Coming soon from FAB Press

THE EURO-WESTERN BEYOND LEONE

The success of Sergio Leone's 'Dollars' trilogy in the '60s sparked a gold rush, as a legion of European film-makers - many of them sharing the get-rich-quick mentality of Leone's mercenary anti-heroes - followed the master's lead to create some of the wildest Westerns ever made.

Cynical and stylish, bloody and baroque, Euro-westerns replaced straight-shooting sheriffs and courageous cowboys with amoral adventurers, whose murderous methods would shock the heroes of Hollywood Westerns. These films became box-office sensations around the world, and their influence can still be felt today.

Any Gun Can Play puts the phenomenon into perspective, exploring the films' wider reaches, their recurrent themes, characters, quirks and motifs. It examines Euro-westerns in relation to their American ancestors and the mechanics of the Italian popular film industry, and spotlights the unsung actors, directors and other artists who subverted the 'code' of the Western and dragged it into the modern age.

Based on years of research backed up by interviews with many of the genre's leading lights, including actors Franco Nero, Giuliano Gemma and Gianni Garko, writer Sergio Donati, and directors Sergio Sollima and Giuliano Carnimeo, Any Gun Can Play will satisfy both connoisseurs and the curious.

Complete with a foreword by Euro-Western legend Franco Nero, this stunningly illustrated reference guide takes aim at the lingering notion that the genre has little to offer beyond the 'Dollars' films and a fistful of others, exposing the full, vibrant history of the Euro-western.

CONTENTS:

FOREWORD
By Euro-western legend Franco Nero, star of Django, A Professional Gun and Keoma, among others.

INTRODUCTION
An overview of Euro-westerns, their origins and characteristics, plus the major professionals whose careers they launched, prolonged or transformed.

TARGET PRACTICE
Early Euro-westerns were hit-and-miss affairs, but A Fistful of Dollars is not the only film from the genre's formative period worthy of recognition.

A BULLET SPENT, A DOLLAR EARNED
In the wake of For a Few Dollars More, the genre matured and broadened its horizons, presenting a misanthropic world-view, leavened with irony, that perfectly matched the tenor of the times.

RELATIVES AND RELIGION
Many Italian Westerns skewed their stories towards the home market, serving up stereotypical stories of troublesome females, feuding families and a satirical or critical treatment of religion.

'GOD FORGIVES... I DON'T!'
Euro-westerns posit a world where betrayal is rife and violence ever-present, taking the theme of revenge to extraordinary extremes.

'DON'T BUY BREAD, BUY DYNAMITE'
Euro-westerns were unashamedly populist, and many of them adopted a left-wing stance in the late Sixties, reflecting the influence of radical film-makers and the political atmosphere of the times.

BEWARE OF FAKE GUNS
While American Westerns had Jesse James, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, European film-makers invented a pantheon of their own, populated by the likes of Django, Ringo, Sabata, Sartana and Trinity.

COWBOYS, COMEDIANS AND KUNG FU STARS
Many Euro-westerns were hybrids not just of cultural traditions and film-making styles, but also tones, subjects and settings, with elements such as mystery, comedy, horror and martial arts not uncommon.

DESOLATION AND DECONSTRUCTION
The genre burned brightly but briefly, and by the early Seventies it was in decline. This chapter examines what these latecomers have to offer, and whether they have been dismissed too lightly.

WHO'S WHO IN EURO-WESTERNS
A biographical A-Z of the most important and prolific actors, directors, composers, etc.

EURO-WESTERN FILMOGRAPHY
A chronological listing of European Westerns.

[Sounds like a good, comprehensive guide for the most part IMO]

The Best of Spaghetti Westerns

This ten disc set features 20 films, two to a disc:

No Room to Die
Lone and Angry Man

Rope and the Colt
In the Colt's Shadow

Shanghai Joe
The Return of Shanghai Joe

Charge! Dirty Dogs
Shoot Gringo Shoot!

A Bullet for a Stranger
10,000 Dollars for a Massacre

A Pistol for Ringo
The Return of Ringo

Ringo: Face of Vengeance
Blood for a Silver Dollar

Deep West
Seven Dollars on the Red

Bandidos
Forgotten Pistolero

A Noose is Waiting for You Trinity
A Sky Full of Stars

Not bad for £15 or so from Amazon marketplace.

I've got Seven Dollars on the Red on at the moment and it looks damn good, in the proper aspect ratio, with vibrant colours, a pretty immaculate print and with no artefacting or pixelation thus far. Hope the other films are equally impressive...

Wild West Gals

I must confess to being somewhat tardy in acquiring this volume from Glittering Images, only remembering about it when I became aware of their new book in the same series on the giallo (more on which soon).

The subject of the book is the figure of the female in the western, encompassing genre classics, B-grade exploitation films and the WAI or western all'italiana, better known to most of us as the spaghetti western, and in comics, both North American and European.

Or, to be more precise, it is about the woman in the western when she was assigned a more active role than was traditionally the case in the 1920s and 1930s western – and, indeed, would continue to be the case in the majority of genre entries.



The coverage of films is chronological, beginning with the likes of Destry Rides Again (1939) and My Little Chickadee (1940) and concluding with Bandidas (2006), although the bulk of the films featured are from the 1950s through 1970s.

While some of the texts featured are familiar, the vast majority are obscurities likely only known by the specialist. Yet even here, the author's completist approach, in including – for example – Joe D'Amato productions from the 1990s whose raison d'etre is frankly of the pornographic kind (I speak from experience, having been thoroughly bored by his Calamity Jane) means that any and all readers are likely to discover something new.

This is especially apparent – at least for the film-oriented reader – when it comes to the appendix on comic books / fumetti.

The book is typically well illustrated. The stills featured might be criticised as exploitative, but another way of looking at it, one made more clear by posters and other advertising materials, is that this is the entire point.

Unfortunately all the interior images are black and white. Given that this is also the case in the giallo book, this looks to be representative of a change in Glittering Images' wider policy.

One the one hand it perhaps keeps the price down. On the other hand these are, as the imprint itself used to remind us, highly specialist books, or in other words things that are not particularly price elastic. At some level, you / we / I am going to buy it while the casual browser is not, regardless of price.

French readers should also note that, unlike many of Glittering Images' earlier releases, the text is now only in Italian and English. For Italian and English readers, meanwhile, the more parallel approach within the filmography – a one paragraph précis in Italian, followed by a one paragraph précis in English – makes for a nice parallel text for learning the other language. (Note that ironic use of the French there ;-))

Invisible Bullets

A short film, "heavily influenced by the spaghetti westerns, particularly For A Few Dollars More."

http://www.virginmediashorts.co.uk/films/entry/346076/invisible-bullets-3

Further information, including press kit and stills, can be found here:

http://www.invisiblebullets.co.uk

I'm sure they'd appreciate your comments

Subtitle positions

So, I am watching Machine Gun Killers / Gatling Gun, a pretty decent spaghetti western, in the English version with some scenes in Italian with subtitles. What is unusual is the way the subtitles appear: Rather than always being centred, they are sometimes to the right or left, to reflect who is speaking. Seems like an interesting variation on the convention I am familiar with...

The science of the gunfight

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8493092.stm

Further research: Applying this to the three-way duel or truel in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and bringing in differences in knowledge over which guns are actually loaded...

Also speed and accuracy?

Sartana - The Complete Saga

Another budget spaghetti box set, and another release which, from initial impressions, will appeal more if you have a tolerance for bad transfers.

Ten films across three discs, with all that implies for image quality - or lack thereof - and Django vs Sartana, for one, actually showing the imprinted logo of the TV station it has been sourced from, 7 Gold.

It's debatable whether these ten films represent the "Complete Saga" because of retitlings and cash-ins - the 'official' Sartana, Gianni Garko, as seen on the cover, isn't in all the films.

Spaghetti Western Collection

This arrived today. 20 films for £6 or so, including postage. It's the sort of price that you can't go wrong with, unless you care about the quality of the presentations. (Oddly it has a different cover, though still with Van Cleef.)

So far I've only watched two of the films contained within, neither of which I had seen before: Gunfight at Red Sands and Apache Blood. Both are very much AVI from video quality transfers, which is to be expected given that there are four films to a disc: Acceptable on a small laptop screen, or on a larger screen from a distance, but far from showcasing the format or more expensive equipment.

The two films provide an intriguing contrast, Gunfight coming before the boom, in 1963, and Apache Blood after it, in 1975.

Gunfight stars Richard Harrison as the avenging hero and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart as the sheriff/villain, with other prominent contributors including Morricone and, perhaps, Nicolai as Dan Savio and Lee Nichols, along with Massimo Dalamano, as Max Dalmas. The negative portrayal of the sheriff, along with the Mexican frontier setting, mark it out as a spaghetti, but otherwise its relatively conventional.

Apache Blood stars Ray Danton as the Apache seeking vengeance upon the cavalry. If it's unusual as a spaghetti by focusing on the Native American rather than the Mexican, it's also more conventional for a 1975 western through its more complex portrayal of the relationships between the redskin and the white man, as one which is not simply good and bad, or vice-versa.

The films:

1. Apache Blood
2. Between God, the Devil and a Winchester
3. Beyond the Law
4. China 9, Liberty 37
5. Death Rides a Horse
6. Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe, The
7. Find a Place to Die
8. Fistful of Lead
9. God's Gun
10. Grand Duel, The
11. Gunfight at Red Sands
12. It Can Be Done Amigo
13. Johnny Yuma
14. Man from Nowhere
15. Minnesota Clay
16. Sundance and the Kid
17. This Man Can't Die
18. Trinity and Sartana
19. Twice a Judas
20. White Comanche

10,000 Ways to Die

This new-old book from Alex Cox has an interesting history. Cox originally wrote a manuscript about the Italian, or Spaghetti, western in the 1970s as a graduate student and aspiring filmmaker. Unfortunately for him, at least at the time, the project fell through and the manuscript was never published – although he more recently made it available, as typewritten pages converted to a PDF, to download from his website.

Though Cox has since made several changes to the text, downplaying semiotic and other fashionable theories of the time in favour of a more personal approach based on his own experiences as a director, one constant remains: 10,000 Ways to Die is an excellent and insightful discussion of its subject that deserves a place on any genre fan’s bookshelf.

There are some minor errors. Herschell Gordon Lewis’s first two names are reversed when he is invoked in relation to the late Spanish horror-western Cut Throats Nine, for instance. Edda Dell’Orso is erroneously referred to as the vocalist on The Big Gundown, rather than Christy, an odd mistake in terms of their dissimilar styles but excusable via Cox’s admission not to have a much musical sensitivity.

These errors are, however, countered by all manner of details and insights. Three things particularly impress.

First, Cox’s use of triangulation, with different sources being played against one another, much like the factions in A Fistful of Dollars, to see where they support and contradict one another; in this regard Cox concludes Leone’s first western was essentially a rip-off of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, with the Italian’s claim to have drawn inspiration from Goldoni’s play Harlequin Servant of Two Masters being little more than a post-facto attempts to avoid paying royalties to his Japanese counterpart.

Second, that Cox, as an independent film-maker and self-identified anarchist, isn’t afraid to challenge received – and thus safe and boring – critical opinions. He considers the shorter version of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly superior to its longer counterparts and is largely dismissive of Clint Eastwood’s work as a director, for instance.

The most important aspect of this revisionist approach – one with an elective affinity for the spaghetti western, as revision of its own Hollywood counterpart – is however the promotion of Corbucci, via Django and The Great Silence, as a western filmmaker on a par with Leone.

Here, and in his discussions of a number of other films and filmmakers, Cox beautifully brings out the distinctions between ‘American’ and ‘Italian’ elements. Those favouring the former market tended towards a more conservative and conventional approach, those the latter greater experimentation, subversion and surrealism. As a filmmaker, Cox proves particularly sharp on issues around mise-en-scene, aspect ratios and so on, that Django’s 1.66:1 ratio – for instance – is apposite given its particular milieu against A Fistful of Dollars’ more usual 2.35:1. A split between televisual and cinematic aesthetics recurs within Cox’s discussions of framing and composition, some films tending towards familiar Hollywood-style centring of the ‘important’ things against others’ more off-centre – or decentred – approach.

Third, Cox’s selection of films, both broader than other key English-language texts, such as Frayling’s Leone-centred Spaghetti Westerns and Hughes’s Once Upon a Time in the Italian West, but not so broad as to ever become a set of lists. The important films, whether ‘good,’ ‘bad’ (Cox has a particular distaste for Tony Anthony’s Stranger series) or just plain ‘different’ (Little Rita of the West, The Price of Power, Closed Circuit) are amongst the fifty discussed in detail, while three or more times as many are mentioned in passing.

Westerns all'italiana blog

Anyone who knows their spaghetti westerns will also know who Tom B / Betts is.

Well, he's recently started a blog which is, needless to say, essential for fans of the form:

http://westernsallitaliana.blogspot.com/

Wild West Gals

A new book from Glittering Images on the cowgirl in films and pop culture:



Looks interesting, though maybe not as Euro-focused as some might like.

Così sia / They Called Him Amen

Has anyone seen the 1972 western Così sia / They Called Him Amen, directed by and co-starring Alfio Caltabiano? Dario Argento has a co-writing credit on it, which I would guess must be for an old script dating back three or four years. Intriguingly one of the keywords to describe the film on IMDB is 'gay,' leading me to also wonder if there are any quirky gay characters along the lines of those in the Animal Trilogy.

Bueller?

Colossus Projects

Just a "for your information" post:

Colossus, the Finnish progressive music association, has done a number of projects where contemporary progressive bands do new theme suites for films like Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good the Bad and the Ugly. They also have projects based on The Great Silence and Profondo Rosso in the works. Check them out if prog rock is your thing:

http://www.colossus.fi/125/index.php?id=11,0,0,1,0,0

Some spaghetti westerns from Germany's Koch Media

Two that are out just now:


Sergio Martino's Arizona si scatenò... e li fece fuori tutti, co-scripted by Ernesto Gastaldi, with Anthony Steffen and Rosalba Neri

http://imdb.com/title/tt0065422/


Tinto Brass's Yankee, with Philippe Leroy; does anyone know if Brass's early giallo Col cuore in gola is available?

http://imdb.com/title/tt0059924/

And two coming in a month or so:




And more Anthony Steffen

Spaghetti westerns

I envy anyone attending the Venice film festival this year, with its retrospective of 32 spaghetti westerns, curated by Quentin Tarantino. The article on the BBC is unfortunately light on details, however; I'd be curious to know how obscure it gets.

The Spaghetti Western: A Thematic Analysis

As an academic study adapted from Bert Fridlund's doctoral thesis, this is not a book for those seeking a viewer-friendly introduction to the Italian western. Rather, it forms a very useful counterpart and corrective to what probably still remains the dominant study of the cycle in English, Christoper Frayling's Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone.

Whereas Frayling takes a more auteur focussed approach in concentrating upon a core selection of perhaps 50 spaghettis, Fridlund points to the frequent inconsistencies in such canon constructions - films like Django Kill and The Great Silence receive greater attention than box-office would warrant while the Trinity series are correspondingly downplayed as emblematic of little more than the descent into parody, for instance - and accordingly casts his net wider to discuss some 200 titles.

Fridlund's methodology likewise differs. Whereas Frayling emphasised the aesthetic dimensions of his films and was somewhat critical of Will Wright's structuralist analysis of the American western, albeit whilst offering his own alternative formulations of characteristic Italian western narratives, such as the "The Servant of Two Masters" plot he identified in A Fistful of Dollars and Django, Fridlund effectively reverses these terms, downplaying aesthetics in favour of thematics.

Indeed, in discussing Fistful of Dollars and A Pistol for Ringo, Fridlund is quick to offer an alternative formulation to Fraylings, that of "The Infiltrator," whilst subsequently identifying Django as an exemplar of another plot constellation, that of "the deprived hero".

Some of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches are nicely summarised by the Fistful / Pistol pairing. Whilst I have not watched Ringo and his Golden Pistol for a while - and reading Fridlund makes me want to do so again, which always a good sign - from what I recall its aesthetics were far removed from those of Fistful, more neo-classical in seeking to directly emulate American models, less baroque, askew and 'Italian' - in other words, precisely the kind of thing that Frayling analyses excel at. But on account of this and the fact that aesthetics aren't Fridlund's topic, this is not a problem per se.

What some readers may find less convincing, however, is the way Fridlund's analyses develop over the course of the book as he explores other plot constellations, including "the unstable partnerships of bounty killers," as seen in For a Few Dollars More for example, and "the social bandit" of political or politicised spaghettis like A Professional Gun and Companeros. Or, more precisely the way in which they don't.

The key thing, after all, about Will Wright's Sixguns and Society is that second term in its title, the way in which he sought to bring Levi-Strauss and Propp inspired structuralism and formalism together with Marxism to show that the shifting configurations of the heroes, villains and their relationships with society in the American western over the decades, corresponded to social changes. Thus, for example, the emergence of the "professional" plot in the 1950s and 1960s, wherein the heroes remained outside of and separate from a weak society, corresponded with the emergence of technocratic elite rule.

Fridlund doesn't attempt anything comparable here. Whether this is down to too great a barrier of cultural difference - an American investigating his own country's myths obviously has it easier here than a Swede looking for the ways in which Italian film-makers used an imaginary America as a means of addressing specifically Italian concerns - that between an enduring American genre and a short-lived Italian filone cycle, a simple lack of enthusiasm - the success rate in bringing together the theoretical paradigms of Marxism and Structuralism has arguably been rather low despite the contributions of some of the best intellectual minds - or a combination of them, is open to debate.

On the plus side, however, the very fact that the emphasis is upon description also means that there is more here for the reader who is interested in the films in themselves, with less of those over-analytic, over-reaching and credibility-straining interpretations that often mar academic books as far as the fan reader is concerned.

For those with a more theoretical bent, meanwhile, it also opens up possibilities for further investigations, whether in filling in the gaps between theory and practice - a topic, often of great significance in the political spaghetti westerns to both characters and film-makers if not necessarily their viewing audience - or indeed in demonstrating their very irreconcilability as the reason for such a gap here.

A Spaghetti Western Top Ten

A top ten, deliberately limiting myself to one film per director to avoid the dominance of Leone and Corbucci and omitting Once Upon a Time in the West as being more a classic western than an Italian western, as signalled by Leone's desire to say farewell to the Dollars films by having the three gunmen who meet Harmonica essayed by Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach.

1. The Good the Bad and the Ugly – a great film, period.

2. The Big Gundown – Morricone, Sollima, Van Cleef and Milian all at the top of their game, plus some of the most impassioned singing I've heard courtesy of Christy.

3. The Great Silence – the logical extension of the laconic Man of no Name, the baddest of the bad and the bleakest of the bleak - landscapes and endings - make for an unbeatable package.

4. Death Rides a Horse – another dark, complex and satisfying revenge tale; another great Morricone score.

5. Companeros – the best of the political spaghettis, successfully combining its message with solid entertainment, the latter half of the equation being the one that all too many “committed” filmmakers forgot about.

6. The Return of Ringo – the Odyssey as spaghetti western #1 and a beautiful reinterpretation of the classic American western style and mythology.

7. Cemetery without Crosses – what could easily have been nothing more than formulaic Leone pastiche becomes a genuine tribute from filmmakers who really understood what he was doing.

8. Keoma – yes, even with the singing, no worse than Leonard Cohen in McCabe and Mrs Miller; Castellari's post-Leone, post-Peckinpah action sequences bring it all back home once more.

9. Django the Bastard - the supernatural western, with Anthony Steffen's impassive acting style being to the benefit of the whole and another of Luciano Rossi's delightful wackos.

10. My Name is Nobody – the Odyssey as spaghetti western #2 and a fitting farewell to and summation of the spaghetti form.

Let's hear yours...

Testa t'ammazzo, croce... sei morto... Mi chiamano Alleluja / They Call Me Hallelujah

Yes, it's yet another spaghetti western, Guiliano Carnimeo / Anthony Ascott's Testa t'ammazzo, croce... sei morto... Mi chiamano Alleluja / They Call Me Hallelujah. Made in 1971, it stars giallo stalwart George Hilton and can be pretty much summed up as a combination of most of the post-Leone trends in the genre: knockabout comedy a la Trinity; James Bond style gadgets a la Sabata, and a Mexican revolution setting out of Run Man Run, Compañeros and so on.

As a result, it's enjoyable but lightweight; a description, oddly enough, that also seems fairly appropriate to Ascott's giallo venture of the following year, The Case of the Bloody Iris, for better or worse.

There's also a very giallo-esque moment in Hallelujah that sees our titular anti-hero sneak in on one of the bad guys as his wife is shaving his beard. He gives her a chloroform soaked cloth, takes the razor, and puts it to the malefic's throat.




Not a giallo, despite the black gloves and arm and straight razor; then again in a giallo would the killer give a warning?


Ascott uses the kaleidoscope lens in Case of the Bloody Iris's psychedelic cult / orgy sequences as well

Cimitero senza croci / Cemetery without Crosses

I've been on a bit of a spaghetti western binge at the moment. The best new discovery has been Robert Hossein's Cemetery Without Crosses, co-written by a certain Dario Argento and dedicated by Hossein - who produced, directed, wrote and starred in the piece, remarkably without compromising it - to Sergio Leone.


From one auteur to another?

While it might be possible to seek common elements between the film and Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West - as the Leone film co-authored by Argento, along with Bertolucci - that are not in evidence in Leone or Hossein's other films as possible Argento-isms, in truth I think that would be a largely futile exercise.

One thing that did leap out, however, was the way in which Cemetery's Manuel takes his black gloves out of a musical box and invariably dons the right one before going into action; at one point he even gets an opponent to back down by simple virtue of putting it on. It's classic unimportant prop to signifying fetish material.


The glove box also plays a tinkly music box theme like Mortimer's and Indio's watches in For a Few Dollars More or the killer's tape in Deep Red


Let's go to work...


No, not the infamous panty-ripping murder in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage but some Italian western black glove action

There's also a well staged suspense sequence where Manuel, having schemed his way into the home of the family whose daughter he intends to kidnap, is seated at the dinner table with the rest of their hired hands. Nobody speaks, the only sounds those of cutlery and typically messy spaghetti western eating. Everyone turns to look at him - has he been rumbled? As it turns out, no, with the release of tension coming not through a moment of violence, Leone style, but a Hitchcock style gag, as the family and their hirelings play a practical joke on the new recruit.

More generally, the film made me think about what seem to be the fundamentally different ways in which spaghetti westerns and gialli deal with trauma. In gialli trauma is more likely to induce insanity than a desire for revenge, which often also takes a somewhat confused and generalised form in which the society as a whole or certain groups within it are to blame. In spaghettis trauma usually leads to straightforward vendetta, even if the path to its fulfilment may well be just as convoluted and strewn with flashbacks and mystery elements.

Alex Cox book on Spaghetti Westerns

In case anyone doesn't know about this: Alex Cox, director and ex-presenter of Moviedrome and all round good guy has a manuscript he wrote on Spaghetti Westerns, 10,000 Ways to Die, but unfortunately never published, available for download from his website

From the first few pages, it looks to be an interesting counterpoint / companion piece to Christopher Frayling's Spaghetti Westerns; the beauty of course is that if you don't like it, well, it hasn't cost you anything...