spaghetti western

Ennio Morricone

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Ennio Morricone, one of the greatest movie music composers (and perhaps the most iconic) has died. Among his 519 composing credits, he is most known for his groundbreaking scores in the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

He won an Oscar for The Hateful 8 in 2015. Although his score was excellent, it referred to his earlier, entirely original work, and this was probably a well-deserved “career achievement” award.

Morricone’s work was ever aspirational, seemingly seeking to become iconic. It takes fearlessness to incorporate whistling, gunshots, chanting men’s choirs, the Jew’s Harp, and what the New York Times calls the “bizarre, wailing “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah,” played on a sweet potato-shaped wind instrument called an ocarina“. Morricone didn’t believe in understatement.

Leone earned his first credit in 1960 and wrote the startlingly original Fistful in 1964 at age 36. His music defined the genre of Spaghetti Western as much as did Sergio Leone’s grotesques and closeups. Along with Leone’s great The Man with No Name trilogy, Leona composed for Once Upon a Time in the West and 2 Mules for Sister Sara. His trademark music elevated well over ten Spaghetti Westerns, including the lesser Seven Guns for theMacGregors, Navajo Joe, The Great Silence, My Name Is Nobody, and Duck You Sucker (and I’ve seem ’em all).

Besides the spaghetti westerns, Morricone composed the scores of The Battle of Algiers, 1900 Once Upon a Time in America, La Cage aux Folles and Cinema Paradiso. He was still working in 2020 at age 91.

I particularly admire his score for the 1986 historical drama The Mission. In the video below, Morricone himself conducts a symphony orchestra playing the theme from The Mission. In the story, an 18th Century Jesuit (Robert DeNiro) tries to Christianize an indigenous tribe in Paraguay (and it doesn’t end well). At 3:15, a flute reflects the indigenous culture and, at 5:30, a massive choir brings in the gravitas.

LET THE CORPSES TAN: an exercise in style

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A scene from LET THE CORPSES TAN, courtesy of Kino Lorber

Neo-noir and Spaghetti Westerns converge in the hyper-violent and stylized Belgian thriller Let the Corpses Tan.

Written and directed by Hélène Cattet and  Bruno Forzani, this is a contemporary thriller that pays loving homage to the Sergio Leone canon.  Tight closeups on characters’ eyes aren’t just for the big showdowns in this flick.  They even use two Ennio Morricone musical cues from 1969 and 1971.  A pivotal character even smokes cigarillos like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in the Leone movies.

Let the Corpses Tan is set in a compound of ruins atop a Mediterranean cliff, occupied by an oversexed artist who hosts visitors.  Besides a writer, she’s hosting three mysterious out-towners.  They turn out to be criminals who, with their shady lawyer, have pulled off an armored car heist and are flush in gold bars.  Just as they are ready to sneak away, the writer is surprised by his estranged wife, her kid and her nanny.  Then two cops happen upon the residents, and a gun battle explodes.

There’s only one road out of the compound and two groups of criminals and two groups of the non-criminals occupy various shelters in the ruins.  It’s a standoff because no one can escape – or escape with the gold. They are forced to hunt each other in a lethal and claustrophobic game of cat-and-mouse, including even the guy caught without any clothes.  Under life-and-death pressure, allegiances become malleable and the double crosses and side-switching begin.

So do the casualties.  Sam Peckinpah would wince at some of the gore and splatter, and Let the Corpses Tan lives up to its deliciously brutal title.

As exhaustion mounts from the siege, various characters have vivid fantasies.  Let the Corpses Tan gets very, very trippy.  One breast milk crucifixion fantasy is like nothing I have seen or could have imagined.  Eventually, there’s a Death character in female form, at one point a urinating Death.

There’s one interesting character.  The artist/hostess is basically a goddess of carnality.  She is played by Elina Löwensohn (from 1994’s Amateur with Isabelle Huppert), and Löwensohn’s eyes are voracious.

Let the Corpses Tan is essentially a soulless exercise in style, more interesting than gripping.  It’s a visual stunner, though, and the Leone references are fun.

IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE: a drifter with PTSD and his dog find Travolta in the Old West

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valley-violence

Writer-director Ti West brings some new touches to the spaghetti western in his mostly successful In a Valley of Violence.  Ethan Hawke plays Paul the drifter, passing through town with his fly-catching dog Abbie.  He runs afoul of the local bully, which unleashes bloody (and, in one instance,  gruesome) revenge.

Right away, the music and the opening titles tell us that we’re watching a spaghetti western.  The dramatic rock formations and thirsty scrub of New Mexico work, too.  But this is a 21st Century take on the genre, with a protagonist suffering from PTSD.  Guilt-wracked, he becomes bent on revenge but remains ambivalent about the killing that his vengeance will require.  There’s also a bad guy with a conscience (but not enough of one).  And the superb final shootout is unlike any that you seen in another dusty street.

John Travolta is exceptional as the town marshal, burdened by wisdom enough to know that he is surrounded by idiots and perhaps to be entangled in their fates.  The marshal is well-seasoned and perceptive.  He reads every character with pinpoint accuracy.  He is one tough, crafty and ruthless hombre, but his actions are motivated by what must be done, not by empty machismo.

As befits a spaghetti western, the end of In a Valley of Violence (including the really violent parts) are filled with dark humor.   James Ransome is very funny as the compulsively foolish town bully, springing relentlessly from one bad choice to another.  One of the bad guys picks the most nail-biting moment to resist fat-shaming: “Don’t call me Tubby – my name is Lawrence”. The film’s highlight may be the LOL dialogue between Hawke and Travolta as they try to navigate not killing each other, all while stalking each other through the back streets.

Abbie the dog (played by Jumpy) is especially endearing and fun to watch.  She even rolls herself up in her blanket by the campfire.   In a Valley of Violence’s credits include the Dog Trainer, three Animal Wranglers and a Vulture Handler

In a Valley of Violence isn’t a perfect film.  The event that motivates the vengeful onslaught is predictable and upsetting to dog lovers.  And, other than Travolta and Hawke, the actors seem like they are modern folks dragged out of a Starbucks and dressed up in cowboy gear.

For what it’s worth, In a Valley of Violence’s climactic gunfight is historically consistent.  Contrary to the tradition in movie Westerns, very few of the Old West gunfights were of the “quick draw” variety.  The real cowboys, outlaws and lawmen tended to sneak up on each other and fire from cover.  When they did approach each other in the street (as here), their guns were usually already drawn.

I’ll watch ANY spaghetti western, but I found In a Valley of Violence to be a particularly successful one.  The dark humor and the performances by Hawke, Travolta and Jumpy are plenty reason to see In a Valley of Violence.

Django Unchained: Holy Tarantino!

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In Quentin Tarantino’s pulpy Django Unchained, a bounty hunter(Christolph Waltz, the Jew-hunting Nazi colonel in Inglorious Basterds)  and a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) hunt down slave holders and slave merchants and dispatch them in increasingly creative and cinematic fashion.  The plot gives them each a credible motivation to do so, but this movie is really just a revenge fantasy aimed at American slavery.

Let’s not short the revenge film genre, which includes many top drawer movies – Winchester 73, The Searchers, Carrie, Gladiator, even The Virgin Spring and Zero Dark Thirty.  (If it’s a really good revenge film, people tend not to identify it as a revenge film.)  But Tarantino is never squeamish about the enjoyability of genre films, and Django Unchained is gloriously pedal-to-the-metal exploitation.

Waltz and Foxx are very good.  The most fun performance is by Tarantino fave Samuel L. Jackson as the malevolent house slave who uses his wiles to advance the causes of his dim masters and of slavery.

Django Unchained – from its title on – is a love letter to the spaghetti Western genre.  We have a title song that could have come from the Italian Ringo movies, lots of Ennio Morricone-like music and even the first movie Django himself (Franco Nero).  The titles are blazing red, and some of the locations (as in the Italian movies shot in Spain) are hilariously inappropriate (California oak grasslands for Mississippi, some rocky California desert for East Texas and a random sequence in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, apparently just because Tarantino wanted to show some bison).  For spaghetti Western aficionados like myself, it’s a lot of fun.

There’s a lot of violence, including an especially gory final shootout that would have unsettled Sam Peckinpah.  One thing for sure – it’s a lot of movie for your money.

Coming up on TV: Sergio Leone and the man with no name

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FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE

On the single blissful evening of November 9, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the three great Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All star Clint Eastwood and feature wonderfully idiosyncratic scores by Ennio Morricone.

Eastwood’s character in the trilogy is referred to in film literature as “the man with no name”. But actually, the character is named Joe, Monco and Blondie in the three movies, respectively.

Here’s Morricone’s theme for A Fistful of Dollars.

Cinequest – Salt: the best spaghetti western this year

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I love spaghetti westerns and so does the protagonist of Salt (Sal), a would-be screenwriter who must have the only cat in Spain named Clint.  He has written a movie set in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, but nobody else thinks it’s any good.  When he decides to visit the Atacama to improve his script, he is mistaken by all the locals for someone else – the guy who had cuckolded the local crime boss.  That first night in Chile, he is plunged into a real life shoot em up and is soon experiencing a story that Sergio Leone himself would have loved to film.

Much of the fun is in the fact that our hero has never shot a gun or been shot at, and he doesn’t take easily to either – he’s no Clint, for sure.   Salt is filmed in the style of a modern-day spaghetti western and comes with its own spaghetti western score with jangly guitar and jarring harmonica.  If you love A Fistful of Dollars, this is the movie for you.  Even if you don’t love the spaghetti western, you’ll find this a satisfyingly funny movie.

I attended the North American premiere of Salt at Cinequest 22.