The Inevitable Head

The trouble with revolutions about destroying hierarchy is that they require leaders. 1969's Tepepa presents characters wrestling with this problem in the context of revolutionary Mexico in the early 20th century. A Spaghetti Western, or in a subgenre called "Zapata Western", it presents the terrific violence and memorable personalities associated with the Italian/Spanish productions from the 60s with an ambition to be something a bit like David Lean's epics at the time. It doesn't quite reach those levels, it's too cartoonish, and the double moral centres, in the form of a cool Englishman and a little Mexican boy, make the film insubstantial in an effort to make it less ambiguous. But Tomas Milian and Orson Welles both turn in good performances and, of course, Ennio Morricone's music is fantastic.

The irrepressible pluck against the frustrated oppressor suggested by the music is nicely complemented by Tomas Milian in the role of Tepepa, a sort of Errol Flynn-ish version of Zapata. Friend or foe, joy or misfortune are as likely to provoke a hearty laugh from this charismatic hero. But he's quite shrewd.

Real life Mexican President Madero is here played by Paco Sanz looking a lot more like Vladimir Lenin than Madero did in real life. When Tepepa helps him take over the country he's quick to notice the same fat cats end up in charge of things. For the purposes of the film, the villain and key fat cat is embodied ably by Orson Welles.

Welles plays Colonel Cascorro, as weary and cynical as Tepepa is lively and positive. But both men are of the unusual kind best suited to be leaders, men who can see the big picture and make decisions outside the confines of crowd mentality or public opinion. Cascorro keeps order with brutality sometimes, Tepepa decides life and death for reasons sometimes unclear or dubious to his followers. He kills one man, formerly loyal, for betraying him and he kills him right in front of the man's son. This is the little boy who becomes somewhat awkwardly symbolic as the movie progresses, leading to an ending in which the boy actually makes a statement on behalf of the spirit of Mexico. In case it just wasn't clear.

The other moral centre befriends the child briefly and almost adopts him. Henry Price (John Steiner) is a doctor from England, perhaps representing the foreign perspective on the political conditions in Mexico. He comes across as faintly psychotic and he's in Mexico to avenge the rape and murder of his fiancee at the hands of Tepepa. At least, that's what he's heard. But he rescues Tepepa from Cascorro at the beginning of the film for reasons he doesn't seem to understand himself.

His continuing investigation into whether this Tepepa fellow is worthy or not mirrors Tepepa's own dissatisfaction in the inevitability of human nature to produce corrupt leaders. If Tepepa turns out to be such a leader himself, does he have the capacity to see it? It's an interesting question perhaps posed a little too cartoonishly in the end.

Tepepa is available on Amazon Prime.

Ennio Morricone

Yesterday one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of film composers, Ennio Morricone, passed away at the age of 91. He had a genius for melody and his experimentation with sound gave us the peculiar yet perfect vocals in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, the synthesiser paired with strings in The Thing, and the eerie electric guitar in my favourite of his scores, Once Upon a Time in the West.

People writing about Morricone are justly including The Mission and Once Upon a Time in America as among his finest scores. But I thought I'd make a list of some of his lesser known but also astounding works.

Navajo Joe

As with Once Upon a Time in the West, his Navajo Joe score impressively weaves seemingly discordant screams with a sharp, electric guitar driven melody.

The Great Silence

The great exercise in bitter cold, Morricone offers a light touch to capture the every day truth of Klaus Kinski's villain.

Theft is No Longer a Crime

Like parts of his scores for The Thing and Allongsanfan, Morricone predates Rasputina in being able to really rock with a cello, lending a carnal impulse to this economic satire.

Finally, I leave you with this beautiful, underappreciated song he composed for Django Unchained:

Twitter Sonnet #1370

The granite holds a swirling wind for keeps.
Untidy doors would clutter jambs and knobs.
Above the buildings Locust Woman leaps.
The corn exceeds the biggest bin of cobs.
The quicker pen consists of bolts and light.
Extended time consumed the cheaper watch.
The lines of song removed the will to fight.
Defining shades reduced the mental blotch.
A signal look imputes the word to mess.
Mistaken tools were broken down the side.
Restraint prevents a foreign, errant bless.
A flimsy bag contained a soapy tide.
The pistol barrel's scream attends a glow.
A silent flute remembers rivers flow.

Theoretical Economic Systems or Butchery versus Burglary

How can the average Marxist start putting his philosophy into practice in a Capitalist country? A nervous young man named Total starts with the little things in 1973's Property is No Longer a Theft (La proprietà non è più un furto). A film that's much more interesting than it is funny or viscerally appealing, its ideas of Capitalism versus Communism playing out in a personal battlefield are explored with nice sets, costumes, makeup, and a particularly good score from Ennio Morricone.

Total (Flavio Bucci) works in a bank despite the fact that he's allergic to money--after touching bills he compulsively scratches his face and hands. Considering the massive poster of Karl Marx in his home, it may be fair to call his condition psychosomatic.

His father (Salvo Randone) routinely tells Total that money is a reflection of self-worth, that the two of them are poor because it's what they deserve based on how society has reckoned things. Total boils in frustration all the while. At work, he develops a hatred for the Butcher (Ugo Tognazzi) who comes into the bank regularly and hands out meat. After watching a foiled robbery which ends with the Butcher viciously kicking one of the thieves on the ground, Total acquires a mad, fixated hatred for the Butcher.

He hates the Butcher so much he decides he wants to bring him down to the same level of poverty as himself. But the Butcher turns out to be improbably wealthy--he has a fabulous apartment and owns several buildings. Total's technique is steal the Butcher's small belongings, one at a time. First he steals his butcher knife and then his hat while he's masturbating in a porno theatre. He breaks into the Butcher's apartment where he finds a beautiful woman in pearls, Anita. He takes the pearls and fondles Anita's genitals--after all, no-one owns anything, even their own bodies.

It's fitting that Anita is played by Asia Argento's mother, Daria Nicolodi. As Asia Argento's campaign of vengeance disguised as altruistic crusade was eventually unmasked by her hypocrisy, the world depicted in Property is No Longer a Theft is one where people are inevitably motivated by a desire for dominance, whatever they may otherwise profess. In the first half of the movie, we are invited to laugh at the Butcher and Anita who do bear a resemblance to Boris and Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoons.

Everyone seems aroused in a positively sexual manner by every transgression they get away with. The police detective investigating the thefts seems to struggle to withhold an orgasm as he talks about every detail of the crime. Anita switches between being horrified by Total to feeling pleased at getting one over on the Butcher, who it seems she was with only for the money. Maybe.

But the interplay between need and desire isn't so easily defined. Total finds he takes sadistic pleasure in the dominance he exerts through his random thefts. He glorifies in depriving the Butcher, Anita, and anyone else of a sense of control. In the end, no-one comes out of the movie looking especially good but the Butcher seems just a bit more honest with himself.

Property is No Longer a Theft is available on Amazon Prime.

Inexorable Vengeance

A marauding band of scalp hunters are pursued by a lone, vengeful Native American man called Navajo Joe in a 1966 Sergio Corbucci Spaghetti Western. Not a fondly remembered film--even its star, Burt Reynolds, didn't seem to like it--it's still a taut story with good performances, terrific action, and a wonderful score.

As Joe, the title character, Reynolds is almost unrecognisable. If you're looking for the mischievous moustached man, he's not here--Reynolds certainly looks odd without a moustache, his heavy brow making his face look unbalanced. With the bad makeup and really bad wig, he looks more Romulan than Navajo. But an interesting thing happens when you have a charismatic actor play a quiet, relentless man of action. Reynolds is so full of personality that some of it inevitably comes through and you get a sense of the man Joe used to be despite the film's minimal dialogue and lack of elaborate backstory.

Ennio Morricone's score is a showcase of what he did best; electric guitar and weird vocalisations along with grim, isolated piano. The vocals have a much angrier, horrific, scream-like quality than in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, though. It's another thing that fills the void left by the minimal story. We know Joe's wife was killed by the leader of the marauders, Duncan (Aldo Sambrell), and that's all we need to know.

The marauders are a product of a town's bounty on Indian scalps. Even the townspeople no longer recognise the need for this bounty as the gang have now taken to scalping women and children and expecting to be paid for it. When Joe comes to town with the train load of money the town thought the marauders stole, he casually demands the sheriff's badge at the point of a gun. He's got too much on his mind for their bullshit. Navajo Joe is available on Amazon Prime.

Crossing the Old Bridge

In light of the frighteningly polarised political landscape in the U.S. to-day, it's strange to think there's a movie from 1984 called Once Upon a Time in America that starred Robert De Niro and James Woods as best friends. In 2018, De Niro has been targeted by a mail bomber for publicly denouncing President Trump and Woods' support of Trump has seen him reposting right wing conspiracy theories on Twitter, including a claim that the bombs were hoaxes. But that's not all that makes the film a freshly compelling commentary on America. Director Sergio Leone made a beautiful picture, visually and thematically; it's a subtle tragedy about the American love for independence gone wrong.

The story of a group of poor kids in New York who become gangsters feels in some ways like an extended version of the flashbacks in The Godfather Part II. Instead of Vito Corleone, Robert De Niro plays David "Noodles" Aaronson--Noodles is played by an intense kid named Scott Tiler when he's younger. Tiler looks a bit more like Al Pacino, if you ask me.

The film is surprisingly frank about the formative sexual experiences of Noodles and his friends. There's a girl named Peggy (Julie Cohen) who trades sexual favours with the boys for pastries. The scene where she's introduced, when Noodles leaves the door unlocked on purpose while he's on the toilet and she walks in, effectively establishes the curiosity and insecurity of both kids. A later scene, where Noodles and Max catch a cop in a compromising situation with a prostitute, shows neither boy can perform sexually in a way that matches up with his bragging.

Max is the character played by Woods in the scenes where he's older--young Max is played by Rusty Jacobs with visible acne; a nice touch, I thought, to establish Woods' pock marks. In any case, with the uniform perfect skin in movies to-day, it's always nice to check in with the reality in 70s and early 80s films.

Max is slightly older, or at any rate taller, and more ambitious than Noodles. Woods has banner art from Once Upon a Time in America on his Twitter page now making me wonder if he feels Max's involvement with unions and eventual success in politics fits the model of a modern Democrat. One could as easily compare him to Trump, though--really, more easily, as Trump's real estate schemes and courting of blue collar votes combine to make him look especially like a gangster--his tacky personal style sealing the deal.

Noodles is accused by Max of having too much of the street in him--Noodles is happy to stay out of politics. Since most of the movie is from his point of view, he's relatively quiet, and he wants to stay small time, the viewer feels naturally compelled to see him as a moral centre but Leone's telling a more complicated story than that. Noodles assaults men and women to get his way. We understand why he is the way he is well enough to empathise with him--when he goes too far, it's saddening more than repulsive. We understand what motivates him, we see how his simple understanding of the world came together on the streets, learning from petty crimes and peep holes to get what he wants quick. The only question is if he really has any choice and this question is generally posed in scenes between Noodles and Deborah.

Played by Jennifer Connelly as a kid and Elizabeth McGovern as an adult, she seems to present an ideal in contrast to the childish operations of the kid gangsters. He watches her through a peep hole but it's to watch her dance ballet. Not that she's a prude--when she invites him to study the bible with her it turns out she wants to read from "Song of Solomon" with him. But she's no Peggy and when Max calls him away she makes it clear he's choosing between two worlds. Will he choose a path that forces him to consider others or a path where he forces everyone to defer to him?

I love all the apples and pears behind her in the scene.

Leone rather brilliantly evokes old New York in his shots, exploiting locations well.

Ennio Morricone's beautiful score has some of the grand wistfulness of the one he composed for Once Upon a Time in the West, his main theme playing at times that at first seem inappropriate. But the big, sweeping melody playing over a kid compulsively eating the éclair he'd bought for Peggy and that same melody playing over the aftermath of a rape scene later in the film unify the commonplace with the horrific. There are all these stupid, silly, terrible, beautiful, and ugly pieces under this same melody. The exact same recording in one scene that seems to celebrate what is will in another scene lament what has been lost. The story’s not linear—we get shots of older Noodles in the 70s at the beginning of the film and scenes from the 20s and 30s mixed with the 10s and 70s throughout. What’s lost becomes suddenly present again and then lost again in a moment with a closeup of De Nero’s eyes.