Did you miss me? Terribly?
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Gonna break protocol, and explain my hiatus of the past week. I had to find somewhere new to live which in LA is always a daunting task. Anyhow, I did it. Just gotta sign some paperwork, then I start the moving process. Happy, happy, joy, joy....On to business...
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So Wild East Productions, the company that put out the rather beautifully restored DVD for Tonino Valerii's Day of Anger, has put out another couple of titles. Well, they've released one, and they've got two more on the way. Happy day for me, right?
Well sort of. Allow me to explain in my review of...
ARIZONA COLT (aka. The Man From Nowhere, 1966) d. Michele Lupo
The Story: In releasing a bunch of prisoners to shore up the numbers in his gang, bandit Gordo also releases wily gunslinger Arizona Colt. After Colt refuses to join his gang, Gordo soon finds Colt thwarting his evil schemes at each turn until a final showdown.
The Review: Hmmm, at some point in this series of reviews somewhere, I said that Giuliano Gemma had yet to let me down (unlike George Hilton who seemed to have incredible foresight in how to disappoint me years after the fact). Obviously, you're waing for the "but..." here right? Well, he didn't exactly let me down, but had I seen this one before A Pistol for Ringo I probably would've enjoyed it a little more.
Arizona Colt is an incredibly similar character to Ringo, which isn't at all surprising. In fact, had they just named him Ringo in the movie and made it a sequel, it might've worked better. But he isn't Ringo, and Lupo is no Tessari. I'll come back to that. It makes total sense to make the agile Gemma into the handsome, young, and hellishly cocky gunfighter, but that makes for a difficult line to walk between Franco Nero badass and Terrence Hill jackass. Ringo leaned toward the former, and Arizona toward the latter. He's just a little too free and loose while things around him continue to get more and more grim. Even after his near-crippling, neither the character nor the direction seem to carry the same grim weight that Nero's hand-stomping in the original Django had. Arizona need more of the smile-to-pit-viper attitude.
Part of the problem was the story around him. Even though this movie came out a year after the spaghetti western really got going, many of the genres unique (from Hollywood) conventions were already established. Somehow this one still seemed to be stuck in that proto-spaghetti period where they were still trying to mimic Hollywood (Come to think of it, I didn't like One Silver Dollar with Gemma for the same reason, but that was still a year earlier.). For God's sake, they had cowboys in the movie and talked about a cattle drive, I was just thankful they didn't show any cows. (To read more about the trauma of cows in a spaghetti western, search out my review of The Last of the Badmen.) The best spaghetti's deal with revenge, politics, and gold, not cows.
That's just a surface issue. The real problem is that the story takes too long to go anywhere, much of this being due to the unnecessary show of Arizona's swagger in messing with Gordo's gang as they travel through the mountains. It's called narrative economy. How do we know Django's a bad mother? Cause he drags a fricking coffin around behind him. See? Then we move to the plot line of the bank robbery which again takes way too long. During that we have the murder that finally gets the revenge story going, then there's sort of a motivated plot. Now we have to go back to Arizona's character.
As mentioned above, (and maybe it's the fault of the subtitles) the theme song harps on his being from nowhere, but he explains early on that his names Arizona because he's from Arizona. Just like that, Arizona refers to himself as a bounty hunter, but we never see him bring anyone in. Mostly he cheats at cards, effs around with Gordo, and acts like an all purpose wiseass. In fact, I began to wonder why he kept messing with Gordo when he never seemed to want to bother trying to bring him in. It wasn't like For A Few Dollars More where there's a lot of pussyfooting around with the criminals but it's all orchestrated for a purpose. And it isn't as though you can pass of that Arizona's cocky because he could take them in any time, especially when Gordo hands his @$$ to him with four different bullets. So he's not very likeable, and he doesn't have the cool badass factor going for him either.
So the revenge plot certers around the saloon keeper hiring Arizona to nab his daughter's killer, a member of Gordo's gang. The saloon keeper can't pay him much, but Arizona agrees on the condition that he gets to sleep with the guy's other daughter. This isn't exactly endearing. It doesn't have nearly the alluring but rough sexuality that passes between Jill and Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West. It also makes for a weak love story of any kind, because I don't care how times have changed, no decent girl's gonna go for a guy who offered to take her as compensation for catching her sister's killer. Am I right?
Generally speaking this movie is a mess, but somehow it worked. In fact, I didn't think of all these problems with it until I started thinking about it afterward. Then again, unless there are just glaring gaps in logic or huge mistakes, I tend to stick with stuff until it ends. Besides, I don't go into spaghettis expecting Citizen Kane, I just want a good time. Unfortunately, this one was still a little too aggravating to be all that fun.
None of this was helped by the DVD itself. After viewing the Day of Anger disk, this one could only fail to impress. Granted Anger warranted the restoration job more, but this one's obviously from a print. It's got all the muddy colors, scratches and dirt of a tranfer from a 40 year old print. Though it looks much better than some of the other transfers that have made it to video and DVD (at the very least it's widescreen), for the price difference it wasn't worth it so much. My copy of Find a Place to Die looks damned good, and it was a third the price. I'll still fork out for their next release which is a double feature, I'm just hoping that it turns out better all around.
In the end, I don't wanna give Wild East too much trouble, after all, for the most part, I'm just glad to get to see them.
Well sort of. Allow me to explain in my review of...
ARIZONA COLT (aka. The Man From Nowhere, 1966) d. Michele Lupo
The Story: In releasing a bunch of prisoners to shore up the numbers in his gang, bandit Gordo also releases wily gunslinger Arizona Colt. After Colt refuses to join his gang, Gordo soon finds Colt thwarting his evil schemes at each turn until a final showdown.
The Review: Hmmm, at some point in this series of reviews somewhere, I said that Giuliano Gemma had yet to let me down (unlike George Hilton who seemed to have incredible foresight in how to disappoint me years after the fact). Obviously, you're waing for the "but..." here right? Well, he didn't exactly let me down, but had I seen this one before A Pistol for Ringo I probably would've enjoyed it a little more.
Arizona Colt is an incredibly similar character to Ringo, which isn't at all surprising. In fact, had they just named him Ringo in the movie and made it a sequel, it might've worked better. But he isn't Ringo, and Lupo is no Tessari. I'll come back to that. It makes total sense to make the agile Gemma into the handsome, young, and hellishly cocky gunfighter, but that makes for a difficult line to walk between Franco Nero badass and Terrence Hill jackass. Ringo leaned toward the former, and Arizona toward the latter. He's just a little too free and loose while things around him continue to get more and more grim. Even after his near-crippling, neither the character nor the direction seem to carry the same grim weight that Nero's hand-stomping in the original Django had. Arizona need more of the smile-to-pit-viper attitude.
Part of the problem was the story around him. Even though this movie came out a year after the spaghetti western really got going, many of the genres unique (from Hollywood) conventions were already established. Somehow this one still seemed to be stuck in that proto-spaghetti period where they were still trying to mimic Hollywood (Come to think of it, I didn't like One Silver Dollar with Gemma for the same reason, but that was still a year earlier.). For God's sake, they had cowboys in the movie and talked about a cattle drive, I was just thankful they didn't show any cows. (To read more about the trauma of cows in a spaghetti western, search out my review of The Last of the Badmen.) The best spaghetti's deal with revenge, politics, and gold, not cows.
That's just a surface issue. The real problem is that the story takes too long to go anywhere, much of this being due to the unnecessary show of Arizona's swagger in messing with Gordo's gang as they travel through the mountains. It's called narrative economy. How do we know Django's a bad mother? Cause he drags a fricking coffin around behind him. See? Then we move to the plot line of the bank robbery which again takes way too long. During that we have the murder that finally gets the revenge story going, then there's sort of a motivated plot. Now we have to go back to Arizona's character.
As mentioned above, (and maybe it's the fault of the subtitles) the theme song harps on his being from nowhere, but he explains early on that his names Arizona because he's from Arizona. Just like that, Arizona refers to himself as a bounty hunter, but we never see him bring anyone in. Mostly he cheats at cards, effs around with Gordo, and acts like an all purpose wiseass. In fact, I began to wonder why he kept messing with Gordo when he never seemed to want to bother trying to bring him in. It wasn't like For A Few Dollars More where there's a lot of pussyfooting around with the criminals but it's all orchestrated for a purpose. And it isn't as though you can pass of that Arizona's cocky because he could take them in any time, especially when Gordo hands his @$$ to him with four different bullets. So he's not very likeable, and he doesn't have the cool badass factor going for him either.
So the revenge plot certers around the saloon keeper hiring Arizona to nab his daughter's killer, a member of Gordo's gang. The saloon keeper can't pay him much, but Arizona agrees on the condition that he gets to sleep with the guy's other daughter. This isn't exactly endearing. It doesn't have nearly the alluring but rough sexuality that passes between Jill and Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West. It also makes for a weak love story of any kind, because I don't care how times have changed, no decent girl's gonna go for a guy who offered to take her as compensation for catching her sister's killer. Am I right?
Generally speaking this movie is a mess, but somehow it worked. In fact, I didn't think of all these problems with it until I started thinking about it afterward. Then again, unless there are just glaring gaps in logic or huge mistakes, I tend to stick with stuff until it ends. Besides, I don't go into spaghettis expecting Citizen Kane, I just want a good time. Unfortunately, this one was still a little too aggravating to be all that fun.
None of this was helped by the DVD itself. After viewing the Day of Anger disk, this one could only fail to impress. Granted Anger warranted the restoration job more, but this one's obviously from a print. It's got all the muddy colors, scratches and dirt of a tranfer from a 40 year old print. Though it looks much better than some of the other transfers that have made it to video and DVD (at the very least it's widescreen), for the price difference it wasn't worth it so much. My copy of Find a Place to Die looks damned good, and it was a third the price. I'll still fork out for their next release which is a double feature, I'm just hoping that it turns out better all around.
In the end, I don't wanna give Wild East too much trouble, after all, for the most part, I'm just glad to get to see them.
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