Sergio Martino’s Mannaja / A Man Called Blade (1977) is about as entertaining a death-rattle as one might hope to encounter, but a terminal gurgle it remains. The Italian Western phenomenon had persisted, in a variety of guises, since 1963. The precise make-up of this “Spaghetti” canon is still a matter for debate, but the 450-plus films therein attest to a remarkable longevity in the context of popular Italian cinema of the era where genres, or filoni, more often ebbed and flowed with the perceived whims of popular taste. As George Harrison knew only too well, however, all things must pass.

Martino’s film is commonly placed as a footnote to the more celebrated “twilight Spaghetti”, Keoma (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976), and indeed there are numerous points of similarity. Such was the formulaic, incremental nature of filone cinema, however, that pejorative accusations of imitativeness in the Italian Western are trite to the point of tedium. Certainly, Mannaja bears many tried-and-tested Spaghetti hallmarks (childhood flashbacks revealing the hero’s revenge motive, the corrupt capitalist hiding behind a cloak of propriety, the lone warrior caught between rival factions, to name but a few), but Martino tweaks these to fit a decidedly apocalyptic agenda, which warrants critique in its own right. From amidst this network of citations, it is the easily-overlooked sub-plot in particular which stands out for its defiance of audience expectation and its symbolic farewell to this most irreverent, and lucrative, of Italian genres.

Beloved by fans and critics alike, Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramírez (AKA “the Rat”) was lifted straight out of the Commedia dell’arte and granted a celluloid apotheosis by the collaboration of Sergio Leone and Eli Wallach in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo / The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Tomas Milian would subsequently embrace the archetype with the guileful clowning of Cuchillo Sanchez, forever one step ahead of the dim-witted authorities (see La resa dei conti / The Big Gundown and Corri, uomo, corri / Run, Man, Run (Sergio Sollima: 1967, 1968)). This grubby, and perennially on-the-run, vagabond would become an enduring, and endearing, characteristic of the picaresque Spaghetti variant: a loud-mouthed comic foil, by turns hindering then assisting the filone’s near-ubiquitous cool, taciturn bounty-hunter.

The relationship between Mannaja (Maurizio Merli) and Burt Craven (Donald O’Brien) is a clear echo of this cat-and-mouse pairing: the reserved superhero and the rude mechanical respectively. When Mannaja lets Craven escape early on in the film, the hero’s fond smile and the good-natured banter indicate a repetition of this familiar motif. Yet already there is injected a more macabre element than is evident in the earlier Tuco / Blondie double-act. Mannaja’s very first scene is a horror-inflected pursuit through dense fog, punctuated by a haunting refrain, claustrophobic tight close-ups and frantic point-of-view shots from the terrified prey. Where Blondie (Clint Eastwood) merely leaves his partner in a pickle with a wry grin, Mannaja maims Craven with a carefully-aimed hatchet which severs his hand in centre-frame close-up. The Spaghetti Western’s mischievous humour is turning sour even at this early juncture in the film.

As the denouement approaches, Craven’s return to the narrative signals a further continuation of the Tuco / Blondie schema, when the vagrant arrives in time to save Mannaja from an elaborately sadistic death at the hands of the diabolical Valler (John Steiner). The hero’s slow recuperation, nursed by his down-to-earth partner, not only echoes Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, but also resonates all the way back to Per un pugno di dollari / A Fistful of Dollars (Leone, 1964). Even when Craven proceeds to betray Mannaja, it merely promises a repeat of the comic distrust, perpetual back-stabbing and loose loyalties which pervade the “Dollars” trilogy, and recur throughout the filone’s development. After all, Blondie spares Tuco at the eleventh hour while, in La resa dei conti, Jonathan Corbett joins forces with his erstwhile prey Cuchillo. This “Blondie”, however, has had enough. Maurizio Merli – 1970s Italian cinema’s coolest and most ruthless cop temporarily transposed to the knockabout world of the Spaghetti Western – is not about to put up with any more bullshit from this irksome little perp.

T.S. Eliot’s apocalyptic vision of Western civilisation is chillingly evoked by the cry of the British bartender calling time on vivacity, merriment and laughter. Merli’s Mannaja is, I will concede, a less accomplished poet, but his declaration of intent to Craven is equally terminal, both for the character and for the Western filone: “It’s time, Bert.”

Time indeed. Time to end the irreverent burlesque. As Craven is dispatched, it is perhaps apt that it is a star of the poliziesco – a bleak, uncompromising filone which, by addressing the fraught issues surrounding violence in Italian society directly, began to challenge the Italian Western’s place as the nation’s foremost popular genre as the 1970s wore on – who arrives as the executioner in this his sole Spaghetti foray.

At the end, as Mannaja rides away, the theme tune offers a final valediction for this behemoth of cult cinema genres: “Now the time has come to leave.”

È finito.
Buona sera Tuco. Buona sera Sergio.
Arrivederci. Buona sera. Buona sera.

If this was indeed a farewell to the prestige studio Western, it is appropriate that the setting for The Virginian – the oft-mythologised Johnson County War of 1892 – should return as the site of the genre’s obligatory violent conflict. Heaven’s Gate takes the subversion of Wister’s 1902 novel – previously carried out by George Stevens’s Shane (1952) – to a radical extreme. These steadily more hostile depictions of the violent campaign waged by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA) against smallholders and farmers reflects the increasing ambivalence to corporate power within the Western genre. Where Wister diagnoses fin de siècle social ills by championing the right of the WSGA to lynch ‘rustlers’, Shane affirms the farmer’s right to land. Cimino, however, posits the thesis that the cattle barons and the institutions of monied capital which support them are an elite, and genocidal, cabal.

Patrick McGee highlights the extent to which the Hollywood Western had, throughout its history, ‘repeatedly formulated the question of who has the right to wealth, the right to the power that wealth seems to bestow, and the right to freedom in the form that Marx specified as the definition of wealth’. [2] If, as this argument holds, Westerns had always been ‘about’ class struggle, yet traditionally obfuscated that imperative, then Heaven’s Gate is a singular act of unmasking. Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis’ of 1893 is commonly applied to the Western genre for its elegiac affirmation of American exceptionalism; the Western ‘safety valve’ offering immigrants and workers the chance to forge their own destinies, thus averting the class conflicts which had bedevilled European social relations. Cimino’s film, however, demands that attention is turned towards Turner’s lesser-dramatised disquiet at the officially-declared closing of the Frontier in 1890: what Barry Langford describes as the ‘undertow of both nostalgia and anxiety for the future in Turner’s survey of an ostensibly triumphant present’. [3] McGee goes on to identify [4] in Cimino’s film, along with Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976), an attempt to create what Walter Benjamin, in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), termed a ‘Messianic cessation of happening’. The ‘brief epoch’ of the cowboy identified by Wister here takes on an altogether more radical slant, since the joint tasks of unveiling the Western’s dominant ideologies and subverting its established signifiers lie at the heart of Heaven’s Gate’s political agenda.

Figure 1 / Figure 2

This notion is ably symbolised by Cimino’s shot composition, as Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) rides towards Sweetwater shortly after his arrival at Casper railway station. A bereft immigrant woman struggles to pull the family’s wagon along the road, her two children trying to help by pushing from behind (Figure 1). Atop the wagon lies not only the family’s possessions, as they head for their new life as sharecroppers on the Wyoming plains, but the body of her husband, who has been murdered by thugs employed by the WSGA. Spliced between two side-on shots of this pitiful, static scene is an identical framing of Averill’s horse and carriage, speeding comfortably away from them after he has promised to get help (Figure 2). Most strikingly, by associating the widow’s position, as the draught of her wagon, with that of the horse at the front of Jim’s carriage, this juxtaposition emphasises her status in society as a beast of burden, offering an apt symbol for the manner in which the immigrants are butchered like animals through the course of the film. Additionally, each vehicle is ‘ridden’ by a male representative of his social class: one a wealthy Easterner, the other the brutally beaten dead body of an immigrant. Jim’s carriage, the commonplace vehicle of the Eastern ‘dude’ in the genre, signifies propriety and wealth, the framing implicating Eastern capital – of which Harvard-educated Averill is inescapably a representative – in the abject misery of the working classes.

These shots therefore unmask the Western genre’s obfuscation of class tensions, the inertia of the struggling workers demanding that history pauses to take cognizance of their plight. Jim’s backward gaze at the family as he rides away suggests his simultaneous feelings of guilt and of impotence to make good his promise of help, since in Heaven’s Gate all are embroiled in a rigid class system. ‘Whole damn country’ll be nothing but widows and orphans soon’, he mutters. Just like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, indeed, his eyes are turned towards the past, perceiving in horror the ‘catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’, yet powerless to halt the headlong procession into the storm ‘we call progress’. [5]

Jim Averill’s carriage rushing away from the wreckage of the class-struggle way out West is therefore replete with symbolism, since Heaven’s Gate is a self-conscious intervention in the pre-existing mythic discourse of the Johnson County War. Cimino’s counter-historical occupation of Wister’s hallowed epoch directly implicates the upper-classes of the East – of whom Wister was one – in both the oppression of the working classes and the cloaking of this brutal history.

The poliziesco can be – and has been [2] - read as a collective response to the traumas surrounding the anni di piombo (a phrase – literally “years of lead” – referring to the wave of political violence which scarred the Italian national psyche between the years 1969 and 1983). This said, these violent tales of maverick cops refusing to play by the rules of an ineffectual state are more commonly seen to be no more than transatlantic parasites: reactionary facsimiles of such globally visible phenomena as Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry and William Friedkin’s The French Connection (both 1971). This reductive interpretation overlooks the extent to which this filone frequently registers nuances inherent to Italy’s post-war transatlantic relationship: a point underscored by Revolver. Sollima’s film in fact displays the complex ways in which popular cultural manifestations of US-led modernity were negotiated with and appropriated as a means by which to view, dramatise and resolve neuroses surrounding extremism, terror and the individual’s fraught relationship to societal power structures.

From the late 1960s onwards, Sollima’s eclectic oeuvre repeatedly acted as a repository for socio-political outlooks which accorded with the belief systems of the Italian New Left (that is, broadly speaking, the student movement in and around 1968, and related groupings with aims of protest and/or revolution), but also gave voice to widespread contemporary unease concerning the operation of the modern state. In particular, the sense of mistrust - known colloquially as dietrologia - of instruments of government is palpable through his didactic manipulations of the cinematic medium. Sollima’s most accomplished Westerns La resa dei conti and Faccia a faccia (both 1967) depict a corrupt, labyrinthine Wild West ruled by a murky cabal of ruthless capitalists. In the modern-day Città violenta (1970), Charles Bronson’s hit-man finds himself similarly caught in a web of intrigue, on the run from a brutal yet powerful criminal network. Revolver belongs firmly within this paranoid continuum, displaying Sollima’s filone-hopping deftness with yet another tale of men on the run from a malevolent and apparently omnipotent “system”. Its structural and thematic resemblance to his earlier films, indeed, is striking.

Franco Solinas’ original screenplay for La resa dei conti was set in contemporary Sardinia. In it, a police officer pursues an elderly peasant accused of molesting a child, but the climax reveals the peasant to be innocent, framed by corrupt local officials to cover up their own misdeeds. The policeman, awoken to the corrupt nature of the system he has served, still sees no alternative but to shoot the innocent man in cold blood and protect himself. Sollima’s Wild West version of the tale reversed the ending into a crowd-pleasing, if politically anodyne, rebellion against the bourgeois conspiracy, but with Revolver he makes amends, at last staging the bleak ending denied the earlier film. Its cat-and-mouse relationship between an ex-lawman and a petty crook with powerful enemies closely follows the structure of La resa dei conti, until retired cop Vito Cipriani finally laments that “we’re up against something far bigger than ourselves” and shoots his roguish companion Milo Ruiz (Fabio Testi) in the back to save his own skin. This time, “The Man” has won.

These two films are therefore effectively in dialogue with each other: opposing resolutions to the filmmaker’s countercultural neuroses, and personal expressions of the alienation of the subject in late capitalism. Yet the relationship between them goes deeper than merely giving voice to this internal dilemma. Alan O’Leary identifies in Italian cinema which seeks to deal with the anni di piombo through recourse to conspiracy theory “the mythically-inflected manifestation of an inability to orient oneself in a complex social system”. [3] By turning to transatlantic formats as means through which to filter the traumas of contemporary Italy, both La resa dei conti and Revolver enact just such a need for a coherent narrative in a time of  cultural and political disorientation. In each, Sollima requisitions a popular US format and projects contemporary Italian neuroses upon a mythic icon of Americana (firstly the Western, then the cop thriller).

That the poliziesco is, on a formal level, indebted to such international successes as Dirty Harry and The French Connection is beyond doubt. True to the reactive, opportunistic nature of filone cinema, this spate of Italian films appeared directly on the back of the lucrative US trends spawned by these box-office behemoths. While Dirty Harry seeks to dramatise and resolve Nixon-era fears over increasing urban violence in the US, however, the poliziesco appropriates the form and adds a distinctively Italian twist of paranoia. In this way, Revolver is an exemplar of its filone.

[2] See Barry, Christopher, ‘Violent Justice: Italian Crime / Cop Films of the 1970s’, in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (London: Wallflower, 2004).

[3] O’Leary, Alan, ‘Moro, Brescia, Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style in Italian Cinema’, in Pier Paolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary (eds), Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy 1969-2009 (London: Maney, 2009), p. 54.

As opening vignettes go, this comic undercutting of familial loyalties, too, is not entirely alien to its generic context: one broadly characterised by ruthlessly sardonic irreverence and hard-nosed, remunerative expediency. The archetypal hero of the Western all’italiana is certainly no stranger to unyielding Realpolitik, even in his most endearing incarnations. See Duccio Tessari’s Una pistola per Ringo (1965), for example: a film whose comic value rests largely upon the wisecracking hero’s frequent exposition of a strict “moral” code that shooting people in the back is common sense. Yet here, though moral judgements are amusingly nebulous, they are still informed by familial, and more specifically filial, ties: Ringo’s role-model is his father, who switched sides in the Civil War when the South started losing. When one considers that, by contrast, the narrative content of Django spara per primo for all the world resembles a family revenge Western, the tenor of the opening sequence is a jarring departure. De Martino arrests the spectator with a series of incongruous familial and marital associations, while at the same time trying to chronicle a hero seeking righteous vengeance upon the man who betrayed his father. Even at the film’s denouement, Garvin’s stony-faced declaration to his nemesis that he must pay for “la morte di mio padre” is again diminished, as his knowing winks, grins and happy-go-lucky demeanour return the moment the decisive gunsmoke has cleared and the real, financial, motivation is secured.

The above analysis is no ground-breaking deconstruction of the Spaghetti Western’s purposefully oblique moral code. The sneering reinterpretation of Hollywood’s hallowed founding text undertaken by Italian film-makers in the 60s and 70s is well-travelled scholarly territory, and in any case, Django spara per primo is unremarkable in its stylistic and thematic derivativeness. The dissonance between the film’s cynical, world-weary humour and its ostensibly cathartic revenge plot, however, signals an oft-overlooked point concerning this perennially-popular yet oft-misunderstood genre’s industrial conventions: namely, that verisimilitude, narrative coherence and dialogue did not necessarily supersede cinematic style and astute post-modern panache in film-makers’ production practices.

A blog entry is not, I think, the forum for a deeper critique of this point, but please let me indulge this minor bugbear until the end of this paragraph. Since Christopher Frayling’s ground-breaking volume Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (1981) admitted this filone into the academic fold, two of the foremost models of criticism in 1960s and 1970s analysis of the Hollywood Western – structuralism and auteur theory – have remained dominant in critiques of the Italian version to the present day. To take the centrality of a Spaghetti Western’s narrative unity for granted – as both of these fields are wont to do – is to overlook its aspect as “popular” cinema, along with the industrial, cultural and stylistic implications of that term. By its very typicality, Django spara per primo offers an emblematic case-in-point.