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I just went to see a double feature at the Film Forum, which is running a "spaghetti western" film festival.
No, i didn't check out any of the Leone films; i've seen them all, and own them on DVD. No need to rush out and see them in the shitbox that is the FF. I wanted to see some i haven't seen, ones that aren't particularly available in the U.S., so I saw 2 films by the OTHER "Sergio", Sergio Corbucci, THE GREAT SILENCE (1969) and COMPANEROS (1970).
COMPANEROS is a "zapata western" [like Corbucci's earlier MERCANARY (1968)], taking place during the Mexican Revolution. Franco Nero is "the swede", an amoral gun runner, and Tomas Milian is the bandito-turned-revolutionary who reluctantly partners with him to fetch "the professor" (Fernando Rey), a Christ/Gandhi-like non-violent revolutionary, at the behest of an opportunistic general who wants to use the professor to access a safe full of treasure. Fearing the professor might lead the peasants and students in a true revolution that would take over the oil industry, venal industrialists hire Jack Palance (a sniggering, pot-smoking, vulture-wielding killer) to kill the professor before he can be returned to the general by Nero and Milian. COMPANEROS is really a buddy movie of sorts, as Nero and Milian bond on the road with the professor, and are radicalized by the journey. Its darkly funny at times, violent always, and uses religious iconography to give its radical political ideology more emotional punch. But its ideology is muddled; it deifies the professor but also suggests that his non-violence is naive and out-of-date, even as the violent methods employed by Milian and Nero are doomed in the end, as they race headlong against overwhelming forces. There are some interesting things in the movie, but its visual style is pedestrian at best, and the Morricone score is not up to the master's usual standards. Milian is great, but the rest of the cast not so much. Nero in particular is given little development and lacks the Eastwoodian charisma necessary to pull off the character. Overall, a bit of a disappointment.
THE GREAT SILENCE, however, is seriously wacked out. No less political and even more bleak, it is more extreme in every way. Here the hero is not only a man of few words, he is a mute, played by Jean Louis Trintingant with square-jawed good looks and a deadly Mauser he uses to kill bounty hunters. Klaus Kinski is the mad-eyed bounty hunter antagonist, and their conflict plays out in a small town and the surrounding snowy mountains of Utah (actually, Northern Italy), with the kind of windblown, off-white melancholic atmosphere you'd expect in that landscape. It is overlong and generally humorless, with ham-fisted dialogue (even by spaghetti western standards), yet the movie is stark, chilling and affecting nonetheless, with its dark ending unusually disturbing.
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