It’s one of the great pleasurable sounds in the history of the movies-- Eli Wallach’s Tuco calling out in that patented rasp with brio or trepidation, depending on the con man-killer’s circumstances, to villain Lee Van Cleef, who he alone refers to as “Angel Eyes” in Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. (Van Cleef’s character’s proper credited name is Sentenza.) One of the great jokes in that movie—one Leone filled with as much mordant (and morbid) humor as a single giant Western could handle, just before the old wineskin ruptured and spilled forth lots of new blood, right on schedule-- was how ill-equipped Tuco’s observation really was. Rather than signifying a messenger of God, Van Cleef’s eyes, their almond shape, their steely gaze, seem more satanically inspired, perhaps those of an angel of death. (I always suspected Craig McCracken might have cast an eye in Van Cleef’s direction when originally modeling the villain Him from The Powerpuff Girls.) And because of the angularly unique sculpting of his features— an arrow-shaped head complemented by hawk-like nose, a smile that could seem warm and sinister almost simultaneously, and yes, those eyes—Van Cleef seemed destined, from the beginning of his movie career—a small part in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon-- to be typecast, albeit memorably, as a bad guy. And that’s largely the way he rolled throughout the ‘50s and early ‘60s, in one character role after another in movies and especially television, creating a niche for himself, usually as a singular nasty, for directors like Phil Karlson (Kansas City Confidential), Raoul Walsh (The Lawless Breed), Richard Fleischer (Arena), Arnold Laven (Vice Squad), Fred Sears (The Nebraskan), Nathan Juran (Tumbleweed), Joseph H. Lewis (The Big Combo), Robert Wise (Tribute to a Bad Man), Roger Corman (It Conquered the World), Samuel Fuller (China Gate), John Sturges (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral), Anthony Mann (The Tin Star), Budd Boetticher (Ride Lonesome) and John Ford (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).
By the time Valance was made, Van Cleef had more credits in guest spots on TV than in movies and may well have been looking for a more substantial experience when Sergio Leone cast him as Colonel Mortimer, reluctant but driven compadre to Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name in the first Dollars sequel, For a Few Dollars More. It’s interesting to note than in his first movie for Leone, his debut in the spaghetti western genre that would sustain his career and reputation as a high plains bad-ass nonpareil, Van Cleef was actually cast against type in an essentially sympathetic, heroic role. And it’s also worth mentioning that though his work in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is probably considered his signature performance, the one with which he will be most closely associated and remembered for, Van Cleef’s subsequent career was not confined to expanding on the straight-up villainy that had characterized his career since he first confronted Gary Cooper on that dusty main street in Hadleyville.
He had plenty of nasty turns left in him, to be sure—most memorably, for me, his bounty hunter in the blaxploitation western Take a Hard Ride was no gentleman—but after his two performances for Leone he was more likely to be found in roles that played off an awareness of Angel Eyes’ essential brutality while leavening it with less ambiguously heroic character traits. The role he played immediately following The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)-- a murderous gunman released from prison who joins with the surviving member of a family killed by his gang to exact revenge on the killers in Guilio Petroni’s Death Rides a Horse (1967)-- remains probably the best balancing act between the two personas. (Critic J. Hoberman memorably described it as “Replete with baroque torture and acid flashbacks (which) unfolds in a starkly primitive world—if not a desert on the planet Mars.”) And the role that stands as my favorite of Van Cleef’s post-Angel Eyes appearances is as the admittedly generic gunfighter who joins forces with martial artist Lo Lieh against a gang of ruthless murderers in Antonio Margheriti’s gleefully silly, yet tough-as-nails The Stranger and the Gunfighter (1976) (known as Blood Money on DVD), Hong Kong producer Sir Run Run Shaw’s foray into cross-cultural genre mixing (a sub-genre unto itself known in some circles as the lo mein western. Gunfighter is a nasty romp with a strong whiff of its own absurdity, and adorned by yet another catchy musical theme, this one composed by Carlo Savina. I’ve never understood why it doesn’t have the following of some of Van Cleef’s other post-Leone pictures. Perhaps its sparse distribution in the video age has something to do with that—it has largely been available on VHS in a terrible pan-and-scan print, which is likely long out of circulation. Happily, Gunfighter was released last year on a nice (and inexpensive) wide-screen DVD under the title Blood Money as part of the “Shaw Brothers Dynasty Collection” and is, for fans of the steely-eyed sharpshooter, an absolute must-own. (So is, I suspect, Death Rides a Horse, a movie I have never laid eyes on myself, though it remains available only in shoddy cropped VHS and DVD editions.)
But outside of Angel Eyes, the role that would cement the final touches on his legacy as, other than Eastwood, the defining icon of the spaghetti western genre are the two films he made for Gianfranco Parolini (under the generic nom de camera Frank Kramer) as the mysterious “man with the gunsight eyes,” Sabata (1969) and Return of Sabata (1971). (Yul Brynner replaced the actor in the title role for Parolini’s first sequel, 1970’s Adios, Sabata, while Van Cleef was off filling Brynner’s shoes as Chris Adams in the third film in the Magnificent Seven cycle, The Magnificent Seven Ride!.) Van Cleef’s smartly attired assassin, whose range with a rifle is an unlikely marvel, witnesses the robbery of $100,000 from a supposedly secure safe. He returns the safe to the town officials who, unbeknownst to the citizenry, actually orchestrated the theft as a means of providing funds for the greedy plans of a slimy ex-Confederate officer, Mr. Stengel, who plans to use the money to gobble up cheap Texas land. But the bad guys don’t know (at first) that the safe is in fact empty, kicking off a series of thrusts and parries between the thieves, who want their dough back, and Sabata, who has other ideas. Sabata utilizes the familiar lone gunman with a mysterious past template, but Parolini, who has the fine eye of dynamic composition that characterized directors of the period who were drawn to the spaghetti western (but who lacked the sense of pace and sensate elongation of movement for effect of which Leone was a master) recognizes Van Cleef’s strengths and exploits his star’s singular ability to stand out in a landscape of chaos to great effect.
It’s interesting that a lesser actor might have rested on the clean lines of Sabata’s hat, the way the brim slices through the frame in beautiful perpendicular contrast to the sharpness of Sabata’s long, dark trench coat, or the sinister-seeming angularity of Van Cleef’s face itself to project the cool menace and purpose of the character. But in Van Cleef Parolini was also lucky to find an actor in enough command of his obvious strengths to provide subtle shadings within scenes that play off Van Cleef’s previous experience in villainy. When Van Cleef smiles, it’s one of the most insinuating, ambiguous smiles in the history of movies, usually masking some dark, murderous intent. But as Sabata Van Cleef turns the effect of that insinuating grin, combined with an unblinking stare, to cross purposes, confusing audience expectations with a broad stroke of, of all things, sincerity, nicely mixing up the customary connivance and strategizing inherent in such a character with a more uncommon ingredient. We’re left unsure of Sabata’s background—it is implied he has a history as a fighter for the North in the Civil War—so the audience then is kept off balance almost as much as those of the corrupt city officials and their arms-bearing henchmen who provide Sabata his headaches and his amusement. The indication is there that Sabata isn’t out for himself, yet the hint, the suspicion that something else might be going on never quite goes away.
The character is surrounded by an unusually broad group of supporting players, even for a spaghetti western. Stengel (Franco Ressel) is a skin-crawling villain, with a veneer of decadence—corrupt military arrogance combined with an air of inappropriate elegance, Conrad Bain as a heavily decorated and probable molester of farm animals—that seems right at home among the slightly off-kilter landscape Parolini conjures. Sabata’s primary compadre, with whom he has a mysterious past (and who may not be showing all his cards), is a gunfighter named Banjo (William Barger) who is a sure-shot with the Winchester hidden neatly by the long neck and body of his chosen instrument, but he is also saddled with the bear-like Carrincha (Ignatzio Spalla), who is Bud Spencer-like but with far more emphasis on the scenery-chewing, life-embracing bigness of an Italian Brian Blessed or Jonathan Rhys-Davies.
Linda Veras, who began her career with bit parts for Rossellini and Godard, stands out as the prostitute who has poured her hopes into a life with Banjo, which may not turn out to be such a good investment strategy. But the strangest addition to the cast is Aldo Canti, a Roman stuntman who went by various other names (including Aldy Canti and Nick Jordan) who plays, inexplicably, an acrobat who hangs around on the rooftops of local businesses waiting to come in handy—and he does come in handy-- as part of Sabata’s team. (Carrincha calls him “Alleycat,” an obvious tip of the hat one of his “real” names.) The combination of all these characters, along with Marcello Giombini’s lively, Morricone-esque score, lends a playfulness that leavens the violence to a certain degree and plays into Parolini’s apparent intent to move outside the boundaries of the spaghetti western slightly and toward, surprisingly, an almost Bondian tone in some of the movie’s rousing action set pieces. (Leone derided the firs Sabata movie, labeling it a “circus western,” not without some strong evidence.) Giombini’s title song is a memorable one too- its themes are echoing throughout, but over the opening credits it is accompanied by the lyrics that would provide the movie with its Italian title, “Ehi amico... c'è Sabata, hai chiuso!” (Roughly translated, it means, “Hey buddy...it's Sabata, it's over now!" surely a sentiment whose degree of intimidation is more jocularly colored than the nihilism and bitter poetry that characterized Leone’s films.)
But in a way it’s perfectly fitting, because Parolini’s film is lighter in tone and effect, and it too, like The Stranger and the Gunfighter, wears its silliness on its sleeve. (Sabata sports a multi-barreled Derringer-esque pistol with a compartment in the handle revealing several more deadly barrels that is blatantly fictitious.) Even so, Sabata retains the muscular power of its convictions through Parolini’s clean, dynamic eye, to be sure, but more importantly through Van Cleef’s singular status as a spaghetti western icon, a deadly specimen who in some ways resembles a deserts scorpion come to angular, elegant life, unruffled by the attendant chaos, corruption and undeniable nonsense that surrounds him. (He shrugs off Carrincha’s attempts to mythologize him to the bystanders who have witnessed a particularly snazzy bit of gunplay with a laugh and a straightforward denial of his supposed spectacular dealings of death and destruction.) Van Cleef, who died in 1989 at the age of 64, extended his reputation as one of the movies’ prime tough guys working with Chuck Norris (The Octagon) and John Carpenter (in Escape from New York, where he was “reunited” with Clint Eastwood via Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken), but by then he had made his bones. Sergio Leone brought him out of the obscurity of mean-ass Hollywood character parts and gave him his great moments, and the Sabata films, by no means a patch on Leone’s but still vividly entertaining in their own right as part of the cream of the spaghetti western subgenre, made it clear that for Lee Van Cleef there was more to a western villain, or a hero, than the way he cut the sun-baked horizon in a sharp suit.
(Sabata is doubled tonight and tomorrow night with Death Rides a Horse at the New Beverly Cinema. For anyone who loves the genre or Van Cleef, this is a can’t-miss engagement. Unfortunately, I will be out of town so I will have to miss it. But please take the opportunity to bask in this great wide-screen double feature, and on your way out give a tip of your wide-brimmed hat, or your baseball cap, to Michael for bringing this one to town.)
All right, the SLIFR University staff has simply had it with my hemming and hawing and have pushed me and my answers to Professor Russell Johnson’s quiz aside. This is not to say that I won’t attack them later on this week, out of a raging fit of heretofore frustrated completism. But I must make way for the changing of the seasons. Some of you still have snow on the ground for your spring break, and to you I say, in all sincerity, congratulations. Here at SLIFR there is a very rare tip of the meteorological hat to the demarcation of spring, summer, fall and winter—though we did have some very nice, gloomy skies and wet weather over the last week or so. We take what we can get, and so too does the unflappable student body of SLIFR U, ready and willing as they are for another foray into the unfathomable well of personal responses that make up our seasonal quizzes here. This one is being unleashed by one of our most Machiavellian maestros of calculated madness and pent-up fury (albeit in a slapstick vein). Behold the 37-question beast that is the work (with a little help from our noted friends) of physics professor and chairman of the SLIFR Department of Ne’er-Do-Wellery, Professor Fate, not so fresh but still running the Great Race to ultimate film knowledge and discovery. Should you join him on this quest, just be sure to copy and paste the questions into your comments and answer them with the questions attached, so we bewildered students and faculty will know to which pithy question your brilliant response belongs. As always, there is no deadline except that to which your own conscience tethers you. Having set my own conscience free over that last quiz, I wouldn’t worry too much about deadlines were I you… but just don’t tell the testy Professor Fate I ever said that. He has been known, in the past, to, um, go off. So, with that warning, er, encouragement in mind, let us press ever forward into the mind of a brilliant madman and begin scratching out the answers to Professor Fate’s Spring-Loaded, Great-Racing Spring Break Movie Quiz! Go, go, go, go, go! (And many thanks to the students who offered up questions to the professor. If he didn’t use yours this time, don’t be discouraged! There’s always the summer, assuming we all survive this one!)
We who write about film online have known for some time now that we’ve been involved in a changing of the guard of sorts, a refashioning of the forms and function of film criticism, a shift from a Solitary Voice to an Interactive One, the encompassing of new forms (video essays and the use of DVD as a tool toward examining film down to a frame-by-frame analysis), and of course a shift in the economic paradigm from the Old Media and Getting Paid to a world of Brave New Possibilities and No Remuneration. And while none of us have quite yet figured out how to adapt the New Media toward long-term career possibilities—the truth of the matter may very well be that the structure that will allow for passionate Internet writers to make a living from a love of movies may have played itself out and may be unlikely to reshape itself in a meaningful way, at leas in the immediate future. Critic John Powers was probably right when he suggested recently that the Golden Age of American Movies—the’70s—may be notable for the movies it produced but also for being a time—a freakish window of opportunity-- in which it was possible to make a living practicing the art of film criticism commensurate to the quality of the films being produced. No other age has sustained its critics, in any field of artistic expression, the way film critics were sustained in the ‘70s and, with the advent of those Chicago-based thumbs, into the ‘80s.
Yet there are those who are either retaining the power of the medium to showcase the written word, using it to create new ways of using film images and their juxtaposition with themselves and the written word to forge out new forms of film criticism, and those who are beginning to play with the possibilities of blogs themselves as more than just a conduit for the narrowcasting of personal observations. Three of those people are personal friends of mine, and I would love to take the opportunity to make sure you know what they’re up to, in the hope that they will continue their good work and have an audience for it, an audience that may continue to help push and guide them in ways they may not even be aware of yet, ways in which interactivity and reaching out to the audience may continue to reshape the attitudes behind the work as well as the work itself.
One of my favorite film writers, Stephanie Zacharek, has, after 11 years writing short film reviews and longer essays of film and music criticism for Salon magazine, finally set off for more adventurous shores. This week Stephanie began what one can only hope will be a long and fruitful career as the chief film critic for Movieline, the new and zippier online version of the ‘80s-‘90s movie magazine staple.
In her valedictory piece for Salon on Thursday, April 8, she wrote:
“When I was a journalism student in the 1980s, if you had told me that by 2010 it would be nearly impossible for a smart, experienced professional to make a living wage as a journalist or editor, I'd have accepted it only if you'd told me that by that time, we'd also be zooming around in flying cars, like the Jetsons. Journalism, as a profession, is in danger of dying; I'm still waiting for that flying car. And lest you think I'm going to hijack this space for a speech about the death of film criticism, I need to say that, realistically, the world could survive without full-time movie critics. But if dedicated, disciplined, paid journalists disappear, we're headed for some very dark times.”
Stephanie understands the passion of the passionate who write about movies, but like any talented writer she also knows that movies are not the be-all and end-all, but instead an extension of, a reflection upon the real world about which those paid journalists must continue to have a platform to investigate, to report upon, to analyze and criticize and help to change. Stephanie brings that kind of informed, impassioned sense of reality to her writing about the movies—you always get the sense of the life she lived, that she continues to live, that is enhanced by but not subservient to the movies. It may seem a small point to some, but when, in an interview with me last summer, she talked about sewing her own clothes, it wasn’t to point out her own earthy integrity or score points off of others who don’t, but instead to illustrate one of the ways she stays connected to the world she keeps in contact with through everyday experience as well as at the movies. At Movieline it’s possible that Stephanie Zacharek will have even more avenues available to her down which to explore the many ways movies touch us, inspire us, aggravate us, expand our emotional vulnerability or shut it down. We are lucky, in this age of the Disappearing Film Critic, that she has found a place that seems ready to cultivate her development toward even more expressive ends, and that she is but a click and/or a bookmark away from developing a writer/reader relationship with us.
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Matt Zoller Seitz continues his fine work for the Moving Image Source this week with a transporting video essay on the life and work of Dennis Hopper entitled “The Middle Word in Life” (you know where that line comes from, right?) Here’s Matt in his introductory notes to the piece:
“When I think about Hopper, I hear his voice in my head: the nasal Kansas vowels; the cowboy twang; and last but not least, the semicolons where periods would normally go, contributing to a sense that his thoughts, like works of art, are never finished, only abandoned, that he never really stops talking, that there's always one more observation or pronouncement or dirty joke waiting just around the bend. If the final stretch seems to have an elegiac tone, it's because the circumstances made it unavoidable. Contrary to what we'd all come to believe, Dennis Hopper is not immortal. Let's appreciate him now.”
One of the many things that is remarkable about Matt’s video essay, which invokes the spirit of Hopper as much as his concrete contributions to the arts of film and acting, is the way, in an almost offhand fashion, Hopper’s restless, animated, searching, self-indulgent spirit comes to mirror the searcher, the technician, the wayward artist in us all, and perhaps artists like Matt Zoller Seitz in particular, who are looking at the vast expanse of possibilities during a very dark age, much like Hopper did. And much like Hopper, Matt attempts to find his way around in the dark through means that may look inadequate or impersonal at first glance (the film in Hopper’s younger days, the video essay in a time which cries out for new forms in which to elucidate the sometimes ethereal, uncapturable responses evoked by a film’s imagery) but may be a unique key by which to open the door to the true meaning of a film, or of film. And on a very fundamental level you can feel the critic connecting to Hopper’s desire to connect to the world—Matt overlays a monologue taken from Hopper’s appearance on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970 and turns it into a elegy of making one’s mark, in setting out on paths untrodden, unsure, mixing it with clips illustrating various filmic exits taken by the actor and Bob Dylan lyrics from the Easy Rider soundtrack until as clear a picture of Hopper’s meaning for us as viewers and critics becomes possible, and remains as contradictory as it ever has been. With “The Middle Word in Life,” Matt Seitz gives us the Hopper we know, the Hopper we only thought we knew, and the Hopper that will sustain us after he’s gone. It’s a brilliant piece of work.
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Finally, old friend Larry Aydlette, first known to many of us as That Little Round-headed Boy, has become known of late for his vagabond tendencies in the blogging world. Larry has never been one for keeping archival records of his previous posts, and for most of us that notion becomes ever more frustrating the closer we’ve come to appreciating what a sharp writer and pop culture commentator he really is. I look back at my own posts, peppered with links to TLRHB posts that are no more, some that haven’t been for years, and it makes me sad that I wasn’t smart enough to make hard copies of everything. (I do have copies of some things, but not nearly enough.) Larry’s refusal to stay in one place for much more than a couple of months of late, and his occasional disappearance altogether, have caused some to worry that we may have seen the last of him. Greg Ferrara recently even started a Facebook page called “If a Million People Join This Page, Larry Aydlette Will Get Back Online.” Larry’s here-and-there absences have also helped to throw into relief the worries and frustration that bloggers bring on themselves—whether fashioned out of boredom, self-imposed expectations, an obsession with tracking site traffic, or just a simple lack of inspiration regarding with what to fill up all those virtual pages, Larry’s numerous disappearances have often coincided with my own moments of self-questioning, of dwindling self-confidence, a frayed sense of purpose, moments which force me to realize that I am far less tethered to the “commitment” of blogging than I at times allow myself to realize. But ultimately, Larry’s absences have largely been interpreted as the simple need for a break, to rejuvenate, to reassess, to figure out where blogging’s future lies, not on a grand scale, but on a very personal one.
And this time Larry has come up with an answer that may not change the larger path of blogging for the majority of those who do it, but one that certainly will infuse his own methods and interests with a pointed mixture of detailed obsession and Larry’s own flirtation with the artistic possibilities of the limited engagement. Returning yesterday under the banner of That Little Round-headed Boy, Larry has initiated a new blogging format which will take a strict two weeks of prepared writing and research, all done around the theme of the underappreciated director. Once the two weeks are over, the posts will disappear, making way for a new director at some unspecified time. (I’d advise getting those hard copies this time around.) Hardly a perverse exercise in contrarian freak flag flying, Larry aims to showcase directors, some obscure, some of the mainstream, Oscar-winning variety, and make the case, by examining their careers in detail and pointing to other areas of research, what makes taking a second look at them something more than an academic wank-off. The new Aydlette experiment kicks off this week with a look at George Roy Hill, Academy Award-winning director of The Sting, The World According to Garp, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Slap Shot and several others that may not as quickly come to mind. It’s part of Larry’s mission to change all that:
“Why George Roy Hill?
Because he's the name director that nobody ever talks about. The name is known, of course, as it graces some of the most famous films of the '60s and '70s, especially Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, the film that won Hill an Oscar for directing. But the talk usually concentrates on those films' stars, Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Hill usually gets left out of the conversation, even though both Newman and especially Redford felt they owed Hill a great deal. "I don't think he's gotten the attention he deserves," Redford has said.
There is only one book on George Roy Hill. No major retrospectives that I'm aware of. Bloggers and film critics have never given him much attention (Pauline Kael damned him with faint praise, and back then Kael's likes or dislikes could steer the conversation on a director's career.) So, I would see his name pop up on films that intrigued me and I'd think: He directed that, too? Why isn't anybody talking about him?
In wanting to form my own opinions, I've steered clear of academic Andrew Horton's 2004 book on Hill. The flaws of this enterprise, and they will likely be deep and wide, are fully my own. What I have read about Hill, mostly short Internet items and obits (he died of Parkinson's disease in 2002), convinced me that Hill deserves greater scrutiny. He's like one of those old-time directors in the Howard Hawks mode, a man who brought his passions and broad life experience to inform his films.”
The man who brought us a whole month devoted to the legacy and movies of Burt Reynolds is, I suspect, more than up to the task to shedding light on directors to whom many of us aren’t so willing to give a whole lot of credit. Whether influenced by Kael or my own eyeballs, I’ve never thought much of Butch Cassidy or The Sting or Garp, but I’m looking forward to letting Larry make the case for the error of my ways, or at least guide me down the path of his own sincere appreciation, which I’ve no doubt will not be undertaken with the blinders of the unabashed fan in place. On the other hand, I adore Slap Shot and think that Slaughterhouse-Five, along with David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, remains the cinematic textbook on adapting the unadaptable, and Hill did it without the patented, culture-approved credentials of the certified stylist. I know that Larry will let me know when a new director is coming down the pipe, and I will do my duty to pass the word along. Let us enjoy his efforts, along with those of Matt Zoller Seitz and Stephanie Zacharek, to take us down paths we might not have chosen for ourselves, as they approach the joy and penetrating beauty of the movies from each of their special and evocative places. With friends like these, a future of looking at and thinking about movies seem a whole lot brighter.
Well, there's tardy, and then there's tardy, and then there's jaw-dropping, passive-aggressive procrastination of a spectacular fashion. I leave it up to you as to which category belongs this post, in which I submit an only-partial list of responses to Professor Russell Johnson's "My Ancestors Came Over on the Minnow Thanksgiving/Christmas Quiz, to which I initially vowed I would respond by the end of 2009. (Thanksgiving/Christmas! Don't worry, I'm properly embarrassed...) What's worse, I've only made it through about 20 questions, with a little skipping around even. See, I told myself (one of many things I tell myself these days) that I wanted to finish my own answers before posting the new Spring Break quiz. But as the days dragged on, I had a new quiz ready to go yet my process of sitting down to write the answers from the previous one were at a near standstill, and when it was moving it wasn't doing so any too quickly. I sat here this afternoon, taking a day out of my self-applied time off for writing, and it became clear that even with no distractions and an entire day to write I wouldn't finish them. So I decided to just post what I had in the hopes that the 30 or so questions left dangling would provide me their own kind of motivation to eventually finish while not delaying the posting of the new quiz any longer.
I have been berated, and soundly, by Professor Johnson and the entire SLIFR U staff for approaching my academics in such a slovenly manner, and I apologize. I only hope that after reading the answers I do have the general consensus won't be that I should have just stayed away altogether and waited for the Spring Break test. Here then, if anyone still cares, are my 20-or-so answers. (By the way, God, what a looong quiz!) Hope the taste of my blood, sweat and tears isn't too off-putting!
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1) Second-favorite Coen Brothers movie.
Thought it seems kind of silly and inexplicable now, I spent the early part of the Coen’s directorial career resisting their considerable charms. Even to this day I find it easy to not love, or even much like, Blood Simple-- though I must admit that I first saw it in its theatrical run and may have only seen it one other time since, and many years ago at that, so this first big splash of theirs may be an excellent candidate for consideration amongst the vast array of films that I initially disliked but are ripe for my own reconsideration. (Another candidate for reconsideration is Barton Fink, a movie I loved the first couple of times out—with extra credit lavished upon Tony Shaloub as the second-tier studio boss, whose oily contempt couldn’t have been conveyed with more sarcastic, top-volume wit—but which has soured for me over the years.) And it took me two, or maybe three tries, and at the insistence of my wife, whose anarchic sense of humor and susceptibility to silliness must be acknowledged and respected, before I saw past the opposition position on Raising Arizona and its ostensible condescension to everyone and everything in sight.
But by the time I found myself walking down the road with Albert Finney and Gabriel Byrne after the funeral of Bernie Bernbaum, I knew I’d seen something that fully lived up to the promise of the first two features and the enthusiasm of the Coen heads who loved them. A decade later, after I’d seen Miller’s Crossing at least 15 times—it was and is a movie I often crave seeing, and if I stumble upon it midway through on cable the next hour and 15 minutes or so are lost to any other cause—it had clearly become my favorite Coen Brothers movie, despite the advent of The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou, all movies I love to one degree or another. By the time I found myself digging even a period that most folks would consider minor at best-- The Man Who Wasn’t There, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers-- I had to admit that not only was resistance futile, it was nonexistent. And then came the brilliant chamber of horrors trilogy of No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading and A Serious Man, which in my eyes cemented these two as perhaps the best filmmakers of their generation. Seriously, once you grapple with the age-old complaint of the Coens not “liking” their characters or feeling superior to the worlds they create, where do you go from there? Did Shakespeare “like” Shylock or Richard III? Did he endorse the superstition running rampant in Macbeth or not look upon his lead character as ceaselessly spineless in his ambition and beholden to the whims of his even more power-hungry wife? As with most complaints of this sort, it’s far too reductive—to obsess over whether J.D. Salinger was looking down his nose at Holden Caulfield would be, I think, to miss the bigger picture. Yet the Coens are routinely accused of callousness simply because they often root their subjects in the comedy of despair, and when they leave the comedy out, as in No Country, to some that despair can seem overwhelming, bleak beyond bearing.
So by declaring Miller’s Crossing (a movie, according to legend, apparently named after its editor) as sitting pole position in my personal ranking and spending a few words on the rest of the pack, I have still successfully avoided answering the question. Unfortunately, as it has been for many who have tried to pin this one down, the answer as to favorite, or second-favorite Coen Brothers film is for me remarkably fluid. My head says No Country for Old Men, or perhaps the richness and mystery of A Serious Man. But for this answer I’ve picked a movie which has resisted the erosion of the cult and retained its vibrant, lived-in pleasures despite the insistence of the enthusiastic and the threats of overexposure. I am making my choice by simply relying on the number of times I’ve allowed the movie to float past my eyes, hitch its hooks into my brain, make itself seem like not just a movie but part of who I am. Miller’s Crossing has this effect on me. So does number two: The Big Lebowski.
2) Movie seen only on home format that you would pay to see on the biggest movie screen possible? (Question submitted by Peter Nellhaus)
I didn’t know it initially, but right after I posted this quiz I knew what my answer was. I got hold of the American Cinematheque January calendar and there it was-- January 5, on that gigantic screen, my favorite James Bond movie, which I have seen many times on the ABC Sunday Night Movie, cable TV and DVD, but never on the big screen: You Only Live Twice (1967), directed by Lewis Gilbert, written by Roald Dahl, featuring the ultimate Ken Adam production design, that dogfight over the “volcano,” and all those luscious Japanese… locations. Yahoo! Check that one off the list, right? Not so fast. We had family in town, and it would have been unseemly of me to say hi and then bop off to see a movie that, after all, Dennis, you can see anytime you want on DVD. So we all stayed home with the kids and the visiting relatives and played Wii Bowling, which was, seriously, a lot of fun. A different kind of fun, perhaps, than buzzing villains in Little Nellie, but a lot of fun nonetheless. And I’m still waiting on the doorstep for my big-screen dream date with You Only Live Twice.
3) Japan or France? (Question submitted by Bob Westal)
4) Favorite moment/line from a western.
Not exactly a short list from which to choose. From Once Upon a Time in the West it’s a toss-up between the rightfully famous opening scene, in which Jack Elam and Woody Strode wait patiently at the train station for the arrival of Harmonica, and Claudia Cardinale’s arrival in Sweetwater, with Morricone’s soaring melody lifting us up as she realizes her new husband is not there to greet her—she enters the train station, is seen through another rectangle frame, the window into the station, and the camera swoops over the building, giving us our first look at the bustling community below and eventually her buggy ride through town toward a horrible discovery. From The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the last half hour, after Tuco and Blondie blow up the bridge and make their way across into the graveyard, where they meet Angel Eyes and discover, finally, what’s written on the back of Bill Carson’s tombstone. And just for good measure, Arthur Kennedy’s betrayal of Jimmy Stewart on the way back up into the mountains with winter supplies for the settlers in Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River.
5) Of all the arts the movies draw upon to become what they are, which is the most important, or the one you value most?
It would seem that the most obvious answer would be photography. But as soon as I settled on that answer, then sound, or music, or editing suddenly made just as much sense to me, if only to distinguish between silent and sound film aesthetics and the way modern films themselves are structured and composed as set apart from their predecessors. But the one thing that is constant throughout the history of cinema, whether there be sound or silence to accompany the images, is the fact that those images were , for the most part, grounded in the music, rhythm and language of the written word, the script. You only have to put a brilliant actor in front of a large crowd of people, say, accepting an award, to get a quick illustration of how most actors usually depend heavily on memorization and interpretation of a script in order to come off looking as though their shit was halfway together. This isn’t a knock on actors but instead an acknowledgement of the necessity of the organizing principles of words, a foundation for presentation, to help make any of us look as though we know what we’re talking about. Heavily improvised films can be interesting, but they rarely result in the kind of truth that is intended; usually the most profound truth exposed is that there wasn’t a script in place. And when they do work they’re usually guided by someone with a vision of what the camera can do to shape those improvisations (Robert Altman) as opposed to someone who prefers to follow the actors around documenting their every move down a series of relatively blind alleys (say, John Cassavetes in full-on Husbands mode). So for me the most important art the movies draw upon to become what they are, the one I value above all others, must finally be the art of writing, which, just like the others, becomes a lot harder as soon as you try it for yourself-- which is why there are a lot more folks running around (many of them paid handsomely) who think they can do it as opposed to those who actually can and do and do it well.
6) Most misunderstood movie of the 2000s (The Naughties?)
The movie highest on my own personal list of the best of the decade that just seemed to zip right past most critics and certainly paying audiences has to be Speed Racer (2008). It is my firm belief that this movie has already affected (for good and for bad, of course) how certain films have been made and that, like Blade Runner before it, it will continue to make its presence felt, even if those who initially ignored it will give credit to other films (and video games) for pioneering visual ideas that either originated with or were perfected by the Wachowskis. If it’s possible for us to be anticipating a 3D IMAX-ized sequel to, of all things, Tron some 28 years after that movie was unleashed (and make no mistake-- I’m as excited as anyone to experience it after seeing the trailer), then I will never entirely give up hope that someday Speed Racer will be fully appreciated as a masterpiece of poetic commercial filmmaking.
7) Name a filmmaker/actor/actress/film you once unashamedly loved who has fallen furthest in your esteem.
My stock answer to this question might be Ridley Scott if there were ever a point where I held him in high esteem in the first place. The initial promise of The Duellists, Alien and Blade Runner began to fizzle so thoroughly by 1983 that I can truly say I’ve never had my senses heightened by the prospect of seeing yet another Ridley Scott film. Actually, I was preparing to hand it over once again to Woody Allen, whose movies in the 1970s, up through Interiors and Manhattan, were actually considered generational must-sees for whippersnappers of my certain age. But even though I don’t think Woody’s made an altogether wonderful, or even good movie since Manhattan Murder Mystery (a statement that must be qualified by the fact that I haven’t been able to bring myself to see all of them he’s made since then), even something as dreadful as Whatever Works doesn’t sour me on the possibility that he might still have another Manhattan Murder Mystery in him. (And at least he doesn’t insist on casting Russell Crowe, or Larry David, in every goddamn movie he makes.) So I think this dishonor has to go to someone whose movies I used to find really enjoyable, who has gone so idle as to redefine “spinning your wheels,” whose own navel-gazing creative cannibalism (I used to think of it as crafting a comic universe) has retroactively spoiled even the films of his that I used to like. Those who routinely complain about how Quentin Tarantino can’t write characters who don’t all sound exactly alike, like him, are not only not paying attention, but should be directing their ire toward this fella, who is perhaps the guiltiest on this count of anyone to come of out the American independent film explosion of the ‘80s and ‘90s. I nominate Kevin Smith as the filmmaker who has most egregiously fallen in my sight.
Back in the day I loved Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma, even Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. I’ve defended Jersey Girl. I even bought the Mallrats DVD (albeit used) just for the camaraderie of the hilarious commentary track. But Clerks II and Zack and Miri Make a Porno were trough-trawling lows, and those “Evening with Kevin Smith” indulgences only shapeless, self-serving and insufferable, not funny or insightful. I’m at the point now where Kevin Smith has invited me to see through Kevin Smith to the degree that I don’t even trust my memory of what was good about those films I’ve mentioned that I once cared about. And I dread revisiting the one-- Dogma-- that I ever connected to on any level other than just as a loose-limbed laugh machine. Moreover, Smith’s strange ability to attract attention around the time one of his new movies is coming out (shouting down movie critics, complaining about the conservative ratings board, getting busted for being too fat) reeks of calculated desperation, as do his increasingly boorish man-or-fan-of-the-people Internet stances, which do nothing to minimize the perception that the man has been more forthright than we ever wanted to believe in insisting that he really never knew what he was doing, that he’s been winging it all along. I actually believe that the best thing for Kevin Smith is to have directed someone else’s script, just to try to get himself out of his own head, out of his own self-inflated mythology. But I’ll be damned if I could be roused to stomp down to the cineplex and see something as apparently tired and cynical as Cop Out, which (who knows) may turn out to be a perfectly fine Netflix rental. The long, strange career of Kevin Smith seems a perfect example to me of a downward trajectory from, despite his being in exactly the right place at the right time, a height that was never too lofty to begin with, one which his fans (myself included) elevated in part because he seemed so unpretentious, so limitlessly unflappable in his profane worldview, so unimpressed by his own success. His recent output, including the full-on embracing of the Kevin Smith cult and his standing as a pop culture oracle of the everyman, hasn’t sent the Smith Express off the rails—he seems to be hurtling ever forward to who knows where—so much as it has forced me to make other travel plans. Or, as one of his characters might colorfully put it, when it comes to “A Kevin Smith Film,” I guess I just don’t give a flying donkey fuck anymore.
8) Herbert Lom or Patrick Magee?
Patrick Magee is one of the great over-actors of all time. To see him in just about anything, from Dementia 13 to Die, Monster, Die!, The Masque of the Red Death, Marat/Sade, Tales from the Crypt, Asylum, Young Winston, Barry Lyndon, Telefon and most memorably, rolling his eyeballs to the back of their sockets like no man ever had or has since in Clockwork Orange, is to enjoy the consumption of scenery at the highest possible station. Herbert Lom, on the other hand, has degrees of madness, more varied cuts and styles of straitjacket. His exquisitely insane Inspector Dreyfuss, constantly deflated foil to Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films, plays almost (and especially in The Pink Panther Strikes Again) like a parody of Magee’s special excess. He had a decade of programmers under his belt by the time he oiled up the screen as Kristo in Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, and character turns in films like Henry Hathaway’s The Black Rose and Michael Anderson’s Hell is Sold Out made way for his brilliant bit as one of The Ladykillers alongside Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker and future comrade in destruction Peter Sellers. But for this budding movie fan it was his pre-Dreyfuss performances as Captain Nemo in Cy Endfield’s Mysterious Island (with effects by Ray Harryhausen) and as the titular Phantom of the Opera in Terence Fisher’s lurid remake that sealed Lom for me as a major player in the Famous Monsters Hall of Fame. Despite plenty of other good character parts, Lom always returned to the horror well, even essaying Professor Van Helsing in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula, as well as featured roles in Amicus’ anthology chiller Asylum, AIP’s Murders in the Rue Morgue and even an Italian remake of Dorian Gray. He also appeared memorably opposite Christopher Walken in David Cronenberg’s measured and haunting Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone. For me, Lom’s career is the one that shows the most range, and certainly the most appeal, deranged or no.
9) Which is your least favorite David Lynch film (Submitted by Tony Dayoub)
I’m tempted to be a smart-ass and say Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, but I’m perfectly happy to let Herzog take the blame for that one. (Lynch was the executive producer and, for worse and then way worse, the film’s obvious stylistic source of “inspiration.”) So, keeping to films Lynch has actually directed, let’s see… I have an interesting history with Eraserhead, a movie I love and respect now, but not so much then; The Elephant Man has to be one of the great commercial movie debuts ever; I even loved Dune, the poor, truncated, overstuffed thing, as a quite literal embodiment of visually arresting space opera, such as it was pitched and presented by Lynch’s ambitious imagination. (I continue to dimly hope that Lynch will cut together his own long version.) Blue Velvet, The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive are clearly masterpieces, and the Twin Peaks phenomenon is one I gratefully participated in during its time, right up through Fire Walk With Me, which I did not love, but which I can accept on a certain level as a sincere effort to battle encroaching self-awareness on the part of this most dream-connected and least calculated of filmmakers. (Fire Walk with Me succeeds—barely-- in avoiding this trap through the directness of its emotional hell.) I hated Lost Highway when I saw it some 16-17 years ago, but something tells me there’s more there than I was able to process when I first saw it (yet another nifty candidate for re-evaluation). The one movie that I think fails on precisely the terms in which Lynch carved out for himself, alone on the landscape of American cinema, is Wild at Heart, which though it is based on a novel written by Barry Gifford, seems to afford every opportunity for Lynch to play at being David Lynch, with all the trickery, overarching indulgence, embarrassing self-consciousness and stomach-turning grotesquerie that such play implies—it is, for all intents and purposes, Lynch’s own My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.
10) Gordon Willis or Conrad Hall? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
Conrad Hall is responsible for some of my favorite images from some wonderful films--The Professionals, Cool Hand Luke, Smile, Electra Glide in Blue, The Day of the Locust and Without Limits-- as well as some memorable work in movies that don’t work for me as a whole, including In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, Black Widow, Tequila Sunrise and his Oscar-winning cinematography on The Road to Perdition and the wretched American Beauty. (I think I really love his atmospheric work on Bruce Robinson’s ultimately muddled Jennifer Eight most of all.)
But with all respect to Hall, his memory and his body of work, Gordon Willis, despite the fact that his career as a director is responsible for a movie as reprehensible as Windows (1980), trumps anything and everything with his cinematography on The Godfather trilogy alone. And that’s to say nothing of the imprimatur of a masterpiece he bestowed upon Woody Allen’s Manhattan, perhaps one of the most astoundingly lovely black-and-white films ever shot, or his groundbreaking and astonishing work on Allen’s Zelig, which can be said to have ushered in, for better and for worse, an entirely new range of possibilities for the recreation of found photography—newsreels and home movies processed to visually revise historical events with the inclusion of fictional characters.
But for crying out loud, take a look—really take a look-- at the brilliant choreography of shadows and light he was responsible for in films like Klute, Bad Company, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, The Drowning Pool, Annie Hall, The Purple Rose of Cairo (which placed his Zelig techniques in a more fanciful, depressing context) and two personal bests not related to Coppola or Allen—the stunning landscape palette he realized for Alan Pakula’s Comes a Horseman and the brilliantly depressive Edward Hopper-by-way-of-Busby Berkeley wide-screen glories he created for Herbert Ross’s Pennies from Heaven. These are among the most gorgeous and evocative films ever shot, and if Willis had only delivered the two of them he would have a place among the pantheon of great cinematographers. But he shot The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Manhattan and Zelig too. End of story. Slam dunk: Gordon Willis.
11) Second favorite Don Siegel movie.
Well, there ain’t no doubt in my mind that Charley Varrick rules the roost here. But that ain’t the question, now, is it? The Big Steal, Escape from Alcatraz, Hell is For Heroes, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Riot on Cell Block 13-- any one of those five could sit second-place in the company of the Last of the Independents. And though I’ve had the DVD since Christmas, I don’t know yet from personal experience, though I suspect that The Lineup could easily join that rarified company. Second-best Siegel would really beat just about anybody’s first, especially if we’re talking hard-boiled drama, in black-and-white or color. And with that in mind I submit the original, oft imitated, never matched Dirty Harry as my second favorite Don Siegel film-- together with Varrick it comprised an early ‘70s one-two knockout series to the breadbasket the likes of which Siegel himself would never surpass. Dirty Harry remains, 39 years later, one of the great, influential modern policiers, even if it does take a drubbing in the context of David Fincher’s Zodiac, and even if Pauline Kael was horrified by it. This was my introduction to the world of R-rated films back in 1972, when I saw it at the ripe old age of 12 at my local drive-in. Great memories are made of far less heady stuff than this, and Dirty Harry in many ways laid the groundwork for a life of appreciating movies where bruised and battered dreams conjured by the likes of Siegel, Eastwood, Leone and many others were constantly being discovered and made to come alive. Not bad for second-best. (Here’s the opening credits.)
13) Which DVD in your private collection screams hardest to be replaced by a Blu-ray? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
I would love to see Paramount (or whoever it is that owns the rights these days) pull out all the stops and release a nicely, crisp letterboxed DVD of Mandingo with a commentary track featuring the surviving actors. And wouldn’t it be nice if Universal could somehow talk Steven Spielberg into sitting down and creating a remastered version of the director’s cut of 1941 for Blu-ray (and sure, go ahead and include the theatrical version too, for comparison purposes.) The existing DVD is excessively diffuse (even more so that DP William Fraker intended, I suspect) and it isn’t even an anamorphic transfer for wide-screen TVs, a sure sign that the movie has been floating around too long in the home video universe without a necessary second look. But I think ultimately I’d like to be able to toss my TCM-dubbed wide-screen copy of Charley Varrick and replace it with a slick Blu-ray transfer. The Nevada desert will have never seemed dustier and more menacing that on a good Blu-ray version on Don Siegel’s masterpiece. There must be some good promotional material that could be included, not to mention the remembrances of surviving actors like Joe Don Baker, Andrew Robinson and even Felicia Farr, who ought to have one or two stories about Walter Matthau worth sharing. At any rate, disposing of Universal cut-rate full-screen, no-frills DVD from several years ago—the only official stateside digital release of this movie available—would be a cause for celebration in itself, but especially if there was a Blu-ray waiting in the wings.
14) Eddie Deezen or Christopher Mintz-Plasse?
As much as I love Deezen in 1941 and I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Mintz-Plasse is less of a one-note performer—he’s McLovin’, for Christ’s sake, and he might have been even better in Role Models. I even liked him in Year One. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to Kick-Ass. Advantage: Christopher Mintz-Plasse.
15) Actor/actress who you feel automatically elevates whatever project they are in, or whom you would watch in virtually anything.
Among those whose body of work is signed, sealed and delivered, there can be none higher than Barbara Stanwyck in this regard, and I have yet to see so many of her films, relatively speaking, that she feels just as alive to me as she did when she actually was. (Next up: Stanwyck and MacMurray reunited in There’s Always Tomorrow.) Among the living and breathing, I’ll say Michelle Yeoh or Maggie Cheung.
The men folk would be represented handily by the sublimely menacing and always interesting Bruce McGill. As I wrote in my 2009 roundup: “I will watch (McGill) in literally anything, which is good for him, but not always for me because he’s made his share of bummers… You come away wishing, as you do in so many movies which feature McGill for only a scene or two (I’m thinking of Michael Mann’s The Insider) that this dynamic actor had possession of the lead role instead of being forced to sear his way through the distractions of ungainly plots and other actors in order to make an impression. Those hang-dog eyes… have translated with age into deep pools, reserves of humanity that have more than enough room for anger, humility, affection, arrogance, entitlement, righteousness and the many other tools of the trade of a great character actor. I continue to wish him better parts, but I am always so grateful for those moments when he pops up unexpectedly to save whatever mediocre film he’s in at the moment that I’m almost afraid of getting what I wish for.”
And having just seen Bronson I’d be willing to project that the almost satanically magnetic Tom Hardy might be a candidate for possible installation here in the future.
20) What's the least you've spent on a film and still regretted it? (Submitted by Lucas McNelly)
I’ve been paid to see movies and still felt I would have been better off doing a load of laundry. However, in keeping with the spirit of the question, I once paid 50 cents to see a Saturday matinee of The Shoes of the Fisherman which, even though it happened 40 years ago, still has to rank as one of the most profoundly boring experiences of my life. I know I’m all about going back and revisiting duds of my past these days, but do I have to go back and see this one again?
(To Be Continued, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel...)
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By the time Valance was made, Van Cleef had more credits in guest spots on TV than in movies and may well have been looking for a more substantial experience when Sergio Leone cast him as Colonel Mortimer, reluctant but driven compadre to Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name in the first Dollars sequel, For a Few Dollars More. It’s interesting to note than in his first movie for Leone, his debut in the spaghetti western genre that would sustain his career and reputation as a high plains bad-ass nonpareil, Van Cleef was actually cast against type in an essentially sympathetic, heroic role. And it’s also worth mentioning that though his work in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is probably considered his signature performance, the one with which he will be most closely associated and remembered for, Van Cleef’s subsequent career was not confined to expanding on the straight-up villainy that had characterized his career since he first confronted Gary Cooper on that dusty main street in Hadleyville. 
He had plenty of nasty turns left in him, to be sure—most memorably, for me, his bounty hunter in the blaxploitation western Take a Hard Ride was no gentleman—but after his two performances for Leone he was more likely to be found in roles that played off an awareness of Angel Eyes’ essential brutality while leavening it with less ambiguously heroic character traits. The role he played immediately following The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)-- a murderous gunman released from prison who joins with the surviving member of a family killed by his gang to exact revenge on the killers in Guilio Petroni’s Death Rides a Horse (1967)-- remains probably the best balancing act between the two personas. (Critic J. Hoberman memorably described it as “Replete with baroque torture and acid flashbacks (which) unfolds in a starkly primitive world—if not a desert on the planet Mars.”) And the role that stands as my favorite of Van Cleef’s post-Angel Eyes appearances is as the admittedly generic gunfighter who joins forces with martial artist Lo Lieh against a gang of ruthless murderers in Antonio Margheriti’s gleefully silly, yet tough-as-nails The Stranger and the Gunfighter (1976) (known as Blood Money on DVD), Hong Kong producer Sir Run Run Shaw’s foray into cross-cultural genre mixing (a sub-genre unto itself known in some circles as the lo mein western. Gunfighter is a nasty romp with a strong whiff of its own absurdity, and adorned by yet another catchy musical theme, this one composed by Carlo Savina. I’ve never understood why it doesn’t have the following of some of Van Cleef’s other post-Leone pictures. Perhaps its sparse distribution in the video age has something to do with that—it has largely been available on VHS in a terrible pan-and-scan print, which is likely long out of circulation. Happily, Gunfighter was released last year on a nice (and inexpensive) wide-screen DVD under the title Blood Money as part of the “Shaw Brothers Dynasty Collection” and is, for fans of the steely-eyed sharpshooter, an absolute must-own. (So is, I suspect, Death Rides a Horse, a movie I have never laid eyes on myself, though it remains available only in shoddy cropped VHS and DVD editions.)
But outside of Angel Eyes, the role that would cement the final touches on his legacy as, other than Eastwood, the defining icon of the spaghetti western genre are the two films he made for Gianfranco Parolini (under the generic nom de camera Frank Kramer) as the mysterious “man with the gunsight eyes,” Sabata (1969) and Return of Sabata (1971). (Yul Brynner replaced the actor in the title role for Parolini’s first sequel, 1970’s Adios, Sabata, while Van Cleef was off filling Brynner’s shoes as Chris Adams in the third film in the Magnificent Seven cycle, The Magnificent Seven Ride!.) Van Cleef’s smartly attired assassin, whose range with a rifle is an unlikely marvel, witnesses the robbery of $100,000 from a supposedly secure safe. He returns the safe to the town officials who, unbeknownst to the citizenry, actually orchestrated the theft as a means of providing funds for the greedy plans of a slimy ex-Confederate officer, Mr. Stengel, who plans to use the money to gobble up cheap Texas land. But the bad guys don’t know (at first) that the safe is in fact empty, kicking off a series of thrusts and parries between the thieves, who want their dough back, and Sabata, who has other ideas. Sabata utilizes the familiar lone gunman with a mysterious past template, but Parolini, who has the fine eye of dynamic composition that characterized directors of the period who were drawn to the spaghetti western (but who lacked the sense of pace and sensate elongation of movement for effect of which Leone was a master) recognizes Van Cleef’s strengths and exploits his star’s singular ability to stand out in a landscape of chaos to great effect. 
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