Movie mov’s homage to Sergio Leone: How the East was won

There is one story and one story only, so said the poet Mister Graves.

A pale rider of a man rides into town on a pale horse, nothing is known about this mysterious cowboy and he reveals even less. Meet the Man with No Name who strolls into town, at first reluctant to fight the baddies who run the entire godforsaken stretch of dead desert land. But there inevitably is a damsel in distress somewhere as the townspeople invisibly cower in fear. The sheriff, not surprisingly, has no authority over anything. Bullets rule over badges in this here town, where gunfights happen left and right and the coffin-maker is always busy hammering away, surreptitiously taking measurements of every stranger passing through. The bell tolls for thee…

The Man with No Name gets a shot of whiskey at the saloon after a long dusty ride from some nameless hell. The booze is quaffed, the plot gets thick quickly. Our hero is beaten up by the thugs at one point, a savage ol’-fashioned Western tap-out. Iniquitous villain laughter ensues. He either is left for dead or manages to escape. Comes back. With a stick of dynamite. Saves the girl. And becomes the avenging angel with a slab of armor to shield his heart, an inexhaustible cache of bullets, guns a-blazing and Ennio Morricone trumpets all a-blaring. Goons gunned down, the Man with No Name moves on.

He travels across the mythic American Old West of a collective imagination. Only this is not America or even Mejico — it is somewhere in Europe to be inexact. Arrives at somewhere else. Judging from the tall cogon grass, rice fields and nipa huts, it could be in Pampanga or Bulacan, two cities outside the Capital City of the Philippines, a country without a history of frontiersmen, gold prospectors, horseback-riding cowboy pioneers or scalp-collecting Indians. There is one story and one story only, all right, but the variations are endless.

The buck starts here: Clint Eastwood is the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari), one of the movies featured in the 2nd Moviemov Italian Film Festival held recently at Greenbelt.

Such are my thoughts after watching Sergio Leone’s classic “Dollars Trilogy” (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) featuring Clint Eastwood as “Joe,” “Blondie” or “The Man with No Name” at the 2nd Moviemov Italian Film Festival from Dec. 5 to 9, 2012 at Greenbelt 3, Cinemas, Ayala Center in Makati City as part of the festival’s homage to the great Italian filmmaker.

 Italian Ambassador to the Philippines Luca Fornari said at the press conference, “The goal of Moviemov is to create a lineup of films and events that will best promote and show in Asia — specifically the Philippines, Thailand and India — what present-day Italian cinema is all about.”

Philippine-Italian Association president Nedy Tantoco said Filipino filmmakers have a lot in common with their Italian counterparts. “We are very emotional just like the Italians. We like drama and we also like la dolce vita — the sweet life.” Such is the positivity we both exude as nations, she added.

Yet, it’s not about presenting an idealist cinema but a realistic one, explained Italian Senator and Moviemov general director Goffredo Bettini. Present-day Italian cinema owes a lot to the likes of Sergio Leone, and not just in terms of creating truly gritty characters in truly gritty settings with even grittier conflicts.

Leone had an astounding vision of reinventing the tired old American cowboy movies, in effect creating a genre all its own — dubbed “Spaghetti Westerns” since they were shot by Italian studios. Although it was vilified by highbrow critics when the trilogy and subsequent movies were released, this sub-genre was a surefire hit at the box-office and became hugely influential to latter generations of cineastes. The sadistic, ironic, fastidiously dressed anti-hero of today’s action movies was spawned by the sweaty, poncho-wearing, cigar-chomping cowboy of Italian cinema. Say goodbye forever to the white 10-gallon hat of the stiff, clean-cut, howdy-pilgrim John Wayne incarnation. What Leone had was a morally ambiguous hero with a sense of humor who fights on the side of the good but leaves a trail of the dead and disarmed. A gun-for-hire with a heart. Sly S., Bruce W., Arnie Z., Dirty Harry, Rango — they’re cowboys… on steel horses they ride. 

Even legendary filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, John Carpenter, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese swear by Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns such as Once Upon a Time in the West starring Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson, which the Taxi Driver/Raging Bull/Goodfellas director wanted to help preserve for future cinema fans.

“Sergio Leone has done innovations in the language of cinema,” said Senator Bettini. “The mastery of (the technique of) weaving scenes and tying them with the music was (emulated) by the generations of filmmakers who followed. It is not a surprise that Scorsese was inspired by him.”

(Leone was much admired as a filmmaker to the point he was asked at the start of the ’70s to direct a film adaptation of a bestseller, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. He turned it down — Francis Ford Coppola got the job — and instead Leone worked on another soon-to-be-classic gangster flick, Once Upon a Time in America featuring Robert DeNiro and James Woods. The newly restored film is also part of the Sergio Leone retrospective at the recent Moviemov festival).

The close-ups, the long shots, expanded time, the insidious background music, the operatic meeting between the dramatis personae — you see those from Scorsese to Michael Mann to Christopher Nolan. The Dark Knight Rises unfolds like a good ole Western. Bane and his posse get control of Gotham City. Defeats the Batman. The fallen hero rises, returns. A duel on Wall Street, more shoot-‘em-ups. Bane is vanquished. (“You see, in this world there are two kinds of people, my friend: those with a Batpod and those who dig.”)     

Clint Eastwood even resurrected his lone-wolf gunslinger in the beautifully shot Pale Rider (believe me, you’ll cheer when the Preacher returns with his Remington to prevent a girl from being dishonored), and returns years later to the genre in the sublime Unforgiven (touted as a “eulogy of sorts” to the genre, which will I believe outlive us all). Don’t forget Quentin Tarantino who is the sum of all his cinematic influences — French new wave, kung-fu movies, Blaxploitation flicks and, of course, Spaghetti Western. He doffs the hat and gives the chin-up to Sergio Leone and the other Spaghetti Western filmmakers in his latest flick, Django Unchained which pits Jamie Fox against Leonardo DiCaprio in the wild, wild West of Candy-land. Same with Quentin’s pal Roberto Rodriguez who came up with a Western trilogy of his own (El Mariachi, Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico).

ADOBO WESTERN

Talk about being influential, Leone’s nameless stranger bears his own name in Philippine cinema.       

He goes by the name Daniel Barrion.

Yes, we do have our own version of the Old American West mythology — Pinoy Western, Adobo Western, call it what you will. But let me state this first: The King of Filipino movies, Fernando Poe Jr. or “FPJ” churned out titles in the Filipino Western vein that were undoubtedly influenced by Pinoy comics and early American cowboy cinema (Shane comes to mind) — since FPJ’s Markado was released in 1961 and the first movie in the “Dollars Trilogy” came out in 1964, and besides, FPJ’s filmography is quite impressively diverse (there are cop movies, historical dramas, fantasy flicks, comedies, etc.). Deservingly FPJ posthumously received the National Artist award for Cinema in 2006.

Still, the shadow of Spaghetti Western cinema looms largely in classic FPJ movies of yore. Who in the local movie industry at that time wouldn’t be touched by Eastwood’s West-world?

FPJ the fast-drawing soft-spoken gunslinger reluctant to fight the baddies at first. He chooses to lead the quiet life as a farmer but when a damsel gets distressed… or when our hero gets “pushed against the wall” by Romy Diaz or Max Alvarado, and “when push came to shove,” he rides his majestic white/black horse to seek vengeance, gives the villains fair warning (ah, the ensuing repartee is priceless), and with all his catchphrases falling upon deaf ears, he shoots them all with his .45 caliber pistol that magically never runs out of bullets. What delicious piece of cinema.  

Another name: Julio Valiente.

Stuntman-turned-actor Lito Lapid had a movie with a scene that is forever branded in my brain. Lapid (who also played Leon Guerrero and Geronimo in other ’80s escapist flicks) is the masked crusader Julio Valiente — a salakot-wearing cowboy — battling the baddies of a town called San Basilio. Two villains are fleeing from our hero who has only one bullet left. What to do, what to do? Valiente takes out a knife, shoots the blade of the knife, supernaturally splitting the bullet in two (the magic bullet theory!), and two thugs fall to the ground on cue. Woohoo! I could almost imagine the moviegoers in the old Susan Theater in San Fernando, Pampanga screaming in delight (maybe in anticipation also for the next movie in the double-bill — the one with Ginger Lynn in it).

Yes, Lapid had a run of Adobo Westerns that turned him into an icon: San Basilio, Brusko, Geronimo, Kamaong Asero, Alamat ni Leon Guerrero and its sequel, Gunfighter and Julian Vaquero, among other movies that would be shown regularly on bleary afternoon TV when I was growing up (IBC-13 and RPN-9). Lapid’s characters fought against all odds, championed the oppressed, stood for good against rising evil (in leather or denim jackets and with Romy Diaz/Joaquin Fajardo goatees and manic laughter). Who is that masked man? In celluloid, he is the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Batman on horseback. The masses idolized him. Now, Lito Lapid is a Senator of the Republic. I’m not saying these things are connected, but…

The women washing clothes in the river. The saloons where they serve local gin. The sidekicks who were as crafty as Eli Wallach. Ah, I remember the wild, wild Filipino West so well. Weird this: I have a sense of nostalgia for a past that never happened.

And that’s the magic of cinema. That’s the magic of Sergio Leone and Italian cinema. Don’t we all have our little fights against our little Lee Van Cleefs of this world — whether it’s injustice, greed, corruption, mediocrity, failure, our intrusive neighbor Pedro, you name it. Riding our own trusted steeds, fighting the good fight, braving the hail of bullets of outrageous fortune, eyes locked on target, heart in the right place.

The ride continues.

You and me.

We are the Man with No Name.

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Moviemov was supported by the General Direction for Cinema of the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Culture and the Film Development Council of the Philippines, organized by the Embassy of Italy, Playtown, the Philippine-Italian Association, Rustan’s, The Peninsula Manila and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.