The Violent Crucible of Creation

First, a confession: I am probably one of the few people who believe famed director Sergio Leone became a better filmmaker with each picture he made.

Leone with Steiger on location

For most moviegoers, The Man with No Name Trilogy is the Italian’s masterpiece (and the exemplar prime of all Spaghetti-Westerns). And there’s good reason to think so. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the final of the three, is a devastatingly epic movie whose convoluted moral landscape and powerful performances led some to label it one of the best films of all-time.

As for me, I will cast no stones at that picture here, save one…

A true classic

As good as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is, I think Once Upon a Time in the West – Leone’s next effort – is far superior in terms of its scope, its construction and the effectiveness with which it presents director’s quintessential themes. For many, Leone’s career ends – or should have ended – with Once Upon a Time in the West. Accordingly, this line of thinking believes Leone’s abilities behind the camera nosedived at the onset of the 1970s and films such as Duck, You Sucker! (often referred to as A Fistful of Dynamite) and Once Upon a Time in America are dour afterthoughts to a career best remembered by earlier efforts.

I heartily disagree.

Having used up all his ideas about traditional Westerns in the Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone cleverly pivots away from the genre with 1971’s Duck, You Sucker! and confronts his audience with a visionary depiction of political revolution as farce. The result is bold and complicated film that functions on many levels and comes closer to qualifying as art than anything else Leone did in his spectacular career.

The dramatic and philosophical direction Leone intends to go, as well as the fact we are a long way from Clint Eastwood and gold-inspired shootouts, is clear when the film opens with this ominous quotation Mao:

“The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or an embroidery; it cannot be done with elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence.”

To ram home these points, one of the first scenes involves a stagecoach full of upper-class passengers who take turns humiliating Juan Miranda, a lowly Mexican peasant who connives his way into their presence. Miranda, played with delightful nastiness by Rod Steiger, eventually robs the coach at gunpoint, rapes the lone female passenger and then revenges himself on the men by kicking them downhill into a gully filled with mud.

What begins as a rather conventional bandit picture – albeit one with striking political overtones – is immediately shaken up by the combustible introduction of the film’s other main character, John H. Mallory. A former IRA activist, Mallory is an expert in explosives who came to Mexico to do demolition work for a German mining company. Throughout the film, his disdain for “uniforms” and other figures of authority is the palpable product of his unspoken anarchism (at one point, he is filmed reading Bakunin’s famous treatise on the topic). Mallory is confronted by Miranda and his gang and subsequently tricked into becoming an outlaw. Mallory eventually returns the favor by tricking Miranda into helping the Mexican Revolution, despite the latter’s complete lack of sympathy for the revolution and total disinterest in politics.

A table fit for the poor

The fact the setting of this film has shifted from the America to Mexico and the timing moved ahead from the Old West’s traditional 19^th century period to 1913 further illustrates Leone’s explicit desire to turn his back on the ferocious isolation he chronicled in Eastwood’s The Man with No Name trilogy. However, there is a thematic connection between those pictures and Duck, You Sucker!

More specifically, Eastwood begins his three films essentially as a loner.

In A Fistful of Dollars, he commits himself to no cause, choosing instead to play two rival factions off each other in a desolate town. In A Few Dollars More, his second outing, he is paired with Lee Van Cleef in what can be construed as a heroic quest. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly begins with an attempt to restore Eastwood to his lone gunman status, only to see events in the film force him into various undesirable partnerships. Along the way, he is – for the first time in the series – forced to acknowledging the suffering of others (most obviously the Civil War soldiers) and to realize that “going it alone” is not always a realistic approach.

Unlikely friends...

This is important because Leone himself claims Duck, You Sucker! is essentially a “buddy” picture that documents the friendship between Mallory and Miranda.

To explain, Miranda begins the film as an almost primitive human being, in that his moral code is entirely the amoral tribalism bound up in familial connections. His gang is made-up of family members and his ambitions will not tolerate any horizon that is not associated with his family’s profit. This is a kind of familial narcissism, in which all other non-familial people, such as those on the carriage, are a means to an end and nothing more.

Mallory’s friendship forces Miranda to accept that non-familial people can have value, and this ultimately shakes-up Miranda’s worldview and forces him to accept the importance of the politics he has hitherto ignored. The politics become even more important when they inadvertently lead to the demise of his family and Miranda realizes that who is in charge of a country can literally mean the difference between life and death.

For Mallory’s part, his friendship with Miranda is purely redemptive. Through a series of flashbacks, it is gradually revealed that Mallory’s best friend back in Ireland exposed the explosive expert’s revolutionary activities to the authorities, most likely because the two men were competing for the love of the same girl. Not only did this betrayal lead to Mallory leaving Ireland, but it also strengthened his feelings toward anarchical sentiment (if friendship is a sham, then all of society’s bonds must be equally empty, right?).

As important as the relationship between the two lead characters is, their interactions are also functional, in that they serve Leone’s larger, more ambiguous intent.

As the opening quotation told us, this is a film about violence and revolution. However, the difference between this picture and the many others that have explored these subjects is that Leone ultimately advances no agenda and offers no conclusive ideology. Those who criticize the film for this – the sort, who I suspect yearn for this picture to morph into a kind of Battleship Potemkin – have missed the one definitive statement Duck, You Sucker! does make.

Put simply, this movie is ultimately about the act of creation, and it explores the notion that all forms of creation – be they political “revolutions” or otherwise – are born from a violent combination of chaos and destruction. This is why The New York Times is correct to observe that film feels “rapturous and more than slightly insane.” Creation typically involves both sudden rapture – or Eureka moments – and the painful all too often zany process of organizing one’s inspiration.

Thus, like the political revolutionary who attempts to breakdown society so he can reorganize the mob within new political boundaries, the artist’s work is an imperfect effort to impose order on formless media – the blank canvas, the shapeless lump of clay or unexposed film reel. Through the imposition of structure, both the revolutionary and the artist hope to create shared understandings that easily translate from person to person.

Miranda, among the masses, against his will

I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect Leone worked off pure emotion for most of this film. It just feels spontaneous and delightfully unmanaged. Ambiguity abounds, themes are introduced and disregarded. Entire scenes can seem aimless and irrelevant (until the film is complete). This may sound terrible, but it is not. What Duck, You Sucker! does is take audiences through the absolute fury of creation, and along the way, it punctures the tired and elitist notion that human creativity – especially as expressed in politics – is ever a finished product.

“Don’t tell me about revolutions,” Miranda yells at Mallory. “What happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!”

Leone himself said: “I have the film say, in effect ‘Revolution means confusion.’”

Confusion is where creation comes from. It is the void, the chaos from which organization will eventually emerged, but before that process begins to take shape, violence and upheaval have to occur. Miranda has to lose his family in order to see the importance of politics – which admittedly he never wholly subscribes to – and the value in non-familial friendship. Mallory must go through the fire of another bloody revolution to realize he can trust someone and depend on them, regardless of the sort of person Miranda is.

The madness of counter-revolution

And all of this unfolds in scenes of disturbingly violent grandeur or brutal simplicity. The mass executions in the city or the confrontation with the column of soldiers in the desert are both as compelling and beautiful as anything Leone ever filmed, and what is more, I would argue their meaning is far weightier than similar scenes in his previous work.

This is not to say the film is without problems.

It is much too long, for starters, and it undoubtedly suffers from its oft repeated flashbacks and its overly lush soundtrack. Still, for all its blemishes, this is an epic piece of filmmaking, one in which Leone clearly expanded as an artist and a thinker to his outermost limits. Far from perfect, with little or none of the neatness of his previous efforts, Duck, You Sucker! is the boldest and most radical piece of filmmaking the Italian maestro undertook, and it I think it may be the most important movie he ever made.

The Ten Essential American Classics

It is the end of the year and lists and countdowns abound.

Unable to sum up 2010 in any relevant fashion on this site, I have decided instead to post my Top 10 list of American classics. These are the essential pictures, the ones every living and breathing person on Earth should endeavor to see to better understand the cinematic art form, America as a nation … and to just sit back and enjoy great, old fashioned moviemaking.

1. Citizen Kane (1941) – Stands like a colossus over all American film. Orson Welles makes a legend out of himself by petulantly tugging an icon (William Randolph Hearst) from its pedestal. Well-known for its technical innovations and style of storytelling, audiences today often overlook how well the film works as a character study or a piece of social criticism. That Kane’s lifetime of enterprise and achievements cannot recapture the sanctity of his “Rosebud” is both tragic and profound. The American Dream has never been so cleverly explored, celebrated and then debunked.

2. Casablanca (1942) – My favorite film and possibly the greatest motion picture of all time. It cannot equal Citizen Kane for technical prowess or philosophical depth (nor is it as influential), but in every other way this film is its equal. The actors and actresses are all perfect in their roles, and every role is memorable and unique. By blending equal parts of adventure, romance and suspense with a timeless tale concerning sacrifice and moral imperatives, the film manages to have something for everyone. It also speaks to a great many eternal questions about the human condition without taking the easy turns to either sentimentality or sanctimony. Impossible to watch and not feel uplifted.

3. Rear Window (1954) – Unquestionably Hitchcock’s masterpiece, in which he deftly juggles ethics, psychology and suspense to titillate audiences. An even greater film when one considers it is largely set in one room and revolves around a wheelchair-bound protagonist who never leaves his apartment. Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly ooze stardom, practically float across the screen. The final 30 minutes stir up more tension and mood than any other movie I am aware of. A murder is discovered and exposed, but Hitchcock forces us to consider the cost of the exposure and to wonder if the protagonists are not as demented as the man who actually killed his wife.

4. The Godfather (1972) – A powerful exploration of the perversion of the American dream, an epic about the rise and fall of a family or just the best mafia film ever made? Take your pick. The Godfather is all of these things and more. Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo’s refashioning of the latter’s rather ordinary novel is perfectly executed. Each scene precisely conveys its intent, and when taken as a whole, this picture is one of the few films that successfully steers the audience through a host of conflicting emotions and moral conflicts that refuse easy characterization. There has never been a better movie made about the shades of gray that exist between the black and white of good and evil. This is why we root for Michael at the same time we shudder at what he is becoming.

5. Patton (1970) – There are many noteworthy war films, but Patton stands supreme. Released during the Vietnam War, the film’s creators envisioned this as an anti-war picture. They were horribly wrong. In addition to multiple White House screenings by Richard Nixon, the general populace took Patton into its bosom as a celebration of American tough-mindedness. Patton, whose famous temperament and lust for battle attracted admiration, loathing and fear during his lifetime, is played to perfection by George C. Scott (who famously refused his Oscar for this role). As a character study, the film’s nuanced portrayal of the general’s megalomania, gallantry and genius is unequaled.

6. Chinatown (1974) – Nothing is more American than film noir, and the genre never worked better than it does in Roman Polanski’s 1974 homage starring Jack Nicholson. Filled with seedy politicians, corrupt policemen and neurotic women this gothic tale about a private detective in California forces audiences to confront institutionalized injustice and ultimately accept our own powerlessness to remake every corner of the world. The last line of the film, which might be the best coda ever penned for the screen, says it all: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

7. Dr. Strangelove (1964) – Difficult to pick just one from Kubrick’s many great works, but this film is satire incarnated and it seems to grow better with age. Indeed, as the Cold War fades from modern memory, one can easily imagine a scenario where this film comes to stand as a kind of documentary – albeit one with a great deal of hyperbole – representing many of the attitudes born from that complex conflict. A virtuoso performance from Peter Sellers, who plays multiple roles, and a script infused with the kind of crass intelligence that coughs up endless one-liners, such as “Gentlemen, there’s no fighting in the war room,” ensures this picture’s Olympian status.

8. From Here to Eternity (1953) – Long before the hardheaded contrarians in Coolhand Luke or Rebel Without a Cause, there was Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt in From Here to Eternity. Prewitt’s inability to be broken by an institution he loves – the U.S. Army – is an aggressive examination of individualism and personality. Each of the soldier’s flirtations with depravity is sharpened by the audience’s awareness that the film is ticking down to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. These are the men and women who would become the Greatest Generation and in the film we learn about their strong sense of self, their categorical dismissal of weakness and pedantry.

9. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) – Selected just ahead of Leone’s other masterpiece, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, as the best exemplar of the American Western. Why? Manifest Destiny, the cruelty and injustice of the West, the rugged individualism it inspired, the complex code of the survivors who journeyed there for a fresh start, the notion that to achieve the moral end, a person may have to do some immoral things along the way – it is all here, in this often overlooked film. So, too, is a great performance by Henry Fonda.

10. The Graduate (1967) – No other film captures the pivot between the America of the 1950s and the America that emerges from the crucible of the 1960s as well as The Graduate. The story of Benjamin Braddock’s inability to orient himself within the environment created by his parents is not just another retelling of a timeless crisis faced by all adolescents, but a powerful metaphor for a country that was clearly restless about its future. Braddock’s sordid journey through the boozy, adulterous world of Mrs. Robinson ends with a frantic escape – undertaken with Mrs. R’s daughter – from the limited possibilities setup by the previous generation. Or does it? The final expression on Ben and Elaine’s faces is one of the most enigmatic in film. Are they happy? Sad? Relieved? Or simply resigned to eventually recreating the kind of world they just escaped from?

The Ferocity of Alone

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is perhaps the most famous Western of all time.

Made in 1967, this is the third of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns that star Clint Eastwood as a lonely gunslinger with a curiously unique – some would say indecipherable – code of conduct that allows him to remain aloof from the immorality of frontier America. Of the three, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is by far the most complicated and compelling of the so-called “Man With No Name Trilogy" the two men made together. Indeed, the fact the movie survives the ravages time often inflicts on Westerns and remains popular among both fans and critics alike is a testament to the film’s visual and thematic power and the very real weight of the philosophical issues the plot wrestles with.

 

More specifically, this is a film that probes the limits of individualism and exposes the dangerous links between independence and amorality in the Old West.

Leone himself said, “the West was made by violent, uncomplicated men and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures.” To achieve this, he scrubs the Western to its base elements; he jettisons Indians, mining towns, wagon trains and the card games in saloons that dominate more traditional Hollywood Westerns and depopulates his vision of the West until nothing is left but a handful of stubborn survivors who believe violence is the only way they can impose themselves on the empty grandeur of their surroundings. 

In Leone’s West, there is no community to speak of and certainly no authority capable of taming the wild country and the barbarity of men. As a result, a wary brand of individualism – and to a lesser extent, amorality – thrives in all of his characters, because an individual in Leone’s West does not have the luxury of anything like trust in others or absolute morals. If this world has any rule it is that people must look after themselves and remember that circumstance trumps all.

In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a trio of opening vignettes establishes who is Good, who is Bad and who is Ugly. The sequence also forces the audience to question why these characters are described in such terms and to judge during the course of the film whether the descriptions are accurate.

As is the case with all Leone films, the dialogue is sparse – indeed, 10 minutes pass before the film’s opening line – and the characters reveal more about themselves with their eyes and their body language than they do with words: The angular figure of Lee Van Cleef standing in a doorway with one hand resting on a pistol needs no vocabulary to communicate purpose.

When the film opens, Van Cleef – the movie’s Bad character, called Angel Eyes throughout – is on the trail of a missing Confederate soldier who knows the whereabouts of a cash-box stuffed with Rebel gold. His quest for the riches eventually attracts Eastwood – the Good character – and a low-level Mexican bandit named Tuco – the Ugly character, played with a wonderfully-rotten panache by Eli Wallach.

When both Eastwood and Tuco discover clues about the gold’s location, circumstance dictates that they form an uneasy partnership and go after the treasure together. Angel Eyes soon learns what the men have discovered through a combination of sheer brutality and pragmatism. He briefly joins forces with Eastwood – butting Tuco out – in an even more unwieldy partnership, only to be driven away in the film’s penultimate gun-battle. These relationships of convenience, the switching sides – from Union to Confederate – and utilizing whatever is available – the Church, the Law or each other – all to further the quest for gold serves as a constant reminder to the viewer that none of these men has an allegiance to much of anything beyond themselves and their immediate goal.

What little moral clarity there is in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly arrives with the devastation of the Civil War. Both Angel Eyes and Tuco seemed unmoved by the conflict’s violence. To them, the war is an inconvenience, something that stands in the way of their big payday. Eastwood shares this sentiment, but he also recognizes the folly of the death all around him and it moves him to express as much compassion as his character is capable of. “I’ve never seen so many men wasted so badly,” he observes after watching a hopeless attack on a bridge.

Eastwood’s gradual emergence from his shield of solipsism is starkly contrasted by the company necessity has forced him to keep. At one point, Tuco is asked: “Outside of evil, what have you managed to do?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Eastwood dubs Tuco the “Rat” because of his odious personal habits and his unsavory penchant for selfishness. But as repugnant as Tuco is, he is not as bad as Angle Eyes – a committed solipsist who kills, tortures and lies his way through the film’s plot with the cool calculation of a sociopath who sees people not as people but as tools for his fulfillment.

In the film’s famous climax, Eastwood tempts the other two protagonists into a three-way duel. Initially, it appears the entire trio will have to consider both their own perceptions and those of their opponents before deciding who to shoot at. Unknown to Tuco or Angle Eyes, Eastwood emptied Tuco’s gun the night before, meaning he knows who to shoot at and knows he will survive if he shoots quick enough. Far more interesting than Eastwood’s stratagem is the fact that Tuco also chooses to fire at Angel Eyes. So it seems neither the Good or the Ugly can tolerate the Bad – and both men think they will get a better deal with each other rather than with a remorseless killer like Angel Eyes.

To put it another way, it is obvious that if Angel Eyes lived, he would have killed whoever survived the standoff because killing people is what he does (he is bad). Tuco would have killed the duel’s survivor because it would have meant more money for him (he is ugly). Eastwood splits the money with Tuco and rides away, their partnership now forever dissolved. While he might not be “good” in any absolute sense, he certainly is good in the film’s compromised world. And what is more, he seems to have learned a deeper truth the others missed: Namely, that some things are impossible to do alone. One man is not enough.

This reflection does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that one needs the society and community intentionally absented from Leone’s film, but it is a strong indication that the director is trying to say partnerships – or something like them – are important, even for rugged, individualistic gunman. Indeed, such arrangements are the building blocks of the society and community Leone’s Old West -- essentially a kill or be killed state of nature -- lacks. In this sense, Eastwood’s character has evolved, and in doing so, he points to a future where militant individualism -- and the amorality that comes with it -- will not be as necessary as it is for the men in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

In other words, civilization proper was coming to the West, it just took some time getting there. In the meanwhile, the denizens of the frontier were, well, on their own. So when Tuco tells a corpse who failed to get the drop on him: "Just shoot: Don't talk about it," the audience knows exactly what he means...