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The opening Mao quote ("The Revolution is not a dinner party...") gives way to a barefoot campesino pissing on an anthill, jibes at La Chinoise and The Wild Bunch before the credits even begin. Sergio Leone is funny like that, he turns the stagecoach into a drawing room on wheels, the bourgeoisie excoriating the Mexican peasant (Rod Steiger) is assaulted, impregnated, and dumped into a pigsty. The Irish dynamiter (James Coburn) arrives weary of uprisings ("One was enough for me"), lanky firecracker to Steiger's squat cherry-bomb, "John and Juan." In the land of Zapata and Villa, a bandito becomes a patriotic leader by mistake—the bank is the town's shimmering temple, the Neruda joke is that the storming reveals one vault after another filled with political prisoners. Meanwhile, the ex-IRA fighter recalls a gauzy ménage back home (with a note adduced from The Informer) and ponders his partner's view of revolt: "What happens afterward? The same fucking thing starts over!" Jagged Western landscapes camouflage what is essentially a WWII battlefield, with massive fusillades and a crypto-kommandant atop a convoy of Federales. (The Rossellini strain continues in the execution against a church wall witnessed through a government poster with ripped-out eyes, and a Guernica view of the massacred brood in the catacombs.) Very much part of the post-'68 theater of radical disillusionment (The Spider's Stratagem, Allonsanfan), impossibly virile and caustic down to the clash of lyrical chorales and sardonic organ in Ennio Morricone's score. "To me, you are just a naked son of a bitch. Understand, Yankee?" Cynical comedy turns into cynical tragedy aboard a hurtling locomotive, the rest is elaborated by Leone in Once Upon a Time in America. Cinematography by Giuseppe Ruzzolini. With Romolo Valli, Maria Monti, Rik Battaglia, Antoine Saint-John, Franco Graziosi, and David Warbeck.
--- Fernando F. Croce |