Giu La Testa / Duck, You Sucker! / A Fistful of Dynamite (1971): Sergio Leone's final spaghetti western is in many ways nothing of the sort. Where his earlier films--A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1966)*, and Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)--were intensely stylized renditions of good vs. evil archetypes with the occasional lusty Sancho Panza figure thrown in**--Giu La Testa takes place in a concrete historical reality, namely, the early years of the Mexican Revolution (after Madero's assassination and before Huerta's downfall, so 1913-15).*** Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger), a Tuco-like Mexican bandito (the role was originally to go to Eli Wallach), robs a stagecoach full of wealthy, snobbish passengers and tries to keep afloat during the growing institutionalized violence between the government and the rebels under Pancho Villa. Along comes John Mallory (James Coburn), an Irish explosives expert with a dark past whose contract with a wealthy German mining magnate comes to a brutal end. The two team up to rob a bank in a nearby city, only to find a hornet's nest of further violence, politics, guilt, and hard choices. Juan's avarice and understandable distrust of what happens to people like him in revolutions play well off John's tormented memories, gorgeously filmed in memorable musical flashback sequences, of what happened when he was involved with an earlier cause (this latter leading to some historical fudging, I think, on the movie's part). In many ways, it isn't so much a spaghetti western as it is a sociopolitical adventure-thriller that happens to take place in a spaghetti western-like setting. Unlike many of the earlier protagonists of Leone's films, "Juan and John" are real human beings who change and actually grow during the course of the movie, their respective cynicism and disillusioned idealism reinforced by the revolutionary goings-on of the story (if I remember right, Danny Peary likened the earlier spaghettis to ancient myth, with the gunfighters as gods who mix with mortals, their world vanishing as people increasingly lose their belief and turn to civilization, embodied in the advancing railroad of Once Upon A Time In The West). Leone's own disenchantment with the radical leftism professed by many of his fellow Italian filmmakers (I'm guessing Gillo Pontecorvo was pretty high on his list)  is reflected in the growing moral equivalence between the government and the rebels, both of which ruthlessly use ordianry people to get what they want. A major exponent of the latter is the engimatic, bourgeois Dr. Villega, played by Romolo Valli, who'd prominently figure in Vittorio de Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis that same year. He continues a fine Leone tradition of strong supporting performances by great Italian actors despite their being dubbed to the gills (for instance, Aldo Giuffre in The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Gabriele Ferzetti in Once Upon A Time In The West). One of Ennio Morricone's most charismatically loopy scores lends the film extra dollops of humor and pathos, and it's nice to see a western of any sort treat Mexico as a real country with real problems, as opposed to the "south of the border" fantasy to replace a vanishing American frontier (even in such ostensibly critical films as Sam Peckinpah's 1969 The Wild Bunch and 1973's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid--the latter also starring Coburn).**** The recent rerelease of the film on DVD features a fantastic restoration, as well as a couple of decent documentaries with film historian and Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling, as well as frequent Leone screenwriter and collaborator Sergio Donati (and a number of curators at the Museum of the American West putting together a Leone retrospective).***** Giu La Testa, which must have puzzled as many Leone fans as it pleased, deserves to be remembered as one of the great westerns and great political films of the era.

*I commonly claim this as my "favorite movie," although it's really one of ten or so, as it ranks on so many "top ten lists": Westerns, war movies, soundtracks, opening shots, opening scenes, etc.

**Generally played by a distinguished American stage actor largely associated with the work of a particular playwright, viz. Eli Wallach (Tennesse Williams) as Tuco in The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Jason Robards (Eugene O'Neill) as Cheyenne in Once Upon A Time In The West.

***Again with the endnotes; while The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly takes place during the American Civil War, with the New Mexico Campaign of 1862 as a backdrop, it's arguable that the conflict has been leached of any real meaning so that it can stand in for any war. 

****I saw this not long after Alfonso Cuaron's wonderful Solo Con Tu Pareja (1991), which rejected nationalistic and tourist fantasies of Mexico City in favor of the growing middle-class culture that was starting to make its mark at the time (reminiscent of Almodovar's approach to Spanish culture).

*****Leone's films on DVD are an odd bunch--The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, with surprisingly lackluster extras (including a sub-History Channel documentary on the New Mexico Campaign that creepily and inaccurately refers to the Civil War as the "Second American Revolution"), went for around $25-30, as did Giu La Testa, whose extras were rather more interesting, but Once Upon A Time In The West, with several different commentaries and documentaries, including a wonderfully filmed retrospective with Gabriele Ferzetti and Claudia Cardinale, is still going, so far as I know, for $10 at Borders, making it one of the great DVD bargains--an inscrutable situation.