The moment I started up this crazy column, people have been asking me when I would write up The Wild Bunch.  It’s not my intention to snub Sam Peckinpah (though he has been poorly represented here) at all. When I started this column, it was meant to inspire discussion of older films, and encourage people to seek out classics they hadn’t seen.  With online streaming, it’s easier to do than ever, and I tried to focus on films that were on Netflix or Hulu because the format removed any excuses you had not to watch The Searchers or Stagecoach.

The past few installments haven’t been on Netflix Instant due to the luck of the draw — if The Great Silence or Hannie Caulder arrives in the mail, how can I not write it up? — and time constraints. One of the reasons I had put off The Wild Bunch was that I was hoping it, like The Searchers, Stagecoach, and much of Sergio Leone, would pop up on Instant Watch.  But it hasn’t.  Instead, it played on TCM.  A more savvy writer may have timed this piece to go up prior to its airing.  Oh well.  Chances are, this is a film you’ve seen. But it’s always a film worth talking about.

The Wild Bunch is a significant Western, obviously. It’s the first American western to get as down, dirty, and violent as they had in Italy.  (Vera Cruz paved the way though, remember?)  Sergio Leone considered Sam Peckinpah his only rival in the genre. That said, it’s not one of my favorites — I prefer a cool flip of the serape to scorpions being eaten alive, because I like my cathartic violence to be a little more stylish. But that’s just me.

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Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah painted some bleak and cynical portraits of the West. They gun down children, show the futility of civil war, pile corpses in wagons, and survive by whatever bloody means they have to.   It’s my humble opinion that Sergio Corbucci might make them both look like Walt Disney with The Great Silence.  (PG-13 Disney, mind you ….)

The plot of Silence is typical spaghetti – mysterious gunslinger rides into corrupt town, aims to clean it with bullets, rival bounty hunters get in his way – but is far more hellish.  Corbucci once again makes a greater use of landscape and weather than most Westerns do (Django was one of the few that embraced mud and dank, Silence is the rare one that replaces the bleakness of the desert with the inhospitable winter). But there’s no thrill of the wild here.

Leone took a certain glee in painting his fictitious “age of the bounty hunters”, and Corbucci embraced that spirit in Django, but here he creates a West of punishment and horror. It feels more like Purgatory than faux-history.  There’s no world outside of his Snow Hill. Characters ride in and out of it, but they don’t seem to go anywhere or have any awareness of a world outside their town.   There’s no greater plan for civilization – at one point the newly appointed sheriff speaks grandly of eliminating the bounty hunter in favor of law, order, and peace.  Everyone looks at him as though he’s speaking Greek.

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My Name is Nobody looms large among spaghetti western and Sergio Leone fans — and probably Henry Fonda’s too, since it was the last Western this legendary range rider appeared in. The legend of its creation is an amusing one, and a rare one among directors who are generally sensitive about the worlds they created. Leone, appalled at the spaghetti western industry that he had wrought, decided to gleefully destroy it with his protege,  Tonio Valerii.

If the Italian western was going to become a joke led by actors dubbing themselves Flint Westwood, then by Tuco they were going to make it the biggest joke of all. And the film certainly is. It’s like Mel Brooks by way of Leone — every sacred scene of Leone’s films is mocked and beaten dead of its coolness.

The only thing missing is that they never shoot a blonde fellow in a serape, or kick around a guy smoking a big yellow pipe. Perhaps they couldn’t quite bring themselves to do it. There’s a crying clown under all the pranks, and when Fonda’s character gives his grand speech about the dying West and its romantic gunslingers, you know that Leone, Valerii, and Fonda mean every word of it.

They also refused to slum it. They may be burying the genre, but Leone and Valerii couldn’t resist showing their country copycats how it was done. It may be a satire, but every shot is perfection. Leone personally directed the opening scene, and I think even a blind film fan could tell. It oozes the tension and raw sound that always made his openings a thing of epic, cruel beauty.

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Vera Cruz is a film that’s often name-dropped in the discussion of Great and Influential Westerns. Starring genre heavy-weight Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, every synopsis you’re likely to come across promises a film with adventure, a Mexican countess, and bromance. Don’t believe them.

Cruz is set in the midst of the Mexican Revolution of 1866, a time when mercenaries and adventurers crossed the border in search of profitable employment. In fact, it’s the very same setting as Two Mules for Sister Sara, and if fanfiction had existed in the good old days, someone would have written a sexy crossover. Thank goodness it didn’t.

The film wastes no time in setting up Ben Trane (Cooper) and Joe Erin (Lancaster) as that most reliable of Western archetypes — the broken down Confederate, and the daring mercenary. Their characters are rigidly defined within the first ten minutes over the matter of horseflesh. Trane shoots his injured horse because it’s suffering.

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