The Great Duel | Lee Van Cleef, Tarantino's love and that forgotten western

Between crime fiction and spaghetti westerns: why (re)discover Giancarlo Santi's film loved by Tarantino 

The Hot Corn

By JacopoConti

August 18, 2024

MILAN – Ended up in oblivion for decades, The Great Duel at some point returned to the attention of the most attentive public in 2003, when Quentin Tarantino used the main passage of the film's soundtrack, signed by Luis Bacalov, for a precise sequence of Kill Bill: Volume 1. Since then, at regular intervals, we read either about how much it has been underestimated by some over time or how Tarantino's exhumation would, instead, have pushed others to overestimate it. We are on the side of those who say that there is more than one valid reason to recover the film (you can find it streaming on Prime Video and Apple TV), even if we understand the dissatisfaction of those who, watching it, thought they were rediscovering a cult à la Sergio Leone at the highest levels but found themselves faced with something else (complete with references to Days of Wrath and Django).

Yet The Great Duel has in some way to do with Leone's cinema, because the director, Giancarlo Santi, had been the deputy of the great Sergio in the filming of two of his major works (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West). And "a little bit" – net of the less successful sequences – the mistreated disciple has learned, especially in the good management of close-ups (especially in the finale) and silences, in the use of flashbacks and in the centrality assigned to a Morricone-style soundtrack.

This film, with a modest budget and spaghetti western aesthetics and plot, is also extraordinarily representative of what was the Italian cinema of the early 70s, both in the field of westerns and outside that perimeter. The merit? It is probably to be attributed to Ernesto Gastaldi, author of the screenplay and guru of the scripts of that period (his, among others, Milan hates: the police can't shoot, Once Upon a Time in America and Days of Wrath) who in the film directed by Santi manages to make the elements of the spaghetti western tradition coexist with those of the detective story (without sparing us even some occasional heavy jokes) and detective stories. A genre film, therefore, in which different narrative forms converge.

Absolute protagonist? Clarence LeRoy Van Cleef Jr. or Lee Van Cleef with now white hair, who embodies - as already happened for the elderly John Wayne - not only himself and his character (in this case Sheriff Clayton), but also the entire baggage of good and bad that he had played in the previous films. Masks gathered inside that face of an old fox and that attitude of a seasoned and aware star with which he makes fun of the four thugs decorated with bounty hunters in the first sequence. From the beginning, thanks to Van Cleef, we have no doubt that the sheriff will be the star of events until the unexpected final twist.

Clayton is looking for the young Philipp Wermeer – played by Alberto Dentice, the then impersonator of Massimo Ciavarro credited with a pseudonym and then a journalist for L'Espresso – convicted of the murder of Patriarch Saxon, a grabbing and violent capitalist who together with his three sons controlled a border area through his properties with the sole aim of enriching and expanding his possessions. From this point of view, we are faced with a feudal (or pseudo-mafia) western, with the addition, however, that the antagonists are characterized more by their tics, neuroses and bizarre elegance, than by the qualities demonstrated on the battlefield or in the liturgy of the duel. But the issue is more complicated.

How come? Because we are not in a Bud Spencer and Terence Hill comedy. Here, behind the apparently trivial fight between the sheriff and the bounty killers, there is a shade of mystery, a truth that few know and that no one seems to want to say. Will the young Philipp really be guilty? Who is trying to frame him? The answers come gradually, not without some misdirection. Furthermore, in the film we witness a reversal of values between the figure of the sheriff and the family of capitalists, in which the separation between law and justice plays a fundamental role, which, on the other hand, often coincide in the American western (remember that we are in Italy, two years after the release of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion).

The Saxons, dressed in white and masters of the county, are supposed to represent the state or some offshoot of it, but in reality they are deranged who use the system to serve their business, not to maintain social order. The sheriff, on the contrary, is dressed in black, and, indeed, due to differences with the top management, he has been removed from his role. It is therefore not the institution itself that takes care of individuals, but the moral strength of the insulted ex-sheriff, who unhinges a corrupt mechanism (as is the same judge who condemned Philipp) through the deadly weapon of truth and alliance with the persecuted other. The law in itself is no longer enough, it is necessary that upright men put it into practice, otherwise the gear breaks. All the time.