Once
Upon A Time In Italy
(1967 - 1976/DVD boxed set/Anchor Bay)
Picture/Sound/Extras/Films:
A
Bullet For The General
(1967) B-/C/D/C+
Companeros
(1970) B-/C/C/B-
Four
Of The Apocalypse
(1975) B-/C/C/B-
Keoma
(1976) B-/C/B-/B-
Texas,
Adios
(1966) C+/C/C/B
NOTE:
Since
this set was issued back in 2004 (!), Bullet
For The General
and Companeros
have been issued in great Blu-ray upgrades by Blue Underground you
can read more about at these links:
Bullet For The
General
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/11617/A+Bullet+For+The+General+(1968/aka+Quien+Sa
Companeros
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/13065/Companeros+(1970/Blue+Underground+Blu-ray
If
all you know about the Spaghetti Western trend is a few films by
Sergio Leone, even if you have seen all five of them (A
Fistful Of Dollars,
For
A Few Dollars More,
The
Good, The Bad and The Ugly,
Once
Upon A Time In The West
and Duck,
You Sucker (A Fistful of Dynamite);
all now on Blu-ray since we first posted this review and most
reviewed elsewhere on this site), then you have no idea of what
really was produced in that cycle of The Western. To add to the
previous DVD releases (and re-releases) of M-G-M, Paramount and VCI
is Anchor Bay, with an impressive new five DVD boxed set boldly
entitled Once
Upon A Time In Italy.
This box reissues five
other films not involving Leone that are among the most graphic and
relentless Westerns ever made, which Anchor Bay first offered
individually in 2001. This is a nice way to repackage them in an
exceptional box and slender-case packaging. They are all in their
unrated versions, most of these films have never been on video in the
U.S. at all, while this is the first time any of them had been uncut
since their original release. Some never finished their run that
way, and one here has not been seen for over 25 years!
As a result, new prints
had to be struck for just about all the films and they are all
unrated, which will come especially as a surprise to fans who have
lived with some of them as R-Rated for decades. Some of the films in
the cycle were done to me more comic and commercial, but these are
the opposite, trying to top Leone s vision.
A
Bullet For The General
is Damiano Damiani's overtly political Western with Gian Maria
Volonte (A
Fistful Of Dollars)
as the gang leader taking his people against the power held by the
title character. The great character twists here include Klaus
Kinski as the holy man El Santo, out for the kill! As the trailer
boasts, what
the Lord giveth, he took away,
Bond Girl Martine Beswick as Adalita, a murderous seductress, and Lou
Castel as that American
Gringo
who decides to help the gang out. Unfortunately, the politics are
undercut by genre conventions Leone would have avoided, but that does
not negate the politics. However, despite the star power and
potential fruits that could bare are never realized. It is still
watchable, especially with the print looking this good, and the
actors are compelling enough. The Salvatore Laurani/Franco Solinas
screenplay still feels like a missed opportunity, especially with
what Kinski went on to do.
Companeros
is a title that has been often used, it turns out, but none have the
cool theme song this one has. An arms dealer (Franco Nero) gets
involved in revolution and the robbery of gold. He makes an unholy
alliance with a killer thief (Tomas Milian), though they are not the
best of friends. They also have to juggle to drug-crazed killer
(Jack Palance, who is not in the film enough, but in what was typical
of these films, would take an American actor's cameo and pretend it
was a starring role), a clever female revolutionary (Karin Schubert),
and a professor (Fernando Rey) who knows how to get the gold. This
worked better, thanks in part to an actual Morricone score, but the
film is not always as successful. It does more with its star power,
but the usual trappings of sadistic torture and women to be beaten,
humiliated and raped grows tired instantly, especially with a
predictable screenplay. Director Sergio Corbucci, who came up with
the idea and co-wrote the film with four others (one uncredited),
gives the film some energy, but cannot rise above convention.
Four
Of The Apocalypse
is a film that never originally made it to the United States, is the
only 1.85 X 1 film in this box and the most graphic. It is also
directed by Lucio Fulci, better known for his Horror genre films, and
that might be the reason fellow Horror genre director Sam Raimi may
have preferred this same frame for his Spaghetti Western, The
Quick and The Dead
(1995). This is even better than the prior films, but the time spent
on they outdoors is reminiscent of the music breaks in many late
1960s/early 1970s films of the time, trying to capitalize on Mike
Nichols' The
Graduate,
Rockumentaries and like movements and trends. This seems to be added
to update the cycle, but turns the film into a time capsule instead.
Part of the look and the soundtrack is trying at times to emulate
Robert Altman's McCabe
& Mrs. Miller
(see it elsewhere on this site), but it is not on that level. It is
at its best when it gets dirty as four outcasts (Fabio Testi, Michael
J. Pollard, Lynne Frederick, and Harry Baird) escape a massacre by
masked murderers and are on the run. The rag tags here include, in
the best Stagecoach
tradition, a gambler, hooker, drunk, and meet their match in the even
crazier psychopath (Tomas Milian) out to settle a few scores of his
own when he is not outright crazy. Will they or will they not make
it? The characters are not as involving as one would hope, but they
are somewhat likable. I give the film points for its naturalistic
approach, and that goes beyond nudity and scenery, as Fulci has more
vision than the directors of the previous films.
Keoma
occurs at the end of the cycle, which coincides with the final years
of Techniscope (using dye-transfer technicolor before it becomes
two-perf Super 35 and/or Chromoscope), using CinemaScope lenses
instead. This is the newest film in the box, though its overseas
success almost kept these films going. This is the first time this
has been available in the U.S. and director Enzo G. Castellari, whose
much more comical Any
Gun Can Play
(1967, on DVD from VCI) offers an ambitious attempt at a serious
attempt at a Western. Too many bad, obvious music moments (like a
model for bad MTV to come) and a problematic, limited grasp of race
issues date what could have been a key film in the genre, especially
with Franco Nero as the title character, a half-breed rejected by his
brothers, who grow up to be power mad murderers. Woody Strode,
William Berger, and Olga Karlatos as the woman Keoma saves early on,
despite her being treated as having some unnamed plague. It just
starts too many things it cannot finish, but is always interesting to
watch. If it was attempting to be supernatural, that failed.
Texas,
Adios
has what would seem to be a typical Revenge Western plot, as two
brothers (Franco Nero and Alberto Dell'Acqua under the name Cole
Kitosch) go from Texas to Mexico to get revenge on the powerful
Delgado (Jose Suarez) for killing their father. Besides
exceptionally well choreographed fistfights and gunfights,
director/co-writer (with Franco Rossetti) Fernando Baldi shows a true
love of the genre and gets solid performances out of the cast, so
much so that this was the toughest one to try to watch with an
English dub. This does not feel like the overdubbed, stiff,
unintentionally funny film from the cycle. That they were using
actual anamorphic lenses was unusual for the cycle, so there were
high hopes for this film and it certainly delivered the goods. Too
bad it got lost to history, until this DVD.
The
various aspect ratios on all five DVDs feature the plus of being
anamorphically enhanced. Though the back of the case identifies A
Bullet For The General
as 1.85 X 1, it is really 2.35 X 1 from decent Techniscope and
Technicolor materials. To his credit, cinematographer Tony Secchi,
A.I.C., uses the frame form end to end and the presentation here
shows that. Companeros
also has the same print mistake/ratio error form the same formats and
was shot by cinematographer Alessandro Ulloa, while Four
Of The Apocalypse
is the only 1.85 X 1 film in the set, shot by cinematographer Sergio
Salvati, A.I.C., nicely enough in EastmanColor. Keoma
is identified correctly as 2.35 X 1, but is in EastmanColor, with its
scope format unidentified. The cinematographer is Aiace Parolin and
the stock shows its age, even when the color is good. The limits of
the CinemaScope lenses make it look older and even many critics are
likely to misidentify that limit as a stock or budget problem.
Texas,
Adios
has the distinction of still being the first DVD of a film shot in
Ultrascope, a very brief-lived German answer to CinemaScope used for
only three years! Created by the brilliant Jan Jacobsen, the film
used real anamorphic lenses to achieve its scope image, so it did not
cheat. However, for the period between 1965 through 1967, we could
only find ten films ever shot with these lenses. Just about all of
them were Westerns, but these lenses were forerunners of the Arri
Company's anamorphic lenses used industry wide today (even with the
rise of the Arri Alexa HD cameras since this review was first
posted). The cinematographer is Enzo Barzoni, A.I.C., achieves a
unique look here because of these impressive, underused lenses. Too
bad some of this footage looks so poor, but when it looks good, it is
some of the best footage in the entire box. I now want to see more
films in Ultrascope.
This
is the least of the five transfers, only because the color is not
consistent, likely a problem with the age of the EastmanColor
materials. Though Four
Of The Apocalypse
and Keoma
are EastmanColor, they are much newer and their stocks have survived
better. A
Bullet For The General
and Companeros
are in Technicolor so the usual logic would be the earlier films were
dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor, though they do not display the
kind of color range a dye-transfer process would.
Even
if the color was better, Texas,
Adios
does not look more defined than the more cheaply shot Techniscope
films in this box, and none of the five are as impressive as
Paramount's anamorphic transfer (and now even more impressive Blu-ray
transfer) for Once
Upon A Time In The West,
which is the Techniscope transfer to beat. This will make for an
interesting comparison to M-G-M's restored print on their new set of
The
Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
The
lossy Dolby Digital sound on all 5 DVDs, English and Italian, are
only 2.0 Mono. Also, the Italian tracks always sound a bit better
than the English ones, but both suffer post-production dubbing. A
Bullet For The General
and Keoma
only offer English dubs with no subtitles of any kind, but Ennio
Morricone supervised the music on General
by Luis Bacalov, while Morricone composed (if not conducted by) the
Companeros
score. The conductor was Bruno Nicolai. Four
Of The Apocalypse
has music by Franco Bixio, Fabio Frizzi, and Vince Tempera, with the
hit-like
songs by Cook & Benjamin Franklin Group. The Cook
is Greenfield Cook. Keoma
has a lame title song, but better instrumental music by Guido and
Maurizio De Angeles, give or take the ukulele music from Woody
Strode's character. Texas,
Adios
has a decent genre score Anton Garcia Abril and Don Powell.
Extras
for each DVD are a teaser and trailer only on A
Bullet For The General,
while Companeros
offers a trailer, some brief bio/filmographies, and a 17-minutes-long
interview segment In
the Company of Companeros.
Four
Of The Apocalypse
duplicates the latter, but its 17-minutes-long short is on Fulci.
Keoma
offers the most extras, including the only audio commentary in the
box. It is excellent and features the director with journalist
Waylon Wahl, as well as talent bios, a trailer and a ten-minute
interview with Franco Nero. The commentary is one of the best I have
heard in a while, very through form two very well spoken men who know
what they are talking about. Castellari demonstrates why he is one
of the most successful journeyman filmmakers of his generation.
Texas,
Adios
has Nero interviewed again (6 minutes length this time), with his
biography and a trailer.
So this is not a set of
all-time classics, but it is a set of very watchable Westerns from a
time when the big screen was still the big screen. They just happen
to get better as they go along, with the alphabetical order being a
coincidence. It makes sense why this was a cycle and not just a few
films by Leone. Furthermore, Franco Nero was really good in these
films and a better actor than he ever got credit for being. Having
some of his films alongside each other for the first time ever will
back that.
Once
Upon A Time In Italy
is so good, that Anchor Bay was correct in reissuing these. We can
only hope they'll find more obscure Westerns from this era and do a
couple more boxes. (They never did.)
- Nicholas Sheffo
