Sonny and Jed

An Italian-Spanish co-production full of action , exaggerated characters, shootouts and lots of violence . The Cuban Thomas Milian, as usual, puts faces, grimaces, crying and overacting, but plays splendidly ; furthermore enjoyable appearance by Susan George , post ¨Straw dogs¨ . The picture tells the lurid criminal story of a famous delinquents couple, detailing a mythologized biography in ¨Bonny and Clyde ¨ style . In the time of the wild west, Jed (top notch Tomas Milian) recently out of jail meets Sonny (gorgeous Susan George), both become bank robbers. The antiheroes go across the American Midwest and South robbing banks , stores and people , embarking in a criminal rampage. They form a criminal gang, without accomplices only for money, for pleasure, for revenge ; they don't care why , rob , kill or how . An obstinate sheriff later blind ( Telly Savalas ) pursues the thieves , and lets nothing detain in his trail of catching them.

This Western is inferior than previous Corbucci's entries but displays stirring adventures, shootouts, riding pursuits and is pretty amusing. It's an exciting western with breathtaking confronting between the two protagonists and the enemy Telly Savallas dressed in long fur coat and his hoodlums. In spite of some moment is boring I think it turns out to be a good Spaghetti Western . Tomas Milian is fine, he plays similarly his role in ¨Cuchillo¨, as he ravages the screen, he jumps, bounds and leaps, hit and run , but also receives violent punches and hits . Telly Savalas as a cruelly baddie role is terrific, subsequently he would play various spaghetti (Pancho Villa ,A reason to live a reason to die, Land raiders, A town hell) . Furthermore, appears usual secondaries Italian/Spanish Western in brief acting as Alvaro De Luna, Dan Van Husen , Rafael Albaicin , Victor Israel , and of course Eduardo Fajardo , Sergio Corbucci's ordinary. The film blends violence, a love story , tension, high body-count and it's fast moving and quite entertaining . There is plenty of action in the movie , guaranteeing a shootout or stunt every few minutes. There are many fine technicians and nice production design with excellent scenario of barren outdoors, dirty landscapes under a glimmer sun and a fine set on the Almeria landscape. The musician Ennio Morricone, composes a nice soundtrack and well conducted ; it's full of strange sounds in ¨My name is nobody ¨ wake . Striking cinematography by Luis Cuadrado and Alejandro Ulloa with negative well processed . Outdoor sequences filmed at Colmenar, Madrid and of course Almeria, Spain.

Sergio Corbucci's direction is well crafted , here he's quite cynical and humorous and inclined toward violence and too much action, and contains broad comedy supported on the character played by Tomas Milian . Sergio made several Spaghetti classics: ¨ Django¨, ¨The great silence¨, ¨Hellbenders¨, ¨The specialist¨ , and Zapata Western as ¨The Mercenary¨, ¨The Compañeros¨ and ¨What am I doing in middle of the revolution¨ . In addition Sergio directed other inferior S.W. as ,¨Johnny Oro¨, ¨The white the yellow an the black¨ and ¨Minnesota Clay¨.

Have always been a great fan of Susan George and have seen most of her films and this particular picture I discovered on E Bay and it was a great find to enjoy the great acting of both Susan George and Telly Savalvas. Of course this is a Spagettii Western and a comedy but it is not your usual run of the mill type of film. There is plenty of vulgarity and romantic scenes and a rough relationship between Jed, (Tom Milian) and Sonny, (Susan George). Jed is an very crude man who is a robber and he meets up with Sonny who seems to take a liking to him even though he treats her very poorly. Jed and Sonny become something like a Bonny & Clyde team who go around stealing and robbing everyone they come in contact with. Sheriff Franciscus, (Telly Savalvas) is out to get these two people and even though he becomes blind still manages to try and hunt down these two criminals. This is a great film and if you get a chance, don't miss this great Susan George Film.

I'd wanted to see SONNY AND JED for a while thanks to its provenence: the great Sergio Corbucci directing, and starring a fine triumverate in Tomas Milian, Telly Savalas and Susan George. Sadly, this turns out to be nothing more than a misfire, with the actors encouraged to overplay it at all times in the name of some extremely broad comedy, and a general lack of cohesion. Savalas appears at the beginning but then vanishes for most of the screen time, while Milian's anti-hero is one of his most irritating. And poor George is unsuited to her tomboy role and comes across as a little too shrill and histrionic. It's watchable enough for genre enthusiasts, but a far cry from the best of this kind of film.

It's surprising to see how fast Sergio Corbucci's career declined. Only two years earlier he was making COMPANEROS, one of the high-points of the mid spaghetti western period. For SONNY AND JED he united his 'muse' Tomas Milian with Susan George fresh from Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS the previous year and Tellys Savalas who was at the time enjoying a prolonged vacation in the Mediterranean by making Italian b-movies. Despite of the cast however, the movie is a dim shadow of COMPANEROS. Certainly a let-down by Corbucci's usual standards, which he would go on to follow with another two poor westerns, essentially ending his career in the western as ingloriously it began (MASSACRE AT RED CANYON).

SONNY AND JED in its way reflects the ongoing the decline of the genre that Corbucci both helped shape and found his niche in by making the transition from the peplum he used to make under alias Stanley Corbett in his earlier days and with cheesy titles like Goliath and the Island of Vampires. It's a gritty, crass, vulgar tale of two unpleasant people, scruffy bandit Jed and feisty tomboy Sonny, hitching up together in a nameless patch of Roman countryside substituting for a nameless part of the West and going on a robbing spree while a monomaniac sheriff dressed in a fur (!) and his posse gun after them. The couple-of-criminals-on-the-loose idea seems to be a loan from BONNY AND CLYDE and Milian and Susan George have enough chemistry to see it through even when their constant bickering crosses the line from amusing to annoying. Milian's Jed is cut from that mould of distinctly latino temperament, the kind of uncomplicated picaresque irreverence Italians loved to introduce in their characters because it borough the western back home in a way, which owes a big debt to Tuco from Leone's GBU (as do all the characters of that lineage).

In the end the movie doesn't amount to much and the questionable choice of undermining Tellys Savalas' suave menace by turning him from a cruel, methodic badass into a staggering blind does a good job of cutting the legs from the movie's climax, but it's still peppered with memorable moments that save the day. Great examples of spaghetti western visual irony involving coffins and barns, snappy one-liners, hilarious bits like the scene when Jed enters a photographer's shop and demands to know why his photo is missing from the "Wanted" posters he's printing, a general sense of comic-book irreverence that is at once violent and funny, Sonny and Jed, although far from a rousing success, still has enough of these little moments to recommend it to genre fans.

I've been thinking about watching this movie for almost 20 years, but always put off because of the general bad reviews I always read about it. I gotta say these reviews belong to the time the movie was originally released, 1972. They all agree that the movie is silly and that Corbucci made it with the left hand. So far from the truth. Watched today, J&S is a master spaghetti-western, totally on the average of the best Corbucci. Besides the very good Tomas Milian's performance, the witty dialogues, the fabulous cast (Susan George, Telly Savalas, Laura Betti), the charming winter-time Almeria desert locations, the fast pace of the narration and the excellent Morricone's score, J$S stands out for the memorable Jed and Sonny characters and for the love Corbucci shows, once more, for the losers, the marginals and the misfits. There's no clue Corbucci made it just to be on the track of then box-office Spaghetti-western hits like, e.g., Trinità. J&S is a genuine tale about two people trying to survive and keep their freedom in a world which didn't give them any chance. References to Bonnie & Clyde? Not so many. More simply, Corbucci and his writers face the theme of the criminal couple on the run, and do it with an original (and witty) point of view. Which here seems to be the dichotomy nature vs. society. And if you think Corbucci is chauvinist in the way he describes the relationship between Jed and Sonny (at the beginning Jed treats his woman literally like a dog), wait until the ironic end of the movie to express your judgement. Definitely, Corbucci knew what he was doing.