Andalusia, Arizona

The spaghetti western exploded onto the American market in 1967, when Sergio Leone's Dollars films were released stateside in quick succession. But even before that, the genre had acquired a reputation for reinvigorating careers. When Clint Eastwood advised his friend Burt Reynolds to take the lead in a new Italian project, Reynolds - then fresh off a three-year stint on Gunsmoke and keen to make his transition to the big screen - said yes.

Unfortunately for the actor, Navajo Joe (1966) was produced by legendary B-movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis in his first foray into the western genre. By the time Reynolds realised that the film was to be directed by Sergio Corbucci, not Leone as he had been led to believe, he could no longer back out of his contract. So Reynolds had to grit his teeth and bear his season of indentured servitude on location in Almería before fleeing back to the States.

Released to the withering reviews American critics enjoyed lavishing on Italian genre films in the sixties, Navajo Joe has never quite been rehabilitated in the way of Corbucci's other pictures. Reynolds regularly refers to the production as his worst experience in the business: true, no doubt, although the feelings of the star of such latter-day masterpieces as In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale shouldn't be mistaken for critical judgment. Because Navajo Joe isn't just decent: it's a damn great spaghetti western, and far from Corbucci's least.

A band of peaceful Navajos (who live in tepees in the film's imagination) are massacred and scalped by bounty hunters led by Duncan (Aldo Sambrell). Pursued by a lone Indian warrior (Burt Reynolds), the killers make it to the nearest town, where they are informed that the state will no longer sanction their murder of Navajos. (This does not work out for the local sheriff, who is shot by Duncan in cold blood.) An alternative source of income opens up for the bandits, however, when Dr Chester Lynne (Pierre Cressoy) hires them to intercept a train carrying the sum of a million dollars to the small town of Esperanza.

The robbery goes to plan at first, but the Navajo warrior manages to steal the train Duncan's men have secured from under their noses and take it to Esperanza, whose citizens he offers his help in fending off Duncan. The townsfolk, however, prefer to trust in sending the secretly treacherous Dr Lynne for help. Joe sticks around, meanwhile, for revenge and to help Estella (Nicoletta Machiavelli), Mrs Lynne's half-indigenous servant.

Pace some critics, the plot seems rather good to me: straightforward but with clear stakes, and kicked off with the effective trope of a man seeking revenge for the murder of his family. The problem, really, is the characters. Machiavelli's Estella is awfully underdeveloped, and her importance to the plot seems to fluctuate wildly from scene to scene. Worse, Sambrell's Duncan has little in the way of clear motivation. He hates both Indians and white people because as a 'half-breed' he was ostracised by both - well and good; but that motive only appears here and there, and for much of the film he behaves villainously because it's expected of him. We don't come to spaghetti westerns for characters with a compelling inner life, but a little more wouldn't hurt.

That would matter less if Reynolds's performance was better. A gruelling shoot can translate into compelling cinema - see Apocalypse Now, or every Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski collaboration - but here Reynolds's misery just shows in every scene. And the wisdom of casting him as a Native American could certainly be questioned, part-Cherokee or no: at a time when blackface had thankfully been consigned to the past, a white person with copious fake tan and an awkward wig was still thought a good enough approximation of a Native American. (Case in point: the even more Aryan Machiavelli.) Of course, given structural racism in the industry there weren't exactly many high-profile indigenous actors, but someone had to break that vicious cycle.





At the level of script and acting, then, Navajo Joe is certainly not above reproach. But hell, Corbucci's direction is another thing entirely. Full of terrific compositions and stark angles, Navajo Joe is even more aggressively stylised than Django, achieving a rough-hewn poetry that was not surpassed until Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West two years later (and which, arguably, Corbucci himself never achieved again). Occasionally the flourishes threaten to tip the film into ridiculousness, but all in all Corbucci manages the balance.

Even inventive direction can't stop the film from sagging a little in its third act, but for most of its running time Navajo Joe is basically perfect by spaghetti western criteria: amazing visuals, taciturn badasses, and nihilistic violence. Oh, right: this film is brutal by the standards of the sixties. Corbucci just about has the decorum to turn away during the scalpings, but the gruesome trophies themselves are waved about gleefully, and bleached skulls make frequent appearances. It may be a coincidence that Ruggero Deodato, whose infamous Cannibal Holocaust (1980) reduced the human body to bloody pieces, worked as Corbucci's assistant director on this film; but it certainly feels as if there should be a connection.

Once upon a time in a barely disguised allegory

The Zapata western - a burgeoning subgenre of spaghetti westerns set during the Mexican Revolution - was always overtly didactic. Exploring US imperialism, revolutionary politics, militarism and violence with a furrowed brow, these films were far more obviously about the tense political situation in Italy than the only implicitly critical escapism proffered by the industry at large. I don't suppose the phrases 'carefully constructed Marxist critique' and 'box office gold' go hand in hand these days, but you must remember it was the sixties.

1968's Il mercenario (titled The Mercenary during its North American run, but since then known as A Professional Gun in the English-speaking world) was one of the most commercially successful examples of the form, but it wasn't particularly well respected among the more serious minds in Zapata western circles, for reasons we shall attend to presently. The film did, however, reunite director Sergio Corbucci and star Franco Nero, the team behind 1966's smash hit Django.

Sergei Kowalski (Nero, barely recognisable from his star-making role thanks to some magnificent facial hair) is a Polish gunslinger who is hired by Mexican mining barons to transport a load of silver to the United States, protecting it from the rebels roaming the area. Arriving at the mine, Kowalski finds the place in the hands of revolutionaries led by Paco Román (Tony Musante).

When the army attacks, Kowalski lets Paco pay him handsomely to fight them off with the machine gun he carries around ('Two hundred [dollars], you bastard - here, I hope you spend it on doctors!', Paco curses). The next day, Kowalski is accosted by Curly (Jack Palance), a villainous American trying to get his hands on the silver, but he is rescued by Paco's men. Curly swears revenge for the death of his men (one of whom, it is implied, was his lover), but is stripped naked and forced to walk back to civilisation by the rebels. Thereafter, Paco hires Kowalski as military advisor for the revolutionary war.

At a purely narrative level the film feels rote and uninspired. What isn't boilerplate is awkwardly shoved in: the character of Columba (Giovanna Ralli), for example, serves little purpose except as plot device and eye candy. And the film suffers from a series of false endings, stopping and starting repeatedly in its last fifteen minutes before coming to a close with a message that doesn't really respond to the arc of the character it's imparted to.

That mess is particularly odd considering the film seems to announce bold intentions early on. The credits are superimposed on photographs from the Mexican Revolution, drenched in red in the style of the previous year's Bonnie and Clyde, set to an insistent Ennio Morricone piece as if some sort of serious social critique was the aim. And it just carries right on, with a scene in which the miners are served scraps while the bosses feast right from the 'men and maggots' chapter of The Battleship Potemkin. And then there's the above image of company gun thugs hanged in front of a mural praising the revolution.

Nor would it be fair to accuse Corbucci of frivolity, and that makes it even stranger: that same year, after all, saw the release of The Great Silence, a film so grim and nihilistic it pushed the spaghetti western into and out the other side of parody. In other words, Corbucci's first entry into an ordinarily serious subgenre was pretty silly - no film in which one of the parties enters the climactic gunfight wearing a clown costume can claim to be all that straight-faced - while the 'standard' spaghetti western, which left more leeway for and would eventually descend into lightheartedness, was where he chose to place the darkest of his works.

Even though it does not deliver on the promise of its beginning - or, judging from the sort of person Corbucci was, possibly deliberately baits the audience - Il mercenario is far from a waste. Nero's self-amused bastard is as fantastic as ever, and he absolutely rocks the scenes in which he grants himself special treatment just to anger Paco (a device that would be reused by Eastwood in High Plains Drifter). Corbucci's style is nothing to sniff at, either: besides signature moves, the showiest bit of direction is a 360-degree tracking shot of Curly riding in a circle while a man is beaten offscreen. It's not great Corbucci, but is it ever interesting.

At the heart of winter

Italian genre directors of the sixties had few artistic pretensions: they made commercial films. Take the so-called 'dollars trilogy'. Sergio Leone found a formula and star he could work with and struck the iron while it was hot, churning out three films that share no plot points or characters in rapid succession. What's more, directors dabbled in a variety of genres and styles, adopted the latest fads and ripped each other off enthusiastically. Creative anarchy yielded some esteemed classics alongside a whole lot of forgotten genre fare.

Strangely, this altogether mercenary system provides unexpected support for auteur theory. Italian directors may have been hard-working, extraordinarily skilled craftsmen rather than soulful romantic artists, but their films tend to brim with a fierce individualism that was encouraged by the heightened, nonrealistic styles developed in the giallo and western genres.

Sergio Corbucci, I'm starting to realise, was very much an auteur. We last encountered him in 1966, riding high on the success of Django. The following two years are as clear a lesson as anyone could want on the nature of the Italian film industry, for during that time Corbucci directed no fewer than six films - four westerns (Johnny Oro, Navajo Joe, Hellbenders and A Professional Gun), a thriller (Death on the Run) and a musical comedy (Zum zum zum).

The next Corbucci classic, 1968's The Great Silence (Il grande silenzio), is infamous for an ending so bleak that Corbucci had to shoot an alternate version for several markets. I haven't seen the sanitised cut, but it must be as jarring tonally as the actual ending is morally. The Great Silence, you see, is dark and nihilistic to an extent previously unseen in the genre. Corbucci takes all the meaner elements of the spaghetti western and exaggerates them into something resembling grotesque. Parody isn't the right word, though. The film feels too serious for that.

During the great blizzard of 1899, a community of religious dissenters is being hunted down by bounty hunters in the wilderness of the Utah mountains. (The time and place imply they're Mormon fundamentalists, but I don't believe they're ever named as such.) But the hired killers don't stop at outlaws. When her husband is shot dead by Loco (Klaus Kinski), Pauline (Vonetta McGee) hires a gunslinger nicknamed Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant), mute since bounty hunters shot his family and cut his throat to keep him quiet, to exact revenge.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Burnett (Frank Wolff) is sent by the governor to restore order and end the violence by granting a general amnesty. After his horse is eaten by the outlaws, he barely survives to make it to his destination. He's horrified by the conditions there: Loco lugs frozen corpses around to prove his kills, while local justice of the peace and general store owner Pollicutt (Luigi Pistilli) is openly siding with the bounty hunters and making advances on Pauline.

Django was named for the famous jazz guitarist's paralysed fingers. The character of Silence is another of the director's off-colour jokes, as the taciturn nature of the spaghetti western is exaggerated into literal muteness. But here it actually harms the film. The character concept is interesting, but Trintignant just isn't a good enough physical actor to make it work. Instead, his unforgivably bland hero is constantly outshone by everyone around him.

To be fair, Corbucci seems to have realised this. I couldn't swear to it, but it certainly feels as if Kinski's Loco gets more screentime than Silence, and rightly so. In a black fur coat he resembles a vulture, brutal and amused by the scruples of lesser mortals but not apparently cruel. He carefully notes his kills in a ledger and stresses the lawfulness of his profession, insisting that 'it's our bread and butter'. He's level-headed enough not to let Silence provoke him into a gunfight he knows he would lose. Even his racism ('What times we live in - blacks worth as much as a white man', he laments after shooting Pauline's husband) is more lip-service to his white privilege than the fierce bigotry one would expect of an antagonist.

He's the Old West villain as murderous accountant, a savage indictment of the legally sanctioned violence of capitalism. I can't prove it, but I suspect there's a hint of the 'banality' of bureaucratised mass murder that Hannah Arendt's writings on Eichmann had highlighted earlier in the decade. If so, it might be part of the reason Kinski's lines were not overdubbed by a native English speaker. That, and the fact he's Klaus Kinski. It's a formidable performance, physically relatively restrained but no less mesmerising for it.

The rest of the cast range from the fantastic (Luigi Pistilli's literal murderous accountant) to the good (Frank Wolff's overmatched lawman). Vonetta McGee's performance is not much more than serviceable and her character arc hardly makes much sense, but she is helped by being gorgeous & awesome, if I may abandon my critical detachment for a second. And she gets a rare 'let's run away together, abandoning the bus full of orphans to certain doom!' speech that is actually vindicated by subsequent events.

Frequent handheld close-ups and a focus on squalor even more intense than seen in Django result in a rougher, less stately look than the earlier film. The production design, though, is at least as good. Silence's Mauser C96 semi-automatic pistol is one hell of a cool gun (much is made of the historically accurate use of the stock as a holster). And the wintry vistas of the Italian alps give The Great Silence a natural grandeur Django lacks, although those who've been to the Dolomites and recognise the mountains are in for a pretty severe alienation effect. Last but not least Ennio Morricone turns in another terrific score - though where his work for Leone tends to come out blasting, here the music begins subtly and builds over the film, for a suitably dramatic showdown. It's a great film: nasty, cold and hopeless, to be sure, but great nonetheless.

With your shinin' coffin can

Left-pond the spaghetti western is synonymous with the films of Sergio Leone, whose Dollars trilogy made a star of Clint Eastwood. To Germans and other Europeans, this is not so. Over here Leone's films take their place among hundreds of other spaghetti westerns, Bud Spencer/Terence Hill buddy comedies, and West German adaptations of Karl May's late-nineteenth-century western novels filmed in Yugoslavia.

To be sure, the Euro-western fell on fertile soil in a country that had been obsessed with western lore and Native American culture since imperial times. The genre's rise to becoming a major part of German culture and staple of Saturday-afternoon television is still astonishing, though. Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966) wasn't the first spaghetti western to be popular in West Germany. But it was such a massive hit that it spawned dozens of unauthorised sequels, led to the retitling of every Franco Nero film as Django-something-or-other and immortalised the character in sketch comedy.

In a genre replete with stone-cold badasses, Django still manages to put in one hell of an opening. A man wearing a Union cavalry coat (Franco Nero) drags a coffin through a mud-drenched hellscape. He comes upon María (Loredana Nusciak), a woman on the run being whipped by Mexican soldiers. The Mexicans are gunned down by a bunch of racist ex-Confederates dressed in red hoods, who are in turn dispatched by Django. María and Django head to a hotel/brothel in a ghost town on the Mexican border, where Django leans on reluctant owner Nathaniel (Ángel Álvarez) to provide them with shelter.

The reason for Nathaniel's worry soon becomes clear: he owes protection money to two armed gangs jockeying for control of the area. A remnant of Confederate Klansmen led by sadistic Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo) imposes a white supremacist reign of terror on the local Mexicans and Indians, while a second force is led by General Rodríguez (José Bódalo), who's crossed the border to escape the Mexican army. (Although it's not stated explicitly and spaghetti westerns generally play fast and loose with history and geography, the film seems to be set sometime between 1865-67, during the French intervention in Mexico.) Django manages to mow down most of Jackson's soldiers with a gatling gun hidden in his coffin and throws in his lot with Rodríguez, whom he helps steal a large quantity of gold dust from a Mexican fort. But the general's unwillingness to give Django his share of the loot threatens to fracture their uneasy alliance, while a down but not out Jackson lurks in the background.

The stranger playing two unlikeable factions against each other, invented by Leone in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), was a staple of the spaghetti western by 1966. Corbucci, his brother Bruno and their collaborators reinvigorated the trope first by playing up the nastiness of one side. Rodríguez and his Mexicans are venal, but Jackson is wicked beyond belief. Fajardo does some great work portraying a cold aristocrat who believes killing ostensible inferiors is his birthright. The first time the major is seen, he is hunting captured Mexicans for sport. It's a savage critique of the violence of white supremacy in a film industry that, having produced the notoriously colonialist cannibal film, is not generally known for its anti-racism.

It's certainly an uncompromising vision, by which I mean Django is a damn violent film. Like most spaghetti westerns it's cold and nihilistic, but unlike e.g. Leone's films it's also full of gore that was considered so excessive the film remained banned or thereabouts in Britain until the nineties. It's not quite as outré by today's standards, but a scene in which a man has his ear cut off and is forced to eat it still has the power to shock. The single-mindedness is also in the film's squalid look, with Corbucci persuading set designer Giancarlo Simi to leave the set south-west of Rome in its mud-soaked state. It doesn't look anything like the American southwest, but doesn't resemble Italy either: it looks like the forecourt of hell.

It's a mood piece, and both direction and music support it in that respect. There's a shot of Nero drinking while the brim of his hat conceals the upper half of his face, reused by Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter (1973). Corbucci's go-to trick, though, is a rapid zoom from medium shot to close-up. It's used perhaps half a dozen times, to diminishing returns; but while it's good it's very good. Ennio Morricone has so influenced our notion of what a spaghetti western should sound like - strings, harmonica, whistling - that Luis Bacalov's work somehow seems wrong. But it's actually tremendously effective, more than enough to earn Bacalov his cult following (including Quentin Tarantino, who asked Bacalov to contribute music to Kill Bill).

To my mind, though, it's Franco Nero's film above all. As written, Django is the spaghetti western archetype of the amoral drifter who's the protagonist but hardly the hero. Nero, reluctantly stepping into the role after meat-and-potatoes western actor Mark Damon was prevented by scheduling issues, has the charismatic on-screen personality and Henry-Fonda-like ice-blue eyes for the part. The performance itself - Django as a self-amused, even cruel anti-hero - cast a long shadow over the western, arguably even influencing Eastwood's in High Plains Drifter. That it inspired a legion of imitators is no surprise; that it took over twenty years for Nero to step back into the role is.