A Fistful of Dynamite (a.k.a. Duck, You Sucker!)

I'll confess; I've never seen this film.  This one was long out of print and never available on DVD prior to 2007.  Even glorious VHS copies were dodgy, hard to find, and expensive.

My wife bought me the Sergio Leone Anthology a few years ago, thereby hooking me up with beautiful DVD transfers of Leone's classic westerns with Clint Eastwood.  I've owned Leone's "Man With No Name" trilogy twice before, on VHS and DVD, but those versions were no frills, dodgy looking, and sounded terrible.  

Here, MGM went back and restored those films, plus this one, adding a metric shitload of special features.  Plus, the completist in me loved the chance to get Leone's last western — this film — on DVD.

Unfortunately, like a couple dozen other films, I acquired a copy of A Fistful of Dynamite on DVD but never made time to watch.  Then again, that's why I'm here.

Originally titled Duck, You Sucker! upon initial U.S. release in 1971, this film has many names, including A Fistful of Dynamite (to take advantage of the notoriety of Leone's earlier film) and Once Upon A Time... The Revolution, which recalls another.  

Why not bundle Once Upon A Time in the West here, too, and make this a definitive Leone western collection?  The answer is pretty simple; that film belongs to another studio.  MGM had four out of five, and that'll work.

With so many titles, the placement of this film in alphabetical order is a little tricky.  I considered just going with the original Italian title, Giù la testa, but that seemed more pretentious than even I could abide.  In the end, I decided to watch this one under the film's alternate English title in an effort to get this one as close to the rest of the Leone set as possible.

This is a fantastic film; though far from Leone's best, this might be his most sensitive and cynical.  James Coburn plays an Irish explosives expert wandering Mexico, and Rod Steiger plays a bandit with a crew made up of his own illegitimate children from his relations with multiple women.  

Coburn's Irish accent isn't bad...for an American in an Italian western.  He had Irish roots, at least.  Steiger's Mexican bandit sounds an awful lot like Marlon Brando's Don Corleone in an angry mood, or maybe John Belushi doing an impression of Marlon Brando.  

Don't believe me?  Then how come when I search for Belushi doing Brando, I get Belushi doing Steiger?

Leone's only bad film is The Colossus of Rhodes — a colossal mess if you ask me — but even though all of his westerns are rock solid, this is probably the one that stumbles and meanders the most.  In an effort to set compelling characters against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, he creates a story that seemingly wanders from sequence to sequence.  Steiger is channeling a little of Eli Wallach's Tuco from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and Coburn's laid back schemer reminds me a little of both Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef's previous efforts, with a dash of Jason Robards or Charles Bronson.  Interestingly, Eastwood was offered Coburn's part but refused, saying the role was too similar to the other films, and Wallach eventually declined the role Steiger took.  

This could have been "Man With No Name" #4.

While serving as Leone's last western, this film also works as a bridge between Once Upon A Time in the West and Once Upon A Time in America.  If viewed as a trilogy, the viewer can see how Leone's view of western history plays out over the three epic films.  Like Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, here we see the influence of the industrial revolution on the American west, not just in how one traveled, but also how one fought.  Machine guns and automobiles appear throughout, mowing down the victims of circumstance, mowing down time.  Most Hollywood westerns keep things quaint, but both Leone and Peckinpah are right to examine other periods of the west — especially the end.

I love owning a copy of an artist's entire oeuvre, if only to give me more opportunities to use the word "oeuvre" correctly in a sentence.  Taken as a whole, an artist's body of work is a work itself, with logical starting and ending points and an evolution along the way.  I can see Leone's views about the American west reflected in his work, as well as his views on how Americans depicted their own history.

I love Leone's films because he seems to capture more about the American west than any American western director ever did, and he does so with dry humor and a keen eye.  In fact, I'd argue that most of the Italian western directors did a better job of celebrating the west than anyone out of Hollywood not named John Ford or Sam Peckinpah (and those guys had their missteps — Leone didn't).  I suppose one could argue for Clint Eastwood's own efforts as a filmmaker, but I can't watch his westerns and not see the influence of his work with Leone.  That leaves me with only David Milch, whose "Deadwood" redefined how modern audiences view the west (mostly with colorful language many say was heretofore unheard).  

Ah, but A Fistful of Dynamite has plenty of F-bombs — brave for a western released in 1971.

Before tonight, I'd never seen A Fistful of Dynamite.  At 157 minutes, this isn't something I'll return to often, but having seen the film now, the rest of Leone's work sits in a new context, and I can't stop thinking about this one.  I can barely stop writing.