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Film: Faccia a Faccia
Year of production: 1967
UK Release date: 20th June 2011
Distributor: Eureka
Certificate: 12
Running time: 107 mins
Director: Sergio Sollima
Starring: Tomas Milian, Gian Maria Volonté, William Berger, Jolanda Modio, Gianni Rizzo
Genre: Action/Adventure/Western
Format: DVD
Country of Production: Spain/Italy
Language: Italian/Spanish
Review by: Daryl Wing
His films never received the acclaim that two of his contemporaries, Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, rightfully earned, but Italian auteur Sergio Sollima’s movies still deserve a wider audience. Faccia a Faccia (Face To Face), the second of his three westerns, speedily sandwiched between 1966 and 1968, is considered one of his best, and the gang-busting, gun-toting actioner is finally released in the United Kingdom.
Upstanding history professor Brad Fletcher (Gian Maria Volonte) is reluctantly forced into retirement by his poor health and decides to move west for the warmer climate.
Almost as soon as he arrives, however, he is taken hostage by famed bandit Solomon Bennett (Tomas Milian), who needs to escape the attentions of the local sheriff. By necessity Fletcher is forced to take up with his cohorts as they try to reunite the Wild Gang.
But the educated man's growing identification with the gang encourages him to stage a takeover from Bennett, and a crueler system of leadership is put into place just as Pinkerton Charley Siringo’s (William Berger) plans to rid Purgatory City of the gang appear to be succeeding…
If you don’t fight, you fail, and Brad Fletcher certainly isn’t the failing kind. On his death bed at the start of the film, along with Bennett who was shot in its opening exchanges, his transformation from teacher to tormentor is slick and convincing, even if the whereabouts of his illness gets lost in the baron landscapes of this intriguing western. His line, “you couldn’t have chosen a worse hostage, let’s just say I’m dying” to Bennett is slightly perplexing, at first, but in time it’s clear that only his lust for life is fading fast.
Any quibbles about his desire to help Bennett instead of running are quickly brushed aside by both the beautiful visuals and, most importantly, the talented personalities along the way, ranging from Berger’s clever turn as Charley Siringo, who convinces his nemesis to reunite the Wild Gang in order to rid them from the fantastically named Purgatory City once and for all; a beautiful woman called Maria (Jolanda Modio), who questionably falls for Fletcher after being beaten and raped by him; to Rusty Rogers (Francisco Sanz), an all too brief but welcome comedic turn as an elderly man clinging on to his pointless existence by insisting he is still a wanted man even after thirty years in the wilderness.
Sollima isn’t afraid to pepper the screen with unsettling imagery, as a rabbit is shot, women are treated as punch bags then raped, families are massacred (including a frighteningly fantastic shot of the vigilantes appearing over the sand dunes) and a child is silenced by a bullet for daring to tell the Sheriff about the bank raid as he sits snoozing in the sizzling sun. The resulting shoot-out is easily the best moment from the film, as the perfectly planned heist is turned on its head in bloody, exhilarating fashion.
It’s here Sollima ups the ante plot-wise, too, discarding of most of the Wild Bunch in order to concentrate on Fletcher’s creepy transformation, and Bennett’s disapproval of such, despite being solely responsible for turning the man into a monster. Fletcher, described early on as “from up North, he reads a lot of books,” and who at the midway point tries to guilt-trip the gang from stealing money from a mail coach by reading the accompanying letter, begins his slippery slope when he falls for the beautiful Maria. An excellent standoff against the lightning-quick gunslinger Bennett whets his appetite further, but it’s only when he realises what an intelligent man can do in a town like Purgatory that he truly discovers his lust for life again – a fascinating journey mapped out in jaw-dropping style.
Faccia a Faccia also has its problems, though. The search for final gang member Zachary is a little too long, and then brushed under the carpet, as the audience aren’t given enough time to bond with him, which is a disaster when Sollima decides it will be him who turns traitor and leads the vigilantes in the film’s finale. How Bennett gets to his comrades before the marauding mob is even less believable, whether he knows the dessert inside out or not, and his escape from jail, lazily, is never even explained. The final showdown also raises eyebrows, not because the odds of fifty being defeated by two mercenaries need to be shortened, or because Bennett remembers how bad to the bone he actually is, but because Pinkerton Siringo baffles us with another change of heart that sits as out of place as Fletcher’s mutation into a sex-starved rapist.
An effective combination of genuine thrills, traditional storytelling, lush imagery and an outstanding naturalistic performance from its lead helps make Faccia a Faccia a fun, likeable western. Despite its flaws, this film has been imitated by many but bettered by few. DW
Film: Companeros
Running time: 120 mins
Director: Sergio Corbucci
Starring: Franco Nero, Tomas Milian, Jack Palance, Fernando Rey, Iris Berben
Genre: Western/Comedy
Country: Spain/Italy/Germany
Region 1 title.
Part of the ‘Zapata’ sub-genre of spaghetti westerns set during the Mexican Revolution and often containing a leftist political message opposed to American capitalism, Sergio Corbucci’s Companeros (1970) stands as one of the last great spaghetti westerns before the onset of a number of increasingly derivative self-referential comedies and hybrids began to dominate the genre.
During one of the many Mexican revolutions at the beginning of the 20th century, a simple peasant named El Vasco unwittingly finds himself drawn into revolution at the side of the bandit general Mongo Alverez. A treacherous, self-interested opportunist, Mongo is less interested in the revolutionary cause than the contents of the San Bernardino bank.
When a suave Swedish arms-dealer called Yodlaf Peterson arrives in town, looking to sell weapons to whichever side has the most money; he is summoned by Mongo and charged, alongside Vasco, with finding Professor Xantos, the idealistic leader of a pacifist movement, and the only one who can open the safe.
The two unlikely heroes manage to track down Xantos and free him from his cross-border captivity in Fort Yuma, but soon run afoul of an old acquaintance of the Swede - John, a hired assassin paid to protect American oil interests in Mexico threatened by the nationalistic Xantos’s potential rise to power.
As Vasco finds himself increasingly drawn to the beautiful female revolutionary member of Xantos’s student group, and to the cause she espouses, they find themselves not only having to contend with John, but also with the Mexican army and the followers of the duplicitous Mongo…
Even by spaghetti western standards, Companeros is a difficult film to pigeon-hole. Structurally, there is nothing much that we have not seen before. Modelled on his friend Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966), the film intertwines the paths of three characters (Vasco, Peterson and John) in the middle of a conflict, transposing the Mexican Revolution in place of the American Civil War. It also employs the same noose structure Corbucci had used in his earlier Il Mercenario (1968), framing the story as a long flashback within the duel that opens the narrative, which is only resumed towards the film’s end.
What is unusual in Companeros is a kind of conflict between the film’s desire to come across as pure entertainment, while also presenting serious political themes. The film seems not only to reflect contemporaneous expectations of a radical political change in western European countries, but also some left-wing ideas about the solidarity of European intellectuals with third world revolutionary movements. It is certainly the most openly left-wing of Corbucci’s film, full of symbolism such as Vasco’s Che Guevara-like beret, and the ear of corn found in the San Bernardino safe. Though, on the whole, the film benefits from being much less dogmatic than Damiano Daimiani’s similar A Bullet For The General (1967). There are long stretches of the film were it fails to maintain its energy mainly due to Corbucci’s attempts to shoehorn in its political message. This is especially true of the Fort Yuma incident, and the portrayal of the moneyed US interests and their plot to kill Xantos. Though an important aspect of the film’s political message, there is a somewhat clumsy and forced quality to their incorporation within the story.
However, taken on its own merits as entertainment, the film is highly watchable, possessing a warmth that encourages the viewer to overlook such flaws. Similarly, though, many of the film’s jokes fall flat, and Milian and Nero are guilty, at times, of some serious mugging up to the camera - the film is saved by the intrinsic likeability of Vasco and Yodlaf, and it is their relationship and journey towards a social conscience that primarily holds the film up.
Companeros also finds room to incorporate a villain as brilliantly off-the-wall as any found within the spaghetti-western genre. Jack Palance plays the role of the marijuana-adled, sadistic psychopath John, a wooden-handed mercenary with a very personal grudge against Yodlaf. He travels everywhere with his pet falcon, the same bird that had pecked John’s hand off in order to free him from a crucifixion following a Cuban arms deal gone wrong. Despite the comic-book premise of the character, it is an excellent performance from Palance - his acts of cruelty and violence all the more disturbing for the air of stoned bonhomie he displays while committing them.
Cinematographically, Companeros looks great. Eschewing the narrow framing employed in his earlier films, Corbucci opens up here to a full scope widescreen frame that seems to allude to a wider significance beyond the confines of the Mexican Revolution. While not as technically audacious as Leone’s best films, it has a visual appeal all of its own, with vivid colour and a strong compositional sense perfectly complemented by the catchy Morricone score.
Reconciling its conflict of humour and serious political allegory with greater success than Leone’s later A Fistful Of Dynamite (1971), Corbucci’s film benefits from being free of the pessimism and overpowering sense of betrayal and anguish that marked that film. Though the film plays in the same shadow of the inevitable failure and disappointment of the Mexican Revolution, Companeros ends on a note of optimism. The closing scene where Yodlaf returns to embrace his newfound companions and their struggle in the face of certain annihilation as the Mexican army advances toward them represents the victory of the revolutionary ideal. It is a highly romantic conception of the noble sacrifice, the willingness to die for the just cause Corbucci saw exemplified by the deaths of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ, and a trope found in many of his films. It is significant in this respect that the material mercenary John escapes from his cross, while Vasco and Yodlaf embrace the prospect of dying for humanity’s greater good.
For all its faults, Companeros stands as one of Corbucci’s most enjoyable and accessible films, easily justifying the warm regard with which it is held among spaghetti-western aficionados. Highly recommended. GJK
