Duck, You Sucker (1971)

          Unless you’ve got a weakness for spaghetti Westerns and/or the florid style of Italian director Sergio Leone, the man who more or less invented the genre, you might need NoDoz to make it through all 157 minutes of Duck, You Sucker, the last spaghetti Western that Leone directed. (More specifically, this is the last such picture he completely directed; Leone helmed parts of two subsequent entries in the genre without taking onscreen credit.) Alternately titled A Fistful of Dynamite and available in several different versions, some with running times as short as two hours, Duck, You Sucker features the filmmaker’s signature tropes of an intense friendship/rivalry between violent men; big-canvas battle scenes involving explosions and hordes of bullet-ridden extras; pretentious allusions to political ideals; and a kooky musical score by the great Ennio Morricone.

          There’s no question that many of these elements produced timeless cinema in the ’60s, notably The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and there’s no question that generations of fans consider Leone’s operatic approach to frontier morality intoxicating. For me, alas, Duck, You Sucker is dull and excessive. Beyond the interminable running time, the film is built around a ridiculous performance by Rod Steiger, who is not only absurdly miscast as a Mexican revolutionary/robber but also can’t seem to decide whether he’s in a campy comedy or a dour drama. Flailing his hands like he’s spoofing Latinos, barking dialogue as if he’s playing to the cheap seats, and swaggering like he’s the biggest stud south of the border, Steiger is a cartoon from start to finish. Even though he has a few incisive moments, pantomiming in scenes when his character can’t (or won’t) find the right words, he’s exhausting to watch.

          Steiger’s costar, James Coburn, fares somewhat better in the movie’s other leading role. Playing an Irish saboteur hiding out in Mexico, Coburn is smoothly sociopathic, wearing a duster lined with sticks of dynamite as well as a canteen filled with nitro. Since Coburn plays a man haunted by a betrayal that happened back in his homeland (the details of which are revealed in flashbacks), the actor gets to portray a character instead of a caricature. He’s not exactly dimensional, per se, but he’s a hell of a lot easier to take than Steiger.

          And what about the story, you might ask? Well, if you’ve been down the spaghetti-Western road before, you already know the story is irrelevant—true to the genre’s norms, the narrative of Duck, You Sucker is alternately bewildering and idiotic. The gist is that after Steiger’s character cajoles Coburn’s character into helping with a robbery, they get enmeshed in a revolution—the familiar reluctant-antiheroes routine. However, the narrative is secondary to the style of the piece, since Leone unleashes all of his razzle-dazzle gimmicks—outlandish plot twists, sweaty close-ups, tricky tracking shots, visual jokes, and so on. Therefore, how much you enjoy this picture depends entirely on your appetite for Leone’s comic-book silliness.

Duck, You Sucker: FUNKY

My Name Is Nobody (1973)

          One of the best spaghetti Westerns to emerge in the latter part of the genre’s short life cycle, this strangely compelling dramedy was conceived and partially directed by the genre’s grand master, Sergio Leone. The bizarre story begins with the introduction of Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda), an aging outlaw who wants to live out his retirement in peace and quiet. Unfortunately, Beauregard’s reputation precedes him, and young gunslingers regularly challenge him to shoot-outs. One day, Beauregard meets a mysterious young man who calls himself “Nobody” (Terence Hill).

          A lightning-fast shot and a mischievous prankster, Nobody regards Beauregard as a living legend. They share adventures together, and then Nobody says it’s his dream to see Beauregard die in a blaze of glory. (Hey, what are friends for?) Accepting that a violent death is probably his fate, Beauregard agrees to confront “The Wild Bunch,” a giant horde of 150 robbers who ride the West looking for trouble. In the movie’s outrageous finale, Beauregard and Nobody both find the destinies they seek.

          As with the best Leone movies, what makes My Name Is Nobody work is the style, not the story. Through a combination of elaborate editing, histrionic music, and mythic characterization, Leone and the picture’s credited director, Tonio Valerii, create a sense of gods walking the earth, men with gifts and problems mere mortals cannot comprehend. In Leone’s expansive worldview, the people Beauregard and Nobody kill should be grateful to enrich the outlaws’ legacies, and the West is the scroll on which the characters’ inspiring stories are being written. When this kind of hokum connects, as it does many times in this movie, the effect is intoxicating, a larger-than-life opera of bullets and testosterone.

          It helps, a lot, that regular Leone collaborator Ennio Morricone contributes one of his most demented musical scores, employing everything from cavalry charges to elegiac melodies to shrill flute solos and weird vocal shrieks. The sequences that approach surrealism—like a scene of a stilt-walker having his “legs” shot out from under him—are incredibly vivid, even though scenes like Nobody’s painstaking attempt to capture a drowning fly are merely peculiar. (With Leone, you take the bad to get the good.)

          Fonda is strong, investing his performance with a likeable flavor of world-weary bitchiness, and the vivacious Hill blends physical comedy with tough-guy heroics. Reliable supporting players including R.G. Armstrong and Geoffrey Lewis add flavor, as do a slew of Italian character actors, though the real star of the movie is actually Leone. Whether he or Valerii directed the bulk of the film is ultimately irrelevant, since this picture is unquestionably infused with Leone’s unique sensibility. More importantly, the heartfelt ending is deepened by the knowledge that My Name Is Nobody was Leone’s last major statement in a wild subgenre he dominated.

My Name Is Nobody: GROOVY