CINEVUE
By John Bleasdale
January 27, 2016
When Tarantino's The Hateful Eight was released earlier
this year, many pointed to director Sergio Leone as one of the central
influences. Tarantino has often name-checked and sound-checked Leone: Kill
Bill: Vol. 2 features a track lifted from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and
the first chapter of Inglorious Basterds is certainly an homage to the Italian
maestro, playing as it does on the titles of his film Once Upon a Time in the
West and Once Upon a Time in America. But Tarantino is also a huge fan of the
Italian director Sergio Corbucci, who made a series of seminal westerns to
rival Leone's mastery.
Although Leone effectively launched the Spaghetti Western
genre with A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 and despite the fact that the genre has
a tendency to look and sound very similar from film to film - partly due to
Ennio Morricone's ubiquitous soundtracks and a troupe of familiar Italian
theater actors who turn up again and again with the odd forgotten or
up-and-coming American or German actor thrown in - Corbucci's films are far
from being cheap imitations or knock-offs, although undoubtedly that was how
they won their financing. The differences are actually striking. If Leone is
the universally popular Beatles, Corbucci is the Rolling Stones - dangerous, jagged
and a bit dirtier.
One thing that obviously attracts Tarantino is Corbucci's
radical political use of genre. His villains are land owners (Django); or
respectable bankers, as in Navajo Joe; or people working for the authorities,
The Mercenary and The Great Silence; whereas his heroes are the
disenfranchised, such as the young Burt Reynolds who takes the lead as an
avenging Indian in Navajo Joe. If his hero is a man of few words, it isn't a
stylistic choice - Clint Eastwood putting his pencil through Leone's overly
wordy script - it's because Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) has had his throat
lit as a child and who now stands up for those who otherwise wouldn't have a
voice. Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West is an almost wordless avenger,
but his vengeance facilitates the onset of a civilisation he has no real time
for; Silence, on the other hand, fights to save the impoverished and against
the worst savageries of capitalism.
Leone's politics are lightly worn - with the exception of
A Fistful of Dynamite and its opening quotation from Chairman Mao -
civilization is to be scoffed at and there is a distaste for the equation of
money and human life, but there is no real anger and his heroes are
participants rather than rebels. Instead, Corbucci's films always have a
broader political context, in which the gunfighter is only an element and of
limited use. The conclusion of The Great Silence will come as a shock both for
its deep pessimism and the break with genre, showing that the gunslinger is not
a superhero and will not overcome his obligatory beating. Another difference
which might at first appear superficial is the weather. Leone's westerns are
parched, scorched affairs, set on the Mexican border, occasionally drifting
into the desert. It rains at the beginning of For a Few Dollars More but
nothing like the downpour that drenches Franco Nero's coffin dragging
gunslinger, Django. The mud of the town is grimier than anything in Leone. With
its lofty snowscapes, The Great Silence has a striking but frigid beauty, a
cold which matches the bleakness of the film's denouement and a scale which
dwarves the protagonists.
Finally, there's the violence. Leone's films gained a
reputation for bloodshed in contrast to the classic westerns which had largely
migrated to the safety of television, but Leone's violence is quick and
contained. The build-ups are long, but the violence itself is almost over
before it begins, with the exception of the obligatory beating. Corbucci takes
the violence to another level. Where Eastwood's Man with No Name might be given
a sound beating, Silence and Django are beaten and have their hands destroyed.
Leone's villains are bandits and outlaws, his heroes bounty hunters or
avengers. In Corbucci's films, the bounty hunters gun down unarmed prisoners;
in Navajo Joe it's they who scalp the Indians. Even the heroes are soiled by
the violence they perpetrate and are challenged on it. Silence plans to collect
a bounty on Loco (Klaus Kinski) and cynically provokes gunfights so he can kill
the other bounty hunters 'legally'. When Loco gets the upper hand, the ensuing
massacre is all "according to the law".
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