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A Borgesian hallucination of the Old West as lucrative shooting gallery: Life is cheap except to bounty hunters, a profit is made whenever someone is killed. "I would like to relate a nice little parable..." Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) is a great soldier turned jackal, though at least his mission carries the emotional thrust of vengeance; for Manco the mercenary (Clint Eastwood), it's a matter of keeping track of corpses and rewards. They step on each other's toes and shoot at each other's hats ("Just like the games we know," notes an urchin) and join forces to get El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté). From Tucumcari to El Paso to Agua Caliente, lands of dogged vendettas, blasted safes and cadavers by the cartful. "It's a small world." "Yes, and very, very bad." Sergio Leone opens with a formalist gag (a murdered rider dwarfed by the desert, an extreme long-shot to set up the ensuing extreme close-ups) and proceeds to give flesh to the parodical A Fistful of Dollars outline. (The enhanced imagistic sweep has a character's sombrero blacking out the sun as he looms over the camera, Ennio Morricone's score dilates a pocket watch's chimes into a wailing church organ.) Eastwood polishes his sagebrush Kabuki routine, playing straight-man to a screen-hogging Methuselah who grouses about trains traversing the prairie. Van Cleef adds a lavish note of André De Toth by calmly striking a match against the hump of Klaus Kinski's hunchback henchman. (Nothing is funnier than the did-he-just-do-that twitch of wrath in the corner of the bandit's mouth.) Volonté meanwhile rehearses his Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion tour de force, switching from coldly executing a cohort to mock-mourning him profusely. The Wild Bunch takes note of the flashbacks, the arena for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is already visible. "Maybe next time." With Luigi Pistilli, Aldo Sambrell, Joseph Egger, Mara Krup, Lorenzo Robledo, and Mario Brega.
--- Fernando F. Croce |