Cine Savant
By Lee Broughton
July 2, 2024
UK correspondent Lee Broughton returns with coverage of a
striking Spaghetti Western. High culture operator Mario Lanfranchi was
primarily known for directing operas and the works of Shakespeare when he
seized the opportunity to work on a Western in Spain. The result was a very
personal film which featured a stylish look, an interesting narrative structure
and a quite amazing cast.
A young alcoholic, Cash (Robin Clarke), is too drunk to
help when four gunmen attack and rob his brother. When he sobers up he hits the
vengeance trail, hunting four quite disparate killers who have split up and
surrounded themselves with dangerous henchmen. Diaz (Richard Conte) is now a
wealthy farmer while the cruel and perverse Montero (Enrico Maria Salerno) has
set himself up as a professional gambler. Both men are dispatched with little
real trouble but things get trickier when Cash takes on Brother Baldwin’s
(Adolfo Celi) gang of pious enforcers and O’Hara (Tomas Milian), a demented
albino who has a disturbing fetish for blonde women and gold
It’s well known by now that the huge impression that
Sergio Corbucci’s seminal Spaghetti Western Django (1966) made on cinema-goers
in Italy resulted in some of the country’s canny producers and distributors
attempting to cash in on the film’s success by rebranding their own new — and
completely unconnected — Westerns as Django movies of some description or
other.
However, this kind of activity wasn’t just limited to
Italy and a number of West German distributors went on to take the practice to
even dizzier heights. The name Django was crowbarred into the titles of
countless Franco Nero films that were released there (be they Westerns or not)
and several more unrelated anti-heroes were renamed Django when the German
language dub tracks of their genre films were being prepared. This was the case
with Mario Lanfranchi’s Death Sentence, here being marketed by Explosive Media
under its West German release title, Django – Unbarmherzig wie die Sonne.
Lanfranchi was well known in Italy for his work in the
fields of theatre, opera and highbrow television. So much so that he initially
found it difficult to find a producer who would take his sudden desire to write
and direct a Spaghetti Western seriously. When a production deal was finally in
place, Lanfranchi’s professional reputation and contacts at Columbia Pictures
in America helped him to secure an interesting and highly capable cast and he
set about creating a very personal film.
As a result, Lanfranchi’s sole genre entry boasts a
particularly distinctive look and an unusual ambience. The film’s art
direction, set designs and narrative structure (the story is told in four
distinct acts) all suggest that Lanfranchi endeavoured to bring some of his
high culture and theatrical sensibilities to the show. There’s plenty of
well-staged action on display here but Cash’s enemies are all clever and
suspicious men, and he is ultimately forced to employ ingenious and novel
psychological tricks to get them to lower their guards.
As such, all four of the film’s acts eventually become
what are essentially quite wordy, character and dialogue driven, two-man psycho
dramas that Lanfranchi chose to describe as “duels with words.” This approach
works surprisingly well and the director gets some great performances from his
talented cast. Furthermore, Lanfranchi and ace cinematographer Toni Secchi are
able to employ some interesting close-up shots and distinctive editing
strategies during these scenes of verbal sparring.
We’re aware that Lanfranchi is striving to do something a
little different with the genre when he toys with an unusual narrative
structure early on. The film opens with Cash pursuing his first victim, Diaz,
through the desert. Both men are on foot and both men are nearly fit to drop.
Diaz has two pistols but no water while Cash has a supply of water but no gun.
As they call taunts to each other, Cash has a stylised flashback which details
the actions that prompted him to hit the vengeance trail.
Diaz immediately follows this with a flashback of his
own, which shows Cash arriving at his grand hacienda, threatening his wife and
wiping out his men before chasing him into the desert. Richard Conte is
convincing as an ageing bad guy who has reputedly turned over a new leaf, and
he almost prompts a degree of sympathy for Diaz here. Diaz reckons that he has
lived an honest life and has worked hard at building up a successful farm in
the years following the attack on Cash’s brother but Cash remains unmoved.
Cash’s next victim, Montero the gambler, is a pretty
despicable character whose introductory scene shows him accepting a desperate
opponent’s young and beautiful wife (Eleonora Brown) as his stake in a
make-or-break card game. Montero tells Cash that he doesn’t play for money, he
plays for the sake of playing. Put simply, he gets a smug feeling of
superiority when he takes on and beats the forces of destiny at the card table.
The only money that really excites Montero is that which he purposefully sets
out to win from poverty-stricken gamblers as he knows that the poor really
value their meagre stakes.
Cash in turn uses his own gambling skills to push Montero
to the limit psychologically. Enrico Maria Salerno, who does an expert job of
bringing the slimy Montero to life, was the voice of Clint Eastwood’s Man With
No Name character in the original Italian version of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). But he is
perhaps best known to fans of Italian popular cinema for his appearances in a
number of well-regarded crime films.
Things take a decidedly gothic turn when Cash goes after
his remaining two victims. Brother Baldwin dresses like a parson and he affects
the language and the mannerisms of a priest. But he’s actually a callous
enforcer who uses his gang of black-clad killers to terrorise innocent Mexican
villagers. Cash’s refusal to repent his sins and reveal the whereabouts of a
mythical case full of stolen military gold drives Baldwin to distraction,
giving the battered Cash the edge that he needs to turn the tables on this
particularly nasty individual.
Adolfo Celi is perfectly cast as the physically powerful
and brutal pseudo-holy man. Brother Baldwin’s megalomania, his pretensions of
superman status and the ways in which Lanfranchi and Secchi frame him all work
to bestow Baldwin with the aura of a fascist figurehead and it’s probably no
coincidence that Baldwin’s silent and wholly obedient men all wear homogenous
black uniforms.
In the film’s final act, genre stalwart Tomas Milian
brings a touch of deranged magic to the proceedings with his portrayal of the
disturbed albino, O’Hara. The manic and twitchy O’Hara makes a real impression
dressed all in white except for a pair of black leather gloves, a black necktie
and a dark brown gun belt. Cash tries to snare O’Hara by pretending to re-open
a dying town’s bank with the assistance of a local vagabond, Paco, who is
played by fan favourite Luciano Rossi. However, O’Hara escapes from this trap
and flees to his foreboding house that sits at the top of a bleak and craggy
rock face.
Deciding to target O’Hara’s secondary fetish, Cash
employs a blonde beauty (Lilli Lembo) to share his horse as he slowly rides
through O’Hara’s barren territory. O’Hara takes the bait, setting us up for a
spooky night-time shoot-out in a reputedly cursed monastery and its attendant
graveyard. Ever a man of the people, Milian apparently felt that Lanfranchi’s
mindset was too elitist to make a Western and the actor clashed with the
director on set. But Lanfranchi liked what Milian was doing with O’Hara and kept
extending his scenes in order to keep the impressively deranged performance
flowing.
On paper this might sound like a fairly standard revenge
flick but it isn’t. Lanfranchi stated that he set out to create an experimental
one-off Western and in many ways he succeeded. One of the most obviously
different things about this show might be its soundtrack score by Gianni
Ferrio. Ferrio’s music sounds like a Spaghetti Western score that was recorded
by a bunch of jumpy Jazz musicians who were just itching to leave the score
behind and do some improvisational blowing (which they actually appear to do in
a couple of spots).
The use of instruments and musical time signatures
associated with the Jazz and Loungecore movements makes some sense when the
first appearance of Richard Conte immediately prompts memories of his film noir
past. And these musical sounds are also reasonably well-suited to the sequences
that play out in the dilapidated saloon where Montero spends his days gambling.
Perhaps in recognition of Tomas Milian’s status as a genre icon, the music does
take on a more traditionally Spaghetti Western-like vibe for the show’s final
act: some appropriate organ work, vocal chants and choral voices are
effectively thrown into the mix here.
But, good as the music is, it generally fails to generate
the kind of deep emotional response that we associate with the genre’s best
scores. Lanfranchi stated that he wanted to make a Western that was completely
unsentimental and he certainly succeeded in this respect. There’s very little
room for any emotional investment on the part of the audience here. So much so
that it’s tempting to assume that Lanfranchi’s status as a high culture
operator had some influence on this outcome.
Was Milian’s assumption that the inherently highbrow and
aristocratic Lanfranchi simply lacked the (popular) cultural competencies
needed to produce an emotionally charged, populist and crowd-pleasing Spaghetti
Western correct? Or did Lanfranchi consciously dispense with the genre’s
populist form in order to produce a kind of ‘high culture’ variant that would
demand to be viewed from an unemotional and uninvolved critical distance? I’m
sure only Lanfranchi could have said for certain.
Robin Clarke turns in a good performance as the reformed
alcoholic vengeance-seeker but Cash by design isn’t really a character that
we’re meant to feel much for. He is a completely driven killing machine akin to
Bill Meceita (John Phillip Law) in Guilio Petroni’s Death Rides a Horse (1967) and Harmonica
(Charles Bronson) in Sergio Leone’s Once
Upon a Time in the West (1968) but he doesn’t possess the same kind of
sympathetic and emotionally involving back-story as those characters.
Cash’s flashback tells us nothing about his brother and
we never really get to know anything about Cash. If Diaz is to be believed,
Cash’s brother wasn’t a wronged innocent: he was a greedy and dangerous
criminal who tried to dupe his four outlaw partners out of the proceeds of some
nefarious joint venture. And Diaz even indicates that he and Cash had been
known to happily socialise together under dubious circumstances at some point
in the past. The idea that the film’s plot simply details a falling out between
Spaghetti Western gangsters means that the show never really develops much in
the way of a clear-cut sense of moral dualism and there is no need for noble,
Sergio Leone-style duels when it comes to the settling of accounts.
Lanfranchi’s representation of the West itself is equally
unromantic. Most of the film’s impressively designed sets consist of buildings
and interiors that are poverty stricken and badly in need of repair.
Interestingly, some of the show’s spacious interiors are arranged, dressed and
lit in ways that serve to bring to mind stage productions. The film’s costume
designs and art direction more generally are really quite distinctive too.
Designed by Giancarlo Salimbeni Bartolini, much of the effectively aged and
worn clothing on display here comes in interesting-if-untypical shades of
green, red and brown while being fashioned in noticeably theatrical and
flamboyant styles.
Toni Secchi’s cinematography remains both excellent and
stylish. There are some magnificently fluid camera moves on display here and
Secchi and Lanfranchi repeatedly make their static shots interesting by using
door frames, arches, pillars, windows, leaning ladders, lounging bodies and so
on to create striking frames within frames. Secchi had previously worked as the
director of cinematography on Damiano Damiani’s classic political Spaghetti
Western A Bullet for the General (1966) and he went on to direct the genuinely
funny comedy Spaghetti Western Panhandle Calibre .38 (1972), which featured a
charming, career-best performance from its leading star Keenan Wynn.
When they are taken in isolation, all of the individual
elements that make up Death Sentence are revealed to be of a noticeably high
standard and the show’s bold aesthetic qualities certainly help it to stand out
from the crowd. But I can’t help thinking that Lanfranchi’s desire to create
something so noticeably different might have resulted in a film that was just a
tad too un-generic to be fully appreciated by the contemporaneous patrons of
Italy’s popular cinema circuits. Somehow I get the feeling that Lanfranchi
would have regarded such an assessment as a real compliment.
[Lee Broughton is the author of The Euro-Western:
Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film (2016) and the editor of Critical
Perspectives on the Western: From A Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained (2016)
and Reframing Cult Westerns: From The Magnificent Seven to The Hateful Eight
(2020).]
Explosive Media’s Region Free Blu-ray presentation of
Death Sentence is excellent. The film’s interesting colour schemes are
pleasingly rendered and the presentation’s sound quality is excellent too.
There is no English language soundtrack on this disc but it does sport English
language subtitles that support its Italian language and German language dub
tracks (I used the Italian language dub track when viewing the film). Materials
for the film’s English language dub appear to be missing in action at this time
though contemporaneous reviews of Death Sentence do confirm that the show did
have a British cinema release albeit in a shortened English dubbed version that
ran to 82 minutes.
In terms of extra features a major plus here is the
presence of two key features that first appeared on an earlier DVD of the film
that was released by Koch Media in 2005. The first is an English language
interview with Mario Lanfranchi that contains some fascinating background
information about the director and the film itself. The second is the
director’s English language commentary track which works to offer some insight
into just what Lanfranchi was trying to achieve with his unusual take on the
genre. The disc’s other extra features include an English language commentary
track by me (Lee Broughton), a German language commentary track by Leonhard
Elias Lemke and a really comprehensive image gallery. Initial copies of this
release come in a limited edition slipcase.
Review text © copyright 2024 Lee Broughton.
[permission to reprint article per Lee Broughton
and Glenn Erickson]
