Duck, You Sucker

Just caught this flick, also known as A Fistful of Dynamite at a local art house cinema over the weekend. Sergio Leone seemed to get more whacked out & audacious as the years wore on & this 150-minute slab of propagandistic melodramatic mayhem is the arguable apogee of his iconoclastic vision. A buddy Western laced with liberal does of lysergic acid and black humor. Rod Steiger plays Juan Miranda, a greedy bandito cut from the same cinematic family tree as Eli Wallach’s The Ugly. The physical likeness between the two- all sun-chapped paunchy skin, toothy grin, greasy unkempt hair & over-the-top accent- is uncanny. James Coburn plays former IRA terrorist and fugitive Sean Mallory, whose disillusionment with the ideals of his former life leads to, in his own words, a belief “only in dynamite.” The film’s irreverent title originates from his tagline tossed as cautionary quip before every detonation. Early in the plot the two cross paths and soon become embroiled in the Mexican Revolution unraveling around them.

The body count is huge (easily in the hundreds), as is the scale of havoc, helped immeasurably by Mallory’s seemingly endless supply of explosives. Parallels to Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch are frequent too: from the opening shot of Juan urinating on an ant hill to the penultimate scene where he and Mallory annihilate an entire armored column of governmental troops with a pair of cliff mounted machine guns and strategically placed demolitions, to the nihilistic grand finale involving a train stocked with soldiers. There’s also a surreal patina to much of it, as during the opening ‘duel’ between the leads where each ups the other in a call & response of escalating destruction. Extreme close-ups are employed in excess, especially in the beginning, brilliantly emphasizing the repulsiveness of many of the characters & keeping the audience dizzyingly off-balance. Ennio Morricone’s eccentric score threads through the entire thing, equal parts cheesy kitsch & oddball strings & electronics. Overly long and flawed by a preponderance of long shots that overstay their welcome, this cinematic artifact still swings a heavy punch. Anyone else seen it?