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 motion pictures, 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, insofar as possible, 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 drama queens of 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 were eventually released in each other's countries and in the rest of the world).

In 1964 came out the first of Sergio Leone's Man With Ho Name trilogy (called the Dollars trilogy in Italian), 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 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, often 4 or 5 at a time. In the trailer alone, "the magnificent stranger" (the original shooting title of the film) kills about 14 people (they're not easy to count), 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 the dead will bring him. He tells Lee Van Cleef that he "thought I was having trouble with my 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. Having said that, there's no denying that that movie doubles as a war film; as does the third Man With Ho Name entry, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A joke in what I believe is the latter is that Blondie (Clint) is faced with three bad guys in the desert (of Spain), the camera never pulls away from a focus on the gun in his holster as three shots ring out in quick succession, and the three men are lying dead on the ground; it turns out he has shot the trio so fast (à la Lucky Luke, "the man who shoots more quickly than his shadow") that the camera never manages to pick up the action.

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 one of the most patriotic scenes ever filmed], 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 (Sentenza) 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 — at various points during the film, the viewer is not supposed to know for sure which of the three characters — including Eastwood's Blondie — is which person in the title. 

Speaking of getting it wrong, the original tile was Il Buono, Il Brutto, il Cattivo, so the American title gets the two last people mixed up (but that was obviously a deliberate decision, because it sounds better in English) — while the French title is mistranslated as Le Bon, La Brute et le Truand (although The Good, the Brute, and the Crook may also have been a deliberate decision, for the same reason in French). In any case, a young Jean-Paul Belmondo was happily surprised when learning 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 prized by bad boys) but "Ugly."

Update: Grazie, Signora Hoyt, per il Instalink and to Inge Scott for reminding us that "Fistful of Dollars copies Yojimbo. It's an Italian homage to a Japanese Samurai movie influenced by American westerns" — although Steven Fletcher is less diplomatic and calls it a remake or even a plagiary of the the Akira Kurosawa film. 

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, Mister 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 oater — 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 who are every bit 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 (the spaghetti oaters?) 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 Amendment.)

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. 

Needless to say, in the aftermath, Hollywood and the rest of the world's film industries followed the lead of the spaghetti western, both in oaters (e.g., The Wild Bunch) and in other films (e.g., Kingsman: The Secret Service, which, among other things, glorifies the alleged (in-bred?) violence of America's church-goers, as well as their mass murder).

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 (or, rather, using the film's French mistranslation, Obama the Good, Bush the Crook, and McCain the Brute).