John Wayne Vs. Clint Eastwood — Hollywood Vs. Cinecittà, The 2nd Amendment, and the Final Word on Alex Pretti's Fate

 

There are two things that a person discovers the very first time he takes a real authentic firearm in his hands:

First of all, how much heavier the firearm is than thought after viewing innumerable movies, both from Hollywood and abroad; and

Second of all, what a heavy responsibility you feel with what all of a sudden lies in your hands.

In the wake of Alex Petti's death, there has been a great deal of controversy over whether a person should carry a handgun to a protest — why shouldn't he, given that conservatives are always touting the Second Amenment as one of the rights of all Americans (indeed, of all people everywhere)? Aren't Republicans being hypocritical?

Here is the kicker — the final word on the matter, if you will, in a handful of sentences: when wearing a firearm in public and during protests, you should feel that extreme responsibility. Meaning that you stand back; you stand aside; you refrain from touching said gun; you remain calm and composed. You do not get involved in fistfights with other armed men (law enforcement officers or other). Indeed, you don't even get involved in shouting matches. You do not go berserk (think also Renée Good, armed not with a SIG Sauer P320 but with a Honda Pilot SUV). You do not yell. Again: you stand back. You remain calm and composed

Which brings up the matter of the film industry. Remember that Europeans, echoing the Democrat Party, are always calling the United States as a place of violence, indeed a place where the neanderthals are addicted to violence or to guns, if not both.

 

Take two westerns that were released within two years of each other, one in America and one in Europe (although both eventually to each other's countries and to the rest of the world).

In 1964 came out the first of Sergio Leone's Man With Ho Name trilogy, A Fistful of Dollars, which started the spaghetti westerns phenomenon.  Now, I don't want to sound like a spoilsport — I know it is all in fun, and, as it happens, no matter what I write below I still enjoy the Sergio Leone movies — but a number of things need to be pointed out.

In Per un Pugno di Dollari, Clint Eastwood guns down one villain after another. In the trailer alone, "the magnificent stranger" (the original shooting title of the film) kills about 14 people, often punctured with jokes ("Get three coffins ready" "My mistake, four coffins" "See, my mule don't like people laughin'"). At the end of the sequel, For a Few Dollars More, (nine killed in the trailer), a joke in the final scene (at 3:12) has Clint Eastwood piling one gang member after another in a mule cart while he counts the reward money it will bring him. He tells Lee Van Cleef that he "thought [he was] having trouble with his adding".

Of the two heroes in Leone's Once Upon the Time… the Revolution (Duck, you Sucker!), Rod Steiger's total kill count comes allegedly to 37 while James Coburn's rises to 123.

Again, I don't want to spoil the fun, but the revolvers in these films are the epitome of the light handguns we think of as weighing no more than children's plastic toys — and used just as irresponsibly — although they certainly feature in most of American films (westerns or other) as well.  (In one of the most pro-American movies ever to grace the screen, Rough Riders [do click that hyperlink if you want to see a moving scene], John Milius insisted that the actors be furnished with real rifles.)

INTERMISSION: To briefly change the subject: Notice that the trailer for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly gets it wrong — the Bad is usually said to refer to Lee Van Cleef's Angel Eyes while the Ugly is usually said to designate Eli Wallach's Tuco. Having said that, Sergio Leone has declared that the title is intentionally misleading — the viewer is not supposed to know for sure at various points in the film which of the three characters is which person in the title. 

Speaking of getting it wrong, the original tile was Il Buono, Il Brutto e il Cattivo, so the American title gets the two last people mixed up (but that was a deliberate decision, because it sounds better in English) — while the French title is mistranslated as Le Bon, La Brute et le Truand (although that may also have been a deliberate decision, for the same reason in French). In any case, a young Jean-Paul Belmondo used to be proud that he was nicknamed "il brutto" among Italian filmgoers in the 1950s and 1960s until he discovered it was a "false friend" mistranslation. "Brutto" does not mean "Brute" (a bad boy term) but "Ugly."

Incidentally, before I saw a single spaghetti western — or an American western or war movie for that matter — I knew their music through the purchase of LP records, notably the Ennio Morricone soundtracks. (While other kids preferred pop music rock'n'roll, as a teen-ager my favorite records (beyond Civil War songs) were motion picture soundtracks.) 

END OF INTERMISSION

 

Compare the first of the Man With Ho Name trilogy with a John Ford western that was released two years prior. In The Man Who Shot LIberty Valence, the legalistics of killing are discussed (among others, by none other than Lee Marvin) — "That ain't murder, Mr. Marshall, that's a clean-cut case of self-defense!" — and I don't remember exactly how many people are killed throughout the entirety of the 1962 movie — but it's safe to say, hardly more than the fingers of one hand — however, as far as the bad guys are concerned, only one (Liberty Valence himself) is gunned down. His two henchmen — one of whom is Lee Van Cleef — are immediately told to refrain from reacting and to stand down, which they do immediately, threatened as they are by John Wayne's rifle. 

Moreover, the story doesn't end there, but the killing has consequences. A political rival — sounds like a locofoco Democrat, to be honest — tries to destroy Tom Doniphon for shooting Lee Marvin, "an upstanding citizen," while the key plot point revolves around the very fact that that Jimmy Stewart character wants to end his career in his guilt over shooting a man.

In Warlock (with Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn, 1959), a full gang of outlaws as vicious as those of Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) ride into town and confront the wounded sheriff, Richard Widmark — with only two of them ending up killed while the rest are held at gunpoint and arrested.

   

The spaghetti westerns are how the drama queens — Europeans and leftist Americans — alike view America and the absolute horror of its terrifying gun culture.

Remember also, how we are always warned by the locofocos about the dangers of autocracy and genocide to the United States. Often, indeed, we hear about fascism descending upon America (but somehow always landing in Europe). Mass killings, in the form of genocide, have not usually occurred in North America — certainly not to the same extent as in the of the rest of the world — notably Europe itself. (Grazie, Second Amenment.)

While, again, I do think it is fine to enjoy Sergio Leone's westerns (along with Ennio Morricone's music) not least the black humor within, the Hollywood western — no matter how left-leaning its "artists" — was more likely to tote responsibility (not to mention real life) while the European westerns revel in mass murder — which it considers a joke — and fantasy. 

 

Related: 18 years ago, a French TV station compared the 2008 campaign to a Sergio Leone film — Obama the Good, Bush the Bad, and McCain the Ugly (in the film's French mistranslation, Obama the Good, Bush the Bad, and McCain the Brute)