On the Big Screen: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (C'era una volta il West, 1968)

For some movie buffs, "Once upon a time" has come to denote a certain mode of cinematic narrative in which a scene is protracted through prosaic action and dialogue to maximize success by exploiting our expectation that something will or should happen in the scene. Yet for the original Italian audience for Sergio Leone's fourth western, C'era Una Volta would most likely have been a reminder of Francesco Rosi's unlikely fairy tale romance of that name, the Sophia Loren vehicle known in the U.S. as More Than a Miracle, that was released a year before C'era Una Volta il West. Call it that or Once Upon a Time, and audiences around the world would expect a kind of western fairy tale.

Appropriately, the film has a heroine. If not a princess, Jill (Claudia Cardinale) is the heir to an empire in the making. She is courted, so to speak, by three suitors. Of course, the film has no fairy tale ending; Jill may well live happily ever after as the matriarch of the Sweetwater station, but she has no consort. That's all for the best, since Leone's film could just as easily have been called Beauty and Three Beasts. None of the three becomes a prince because this is, after all, a western of the 1960s and the convergence of Leone's spaghetti style and the elegiac preoccupations of many American westerns. Not opening in the U.S. until 1969, it played against The Wild Bunch in some markets. Jill's suitors are of a doomed breed, the "ancient race" of men who live by force, by taking. These men objectify everything and everyone around them. That's true as much for the avenger "Harmonica" (Charles Bronson) as for his enemy Frank (Henry Fonda). They live by taking (even if Harmonica only takes revenge), not by buying, which is the way of the future that Frank flirts with and flinches from after getting burned when money turns his own men against him. More nearly human than the killer and the avenger is the bandit Cheyenne (Jason Robards). While Frank prefers to forget his past until the point of dying, driven forward by ambition, and Harmonica's past can be collapsed into a single moment that motivates his whole life, Cheyenne is capable of nostalgia, of sentiment in general. This makes him seem childish sometimes compared to his peers, but it also makes him the nearest thing to an ideal mate for Jill, with circumstance alone, arguably, preventing that happy ending. Cheyenne seems more self-aware and simultaneously more conscious of others than his peers; he can say of himself that he's not the right man for Jill, even as he warns that Harmonica isn't that man, either. Cheyenne isn't as bright as his peers, though he may have more cunning; he has a hard time grasping that the land of Sweetwater is the treasure rather than some hidden stash of gold until Harmonica spells it out for him.Yet Cheyenne seems to see what's coming, what the future will be like and what it requires of people, in a way beyond the comprehension of fanatics like Frank and Harmonica, who seem to see their successors as inferior beings. Cheyenne's advice to Jill has been condemned since his words were first heard on screen, but if we generalize beyond the character's sexist rhetoric we may get to the real point. Don't begrudge working men the occasional pat of your rear, he says; "pretend that it's nothing. They've earned it." We can dispute whether they've earned that, exactly, but what Cheyenne may be saying, what Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento are trying to say alongside Leone, and through the vehicle of Sergio Donati (in Italian) and Mickey Knox (in English), is that while the mighty men of Cheyenne's doomed generation lived by taking, the world Jill inherits will flourish not through buying, but through giving.

Well, I had to come up with something for the occasion of seeing Leone's epic on the big screen at the Madison Theater in Albany. I still like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly better, but it's very close between these giant films, and it's arguably a competition between an apple and an orange. Once Upon a Time in the West is more self-consciously a work of art on every level, and it's also the climax of an epic decade in which Italy mounted an almost plausible challenge to America's global cinematic dominance. The Italians cracked the American market on all levels, from the arthouse to the drive-in, with everything from Antonioni, at one extreme of pretension, to Hercules movies. Leone and his peers escalated the campaign by appropriating America's defining cinematic genre, and filming in Monument Valley Leone dramatically planted the Italian flag at the heart of American cinema. West is more of an all-out Italian effort than Leone's Dollars films. Conceived by that mind-blasting trinity of Leone, Bertolucci and Argento, it's a masterpiece of Cinecitta production design and probably the most eloquently versatile use of wood ever in movies. You can't fully appreciate that aspect of it until you see it at the right size. Throw a star Italian actress into the mix and it seems even more like the national epic of Italy's battle for cinematic mastery. Maybe Americans recognized this and were repelled by it after embracing the Dollars films.

Why West bombed here remains a mystery; Paramount's fatal excision of more than twenty minutes was a decision of panic while the film was already failing. Did people miss Clint Eastwood? I don't think that was the problem, and I honestly can't see Eastwood as Harmonica -- the Man With No Name never seems that zealous about anything. Pace rather than length seems to have been the main problem, since West was always shorter than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, yet always seems longer. West is simply more complex; while GB&U has to converge only two tracks, Angel Eyes on one, Blondie and Tuco on the other, West opens with two enigmatic bursts of violence, introducing one major character apiece, and then takes its sweet time linking these events to the destinies of four (or five, counting Gabriele Ferzetti's train magnate) major characters. It makes sense once all the pieces are in place, but there are moments when it seems as if Leone is having (or teasing) difficulty fitting them together. Some scenes in "once upon a time" mode, most notably the first scene at Lionel Stander's trading post, seem unjustified by the potential for action; Jill is only a bystander as Cheyenne and Harmonica first meet one another, and neither notices her, each meeting her in Sweetwater later as if for the first time, and while the scene reveals how Frank has tried to frame Cheyenne for his recent crimes, the revelation has a throwaway quality -- and it seems odd in retrospect that Frank and Cheyenne never actually meet each other. While GB&U is a fast engine on a meandering track, there are moments in West where the first-time viewer may legitimately wonder not just when the train will get where it's going, but where it's going in the first place. It's more of a loose baggy monster than GB&U, but on a frame-by-frame basis it's more spectacular, and cumulatively, prodded forward by Ennio Morricone's beloved score, it's a more emotionally moving experience. In ways intended and unintended it marks the end of an epic era, and it is hard not to feel sad to see it end, even if what you feel is that good kind of moviegoing sadness tinged with wonder. It may have been a fairy tale, but some of the magic was real.

DRUM BEAT (1954)

Among fans of 1950s Westerns, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher have their multitudes of champions, so I always like to say a word for Delmer Daves. If not their peer, Daves was definitely the third master to emerge during the genre's golden decade. Like Mann and Boetticher, Daves's western work was chronologically specific to the decade, spanning from Broken Arrow in 1950 through The Hanging Tree in 1959 before he switched to romance pictures like A Summer Place. Often his own writer, Daves was arguably more of an auteur than his peers in terms of creative control, and his name meant enough to be placed above the title of his big-budget Cinemascope western, a star vehicle for an Alan Ladd fresh from Shane and a kind of perverse do-over of Broken Arrow. But while that film established an archetype of a noble Indian in Jeff Chandler's Cochise, Drum Beat gives us Charles Bronson as an intransigent monster who predictably steals the film from Ladd and captured Daves's imagination in a way that muddies whatever message the director meant his movie to have.

"The phrase or slogan of 'peaceful co-existence' is fastening on the public mind in a drum-beat sort of way, beginning softly, slowly, and increasing in tempp and force....The slogan needs exact definition. 'Peaceful co-existence,' conceivably, could become peace-at-a-price -- any price!

The Milwaukee Sentinel, Nov. 18 1954.

The metaphor is just a coincidence -- the sort of thing you get when you search for "Drum Beat" circa November 1954 on the Google News Archive -- but it gives you an idea of the political environment in which Drum Beat was released, with the Cold War still going strong despite Joe McCarthy's fall from grace. Daves had made a film about a peacemaker. In 1872, Johnny MacKay (Ladd) has been summoned to Washington by President Grant. In an interestingly awkward scene, a guard outside the White House invites McKay to stroll right into the Executive Mansion. In the lobby, an old man notes his gun and knife and asks if he means to shoot the President. The oldster goes on to joke about Grant's smoking and drinking before identifying himself as the President's father. Grant himself ushers McKay into a lavish sitting room, where he commissions MacKay to negotiate peace with the Modoc tribe in the Lost River valley. There's already a treaty, but war chief Captain Jack (Bronson) refuses to acknowledge it. MacKay will have to deal with Jack despite the skepticism of a pacifist minister who champions Indian rights. Jack calls himself a captain because he collects pieces of army uniforms and decorates himself with medals plundered off military victims. Not all Modocs agree with him, while some are even more extreme than he, but he bullies and blusters his way to power. He also seems to have some white settlers under his control, having provided them with Indian wives. There's an air of appeasement in the valley that might make 1954 viewers see Captain Jack as a stand-in for the Commies, and his success as an insurgent against incompetent army attacks also makes him a kind of prophecy of the Vietcong and other guerrilla foes of America. But the message of the movie seems to be that we should never stop trying to negotiate peace with hardcases like Jack, no matter how risky it becomes -- and in Jack's case, it's very risky for an erstwhile Indian fighter like Johnny MacKay, who upholds the President's policy despite demands for violent reprisal from hothead whites, one of whom (Robert Keith) starts a war with a vengeance shooting of the Modoc who murdered his wife.

For the record, Daves didn't write Broken Arrow. It's possible that his Drum Beat screenplay is a critique of what was probably still regarded as his greatest triumph as a director. He seems to consciously retreat from the noble-Indian archetype, forefronting a savage enemy who talks in the still-convention pidgin Injun lingo. Indeed, Daves stages scenes in which Captain Jack confronts the brother-sister team of good Modocs, Manok (Anthony Caruso) and Toby (Marisa Pavan) in a Modoc camp -- and they all talk what Jack calls "Boston English" at each other. Jack even tells his supporters at one point to talk amongst themselves in Boston English so the rest of the Modocs won't know their plans. It's especially embarrassing to see Bronson talk this way after seeing him play a chief without the dialect in Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow, but his whole performance here (apparently in his first role under his new stage name) is wildly over the top, yet unfocused. Most of the time Jack is a Magua-esque villain, but there's an odd moment when he's nearly convinced to negotiate peace sincerely, only to be bullied back into intransigence by one of his underlings. Finally, after presenting Jack as an iredeemable monster through most of the picture, Daves stretches out the finish after MacKay captures Jack alive so Ladd and Bronson can have a scene comparing their visions of the afterlife and the two men can shake hands before Jack is hanged, as if the "Captain" had been a noble adversary all along. It's as if Daves didn't know what to make with the character after Bronson was through with it, and the auteur's confusion makes Jack's symbolic role, if he really has any, even more unclear. The only clear message that survives the story is the idea that individuals, not entire populations, are to blame for war. This point is made when MacKay criticizes calls for all-out extermination of the Modocs made after Jack had treacherously attacked McKay himself and other negotiators. Daves may not be as sensitive as his Broken Arrow collaborators, but he doesn't want to be seen as an Indian-hater either. He even teases a Broken Arrow style romance between MacKay and Toby, though the hero's heart ultimately belongs to a white girl, and Toby gets her head bashed in with a rock.

When Daves later cast Alan Ladd in The Badlanders, a Westernization of The Asphalt Jungle, the star promptly had the picture stolen from him by Ernest Borgnine. The record suggests that Daves had little more idea what to do with Ladd, for different reasons, than he had for Bronson. Part of the problem with Drum Beat is that the picture has a story, but not a plot. That is, Johnny MacKay never develops after that promising scene in the White House, and Ladd quickly reverts to his typically inert self. If you wonder why he never really capitalized on Shane, here's part of the proof. More might have been made of the romantic triangle, but Daves is so mesmerized by Bronson's rampage that Pavan interacts with him more and Audrey Dalton, as the white girl, practically disappears from the picture. If Drum Beat is about the difficulties created by an intractable leader, that character itself created crippling difficulties for the picture. That insoluble problem wastes Daves's characteristically scenic location work -- a few soundstage scenes notwithstanding -- but then again Encore Western's typical pan-and-scan presentation was a waste of the film's pictorial splendor and some of its dramatic energy. It might suffice as an outdoor adventure -- Ladd and Bronson have a nice little fight while being carried down a rushing stream and there's a neat portrait in futility as the army storms Jack's hilltop stronghold and is shot to pieces -- but Drum Beat is the weakest Daves western that I've seen so far and regrettable proof that while Daves still deserves recognition as the third master of Fifties westerns, he's not really the equal of the other two.

RUN OF THE ARROW (1957)

"The end of this story can only be written by you," Samuel Fuller writes, and it's a tall order considering that the story is set some ninety years before Run of the Arrow was released. But it's his unsubtle way of reiterating the contemporary relevance of his screenplay, though audiences might be excused for wondering where the relevance was. Fortunately, the film doesn't stand or fall on its relevance.

Fuller's protagonist is only ever known as O'Meara (Rod Steiger). He's a Confederate soldier who claims the distinction of firing the last shot of the Civil War, picking a Union lieutenant off his horse near Appomattox Court House on the morning of April 9, 1865. Claiming the horse, but finding the man still alive, he takes his prisoner to the rebel infirmary, nearer still to the actual court house, where he sees General Lee leave after surrendering to General Grant. Enraged, he resolves to shoot Grant, only to be told by the surgeon that Lee would most likely kill himself out of shame if O'Meara betrayed the truce. Back home, O'Meara remains unreconciled, despite his own mother telling him to grow up and become an American. The best that can be said of O'Meara is that, instead of becoming a terrorist, he lights out for the West. He hooks up with Walking Coyote (Jay C. Flippen), an old, alcoholic Sioux Indian scout who teaches him the language and some of the customs. Surprised by a renegade band led by Crazy Wolf (H. M. Wynant), Coyote gives O'Meara a fighting chance by invoking the "run of the arrow" challenge as an alterantive to death by torture or hanging. Forced to run barefoot with the renegades in pursuit, O'Meara takes advantage of their hounding of the dying Coyote, who'd meant to sacrifice himself, to find shelter in a friendly village where Blue Buffalo (a buff Charles Bronson) is the chief. Impressed by O'Meara's fortitude and his renunciation of allegiance to the United States, and in spite of his continued avowal of Christianity ("We worship the same god," BB assures him), the tribe adopts the Reb and marries him off to Yellow Mocassin (Sarita Montiel), the woman who had rescued and nursed him after the ordeal. The new couple adopts the mute boy Silent Tongue, for whom O'Meara's harmonica is a unique way to communicate that comes in handy later.

When paramount chief Red Cloud (Frank DeKova) negotiates a treaty with the U.S. Cavalry, he designates O'Meara to act as a scout to guide the troops to the site agreed on by both sides for a fort. His blunt honesty impresses Captain Clark (Brian Keith), but Lieutenant Driscoll (Ralph Meeker) is less impressed. A glory hound and Indian hater, Driscoll recognizes O'Meara's horse as the one the Reb took from him at Appomattox. O'Meara still carries the bullet the doctor extracted from Driscoll as a memento, inscribed as a gift from his fellow townspeople. He may have a fresh use for that bullet as Crazy Wolf's renegades harrass the cavalry and Driscoll spoils for an excuse to wage all-out war on the Sioux. When O'Meara captures Crazy Wolf, he forces his captive to play the run-of-the-arrow game, but when Driscoll tries to shoot the renegade, the Reb turns on the officer and takes Crazy Wolf back to Blue Buffalo's village. With Clark eliminated, Driscoll orders the fort built on a more provocative location, daring the Sioux to attack despite O'Meara's warnings. After a brutal, one-sided battle, Driscoll is turned over to Crazy Wolf for death by torture for violating the run, forcing O'Meara to an ultimate test of his principles and loyalties....

As I've already noted, Fuller leaves the ending somewhat ambiguous, and I'll leave it even more so by not describing it further. Suffice it to say that Fuller has some points to make about belonging and reconciliation, but those are complicated by his now-outmoded practice of making a Confederate his hero. As late as The Outlaw Josey Wales, a Reb could stand in for a generic rebel, and O'Meara is a hero in this sense only. Fuller isn't endorsing secession by any means, and he makes a point of having Capt. Clark denounce the Ku Klux Klan while not accepting O'Meara's excuse (actually perfectly valid) of not being involved in cross-burning or night riding. Even for Fuller, O'Meara is acceptable as a hero only insofar as he has no opinion whatsoever about black people. It probably was true that many rank and file Rebs weren't aggressive racists or believers in slavery, but audiences today hold anyone in gray accountable for the Peculiar Institution, and the omission of black-white relations from Fuller's agenda seems more glaring now than it may have been then.

Nor is Run of the Arrow an endorsement of a rebel or renegade lifestyle. Crazy Wolf is a counterexample of a purely destructive renegade, but on the other hand Lt. Driscoll represents the sort of asinine, overbearing authority figure who provokes rebellion. Fuller is neither for or against rebellion, except to say it's got to end sometime. Likewise, he intends no statement on "savagery" or "civilization." He neither idealizes nor demonizes the Sioux; Dances With Wolves this isn't. At the end, however, Fuller seems to acknowledge a cultural divide that O'Meara can't bridge. Until then, the Sioux had been just another nation with its own language and customs. But their insistence upon torture appears to alienate O'Meara from them decisively, and his obvious distaste for it alienates his own wife from him -- she recognizes that, no matter what he feels about Yankees, he remains essentially American. Yet one thing Fuller leaves to our imagination is whether Yellow Mocassin will stay with O'Meara or not; their cultural differences need not divide the multicultural family. But if we root for them to stay together, we should also root, Fuller implicitly insists, for the reconciliation of North and South, Natives and Whites -- and perhaps for their consolidation into something bigger and better than the sum of its parts rather than their common submission to some unworthy authority figure like Driscoll.

Fuller takes a chance by casting Rod Steiger as a leading man, but surrounds him with lots of capable character actors to play off. The tactic works: Steiger has a common man appeal instead of coming off like the archetypal tall Western superman, and his scenes with Flippen, Bronson, Keith and Meeker are great stuff. The best thing about the script is Fuller's transcendence of cliched Indian dialogue. His Sioux talk neither in me-scalpum pidgin nor in the stilted "noble" cadences of too many sympathetic Indians in Fifties Westerns. Instead, they speak an easy, conversational English, a cinematic translation of their own language that humanizes them rather than emphasizing their alien culture as subtitled native dialogue would do. The glaring exception to the high standard of acting is leading lady Sarita Montiel, who was reportedly dubbed by Angie Dickinson to no good effect. Visually, Run is outstanding. Fuller and cinematographer Joseph Biroc take full advantage of the full width and height of the "RKO-Scope" screen and their stark locations to create compositions of epic depth and sweep. Fuller's somewhat muddled message -- I'm still not quite sure to whom or what he expects O'Meara to be loyal -- can be disregarded in a movie fan's enjoyment of a colorful, rousing, violent yet humane adventure film.

Here's a trailer, uploaded to YouTube by skipjackturner.

CHATO'S LAND (1972)

Between 1968 and 1974, Charles Bronson occupied an ambiguous position in the movie business. In Europe and much of the world, Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West had made the veteran character actor a real star. But Leone's film had flopped in the U.S., and Bronson would not really become a superstar in his homeland until Michael Winner's Death Wish appeared six years later. Nevertheless, global demand for Bronson meant work for him in Hollywood. Winner was an important part of Bronson's American build-up, directing him in The Mechanic, The Stone Killer and this Spanish-shot western before the team struck paydirt with their urban-vigilante tale. The title role in Chato's Land seems relatively thankless from an acting standpoint -- Bronson has no more than a couple of lines in English, and not many more in Apache -- but the film anticipates Death Wish in its emphasis on revenge, albeit in a manner designed to disturb rather than gratify American audiences.

Chato's Land is the story of a posse's pursuit of a half-breed who killed a racist sheriff and the breed's turning of the tables on his pursuers. Chato shot the sheriff to save himself from summary execution for the crime of drinking in a white man's saloon. As he flees the scene, Gerry Wilson's screenplay takes its time introducing us to the members of the posse. Most prominent and flamboyant, at first, is Quincey (Jack Palance), a former Confederate soldier and more recent U.S. Army scout and Indian fighter. His donning of his old Rebel coat is a sign of bad new, especially given when this movie was made, but Palance's performance is one of many ways the film defies our expectations. We expect him to play a racist fanatic leading the posse to doom, but while Quincey certainly sees the hunt for Chato as a nostalgic chance for fresh military glory, the film is very much the story of his disillusionment. Compared to many of his fellow westerners -- especially the crew led by Jubal Hooker (Simon Oakland), Quincey comes across as an intelligent, moderate and ultimately weak man. The hunt evolves into a power struggle between Quincey and Jubal, in which Jubal's unrelenting hatred for Indians and the loyalty of his kinfolk give him advantages that outweigh Quincey's experience and wisdom. Along with these, the posse picks up a number of people, played by a formidable gang of character actors, who join with different degrees of enthusiasm -- many have work to do on their land -- but a common sense of communal obligation to fight Indians. One family refuses to join, their barechested patriarch chasing the posse away at gunpoint. He makes such a forceful impression that you expect to see him again, but you won't. His sole purpose in the film is to show us the only way anyone could avoid what's to come.

Chato doesn't go out of his way to kill his pursuers. In the first half of the film, he's only interested in getting them off his back. If he can do that by sabotaging their water supply or scaring off their horses, fine. He just wants to get back to his family and back to work catching wild horses. He makes it, but the posse, helped by a half-Yacqui tracker, never falls too far behind. While Chato hunts horses, the posse finds his wife. Jubal's boys are determined to rape her, while Quincey and the others who are plainly appalled by the idea find themselves powerless -- or simply lacking the will -- to stop the atrocity. A posse is not an army, Quincey concedes, and his uniform gives him no special authority over Jubal or his kin. When the rapists stake the wife out naked to insult and lure Chato into an ambush, Quincey insists on covering her with a blanket, but Jubal's crew won't have it. As it happens, Chato creates a distraction that enables him to free his wife, but his partner in the horse business is killed in the fighting. He now has two offenses to avenge, and now he fights to kill.

Along the way, Wilson and Winner have tempted us to differentiate between the real scumbags like Jubal and the men with remnants or rudiments of decency like Quincey. Viewers are likely to divide the posse into those they want to see die and those they'd rather see live. The problem is, Chato doesn't differentiate. As far as we know, he wants to see the whole posse dead, not knowing who did or didn't rape his wife. As the hunted becomes the hunter and the fiftysomething Bronson strips down to wiry, loinclothed virility, the movie becomes a stark, unsettling parable of collective responsibility. If the first half of the film was a fairly familiar Vietnam metaphor, the second half is a nightmare of revolutionary retribution, a rage and a reckoning that'll spare no one. It belies the logic of the traditional western, which is spelled out in lines lifted nearly verbatim from John Ford's The Searchers about how an Indian will only keep after something for only so long, while the American will keep at it to the bitter end. In Chato's Land it's the Indian, the breed -- the Other -- who is unrelenting, just as the posse turns upon itself. The film grows unpredictable as the confrontations we've been long expecting -- Quincey vs. Chato or Jubal vs. Chato -- are denied us, until we're left with the two most sympathetic or least offensive members of the posse, one of whom is killed with sudden bluntness, falling face-first into a fire. The film closes with one man desperately stumbling through hopeless terrain as Chato watches like an impassive, implacable pagan god.

Bronson doesn't have to do much more than be a presence here, but to be such a presence at his age, at that time, is an impressive feat. Among his antagonists, Palance clearly stands out with what may be one of his best performances, but the ensemble that includes Oakland, James Whitmore, Richard Basehart, Richard Jordan and others is uniformly interesting, each developing a distinctive personality grounded in the life he left behind. Some, like Oakland and Jordan, are over-the-top monsters, but that's necessary for the film to have its effect by making other characters more likable but no less vulnerable.

Chato's Land is an American western filmed in spaghetti territory, and maybe a director who is neither American nor Italian is ideally suited to split the difference, combining the brutality and stark landscapes of the spaghettis with the American commitment to more rounded character development and an introspective quality characteristic of the Seventies. The film may look Italian to an extent, but Jerry Fielding's score reinforces its American essence. Audiences in 1972 may have cheered Bronson on here as they would when Death Wish played, but Chato's Land is, in a sense, a more politically correct vigilante movie and a more honestly disturbing one for daring Americans to imagine themselves, to the extent that they identify with any of the posse members, as targets for a revenge that isn't fair, but might be just.

Notice how the trailer makes the posse look like complete aggressors, leaving no hint of Chato's original offense. It comes from the VideoDetective website.

Trailer provided by Video Detective

Quickies: TELEFON (1977)

Movie fans who revere the 1970s as a golden age of filmmaking often condemn Star Wars and similar effects-laden blockbusters for bringing about a great dumbing down of cinema from the decade's lofty standard. But George Lucas can't be blamed for a film that came out the same year as Star Wars, and was certainly in the works before that one was released, but is as dumb an A picture as the Seventies served up, despite the direction of Don Siegel, a reputed master. Telefon is dumb even by our debased standards. It has an interesting premise, making a KGB agent in America the hero of the story, but Charles Bronson sleepwalks the character through the film. He's sent by his superiors to take out a rogue agent who has, for inscrutable reasons, decided to activate sleeper agents who'd been planted in the States fifteen years earlier. Luckily for him, and bad for world peace, all these sleepers can be activated by the same trigger phrase, a couplet from Robert Frost. We see these sleepers abandon jobs, homes and families to go on kamikaze runs against targets that we're told are strategically obsolete. We never know enough about any of the sleepers to care about their fates, and the irrelevance of their missions makes their attacks unsuspenseful. The danger, we're told, is that World War III might start if we Americans find out that this wave of crazy attacks are actually a Soviet plot, but there's never any suspense over whether we'll catch on, because apart from early computer geek Tyne Daly, the Yanks are idiots. Nevertheless, Bronson feels pressured to discover a pattern to the villain's apparently random sequence of wake-up calls in order to end his spree before we catch on to it. In this he's aided by ruthless Commie spy Lee Remick, a woman who has killed before, we're told, though Remick's silly performance doesn't match the profile. She has a hidden agenda or two to heighten the theoretical suspense, but her real role in the film is to nag Bronson about everything, from the necessity of secrecy to the propriety of murder, and thus win his love. Their quarry is Donald Pleasance, who regrettably abandons early on the Elton John wig that was the most interesting aspect of his character. You'll recall that I mentioned stupidity earlier. Well, here it is: Pleasance the relentless Russian has picked his sleepers and his targets as a way of writing his name, acrostic-style, across the United States -- in English. I may have spoiled Telefon for those who haven't seen it, but if you ever have a chance to see it (as I did on TCM last week) and don't, you'll thank me.

THE MECHANIC (1972)

This review is a tale of two movies in one. I don't know how much money Michael Winner's film made in its initial release, but after Death Wish came out and Hollywood realized that Charles Bronson was "the most popular star in the world," someone decided that there was still money to be made from The Mechanic. That someone lacked confidence in the original title, perhaps assuming that people had mistaken it for a car-racing movie the first time around. So the film was reborn under the vaguely chopsocky-ish sobriquet of Killer of Killers, and the DVD includes a trailer under that title. So the film had two lives, enigmatic than exploitative, and those adjectives could well describe the two halves of the actual film.

Charles Bronson sees himself through a glass -- a shop window -- darkly in The Mechanic.

The Mechanic first appeared at a time when Bronson was still bigger in Europe than at home, and in some way it seems tailored for a European audience. It's moody, ominous, and patient about getting to the big action scenes. It has that distinctive Seventies feel, that teasing sense that you might get to look at a moral abyss. But it's "the mechanic," the killer of killers, who does the looking for us, and we can feel Bronson flinch. Violence won't make him bat an eye, but in the film's most disquieting scene his would-be protege (Jan-Michael Vincent), the estranged son of a gangster (Keenan Wynn) whom Bronson has just killed, takes him first to a party full of idiot kids whose idea of fun is making crank phone calls, then to his girlfriend's pad. The girlfriend has threatened to kill herself, and Vincent has come to see if she'll follow through on her threat. As Bronson watches with uncomfortable impassiveness, she threatens and Vincent dares until she slits one wrist, then the other. Vincent is unmoved. "If you don't care whether you live or die, why should I?" he asks. She asks Bronson how long she has. He answers as objectively as he can, based on her weight. Time dissolves away. She starts to feel cold and shaky. Will Vincent let her die? He won't, but he won't help her, either. But if she wants to live after all, he offers her car keys so she can drive herself to the ER. She staggers out, and the two men leave a little later.

Jan-Michael Vincent goes blithely from his father's funeral to his girlfriend's suicide attempt, with a troubled but taciturn Bronson in tow.

Bronson's character, Arthur Bishop, is an observer by nature. We'd earlier seen him watching an argument between Vincent and Wynn with the same superficial impassivity. However he felt about the spectacle at the girlfriend's house, he felt no visible impulse to rescue her. A certain objectivity may be part of his job as a hitman, but his indifference is a cracking facade. Soon he'll have to be taken to a hospital after suffering a panic attack in an aquarium, apparently brought on by sensory overload. He seems to be breaking under the pressure of being an outlaw who lives by a special set of rules in a world that seems to be abandoning rules altogether. He's also nursing old hurts. You can feel his humiliation when Wynn laughingly recalls an incident when little Arthur nearly drowned, and you sense a vindictive streak when Wilson has to kill Wynn and does so in a way that forces the old man to run for his life to the brink of a heart attack. You're prepared to think of Wilson as a monster until he gets to know Steve McKenna, Vincent's character, better. Steve is a nihilist or a sociopath, contemptuous of his peers and his dead father, interested only in learning about the world of crime and murder from which his dad excluded him. After ample warnings, Wilson takes him under his wing as an apprentice, teaching him that even outlaws have rules. Well, they may have in his day, but Wilson's defensive cynicism is no match for Steve's absolute amorality. Murder, Wilson teaches, is just killing without a license, and everyone kills. He's thinking of the license that governments grant themselves and their soldiers, but Steve understands that Wilson also depends on a license, the one issued by the Mob. That makes him no real outlaw by Steve's lights. Once the student surpasses the master, Steve looks forward to killing only whom he pleases, when he pleases.

Arthur Wilson tries to see himself as a disciplined warrior whose honor resides in his observance of the rules of his trade. It's his own license to kill, one which Steve McKenna doesn't need.

All of this makes The Mechanic one of the grimmest American action films of the Seventies, and the mood takes you by surprise when you're only expecting a violent formula film. Eventually, however, Winner's movie lived up to my original expectations a little too much. For its last half-hour or so much of its sinister tension dissipates as the director focuses on well-staged but routine chase scenes. The mood's nearly broken entirely by a long motorcycle chase that looks for every excuse to stage a sight gag.

The screenplay by Lewis John Carlino (Crazy Joe, Resurrection, etc.) introduces the inevitable big twist a little too early and a little too implausibly. It seems unlikely after a nearly botched hit on his first outing that the Mob would hire a still-green understudy to take out the master, and the film would have been better off letting us assume that Steve will turn on Wilson and teasing the turn instead of making it obvious. But none of this makes the final act dull, nor does it mar the mood of the great earlier scenes. The first half of The Mechanic deserves a better fulfillment, but the film as a whole deserves a look from any fan of Seventies cinema.

Here's the "Killer of Killers" trailer, deceptively presenting Bronson's character as a vigilante, as uploaded to YouTube by ChopperTCB.

HONOR AMONG THIEVES (Adieu L'Ami, 1968)

Here's a teamup of Alain Delon and Charles Bronson circa 1968, just as Once Upon A Time in the West finally elevated the latter to global stardom. Bronson is clearly still the subordinate actor, though you couldn't tell that from the cover art on the Lionsgate DVD. Delon doesn't even appear on the front, though he still has top billing. The film apparently didn't even hit America until 1973, after Bronson finally caught fire here. It's a curious item with some interesting action that's distinguished mainly by what I took to be a streak of misogyny that may reflect the attitudes of its original target audience.

Delon and Bronson are demobilized military men returning to civilian life after a tour of duty in Algeria. Delon's a doctor and Bronson wants him to sign on as a medic for some sort of mercenary unit that he's forming. Delon finds him an annoyance and decks him when Bronson suggests that his share of the payout could be bigger if fewer men survive. Bronson's a persistent character, however, and one who finds odd ways of making money. We see him as a procurer for a depraved old man who wants to play with a living doll for Christmas. He uses the "doll" as a game piece for some sort of strip roulette on a rotating platform in a parking garage before they get down to the real weirdness, during which he steals some petty cash and fights his way out of the building.

Meanwhile, Delon has gotten entangled with a woman who met him at Marseilles asking for word of a fellow soldier named Mozart. Delon says he's never heard of the man, but ends up involved with the lady anyway. She helps him get a job as an office physician so he can break into the office and replace some bonds of hers in a corporate safe. This place gets some hefty payrolls regularly, and that attracts Bronson's attention. He assumes that Delon is intending to rob the safe and wants in. He gets in, too. He and Delon find themselves trapped in an un-air-conditioned basement after brawling in the corridors. They have to figure a way out before they're found in the morning, and here is where they finally bond, Delon explaining that he knew Mozart all along -- had in fact killed him accidentally in Algeria -- and was fulfilling a debt to the man by helping out his girlfriend. Bronson is briefly aghast at the idea, but he understands that for Delon the alternative was unacceptable: he'd be a "dancer," someone who doesn't live up to his word. That can get you in trouble, but as Bronson says, it's hard to tell friends from enemies, or even to separate them. Consider the burning bonds they're using for torches overnight. On the one hand, they give light; on the other, they're using up the oxygen in their room.

After they smash their way out, Delon realizes (voila!) that he's been set up to take the fall for a robbery and murder. Now he and Bronson have a mutual interest in not getting framed for the crimes. Bronson is caught in a train station chase while Delon escapes, and the American shows his honorable side by refusing to rat Delon out despite the third degree. That leaves Delon free to crack the case, which shouldn't be too hard. Setting things right and staying alive may prove more difficult, however....

Some reviewers have gotten a weird vibe from the male bonding between Delon and Bronson and the negative attitude toward women director Jean Herman and writer Sebastien Japrisot express. The lead actress, Olga Georges-Picot, is a kind of femme fatale, but so in a less obvious way is Brigette Fossey as the boss's daughter who's assigned to Delon as a secretary. She starts off quite mousy and seems incapable of looking Delon in the eye; he cures this by kissing her. Later, she shelters him and behaves quite submissively, serving him meals like a maid. Later yet, hoping to stop him from taking her back to the building, she makes a bizarre series of promises to him.

Fossey: Let's go far away, anywhere! I know how to cook spaghetti. I'll let you smoke Papa's cigars. I love you. I'll pass my exams. I'll read Shakespeare. I'll learn to make love very well, but please, let's not go there!

Something may be lost in translation (Delon seems to be doing his own English dialogue, by the way), but this speech had to be weird in the original. In any event, Fossey turns out to be in cahoots with Georges-Picot, with whom she makes a desperate last-ditch escape attempt with an empty gun. How in cahoots are they? Are they lesbians, or is that just an assumption we're more likely to make today? This PG rated film offers no proof, but the women's partnership, combined with the passive depravity on display in the "doll" sequence (in which another woman, presumably the old man's daughter, joins in the ogling) suggests Herman and Japrisot as candidates for the He-Man Woman Haters Club.

Adieu L'Ami is no classic, but it's a mostly effective, efficient thriller in the cool, unaffected French style. It's a potboiler compared with Jean-Pierre Melville's films, but it has just enough action and just enough panache to hold your attention to the end. Delon is his typical self and Bronson seems to enjoy his antihero role. This is the earliest appearance I know of of the mustachioed, thicker-haired Bronson who would become a Seventies icon. That might make it a milestone unless someone knows of an earlier makeover. I would definitely recommend the film mainly to Bronson fans, though Delon's followers will probably also dig it.

Here's the French trailer:

Adieu l'ami - Bande annonce FR
by _Caprice_