This is the forgotten Sergio Leone spaghetti western. The number of people who were intended to be in this movie but ended up not being is large. Essentially the character played by Rod Steiger is Tuco from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and indeed Eli Wallach was supposed to play it. He initially refused because he was signed on for another film, but Leone badgered him so much that he backed out of that one, but by that time the studio had given Leone Steiger (who owed them a film) and so Wallach was out. Understandably, he was peeved, and sued. Clint Eastwood was approached for the James Coburn role but decided he was becoming too associated with spaghetti westerns, so he instead made... Hang 'Em High. If Eastwood and Wallach had been the leads and the film was called something more sensible, like, I don't know, For More Than Dollars, this would be legendary. (Its alternative title is A Fistful of Dynamite, which would have worked with those two, I'm sure.) If anything, Wallach is missed more than Eastwood. Coburn's character is Irish (would he have been if Eastwood was cast?) and has a romantic backstory, and it required a kind of softness and range that is not really Clint's forte. But Steiger, while definitely charismatic, is doing a dangerously-close-to-parody version of Wallach's cod-Mexican accent, and somehow it's more glaring with him (perhaps because we're so familiar with him from On the Waterfront and In the Heat of the Night).
Anyway, the actual film, while it has stretches of pure Leone noodling (lots of slow motion being cool for no good reason), is fairly coherent (I defy anyone to summarize the plot of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) and actually fairly political. The film starts with Steiger's Juan Miranda pissing on an ant hill (is this a comment on the insects at the beginning of The Wild Bunch?) and then being reluctantly admitted on to a fancy stagecoach (which is huge and incredibly luxe inside, complete with an entire dining table) where the poshos mock him and call him an animal, and ask if he even knows who his father and children are. Well, very soon the joke is on them,
because they pass a group of men and boys lazing around that immediately surround the stagecoach and kill its guards, and it emerges that they are Juan's father and sons (the smallest of which is particularly bloodthirsty). The poshos are taken out and stripped, while squirmily enough, the one woman who was particularly condescending (accusing the poor of rutting like animals) is taken off and Juan sexually assaults her. One would hope that this scene would not be part of any remake. Anyway, shortly after the stripped poshos are driven off the road into a ditch, the attention of our baditos is diverted by a series of explosions in the distance. They get closer and then out of a cloud of dust rides a figure on a motorcycle.
He rides right by them, but Juan shoots out his tire to stop him. He responds by getting off, examining his tire, then strolling back (not saying a word) to where they stand next to the ransacked stagecoach, gets a light off the stunned Juan (this foreshadows the end of the film, in a nice bookend), and throws something the size of a cigarette on to the roof of the stagecoach. Then, walking back to his motorcycle, he says "Duck, you sucker!" and the roof explodes. When Juan threatens to shoot him in return, he demonstrates
what the bottle of Nitro he is holding can do with just a single drop and then asks them to imagine what would happen if they shot him and he dropped it. Then he goes and relaxes in the stagecoach, instructing them to fix his motorcycle. Juan has quickly worked out that these explosives could be very useful (he has a dream of robbing a fabled bank in Mesa Verde (a name that should be familiar to fans of Better Call Saul) that his father failed to rob when Juan was a boy). But as the tire is fixed, he and his henchmen go through all the baggage strapped to the bike. One of the henchmen says that they could just do the dynamiting themselves. When Juan says it requires expertise, the henchman says "all you need is matches and some balls" (sidenote: this is definitely a seventies film, because the amount of "fucks" that get thrown around is eye-opening, considering Once Upon a Time in the West was just three years earlier - but who knows, maybe they were there in the Italian in that one), so Juan gives him the chance to demonstrate, and of course he blows himself to bits (a charred hatbrim falls at Juan's feet) and Coburn's character (John/Sean Mallory) smiles to himself with his eyes closed, and mutters "short fuse". However, Juan does find an Irish newspaper in the luggage with a wanted poster in it with John's face on it, and that, along with the "IRA" flag also in the luggage reveals to him that John is on the run from a revolution (and finds himself in the middle of another, as this takes place during the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s). Indeed, periodically throughout the film, we get gauzy, wordless flashbacks of John's time in Ireland, where he was part of a Jules et Jim-style menage a trois
with a buddy who ends up betraying the cause after being tortured by the British (and Johnny kills him for it).
So Johnny carries emotional baggage as well as literal.
Anyway, John initially resists Juan's "Johnny and Johnny"
proposal to team up to rob banks (and departs on foot, after Juan shoots his motorcycle again, and in return Johnny blows up everything that remains of the stagecoach.
However, Juan basically tricks him into blowing up the owner of the local silver mine by accident and he has nothing to lose in joining the bandit gang. Then my memory gets hazy, and they take separate routes to Mesa Verde, with Juan and his gang going by train, where they meet a doctor who surprisingly assists them in dealing with the guards.
The doctor turns out to be a revolutionary leader (you know, like Johnny's friend from Ireland) but and Juan is tricked into raiding the bank only to find it full, not of gold, but imprisoned revolutionaries.
He is a reluctant hero of the revolution. But revolutions are a long process, and they soon encounter a Nazi-style leader of the counter-revolution, Colonel Gunther Ruiz
(who has a skeletal face that reminded me of Richard Widmark with a hint of Steve Buscemi), who vows revenge on them after they destroy a line of tanks of his. Indeed, shortly after this, tragedy strikes, and Juan loses his entire family ("all six. I never counted them before" (turns out the sneering poshos were right)). This fully converts him to the cause, but it also means he needs rescuing after he is captured trying to get his revenge. In the course of rescuing Juan, John sees something that gives him serious flashbacks and sets up a major train-collision scene at the climax of the movie.
In general, this movie looks epic. The scenery is incredible, there are thousands of extras,
there are lots of very real and very large explosions, and the train crashes look very realistic. This definitely deserves to be at least as well-known as the Dollar trilogy and OUaTitW, even if its Morricone score isn't quite at their level (which still means it's better than just about anyone else's would have been). There are some definitely a bit, well Italian moments that sort of take one out of the picture, but also genuinely moving moments. No western fan, and definitely no spaghetti western fan can hold their head high without having seen it. Just be prepared for some very heavy fake accents.
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