‘Sad
Hill Unearthed,’ a new award-winning documentary, follows a quixotic quest to
restore the neglected set of the iconic cemetery scene from the classic Sergio
Leone western
El Pais
By
Susana Urra
October
12, 2018
“In July 1966, the Spanish army
built an enormous cemetery in Burgos.
That graveyard had over 5,000 tombs... but nobody buried in them.”
At a time when dictator exhumations and
the future of a colossal cemetery located in a Madrid valley are taking up many
headlines, Spain is releasing Sad Hill Unearthed, a documentary about
a group of people’s quest to resuscitate the set of a crucial scene in Sergio Leone’s timeless
spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
The film by Guillermo de
Oliveira, which was released on Friday, follows the painstaking restoration of
a circular cemetery that
Leone created out of nowhere in the mountains near Santo Domingo de Silos
(Burgos), and which he used in one of the final scenes for a showdown between
the three main characters, played by Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van
Cleef.
Association founder Sergio García paints the fictitious
grave marker for Eli Wallach.
The 20-minute scene has gone
down in the annals of movie history as a monument to human emotions, and Leone
himself described the place, which he called Sad Hill,
as “the circus of destiny.” The Good, The Bad and The Ugly provided
a critical vision of civil war, and it also included a cemetery built in a
silent valley, just like Spain,
but the story’s backdrop was the American Wild West, and the Franco regime
welcomed the initiative with open arms.
Just like Oliveira explains,
Franco even offered the production company thousands of young men who were
doing their military service, and who ended up not just building the sets, but even participating in the battle scenes and playing dead.
For every day of shooting during that scorching summer of 1966, the company
paid each soldier 250 pesetas (€1.50), and some officials received as much as
900 pesetas (€5.41). In the film, three of those youths who were doing their
military service at the barracks in San Marcial (Burgos) share their memories of that
adventure.
Originally devised as a modest
documentary, the project ballooned into a 83-minute film with appearances by,
among others, score composer Ennio Morricone, actor Clint Eastwood (the only
surviving star of the original movie), technicians who worked under Leone,
Metallica vocalist James Hetfield, who is a devoted fan of the film (for the
last 30 years, Metallicahas
been opening all its concerts with the music from the cemetery scene), the film
directors Joe Dante and Álex de la Iglesia, and Leone’s biographer, Christopher
Frayling.
Aerial view of Sad Hill in July 2016.
The documentary was initially
set in the Sierra de la Demanda, the mountain range where Sad Hill was built –
and restored decades later – but Oliveira ended up traveling to Rome, London and L.A. to complete the
project. In so doing, he managed to contact individuals who had seemed
completely out of reach in his bid to uncover the inner workings of Leone’s
masterpiece, and to divulge the quixotic work of the Sad Hill Cultural Association, the group that began restoring the site in
October 2015.
Love of a legend
Sad Hill Unearthed is a love story about chasing down a legend until
it comes within reach. It is also a story about “stubbornness,” jokes David
Alba, one of the most active members of the Sad Hill Cultural Association. With
help from volunteers who trekked to the cemetery site from several countries,
and using nothing more than spades and hoes, the association slowly cleared the
15 centimeters of accumulated earth and vegetation from the stone circle where
Eastwood, Wallach and Van Cleef once faced off.
Eastwood and Van Cleef chatting with a Spanish Civil Guard
during a break.
Then, in order to restore the
5,000 graves (although Leone had dreamed of 10,000), it occurred to them to
launch a Sponsor-a-Grave campaign to get people to contribute €15 and have
their name marked on one of the crosses. As a result, volunteers have placed
4,500 crosses with the name of living people (and some deceased) in the spots
that still stood out from the earth despite years of neglect.
Even before its formal release
on Friday, Sad Hill Unearthed has already received several
prizes, including one for best movie in the New Visions section of the Sitges
Film Festival, and best technical and artistic contribution to the western
genre at the Almeria Film
Festival.
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