Watching the MOC documentary on the
Grand Silence disc about Spaghetti Westerns, as well as watching that film for the first time, really made me evaluate and look at the genre a different way. I hadn't been exposed to enough of the films to really understand just what many of the classics in the genre were attempting to upend, and I was mostly focused on the more violent nature of the films.
So with that said, it took me a minute to really understand where this film was going, as I can be excused for thinking halfway through the film it'd be some nonstop chase film about a really annoying bandit! But when the film really starts to turn, after the prison scene, it really started becoming one of the most interesting westerns I've seen.
Lee Van Cleef, unsurprisingly, deserves a lot of the credit for the effectiveness of this film. I could feel how annoyed he was getting, as I myself shared that annoyance! After about an hour he's gone from a hunter that could never run out of energy to seeming downright fatigued. And the way Van Cleef acts out that exhaustion is really effective. Once the film reaches it's overtly political final act I was very sold, and loved how it ended.
The package from Indicator is indeed stunning. I only made it through the first article in the book, but learning that the story underpinning this film was written by the same person that wrote
Salvatore Giuliano was interesting and made sense. Indicator give a variety of options in terms of cuts and audio options. I went with the somewhat annoying but honestly the only way that made sense to watch the film: Italian cut with English audio. Given that there are cuts to the Italian version where no dialogue was recorded for an English, it actually makes for a very efficient way to watch the film because you know exactly what was excised from the English cut. For most of the film the cuts seemed pretty minor to me, though there are definitely some conversations where in the Italian cut, you get an extra minute or two of conversation that is enjoyable for pacing. However there is one cut in the English version that was bonkers to me.
As Van Cleef and the son of the railroad magnate are getting ready to hunt down the bandit on foot, it sure seems that Van Cleef is getting ready to change course and aim his fire at the actual guilty party. In the Italian cut, however, he adds a line: "The Mexican is mine." If you take out that line, it seems fairly obvious where Van Cleef is going at this point, but keeping that line in actually does heighten the ambiguity a bit, and it's a shame to lose that line. There's another line at the end that gets cut as well. "You made me lose a lot of money Corbett, but less than I thought. Here, there is a bit of moralizing going on, and someone who was to benefit from corruption actually says out loud that they are better off without the money that corruption brings.
It seems like such a great example of how theatrical cuts, whether taken out of director's hands for final cut or domestic versions like this, adjust the meaning of a film. Without these two lines, you have a final shootout and then riding off into the sunset. These lines, though brief, add a dimension to the film that they'd really be missing without them,
and therefore I recommend the Italian version.
