Reply #26: For a Few Dollars More.

[Joe Chi Minh]

The great departure of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western trilogy from conventional Hollywood westerns, apart from their highly stylised, indeed, quasi-apocalyptic mode, is that Leone has the mindset of an Italian, a citizen of a country in which the phrase, “A fish rots from the head down”, was coined, to convey the sad truth that ultimately the source of all the ills of any society are indeed its own leaders and their respectable, monied supporters.

A country in which the ordinary people for at least two thousand years have witnessed the most shocking corruption among the Great and the Good, the people in high places who defined ‘respectability’ for the rest of the population, putatively in terms of Christianity and the personification of it in their own persons, but in reality, in terms of the extent of their wealth and worldly ambition; and this, for most centuries, from the Vatican down. Indeed, there is still an undercurrent of it within the Church. Scant wonder, then that Mussolini found most Italians knew better than to relish fighting unjust imperial wars, from which only the country’s ruling class and its monied supporters would, in any case, be the only ones likely to have profited them.

This scurrilous(!) attitude towards the notion of white-collar respectability is reflected in these films, and is angrily repudiated by some of the more po-faced reviewers, although it is not so far from the reality - at least, if the Christian Scriptures are to be believed.

It is starkly epitomised by Tuco, in the Good, The Bad and The Ugly, when he reminds his brother, who became a monk, that where they grew up, that to survive in the part of the country they came from, a young man had to make one of only two choices: either to become a priest or to become a bandit. In Tuco’s eyes, his brother’s choice of vocation was not nobly inspired, but rather, inspired by cowardice.

There is even an implicit reference to ‘corban’, referred to scathingly by Christ in the Gospels, with reference to the putative dedication of their lives by some scribes and Pharisees to God, although used by them as an excuse for neglecting to look after their parents in their old age. In the film, Tuco reminded his brother that it was he, Tuco, who had put bread on the table for their widowed mother and the rest of the family.

So, in the Leone trilogy, you get the impression that the townsfolk are not much better than the rogues who were at the centre of the action – where they are not indeed worse, as in the tribute to the genre, High Plains Drifter, directed by Eastwood, himself. The village worthies, the bank manager, ranch-owner, etc had increasingly tended to be depicted as respectable scoundrels in Hollywood westerns, but the somewhat anarchic, working-class type of perspective was taken to a new level here, and provides a strangely comforting backdrop to behaviour that is conventionally viewed as the only real criminality. Whereas white-collar crime, of course, has immeasurably more wide-reaching, deleterious effects.

Of course, there was some element of this in the old Hollywood westerns, but the hero was usually a reformed gunslinger or official lawman persuaded to protect the widder-woman/ innocent townsfolk from the rapacious cattle-baron’s predations; a kind of iconic, sanitized cowboy, not far removed from the world of a Norman Rockwell painting of a homestead with a white picket-fence and a young woman with an hour-glass figure and an apron, looking out from the garden path.
In that sense, the traditional Hollywood cowboy made an ideal poster-boy for imperialist Republican warmongers, like the Pharisees of old, “whited sepulchres filled with dead men’s bones”, cheer-leading young Americans to honour the flag, by killing brown-skinned foreigners for their country’s natural resources on the most specious of pretexts. Wouldn’t work with the Italians. They’re a whole lot wiser in the ways of the world than Americans and Brits.

On the other hand, American TV has long led the way in identifying this inverted social moral order. The cynical police chief and mayor are a staple of your police/gumshoe programmes, to cite just one example.

That earlier complacency may be partly accounted for by the fact that, post WWII, both left and right maintained a relatively fair society, particularly, of course, when contrasted with the post-Thatcher era. While the US was full of hope and now seemingly complacent exuberance post WWII.

If this isn’t the most hilarious, po-faced review you ever read…. I can’t imagine what would be.

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=1&res=9F00E4D81F3CE43BBC4C53DFB166838C679EDE&oref=login

On reviewer also referred to the good Douglas Colonel Mortimer, as “the brutal wanderer”.

You may have heard high praise of the Italians' sense of style. This film is replete with examples of it, even down to the credits - which, of course, are nowadays usually scrolled though too quickly for anyone to be able read.

Other favourite films are The Big Lebowski, some Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino films, All Quiet on the Western Front and others.