169, 196, 216, 227, 231

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index Light the Fuse . . . Sartana is Coming / Una nuvola di polvere . . . un grido di morte . . . arriva Sartana see Carnimeo, Giuliano Lipstick / Il rossetto see Damiani, Damiano Little Big Man see Penn, Arthur Lizzani, Carlo, 172, 273 The Hills Run Red / Un fiume di dollari, 172, 273 Lola Colt see Marcellini, Siro Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades / Kozure Ôkami: Shinikazeni mukau ubaguruma see Misumi, Kenji Lost Youth / Gioventù perduta see Germi, Pietro Lucidi, Maurizio, 117 My Name is Pecos / 2 once di piombo, 117 Mach, Josef, 246 The Sons of Great Mother Bear / Die Söhne der groβen Bärin, 246–7, 256 Mackenna’s Gold see Thompson, J. Lee Major Dundee see Peckinpah, Sam Malle, Louis, 32 Viva Maria!, 32 Man and Boy see Swackhamer, E. W. Man of Straw / L’uomo di paglia see Germi, Pietro Man of the East / E poi lo chiamarono il magnifico see Barboni, Enzo Man of the West see Mann, Anthony Mandingo see Fleischer, Richard Mangold, James, 10, 271 3:10 to Yuma, 10, 271, 275 Manhee, Lee, 5 Break Up the Chain / Yonghwa chusik hoesa, 5 Mann, Anthony, 224, 272 Man of the West, 272 Marcellini, Siro, 110, 119 Lola Colt, 110, 118–19 Marcuse, Herbert, 16 Margheriti, Antonio, 109, 138, 168 Space Men, 109 Take a Hard Ride, 138 The Stranger and the Gunfighter / Là dove non batte il sole, 168, 169–70, 171, 172 Marker, Chris, 96 Grin Without a Cat / Le fond de l’air est rouge, 96

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Marshall, George, 264 Destry Rides Again, 264 Marx, Karl, 16, 17 Mattei, Bruno, 23 White Apache / Bianco Apache, 23 May, Karl, 19, 153, 240, 245–6, 247, 249, 256, 258n McCabe & Mrs. Miller see Altman, Robert McLaglen, Andrew V., 23 Chisum, 23 McLintock!, 23 McLintock! see McLaglen, Andrew V. Melville, Jean-Pierre, 25 Mera Gaon Mera Desh see Khosla, Raj Micalizzi, Franco, 134 Minnesota Clay see Corbucci, Sergio Mirza, Aziz, 185 Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, 185 Misumi, Kenji, 149, 157, 159, 162 Fight, Zatoichi, Fight! / Zatōichi kesshō-tabi, 159 Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades / Kozure Ôkami: Shinikazeni mukau ubaguruma, 162 The Tale of Zatoichi / Zatōichi monogatari, 148–9, 157–8 Zatoichi Challenged / Zatōichi chikemuri kaidô, 157, 159, 160, 161–2 Morgan, the Pirate / Morgan il pirate see Zeglio, Primo Mori, Kazuo, 158 The Tale of Zatoichi Continues / Zoku Zatōichi monogatari, 158 Moroni, Mario, 22 My Name is Mallory / Il mio nome è Mallory . . . M come morte, 22 Morricone, Ennio, 30, 37, 95, 134, 172, 173, 193, 195–6, 222, 230, 233, 235n, 276 Mosagallaku Mosagaadu see Vittalacharya, B. Mujhe Jeene Do see Dutt, Sunil Mukherjee, Deb, 203 Karate, 203 Mukherjee, Subodh, 207n Junglee, 207n Mulligan, Robert, 111 To Kill a Mockingbird, 111 My Darling Clementine see Ford, John

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300

index

My Name is Mallory / Il mio nome è Mallory . . . M come morte see Moroni, Mario My Name is Nobody / Il mio nome è Nessuno see Valerii, Tonino My Name is Pecos / 2 once di piombo see Lucidi, Maurizio Nagaich, Ravikant, 187, 197, 203 Farz, 197 Kaala Sona, 187, 195, 197–9, 200–1 Keemat, 197 Surakshaa, 197, 203 Nair, Shashilal K., 203 Karamdaata, 203 Navajo Joe see Corbucci, Sergio Nelson, Ralph, 40, 214 Duel at Diablo, 106 Flight of the Doves, 40–1 Soldier Blue, 214 The Wrath of God, 41, 44 New Tale of Zatoichi / Shin Zatōichi monogatari see Tanaka, Tokuzo Ninja Band of Assassins / Shinobi no mono see Yamamoto, Satsuo No Country for Old Men see Coen, Ethan and Joel North West Frontier see Thompson, J. Lee O Cangaceiro see Barreto, Lima Okamoto, Kihachi, 164n Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo / Zatōichi to Yōjinbō, 164n Olcott, Sidney, 114 Confederate Spy, 114 Old Surehand see Vohrer, Alfred Once Upon a Time in America see Leone, Sergio Once Upon a Time in the West / C’era una volta il West see Leone, Sergio Ortolani, Riz, 134, 136, 196 Osceola see Petzold, Konrad Paisan / Paisà see Roberto Rossellini Pale Rider see Eastwood, Clint Parks, Gordon, 139 Shaft, 139 Parks Jr, Gordon, 107 Thomasine and Bushrod, 107 Parolini, Gianfranco, 23 The Return of Sabata /È tornato Sabata . . . hai chiuso un’altra volta!, 23–5

4944_Fisher.indd 300

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 107 Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid see Peckinpah, Sam Peckinpah, Sam, 62, 115, 152, 214, 272 Major Dundee, 115 Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, 63 Ride the High Country, 272 The Wild Bunch, 62–3, 152, 214 Penn, Arthur, 23, 247 Little Big Man, 23, 247 Peri, Enzo, 169 Death Walks in Laredo / Tre pistole contro Cesare, 169 Petri, Elio, 107 Petroni, Giulio, 4, 22, 52, 76, 172, 235n, 265 Death Rides a Horse / Da uomo a uomo, 22, 52, 76, 172, 235n, 265 Tepepa, 4 Petzold, Konrad, 247 Osceola, 247–8 Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani see Mirza, Aziz Pierrot le Fou see Godard, Jean-Luc Point Blank see Boorman, John Poitier, Sidney, 106, 114 Buck and the Preacher, 114–15 Pollack, Sydney, 116 The Scalphunters, 116–17 Pollard, Harry A., 114 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 114 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 107, 109 Burn! / Queimada, 109 The Battle of Algiers / La battaglia di Algeri, 235n Pursued see Walsh, Raoul Questi, Giulio, 4, 229 Django Kill . . . If You Live, Shoot! / Se sei vivo, spara!, 4, 229 Quick Gun Murugun see Ghosh, Shashanka Raj, A. B., 187 Adima Changala, 187 Rango see Verbinski, Gore Ray, Nicholas, 151 Johnny Guitar, 25 The True Story of Jesse James, 151 Read, Dean, 255 Sing Cowboy Sing, 255 Reed: Insurgent Mexico see Leduc, Paul

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index Reinl, Harald, 245, 249 Winnetou: The Red Gentleman / Winnetou. 2. Teil, 249 Resnais, Alain, 51 Last Year at Marienbad / L’année dernière à Marienbad, 51 Return of Shanghai Joe / Che botte ragazzi! see Albertini, Bitto Ricci, Tonino, 169 Karate, Fists and Beans / Storia di karatè, pugni e fagioli, 169 Ride the High Country see Peckinpah, Sam Riley the Cop see Ford, John Ringo and His Golden Pistol / Johnny Oro see Corbucci, Sergio Rio Bravo see Hawks, Howard Rio Conchos see Douglas, Gordon Ritt, Martin, 41–2 The Molly Maguires, 41–2, 45n Rizvi, Sibte Hassan, 202 Joshilaay, 202 Romitelli, Giancarlo, 134, 139 His Name Was King / Lo chiamavano King, 134, 139 Rosi, Francesco, 63, 258n Illustrious Corpses / Cadaveri eccellenti, 258n Salvatore Giuliano, 63 Rossellini, Roberto, 53, 65n, 109 Paisan / Paisà, 109 Run, Man, Run / Corri, uomo, corri see Sollima, Sergio Ryan’s Daughter see Lean, David Sagar, Anand, 203 Baadal, 203 Salgari, Emilio, 7, 67–76, 78, 79–83 Salvatore Giuliano see Rosi, Francesco Sam Whiskey see Laven, Arnold Samson see Bhatt, Nanabhai Sandokan the Great / Sandokan, la tigre di Mompracem see Lenzi, Umberto Sangal, Ambrish, 187 Wanted: Dead or Alive, 187, 202–5 Santoshi, Rajkumar, 202 China Gate, 202 Sasanatieng, Wisit, 167 Tears of the Black Tiger / Fah talai jone, 167 Satpal, 195 Chunaoti, 195

4944_Fisher.indd 301

301

Scorsese, Martin, 53 Taxi Driver, 92 Seduced and Abandoned / Sedotta e abbandonata see Germi, Pietro Sergeant Rutledge see Ford, John Seven Samurai / Shichinin no samurai see Kurosawa, Akira Seven Warriors see Hung, Sammo Shaft see Parks, Gordon Shane see Stevens, George Sholay see Sippy, Ramesh Shree 420 / Mr 420 see Kapoor, Raj Shriram, 192 Hercules, 192 Siegel, Don, 18, 134, 267 Dirty Harry, 18, 38 The Shootist, 267 Two Mules for Sister Sara, 134 Sing Cowboy Sing see Read, Dean Sippy, Ramesh, 187, 200 Sholay, 187, 200–2, 203 Soldati, Mario, 52, 80, 81 Flight into France / Fuga in Francia, 52 Jolanda, the Daughter of the Black Corsair / Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero, 80 The Three Pirates / I tre corsari, 80 Soldier Blue see Nelson, Ralph Solinas, Franco, 22, 29 Sollima, Sergio, 4, 7, 22, 68, 70, 75, 76, 77, 78–9, 81–2, 92, 97, 107, 134, 154, 170, 249, 274 Face to Face / Faccia a faccia, 4, 68, 77, 92, 274 Jolanda, the Daughter of the Black Corsair / Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero, 80 La tigre è ancora viva: Sandokan alla riscossa!, 81 Run, Man, Run / Corri, uomo, corri, 68, 77, 107, 117, 154, 170 The Big Gundown / La resa dei conti, 22, 68, 77–8, 92, 97 The Black Corsair / Il corsaro nero, 81 Violent City / Città violenta, 134 Son of Jesse James / Solo contro tutti see del Amo, Antonio Space Men see Margheriti, Antonio Spangler, Larry G., 107, 111, 119, 138 Joshua, 119 The Soul of Nigger Charley, 107, 111, 138 Stagecoach see Ford, John

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302

index

Steno, 258n Flatfoot / Piedone lo sbirro, 258n Flatfoot in Egypt / Piedone d’Egitto, 258n Stevens, George, 151, 167, 265 Shane, 25, 151, 162, 167, 265 Sturges, John, 31, 42, 149, 186, 251 The Hallelujah Trail, 42–3 The Magnificent Seven, 31, 32, 38, 149, 186, 187, 195, 197, 201, 251 Subhash, Babbar, 203 Disco Dancer, 203 Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki, 203, 207n Sukiyaki Western Django see Takashi, Miike Sun, Chung, 175 Avenging Eagle / Long xie shi san ying, 175 Surakshaa see Nagaich, Ravikant Swackhamer, E. W., 119 Man and Boy, 119 Takashi, Miike, 8, 125–6, 128–31, 132, 133, 135, 141, 163, 167 Sukiyaki Western Django, 125–6, 128–31, 132, 135, 141, 163, 167, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181n Take a Hard Ride see Margheriti, Antonio Tanaka, Tokuzo, 158 New Tale of Zatoichi / Shin Zatōichi monogatari, 158–9 Tarantino, Quentin, 4, 8, 11n, 125–6, 129, 131–8, 139–40, 141–2, 142n, 213, 215, 235n Django Unchained, 8, 11n, 125–6, 132, 133, 134–7, 138–40, 141, 213 Kill Bill: Vol 1, 133, 235n Kill Bill: Vol 2, 133 Taylor, Don, 170 The Five Man Army / Un esercito di cinque uomini, 170 Taxi Driver see Scorsese, Martin Tears of the Black Tiger / Fah talai jone see Sasanatieng, Wisit Tepepa see Petroni, Giulio Tessari, Duccio, 22, 81, 173, 250, 265 A Pistol for Ringo / Una pistola per Ringo, 265, 266–7 Alive or Preferably Dead / Vivi o preferibilmente morti, 250

4944_Fisher.indd 302

Don’t Turn the Other Cheek / ¡Viva la muerte . . . tua!, 22 The Return Of Ringo / Il ritorno di Ringo, 173, 265, 266 Thazhvaram see Bharathan The Anonymous Heroes / Wu ming ying xiong see Chang, Cheh The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford see Dominik, Andrew The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo / Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo see Germi, Pietro The Battle of Algiers / La battaglia di Algeri see Pontecorvo, Gillo The Big Gundown / La resa dei conti see Sollima, Sergio The Birds, the Bees and the Italians / Signore & signori see Germi, Pietro The Black Corsair / Il corsaro nero see Sollima, Sergio The Bronze Buckaroo see Kahn, Richard C. The ’Burbs see Dante, Joe The Callahans and the Murphys see Hill, George W. The Facts of Murder / Un maledetto imbroglio see Germi, Pietro The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe / Il mio nome è Shangai Joe see Caiano, Mario The Five Man Army / Un esercito di cinque uomini see Taylor, Don The French Connection see Friedkin, William The Fugitive / Wang ming tu see Chang, Tseng-Chai The Godfather see Coppola, Francis Ford The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo see Leone, Sergio The Good, the Bad, the Weird / Choŭnnom, Nappŭnnom, Isanghannom see Jee-woon, Kim The Grapes of Wrath see Ford, John The Great Silence /Il grande silenzio see Corbucci, Sergio The Gunfighter see King, Henry The Guns of Navarone see Thompson, J. Lee The Hallelujah Trail see Sturges, John

23/03/16 6:12 PM

index The Harder They Come see Henzell, Perry The Hellbenders / I crudeli see Corbucci, Sergio The Hills Run Red / Un fiume di dollari see Lizzani, Carlo The Informer see Ford, John The Iron Horse see Ford, John The Last American Hero see Johnson, Lamont The Last Days of Pompeii / Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei see Bonnard, Mario The Legend of Nigger Charley see Goldman, Martin The Lone Ranger see Verbinski, Gore The Magnificent Seven see Sturges, John The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance see Ford, John The Molly Maguires see Ritt, Martin The Ox-Bow Incident see Wellman, William The Path of Hope / Il cammino della speranza see Germi, Pietro The Pirates of Malaysia / I pirati della Malesia see Lenzi, Umberto The Price of Power / Il prezzo del potere see Valerii, Tonino The Professionals see Brooks, Richard The Proposition see Hillcoat, John The Public Enemy see Wellman, William A. The Quiet Man see Ford, John The Railroad Man / Il ferroviere see Germi, Pietro The Return Of Ringo / Il ritorno di Ringo see Tessari, Duccio The Return of Sabata /È tornato Sabata . . . hai chiuso un’altra volta! see Parolini, Gianfranco The Road see Hillcoat, John The Savage Five / Wu hu jiang see Chang, Cheh The Scalphunters see Pollack, Sydney The Scavengers see Frost, Lee The Searchers see Ford, John The Secret of Captain O’Hara / El secreto del capitán O’Hara see Castillo, Arturo Ruiz The Sentimental Swordsman / To ching chien ko wu ching chien see Chor, Yuen

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The Shootist see Siegel, Don The Sons of Great Mother Bear / Die Söhne der groβen Bärin see Mach, Josef The Soul of Nigger Charley see Spangler, Larry G. The Stranger and the Gunfighter / Là dove non batte il sole see Margheriti, Antonio The Stranger in Japan / Lo straniero di silenzio see Vanzi, Luigi The Stranger Returns / Un uomo, un cavallo, una pistol see Vanzi, Luigi The Tale of Zatoichi / Zatōichi monogatari see Misumi, Kenji The Tale of Zatoichi Continues / Zoku Zatōichi monogatari see Mori, Kazuo The Three Pirates / I tre corsari see Soldati, Mario The Tramplers / Gli uomini dal passo pesante see Band, Albert The True Story of Jesse James see Ray, Nicholas The Warrior’s Way see Lee, Sngmoo The White Bus see Anderson, Lindsay The White, the Yellow, and the Black / Il bianco il giallo il nero see Corbucci, Sergio The Wild Bunch see Peckinpah, Sam The Witness / Il testimone see Germi, Pietro The Wrath of God see Nelson, Ralph They Call Me Trinity / Lo chiamavano Trinità . . . see Barboni, Enzo Thomasine and Bushrod see Parks Jr, Gordon Thompson, J. Lee, 22, 201, 206n, 249 Mackenna’s Gold, 206n, 249 North West Frontier, 201 The Guns of Navarone, 22 Three Outlaw Samurai / Sanbiki no samurai see Gosha, Hideo Through a Glass Darkly / Såsom i en spegel see Bergman, Ingmar To Kill a Mockingbird see Mulligan, Robert To Live in Peace / Vivere in pace see Zampa, Luigi Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die! / Oggi a me . . . domani a te! see Cervi, Tonino

23/03/16 6:12 PM

304

index

Trinity is Still My Name / Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità see Barboni, Enzo True Grit see Coen, Ethan and Joel Two Mules for Sister Sara see Siegel, Don Two Rode Together see Ford, John Uncle Tom’s Cabin see Pollard, Harry A. Valerii, Tonino, 17, 22, 134, 136, 196, 216, 249 Day of Anger / I giorni dell’ira, 22, 134, 136, 196 My Name is Nobody / Il mio nome è Nessuno, 216, 249, 251 The Price of Power / Il prezzo del potere, 17 Vanzi, Luigi, 160, 169 A Stranger in Town / Un dollaro tra i denti, 160 The Stranger in Japan / Lo straniero di silenzio, 160, 169 The Stranger Returns / Un uomo, un cavallo, una pistola, 160 Vera Cruz see Aldrich, Robert Verbinski, Gore, 263 Rango, 276 The Lone Ranger, 263 Vincenzoni, Luciano, 33, 36, 42, 52 Violent City / Città violenta see Sollima, Sergio Visconti, Luchino, 53, 65n Vittalacharya, B., 187 Mosagallaku Mosagaadu, 187 Viva Maria! see Malle, Louis Viva Villa! see Conway, Jack Viva Zapata! see Kazan, Elia Vohrer, Alfred, 256 Old Surehand, 256 Wagon Master see Ford, John Walsh, Raoul, 14, 27 Pursued, 25, 27 Wanted: Dead or Alive see Sangal, Ambrish

4944_Fisher.indd 304

Welles, Orson, 59 Wellman, William A., 18, 264 The Ox-Bow Incident, 264 The Public Enemy, 18 White Apache / Bianco Apache see Mattei, Bruno Winnetou: The Red Gentleman / Winnetou. 2. Teil see Reinl, Harald Yamamoto, Satsuo, 175 Ninja Band of Assassins / Shinobi no mono, 175 Yasuda, Kimiyoshi, 159, 160 Zatoichi on the Road / Zatōichi kenkatabi, 159 Zatoichi’s Cane Sword / Zatōichi tekka-tabi, 160 Yimou, Zhang, 133 Hero, 133 Yojimbo / Yôjinbô see Kurosawa, Akira Young Guns see Cain, Christopher Young Mr. Lincoln see Ford, John Zampa, Luigi, 109 To Live in Peace / Vivere in pace, 109 Zardoz see Boorman, John Zatoichi Challenged / Zatōichi chikemuri kaidô see Misumi, Kenji Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo / Zatôichi to Yôjinbô see Okamoto, Kihachi Zatoichi on the Road / Zatōichi kenkatabi see Yasuda, Kimiyoshi Zatoichi’s Cane Sword / Zatōichi tekkatabi see Yasuda, Kimiyoshi Zavattini, Cesare, 65n Zeglio, Primo, 70 Morgan, the Pirate / Morgan il pirate, 70 Zinnemann, Fred High Noon, 25, 152, 253 Zurlini, Valerio, 109 Black Jesus / Seduto alla sua destra, 109

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