Kino reissues Sergio Leone’s least loved epic, a movie he didn’t want to direct but also the one with the most ambitious theme. A murderous Irish rebel tricks a vulgar Mexican bandit into joining a revolution, and have a rough time dealing with an occupying army that favors massacres of civilians. James Coburn’s dynamiter is trying to atone for his sins back in Ireland; Rod Steiger’s greedy cutthroat just wants to rob banks. Leone stages his picture on a scale worthy of Luchino Visconti, and detonates one of the biggest movie explosions ever. This uncut version also qualifies as a bravura Ennio Morricone music concert. The disc appears to be an unchanged reissue, again under United Artists’ replacement title.

A Fistful of Dynamite (Duck You Sucker)
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1971 / 157 154, 138, 120 min. / Giù la testa, Il était une fois … la révolution / Street Date March 6, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: James Coburn, Rod Steiger, Maria Monti, Rik Battaglia, Romolo Valli, Antoine St-John, Vivienne Chandler, David Warbeck, John Frederick, Benito Stefanelli, Aldo Sambrell.
Cinematography: Giuseppe Ruzzolini
Second Unit Cinematography: Franco Delli Colli
Film Editor: Nino Baragli
Art Direction: Andrea Crisanti
Special Effects: Eros Bacciucchi, Antonio Margheriti
Original Music: Ennio Morricone
Written by Sergio Leone, Sergio Donati, Luciano Vincenzoni
Produced by Fulvio Morsella
Directed by Sergio Leone

So immensely lucrative for United Artists were Sergio Leone’s three Clint Eastwood blockbusters, that he proceeded directly to a fabulous deal with Paramount for a grandiose western starring Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale. But the studio lost faith in the slow, drawn-out, and melancholy Once Upon a Time in the West. It was severely cut for the U.S.. We confess that we first saw it second-run in San Bernardino, California . . . where it played as a second feature to The Green Slime.

Leone’s Duck You Sucker (Giù la testa) came along just as studios were trying to re-establish the movie biz as it was before the Easy Rider shake-up. United Artists wanted an action matinee blockbuster, but received yet another sprawling epic with a story that barely held together. Just the same, the movie is a special favorite. We love the character dynamics, even granted the relatively broad playing between James Coburn and Rod Steiger. At first flippant about ‘the grand and glorious Revolution,’ Duck You Sucker soon reveals the terrible cost of such violent social upheavals. Italo western authority Sir Christopher Frayling detects a resonance with the Fascist experience in WW2 Italy: an occupying army commits horrible massacres, one even in a cave setting.

Giù la testa was hailed as a masterpiece upon its premiere in Rome 1971. It was even given a multi-track stereophonic soundtrack. But the follow-up American release faltered, harming Leone’s bankability as a hitmaker: pundits said he was great with Clint Eastwood, and pretentious without him. Giù la testa saw many versions and title changes. Leone did some revising himself. A French revision in the 1980s removed a key flashback, erasing elements of the story’s original concept.

Leone originally wanted only to produce Giù la testa, so he could concentrate on a gangster epic to be set in America. Peter Bogdanovich wrote that he was summoned to Rome as a potential director. Dismissive of Leone and the project, he all but boasted that he was not seriously interested, but stayed on for weeks just for the paid vacation. Leone tried to begin with his assistant director in charge, but when his stars rebelled he had no choice but to follow through.

Sergio Leone spoke little English. He somehow became convinced that the phrase ‘Duck, you Sucker’ was a common expression in the American vernacular, and nobody could talk him out of it. Did he hear something like it in a Bugs Bunny cartoon?  ‘Giù la testa’ makes good sense in Italian, as ‘duck your head’ is good advice for anyone in the middle of a civil war. When we saw Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), we laughed when the German villain played by Christoph Waltz, voiced the mistaken notion that a common American phrase was ‘That’s a Bingo!’  Was Tarantino inspired by Leone’s insistence that ‘everybody’ in the U.S. could relate to the words ‘Duck You Sucker?’

The scale of Duck You Sucker/A Fistful of Dynamite is epic, but with a dramatic core that focuses on a ‘hero’s dilemma, a past personal tragedy from the Irish Rebellion, with elements of romance, betrayal, and regret. Leone again uses his episodic, somewhat disjointed storytelling style, moving slowly between major set-pieces.

A revolution is well underway in Mexico. The apolitical peasant Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger) and his rag-tag family of bandits rob and rape the decadent rich. When Juan meets expatriate Irish revolutionary and explosives expert John Mallory (James Coburn) on the road, he suggests that they join forces to rob a fancy bank at Mesa Verde. Juan’s ‘big idea’ is presented in cartoon terms, with a holy message floating above John Mallory’s head.  ↑

Only in mid-robbery does Juan discover that John has tricked him: the bank building is now in use as a political prison. The ‘liberator’ Juan Miranda becomes an overnight patriot against his will. The rebel leader Dr. Villega (Romollo Valli) needs to stop an entire government army brigade; John and Juan team to annihilate it with an enormous explosion. The mercenary officer Gunther Ruiz (Antoine St. John) survives, and takes revenge. He captures and tortures Dr. Villega, obtaining information that leads to a terrible slaughter. John discovers what Villega has done but says nothing. Why?   John is himself haunted by guilty memories of Ireland, when he betrayed his best friend Sean Nolan (David Warbeck).

As a visual artist Sergio Leone never lost the ability to energize his screen. We’re still knocked out by Giù la testa’s expansive canvas — every few minutes the screen opens up for a giant panorama that David Lean would envy, such as a train station crowded with hundreds of soldiers and civilians in period costume. An occupying army commits massacres that remind us of Nazi atrocities.  ↑  A final nighttime battle evokes war on a grand scale: crashing trains, machine guns, no mercy. Yet the story’s core conflict is yet another game of one-upmanship between wily tricksters. John Mallory finds it easy to hitch Juan Miranda’s petty avarice to the ‘grand’ revolutionary cause: “Tierra y libertad!”

Leone’s strong suit was always a triumph of style and attitude. His first breakout success was a case of plagiarism, plain and simple, and the ‘duels of adventurers’ in the second two Dollars films worked variations on the cynical double- and triple-crosses of Robert Aldrich’s Mexico-set western Vera Cruz. Our reaction to the superbly crafted The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was to laugh at the absurd, violent cynicism of it all.

The Informer Goes West.

Do Leone fans care that Once Upon a Time in the West is a narrative scrambling of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar?  One must re-see the Joan Crawford movie to understand some of the gaping plot holes in Leone’s storyline. And the only way to fully understand Giù la testa — the only way it makes sense, actually — is through the knowledge that it is an extension of a classic John Ford movie. 1935’s  The Informer is an Irish rebellion tale with a strong Catholic theme, about a betrayal by a tragic hero, Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen). Leone’s picture continues Liam O’Flaherty’s theme of guilt and absolution. James Coburn’s John Mallory could be Gypo Nolan, had Gypo escaped alive to Mexico.  ↑  Seething in guilt over his craven betrayal, Mallory sets out to redeem himself by continuing The Revolution in a new land.

The movie starts with some of its most vulgar content, and its extended opening scene plays as bad political theater. Acting the miserable peon, Juan Miranda is dismissed and insulted by the wealthy occupants of a caravan, hateful elites. In the uncut version, the wealthy travelers’ arrogance justifies whatever crimes Juan Miranda can think of: theft, rape, murder. But Juan is a coarse and uncomplicated bandit disinterested in mass movements or intellectual politics. He’s seen it all before: either by corruption or naïveté, the privileged intellectuals that start rebellions, succeed only in getting a lot of poor people killed.

“But I just want the money!”

The greedy Juan keeps believing that his rebel activity with John is just a warm-up for a partnership as bank robbers. Between dynamitings, John Mallory nurses his guilt over what he did to his best friend Sean Nolan back in Ireland. The flashbacks fumble the back-story, and play like slow-motion memory fragments. John and Sean both like the beautiful Coleen (Vivienne Chandler). The weirdy unclear final flashback sets up a betrayal over jealousy; the big twist-revelation is that John was the betrayer, not Sean. Why else would John run away?  It’s the only thing that explains why he refuses to judge the sad, equally guilty Dr. Villega.

The ‘grand and glorious Revolution’ boils down to a series of brutal executions and atrocious massacres, anti-humanist acts that invalidate any political rhetoric, left or right. John is neck deep in the commitment to violence. He justifies the slaughter hundreds of soldiers in one enormous explosion, as nothing more than ‘ridding the world of a few uniforms.’  But the government forces slay civilians en masse, shooting hundreds at a rail head, and in a hidden grotto. Leone stages a midnight execution in the rain in a way that compares it to a classic painting by Francisco Goya. ↓

The film’s bottom line on revolution is essentially conservative — fighting to change the status quo results only in misery and death for the disadvantaged. Leone has John Mallory express his disillusion directly, tossing a book by the anarchist-communist Kropotkin into the mud. Pity poor John Mallory and Dr. Villega, the soured idealists. The movie finishes by suggesting that Juan and John would have done more good saying Catholic rosaries than making bombs. So is nobody granted permission to try to wrest ‘land and liberty’ from the wicked rich?

The fractured continuity in Giù la testa leaves large gaps in the narrative; some are discussed in an featurette on the disc. Deleted scenes would have depicted the torture by which Dr. Villega was forced to inform on his comrades. The film’s Irish flashbacks have often been interpreted as simple Jules & Jim– like memories of a more romantic time. In reality, the function of that long, final flashback is to upend the meaning of ‘who betrayed whom.’  ↓  Perhaps Leone removed it from one version because he realized that he’d failed to clearly communicate its meaning to viewers. It’s is 3.5 minutes of slow motion footage, accompanied only by Ennio Morricone’s music score. The music assumes the storytelling function, communicating character points that the images alone do not.

A close read of James Coburn’s performance tells the tale: John is doing all these reckless, suicidal things in Mexico in an attempt to atone. Remember the little gold cross: this is a Catholic movie.

We heartily agree that audiences prefer Sergio Leone’s earlier, lighter western romps. Clint Eastwood and his competitors jockey for Top Gun position while blasting down scores of opponents, rejecting the old vision of the West as a place where virtue can triumph. Leone’s two post-Dollars westerns push for bigger ideas and deeper emotions, and are just as compelling. A Fistful of Dynamite/Duck You Sucker maintains a mysterious quality. James Coburn’s conflicted terrorist comes across as unusually resonant. It’s one of the actor’s most interesting performances.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of A Fistful of Dynamite appears to be a straight reissue of their very good disc from six years ago. The two releases appear to be identical in content and menus. The only difference we spotted is that some extras are no longer listed on the package text. Kino usually offers something new, but in this case the added slipcover would seem to be the only change.

When we saw that a new Duck You Sucker was on the way, we hoped for a new restoration, maybe even a 4K release. After all, Paramount Presents has a 4K of Once Upon a Time in the West arriving soon. Duck You Sucker’s multiple versions confusion was mostly settled when John Kirk at MGM accessed an Italian restoration done in 1996. When producing DVD extras twenty years ago, we convinced MGM Home Video to restore the film’s original Duck You Sucker title. Doing so restored the film’s final joke, as the pop-on of a ‘Fistful of Dynamite’ title graphic does not answer Juan Miranda’s final question, “What about me?”

We were told that the title had been formally changed in MGM’s records … but it has again reverted to the English A Fistful of Dynamite. Maybe those clever MGM execs should have redubbed Juan Miranda’s last dialogue line, to have him say, “What a Bingo!”

In Italy Duck You Sucker was released in 4-track stereo. The remastered MGM disc does not include the original 1972 English mono track, only a 5.1 stereo remix made from mono elements. If you like Ennio Morricone’s other Italo western music, the Duck You Sucker soundtrack is a must-hear. Two additional Morricone western scores we think are all-time keepers are the eccentric cues for Navajo Joe, and the dynamic tour-de-force of The Big Gundown. Our repeat viewings are often motivated by a desire to hear the music again.

Twenty years ago disc companies were willing to put up good budgets for quality DVD documentaries and extras. The extras packages we produced for the Leone pictures included money to fly to England to record Sir Christopher Frayling. We may have just missed the opportunity to interview James Coburn and Rod Steiger, both of whom passed away in 2002. My producer compensated by securing an interview with Sergio Donati, connecting with the writer as he passed through San Francisco.

MGM later added a second, very welcome commentary by Alex Cox.

One thing we never quite understood was the choice by Sergio Leone and his producers to film ALL of his epic western features in the half-frame 35mm Techniscope format. We understand why the first Dollars picture employed the budget-conscious format, which used half as much film stock and sped up production. True, the non-anamorphic format had had a better depth of focus and a flatter field than did CinemaScope. But Techniscope was barely larger than two 16mm film frames side-by-side, and careful optical blow-ups and Technicolor printing were required to produce satisfactory 35mm ‘scope projection prints. It really wasn’t appropriate for Epic filmmaking, no matter how well Leone’s crack cinematographers exposed the negative. A full-frame anamorphic 35mm format could have been blown up to 70mm. Imagine Ennio Morricone in 6-track stereo!

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

A Fistful of Dynamite
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent 5.1 Stereo
Supplements:
Audio Commentaries by Alex Cox and Sir Christopher Frayling
Featurettes:
The Myth of the Revolution
Sergio Donati Remembers
Once Upon a Time in Italy (The Autry Exhibition)
Sorting Out the Versions with Glenn Erickson
Restoration Italian Style with John Kirk
Location Comparisons
Trailers From Hell trailer with Brian Trenchard-Smith
2 Animated Image Galleries
5 Radio Spots
Trailers for 5 Sergio Leone Westerns.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 10, 2024
(7093duck)

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