Spaghetti Westerns by Howard Hughes Page A

Sergio Sollima
    Music by: Ennio Morricone
    Cast: Lee Van Cleef (Jonathan Corbett), Tomas Milian (Cuchillo Sanchez), Walter Barnes (Brokston), Nieves Navarro (Widow),
Fernando Sancho (Captain Segura)
102 minutes
     
Story
     
    Ex-lawman turned bounty hunter Jonathan Corbett is hired by rich Texan railroad tycoon Brokston to track down a Mexican renegade called Cuchillo Sanchez. Nicknamed ‘Sanchez the Knife’, he has allegedly raped and murdered a 12-year-old white girl. Made an ‘honorary deputy’, Corbett pursues the Mexican across Texas, but his prey outwits him at every turn, hiding out with a group of Mormons and later at a ranch ruled by the whip of the sadomasochistic ‘Widow’. Cuchillo escapes into Mexico, sheltering at a monastery, and eventually makes it back to his wife in his home town. Corbett tracks him there, but Cuchillo slips through his fingers again, whereupon Brokston, the Baron (his Austrian henchman) and Brokston’s son-in-law arrive and recruit a posse of Mexican rancheros. They flush Cuchillo out of the sugar-cane fields and corner him in the desert. But in the final reckoning it transpires that the real murderer is Brokston’s son-in-law – the manhunt has been an elaborate ruse to leave the Brokston name unblemished. In a duel, Cuchillo kills the real culprit, whilst Corbett guns down the Baron and Brokston. The posse, seeing justice done, disband. Corbett and Cuchillo go their separate ways, each having learnt that wealth and power count for more in the West than the law, but that sometimes the truth can prevail.

Background
     
    The Big Gundown is one of the finest Spaghettis ever made, but unfortunately, like so many, it is only available in English in cruelly abridged versions (95 and 85 minutes respectively). Both versions remove much of the early and middle sections of the chase, including editing the beautifully constructed opening duel when Corbett nails three bank robbers. The original story was written by political scenarist Franco Solinas. In this version, the lawman (a younger man) ended up killing his aged quarry without realising the truth. Sollima reversed the characters’ ages and threw in some troubling subject matter, which inevitably led to censorship problems – in the 85-minute version no reference is made to the young girl’s rape. Sollima also changed the ending to Solinas’s story (making it more upbeat) and cast Van Cleef as the lawman (hot on the heels of his success in The Good , the Bad and the Ugly ) and Tomas Milian, a Cuban ex-pat, as his younger, wily adversary. The film also adds a touch of satire, with bounty hunter Corbett harbouring political ambitions to become a senator.
    The Big Gundown borrowed extensively from previous Westerns (Cuchillo’s knife-throwing skill is straight out of The Magnificent Seven , the crooked railroad magnate is a B-Western standard) but reassembled them so as to seem totally original. Consequently, The Big Gundown is equal to Leone’s films, but many Western fans have never even heard of it, let alone seen it. By contrasting the two protagonists (a believer in the law and a tearaway rebel), Sollima was making subtle political observations without resorting to (a) setting his film during the Mexican Revolution or (b) getting bogged down in a chin-stroking political debate. The points being made, though simplistic (poor, exploited peasantry equals ‘good’, rich tycoon equals ‘bad’), are the same points that several more lauded Italian political films have made, but The Big Gundown is far more entertaining. Poor Cuchillo is even despised by his own people. The Mexican rancheros that Brokston recruits are happy to catch the peon, as he was once a revolutionary who sided with Juarez in the Mexican Revolution.
    Van Cleef and Milian give career-best performances, both eliciting a degree of humanity from their good but duped characters. Other turns of note are Nieves Navarro as the wicked ‘Widow’, who puts Cuchillo in a