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The psychedelic rotoscoping of the credits lays out the Sergio Leone experience—otherworldly sights and sounds as incantation and deformation of the Western. Joe the americano (Clint Eastwood) rides into the frontier hamlet divided between bandit clans and "between funerals and burials," one line is enough to summarize the tale ("There's money to be made in a place like this"). Whitewashed rock and sandy plains comprise the arena, the only tree has a noose dangling from its gnarled branch and the only family has been disbanded so the young mother (Marianne Koch) can become a captive mistress. Gian Maria Volontè as the villain who "always aims for the heart" is given a build-up worthy of O'Neill's Hickey, and lives up to it in a ferocious entrance that has him blithely wiping out an entire regiment of federales while dressed in cavalry blues. (Eastwood's enigmatic gunslinger, who by then has mastered by sly comedy of cowboy-Zen, registers the slaughter by shifting his cheroot from one side of his mouth to the other.) "You will get rich here. Or you will be killed." A very close study, practically a painter's copy, of Yojimbo, which means it's about Ford, too: Wide-angle lenses purposefully distort Kurosawa's long lenses, the pistol that once shot the samurai code now rules the landscape. Explicitly an act of sardonic disrespect toward the genre, like propping corpses against tombstones, yet also a full-bodied passion play—the stubbly stranger experiences a crushing Calvary that dilates the violence of Mann and De Toth, flight (with a coffin's view of the fiery massacre), resurrection in a cave (One-Eyed Jacks), finally a miracle on main street. A Morricone trumpet for "an old Mexican proverb," the ideal rough draft for Leone's view of the Old West as sagebrush Mars. Cinematography by Massimo Dallamano. With José Calvo, Wolfgang Lukschy, Sieghardt Rupp, Antonio Prieto, Margarita Lozano, Mario Brega, and Joseph Egger.
--- Fernando F. Croce |