Five Before Chaos

Ok, gonna put a film review up shortly, but first a bit of background….

I’m not much of a movie guy. I don’t like Star Wars. When growing up, it was the horrible ’slasher flick’ stuff I was into. I know, complete crap. Since then I have come to appreciate good film, I swear. I love many of the great American films of the 70’s; the Godfather flicks, a lot of Al Pacino’s stuff from that era, and the jury is still out for me on Scorsese. Never been much of an ‘art film’ kind of guy, either. My attention over the past year or so has shifted to two particular genres… ‘blaxploitation’ films and so-called ’spaghetti westerns’. Don’t roll your eyes.

I’ll go into the blaxploitation at a later post (it’s so much more than just Shaft and Superfly). A bit of background on spaghetti westerns for you now… Basically a spaghetti western refers to a ‘western’ (as in ‘old American west’) made by Italian filmmakers, generally between 1965 and 1975, although the bulk of the noteworthy ones were made before 1970. Funny thing about the Italian film industry back then (maybe now, too, I don’t know)- apparently when one type of film did well, it was copied ad nauseum by the rest of the film industry, with a notable decline in quality as it went on. For example, the ’swords and sandals’ epics of the late 50’s-early 60’s produced hundreds of really bad films. It started with ‘Maciste’, the Italian version of Hercules-like character. It was quite successful. Next thing you know, there are hundreds of Maciste films out, such as ‘Maciste vs. The Vampires’ and “Maciste vs. the Moon Man’. I’m not making this up.

Anyways, after the runaway success of director Sergio Leone’s ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ in 1964 (the film that launched Clint Eastwood’s film career), many Italian filmmakers followed suit and there was an explosion of Italian westerns. Some were great, others were terrible. Many were filmed with an international cast, and since sound was overdubbed afterwards, often the actors would speak in their own languages (so basically you’d have a dialogue being read by Klaus Kinski in German, Clint Eastwood in English, and Gian Maria Volonte in Italian). They were often filmed in Rome and in the desert of Almira, in Spain(which I hear looks nothing like the American southwest).
Sergio Leone deserves his own post, so I’ll work on that at a later date. But what, you ask, made the Italian westerns so different from thier American counterparts?

Well, the striking difference to me, as one who could never stomach the John Wayne kind of western, was the moral ambiguity of its central characters, and the underlying social commentary of the changes going on in the world of the 60’s. In the traditional western, we knew who the good guys were, and yes, they often wore the white hats. In the Italian western, we’re not so sure if the good guy is so good. If we look at Eastwood’s ‘man with no name’ from ‘A Fistful of Dollars’. he is playing both sides of the forces in town against each other. He doesn’t do it for the people of the town so he can ride off into the sunset feeling good about himself. He just wants to take advantage of a situation, make that ‘fistful of dollars’ and get the hell out of town. Maybe that’s why these films resonate with me whereas the cheesy American themes, which romanticized another West that never existed, don’t. Granted, as has been said before, the spaghetti westerns weren’t necessarily an accurate depiction of the west either, but at least they were dead-on in not painting a pretty picture of it either.

The current events angle is not so easy to put my finger on. It’s obvious when you see it, so I’ll deal with that as they come up. The surprising thing about these films is how artistic some of them are, especially the Leone films. The unusual camera angles, wide background landscapes, extreme closeups and such make these films really stand out to me. I am often surprised, as I venture past the highly regarded Leone films into others of the genre at how good they are as films. Last night, I saw Damiano Damiani’s ‘A Bullet for the General’, a fantastic film of a decidedly more political bent. I’ll have a review coming shortly….

Your homework is to rent Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy, there will be a test….
A Fistful of Dollars
For A Few Dollars More
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

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