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Speaker 4: Sacro, Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host. Mike
Speaker 4: White joined me once again as mister orange Eye.
Speaker 8: Hi Mike, thank you so much, really glad to be here.
Speaker 6: Also back in the booth is Professor Richard I Words
Speaker 6: Thanks Mike, we continue a month looking at westerns with
Speaker 6: one that came out the same year as The Wild
Speaker 6: Bunch but has a very different feel. It's Robert Hossain
Speaker 6: Cemetery Without Crosses, also known as Unacorde Unkult. The film
Speaker 6: stars Hossein as Manuel, a mysterious figure who gets hired
Speaker 6: by the widow of Eli Kin, who was killed by
Speaker 6: cattle rancher Will Rogers, yes Will Rogers, while his brother
Speaker 6: is Rome Free. We will be spoiling this film as
Speaker 6: we go along, so if you don't want anything we ruin,
Speaker 6: turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen
Speaker 6: the film. There's a great release of it from Arrow.
Speaker 6: So Rich, when was the first time you saw a
Speaker 6: Cemetery without Crosses and what did you think?
Speaker 9: So, I actually saw it for the first time in
Speaker 9: preparation for this podcast, prior to you reaching out to
Speaker 9: record this episode. I actually was not familiar with this film.
Speaker 9: I was very thrilled to come across it, and I
Speaker 9: really enjoyed it very much, and I'm going to really
Speaker 9: enjoy talking about it with you and Orrin.
Speaker 6: I'm going to break rink a little bit here and
Speaker 6: say how I saw it the first time. Also similar circumstances.
Speaker 6: What was it two years ago? At newarkhan out in
Speaker 6: Palm Springs the first Palm Springs Nwar khan Orn presented
Speaker 6: kind of a talk on Hossein and showed us a
Speaker 6: film of his and I said, hey, guys, let's get
Speaker 6: together and talk about another one of his films. And
Speaker 6: I'd always wanted to see cemetery without crosses, so this
Speaker 6: was a great opportunity. But yeah, orin, when was the
Speaker 6: first time you ran across this one?
Speaker 8: That's cool. I'm glad to have opened it up. After
Speaker 8: I finished college. This was around five. I think I
Speaker 8: had nothing to do, and I basically watched like three
Speaker 8: spaghetti westerns a day for a long time, and I
Speaker 8: think I went through like one hundred and thirty. They
Speaker 8: all started merging at one point and you just feel
Speaker 8: like you're watching the same movie again and again. And
Speaker 8: Cemetery of that cross has really stuck with me. I
Speaker 8: did not know anything about Hossein up and field really
Speaker 8: three or four years ago, but at that point I
Speaker 8: just knew that it was different than any spaghetti western
Speaker 8: I have watched. I'm not even sure that I realized
Speaker 8: it was a French production at that point, but it
Speaker 8: stuck with me enough to actually take some frames from
Speaker 8: it into my mood boards when I was a Frontier,
Speaker 8: and so there's actually a few shots in Frontier that
Speaker 8: I can now see in Cemetery without Crosses, which is funny.
Speaker 8: I am not sure even when I started watching Hossein's
Speaker 8: movie was recently if I at first realized it was
Speaker 8: the same person who did Cemetery without Crosses, And I
Speaker 8: think I only after watching one I realized, oh, that's him.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Hussein is a fascinating guy. I think I was
Speaker 6: probably most familiar with him before two years ago, just
Speaker 6: with his little role in Raffifi, And don't know if
Speaker 6: I had really seen him in much else, because he
Speaker 6: was first and foremost an actor and then came into
Speaker 6: direct it. And it was what like nineteen fifty five
Speaker 6: all the way to nineteen seventy where he was just
Speaker 6: cranking out a lot of movies and then went on
Speaker 6: a hiatus for a while.
Speaker 8: He moved from movies to the theater. He started in
Speaker 8: theater and then he started making movies, and in nineteen
Speaker 8: seventy he switched to the theater. Back to the theater,
Speaker 8: and he became one of Francis's biggest theater directors. He
Speaker 8: was doing really huge productions, like massive, almost like Broadway
Speaker 8: like productions.
Speaker 6: On stage, he was known for doing Late Miss Arab
Speaker 6: right or was that just the film.
Speaker 8: He did the movie of Lame Miss Rob. I'm not
Speaker 8: sure if he did the play. He might have. I
Speaker 8: know he did like Battleship of Tempkin on stage for example.
Speaker 8: This is like fast forwarding a lot. But he also
Speaker 8: discovered Isabella Johnny had he had an acting school like
Speaker 8: a theater school, and he literally picked Isabella Johnny from
Speaker 8: the street. He saw her with her parents and he
Speaker 8: was like, you should come to my theater school. I
Speaker 8: think he might have also so directed Isabelle operez first play.
Speaker 8: I'm not a hundred percent sure. I think I've read that.
Speaker 8: And then he made a few more movies later on,
Speaker 8: but he definitely spent spent He spent all this time
Speaker 8: acting as well. He was in many movies. I'm sure
Speaker 8: you've seen him in more movies as an actor.
Speaker 6: This is an interesting film insofar as it is very offbeat.
Speaker 6: I've seen it compared to al Topo or Matalo, the
Speaker 6: acid Westerns. I don't think this is as far out
Speaker 6: as those westerns are. It doesn't feel like any of
Speaker 6: our characters are dead or prophets, or there's not a
Speaker 6: whole lot of religious aspect to this, which I think
Speaker 6: both of those other films have. I still haven't seen
Speaker 6: things like Zachary and some of the other acid westerns,
Speaker 6: but this definitely has a different feel to it, and
Speaker 6: it's highly indebted to Sergio Leone. He dedicates the film
Speaker 6: to Leone, but I don't necessarily even see that much
Speaker 6: Leone in this film, even though he allegedly directed one
Speaker 6: of the scenes in it allegedly.
Speaker 8: Can not really be proven. And I've heard two different
Speaker 8: stories about how it happened. There's a French book where
Speaker 8: they say that what happened was that Josein needed to
Speaker 8: leave for something in France and he was terrified of flying.
Speaker 8: I guess he was notoriously terrified of flying, so he
Speaker 8: had a drive or take a train and he took
Speaker 8: a long time, and he tapped Leoni in to come
Speaker 8: in and direct a couple of scenes. But the scenes
Speaker 8: Leoni supposedly one of the scenes he supposedly directed is
Speaker 8: a scene with Hosein in it, So that story makes
Speaker 8: no sense. So I don't really know how it happened
Speaker 8: and if it really happened.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that does cast some doubt on there. And then
Speaker 6: there's also a whole thing about Dario Argento having a
Speaker 6: writing credit. From what I understand, he didn't necessarily write
Speaker 6: the movie, but he might have helped out with the
Speaker 6: Italian dub dialogue.
Speaker 4: Is that you're understanding as well.
Speaker 8: That would be my understanding, and I think that would
Speaker 8: be the most logical explanation, because I honestly, listen, I
Speaker 8: love Argento. He's great, but he's Argenta. It's not really
Speaker 8: a writer, he's a director. I think this movie is
Speaker 8: better written than most of Argento's writing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I always wonder how much he brought to the
Speaker 6: party when it came to Once Upon a Time in
Speaker 6: the West, because I think he's got a co writing
Speaker 6: credit on that one as well.
Speaker 8: That is true. I don't Yeah, I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 8: we can never really know. I know, people talk about Hossein,
Speaker 8: Where's is the Black Glove? And people are like, oh,
Speaker 8: ur Gentle the Glove, But I'm like, this is years
Speaker 8: before ar Gentle meta movie. It's just not I just
Speaker 8: don't know that it's really I feel like it's just
Speaker 8: looking for stuff.
Speaker 6: I would not call this a proto Giallo just because
Speaker 6: Hossein puts on a black glove before he commits acts
Speaker 6: of violence.
Speaker 8: I think to what you were saying regarding how it's
Speaker 8: not exactly like the other acid westerns or kind of
Speaker 8: hard to place within that genre, I think one of
Speaker 8: the reasons is for me past after having gone through
Speaker 8: Hussein's essentially full filmography up until nineteen seventy, I think
Speaker 8: this movie is much more corresponds much more with his
Speaker 8: filmography and which is predominantly a noir filmography, than with
Speaker 8: westerns as a genre.
Speaker 6: Even when it came to his earlier western, the taste
Speaker 6: of violence that felt much more like a noir, especially
Speaker 6: the black and white photography helps to give that feel
Speaker 6: to it as well. I was just so happy in
Speaker 6: that earlier film to see Mario Adorf, who we're going
Speaker 6: to talk a lot more about next week when we
Speaker 6: discussed Deadlock. But that was a lot of fun the
Speaker 6: taste of violence as well. And this one i've read
Speaker 6: it starts in black and white. The version I saw
Speaker 6: it does not start in black and white, but it
Speaker 6: is very muted. It's more I would almost say like
Speaker 6: a not necessarily a CPA tone. We're not doing any
Speaker 6: sort of like colorization like a lemonade jail or something,
Speaker 6: but it just feels very drained of colors, feels very drab,
Speaker 6: like a light lighter browns, and then the color does
Speaker 6: come back into it as we move into the movie
Speaker 6: about what maybe five minutes in. I'm always fascinated by
Speaker 6: how spaghetti westerns start, and just having this one start
Speaker 6: with a horse chase very interestingly shot too, where you've
Speaker 6: got like POV shots chasing these guys. You've got the
Speaker 6: three brothers who are on the run from the Rogers Klan,
Speaker 6: and just setting up this tension right away, giving us
Speaker 6: these three guys and then taking us to the one
Speaker 6: is definitely dying Eli and he moves over and there's
Speaker 6: his ranch right there and his wife, and we get
Speaker 6: his whole lynching. We get the hanging, very well shot
Speaker 6: hanging scene. I really like the way that they did
Speaker 6: that and just putting her on this path to revenge,
Speaker 6: and I like that she uses her husband's share of
Speaker 6: the money from the gig that the he and his
Speaker 6: brothers just pulled. What is the whole story? There was
Speaker 6: a crime but they're the criminals, right. It feels like
Speaker 6: the Rogers people had every right in the world to
Speaker 6: kill these guys.
Speaker 9: I'm not sure that I have definitive answer on what
Speaker 9: the crime was, because I actually like the deliberate ambiguity
Speaker 9: of it. I don't feel Whossan really was trying to
Speaker 9: put his thumb on the scale, and it really is
Speaker 9: hard to tell who the heroes and the villains are
Speaker 9: in this piece, and I like that intentional blurring of
Speaker 9: the narrative. What I loved about the opening is I'm
Speaker 9: a fan of films that just drop us right into
Speaker 9: the action. You don't really have to know much about
Speaker 9: Western mythology to begin to make sense of the very
Speaker 9: kinetic cinematography that starts it. We have no idea who's
Speaker 9: chasing who. It appears to be that there's this gang
Speaker 9: going after these two other writers who are in the
Speaker 9: lead pack, and there's one person who appears to be
Speaker 9: ailing on a third horse. But what I really like
Speaker 9: is that a lot of the cinematography is shot towards
Speaker 9: the purstsuit, not towards the destination, So you actually have
Speaker 9: no idea in the pre credit sequence where any of
Speaker 9: this is headed. And I really felt that really established
Speaker 9: that this isn't going to necessarily be a story about
Speaker 9: any particular destination, and in fact, this probably will be
Speaker 9: a film that has no final destination, because, as you
Speaker 9: were saying so correctly, it ends up just being a
Speaker 9: poetic riff on revenge and all of its different manifestations.
Speaker 9: So this is really, on one level, a melodrama about
Speaker 9: revenge that just happens to hijack an American genre, repurposed
Speaker 9: through an Italian sensibility, and then grinded through a French
Speaker 9: novelle fog stylization. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 9: what you come up with is what I think makes
Speaker 9: Robert Whosaying special as a author of films, which is
Speaker 9: that he is a deeply, at the root of it,
Speaker 9: a humanist who likes to tell very direct stories about
Speaker 9: human nature. And that's what I took out from this film.
Speaker 9: I felt this did better than most spaghetti westerns that
Speaker 9: don't have the name Leoni attached to it with giving
Speaker 9: the characters humanity and that I could actually believe motivations
Speaker 9: in this film and they didn't feel just like the
Speaker 9: machinations of a screenwriter.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I like what you're saying about not knowing the destination,
Speaker 6: because I think there's a literal camera move to show
Speaker 6: us the Eli's house. We don't even see where he's headed.
Speaker 6: His brothers are going one way, he starts going the
Speaker 6: other way, listing along, and just you can tell that
Speaker 6: he's been shot and he's just barely keeping onto this horse,
Speaker 6: and once he falls off in front of his own
Speaker 6: place and it's, oh, okay, I guess his place is
Speaker 6: right here. So I like that kind of reveal that
Speaker 6: Hosein does with this direction on that and that's right
Speaker 6: around the time I believe that the color starts to
Speaker 6: seep in. And I want to say that that's also
Speaker 6: a bookend, right. It happens at the end as well,
Speaker 6: which kind of speaks to, like you were saying, rich
Speaker 6: the whole cyclical nature.
Speaker 4: Of this revenge.
Speaker 6: And that's when she goes to the Hossein character and
Speaker 6: you can tell that they have a past as well.
Speaker 6: You're not really sure on that either. I don't think
Speaker 6: that this movie is very rich with backstory or exposition,
Speaker 6: which is, like you said, absolutely fine. I kind of
Speaker 6: like this vagary that we have where we don't necessarily
Speaker 6: know all of the motivations of these characters, and we
Speaker 6: don't necessarily know the past that they've had. We are
Speaker 6: dropped into this, which I appreciate. And when she gums
Speaker 6: to him and says, I want you to take care
Speaker 6: of Will Rogers and his gang, it's revenge is a
Speaker 6: game that never ends. He puts it right out there,
Speaker 6: but he still ends up. It's almost like he's faded
Speaker 6: to be in this role and spoilers, but this will
Speaker 6: eventually kill him just because of this cyclical nature, that
Speaker 6: whole dig two.
Speaker 4: Graves kind of thing.
Speaker 6: He is due for one of these graves at the
Speaker 6: end of the film.
Speaker 9: I think one of the things I like about Robert
Speaker 9: Hussein in particular in this film is he's very much
Speaker 9: in a showdown, tell mode, and I find that because
Speaker 9: there's so few clues, I find myself watching more intently
Speaker 9: and reading more into the few fragments we have. So
Speaker 9: I believe all of Manuel and Eli and Maria's relationship
Speaker 9: is in a single photograph we see for about four seconds,
Speaker 9: and it implies everything that there is this rich backstory
Speaker 9: that was immortalized in a photograph, and you feel he
Speaker 9: has some sort of psychic debt and you don't know
Speaker 9: whether or not Adios the debt more to the murdered
Speaker 9: man or to the abandoned widow, and it might even
Speaker 9: in fact be both, because there could be a very
Speaker 9: deep triangulation here. What I loved about it is it
Speaker 9: wasn't spelled out. And that's again where I'm going to
Speaker 9: keep saying. I think Hussein is at his strongest when
Speaker 9: he's in a genre picture, recognizing that the audience will
Speaker 9: go with him on very scant evidence. And I just
Speaker 9: love that that, in fact, the entire relationship that is
Speaker 9: at the core of this film might just be encapsulated
Speaker 9: in a wordless photograph we only see once.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I love that. I think it's interesting in terms
Speaker 8: of the audiences at the time because they were walking
Speaker 8: into it knowing the relationship between these two people. Because
Speaker 8: hose and Michelle merce start together in Angelique and this
Speaker 8: was really a subversion of her role in French cinema.
Speaker 8: Hossein already started subverting his own image from Ajilique with
Speaker 8: his previous films, definitely with The Vampire of Dizeldorf, and
Speaker 8: when people went to see the film, that relationship was
Speaker 8: already there. It was like a standard. It was kind
Speaker 8: of like a convention in a way, so they might
Speaker 8: have literally not have needed it. That is true, and
Speaker 8: I think, you know, there's always sort of a duality,
Speaker 8: I think in Hossein's films, where characters might say what
Speaker 8: their intent is and what they think, but they behave
Speaker 8: exactly the opposite of that. So that's at the beginning,
Speaker 8: Hossein basically says, I don't remember the exact quote, but
Speaker 8: he says something something like this, this never ends well,
Speaker 8: like revenge is never This is just not the way
Speaker 8: to go. And then he never even questions that. He
Speaker 8: just does it, and there is I think it's made
Speaker 8: even more tragic at the end when you kind of
Speaker 8: realize that it's maybe his own regret over not being
Speaker 8: with her, is doing it out of love or out
Speaker 8: of his own guilt essentially, which is also a very
Speaker 8: noar guilt, of very noar element, which makes this whole
Speaker 8: thing even more futile, because he's telling you right at
Speaker 8: the beginning, is telling you there's no point on any
Speaker 8: of it.
Speaker 6: He reminds me of the Robert Vaughan character from A
Speaker 6: Battle Beyond the Stars, where it's which is of course
Speaker 6: indebted to the Magnificent seven. When she goes to find him,
Speaker 6: he's living in a literal ghost town. There's no one
Speaker 6: else there. There's the dust and the old roulette wheel
Speaker 6: and these kind of things that you're seeing. He's the
Speaker 6: only person that's there. It's like he is all Murady
Speaker 6: has signed himself to be a ghost.
Speaker 9: That really is all the backstory you really need with
Speaker 9: Hussein's interpretation on the Man with No Name, is he
Speaker 9: really is a Borisian living in this completely fascinating ghost town.
Speaker 9: And within that you get this claustrophobic feeling that whatever
Speaker 9: he had prior to the film's official starting story, he
Speaker 9: clearly the first demonstration we see of his own agency
Speaker 9: is when he just starts to shoot up bottles in
Speaker 9: his own room. You know that he's going to be
Speaker 9: one of the fastest guns in the West, and he's
Speaker 9: a dead shot and all of that great stuff. But
Speaker 9: to what point he starts as a tragic figure? And
Speaker 9: I do like what Orange said that what sets this
Speaker 9: apart from other European takes on the Western is they're
Speaker 9: not Guilt is not often the major driver of why
Speaker 9: people act in Westerns, And one could even almost argue
Speaker 9: that it's almost The Searchers also has an essential narrative
Speaker 9: of guilt that drives the character of Ethan in The Searchers,
Speaker 9: but here Hussein does seem when he finally gets activated,
Speaker 9: he's only activated out of guilt, not out of any
Speaker 9: sort of he's going to fix anything. There's no essential
Speaker 9: sense that anything's going to be made right. And in fact,
Speaker 9: the part that I loved about this film is even
Speaker 9: though I could follow all of the action as motivated
Speaker 9: by human nature, it really was all these people are
Speaker 9: very broken people, and it's actually in their brokenness that
Speaker 9: they start to do things that, when we might code them,
Speaker 9: is like why are they doing that? It's why not
Speaker 9: do that? It's almost like a why not film, because
Speaker 9: they're completely broken, and that, again, I think is part
Speaker 9: of the existential dread that comes from Hussein's background in noir.
Speaker 9: For me, it is the palpable sense of malaise that
Speaker 9: just drenches this film that makes it noir. There's nothing
Speaker 9: more really into cinematography or in the genre. But it
Speaker 9: is in that malaise that he taps into so effectively,
Speaker 9: which also then for the one or two moments of
Speaker 9: levity or the one or two moments when it seems
Speaker 9: like there might be a way out of this existential trap,
Speaker 9: you just realize just how tightly constructed the script is.
Speaker 9: To go back to one of Orne's earlier points, this
Speaker 9: very much is a Hussein film, and I can see
Speaker 9: his fingerprints everywhere, because he is a master genre melodramaist,
Speaker 9: and he knows how to manipulate these dramas. And he
Speaker 9: wasn't trying to be Godar or truth. Oh, he was
Speaker 9: trying to be Robber trusaying. And I think this film
Speaker 9: fell off my radar in film school because film schools
Speaker 9: don't really talk about the master genre craftsman. They want
Speaker 9: the more avant garde, outrageous art film stuff. This isn't
Speaker 9: an art film. To me, that this is a great
Speaker 9: genre film. But sadly, oftentimes critics diminish the power of
Speaker 9: what great craft in a genre is just as important
Speaker 9: as great craft and an art film. But we sometimes
Speaker 9: mistake one is more artful than the other.
Speaker 8: There's no real way to discover it in the sense
Speaker 8: that nobody knows Hossein's film spirit now. I don't think
Speaker 8: even in France. He's just now he's starting to get rediscovered.
Speaker 8: He's been erased as a filmmaker. He's been celebrated as
Speaker 8: an actor and as a theater director, but he's being
Speaker 8: a race as a filmmaker. And that started with Kaye
Speaker 8: Sinema and people like Truffau who just did not like
Speaker 8: him at all from the get go. When his first
Speaker 8: film came out, which granted is not his best film,
Speaker 8: that we could go to Hell. It's it's decent, it's
Speaker 8: a good it's a good first film, but it's not
Speaker 8: a masterpiece. Four wrote some review about it and he
Speaker 8: said something like, no, Robert Hossein will not be the
Speaker 8: Orson Wells of our generation. And it's get over yourself.
Speaker 4: You're expecting every first time filmmaker to be the Orson
Speaker 4: Wells of their generation.
Speaker 8: I'm like, you know what I like, We could go
Speaker 8: to Hell more than I like four hundred blows. So
Speaker 8: there you go, Trifoe.
Speaker 6: We've talked so many times on the show about the
Speaker 6: Cannon and just how precious those Kye Do Cinema writers
Speaker 6: were and just trying to don't look at that person's film,
Speaker 6: look at our films, and just I'm a huge Melville
Speaker 6: fan and they were hot and cold on Melville, but
Speaker 6: for a long time. They were cold and they're just
Speaker 6: like this old man, get him out of here kind
Speaker 6: of thing, and.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, guys, get over yourselves.
Speaker 8: Some of the more positive quotes from character cinema that
Speaker 8: I could find about Hossein's films are stuff like not unsympathetic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, damning with faint praise, but I think he literally.
Speaker 8: Just failed, got lost between the cracks. And there have
Speaker 8: been I know, like that there's a French noir festival
Speaker 8: in San Francisco, I think called the French had a
Speaker 8: name for it, and that the guy runs it his
Speaker 8: name is Dan Malcolm and he's screened a lot of
Speaker 8: Hosain movies throughout the years. But for the most part
Speaker 8: there's just been nothing. And even finding these movies was
Speaker 8: you know, where can you get a bootleg? Where can
Speaker 8: you find this? Where can you find that? Which I
Speaker 8: think is also true for a lot of French noirs
Speaker 8: because there's just hundreds of them. Nobody knows them outside
Speaker 8: of France. They're gone, and I would argue that they
Speaker 8: are more true the literary form than the American wars.
Speaker 8: And partially also each are with what you were saying
Speaker 8: about Hosein and about how the character is an and
Speaker 8: this sense of doom from the beginning. I think in
Speaker 8: many ways a lot of his films remind me of
Speaker 8: David Goodis as far as the author, because when you
Speaker 8: read Goodess's characters seem to just acknowledge they're done for
Speaker 8: the beginning and then just diving deep into it. They're
Speaker 8: just saying it is what it is, going down the
Speaker 8: dark street. And that's what Josein does in almost all
Speaker 8: of his films. It's just this is gonna lead to
Speaker 8: no good and I'm going down And I.
Speaker 4: Agree with that.
Speaker 9: I do find that frequently when I discover late in
Speaker 9: my career new filmmakers and again, or I discovered Robert
Speaker 9: you saying because of you, because when you did do
Speaker 9: the thing at Markhan that introduced me to him. I
Speaker 9: always had him pegged where he's known more popularly, either
Speaker 9: as an actor or as a theater person. I didn't
Speaker 9: realize he had this wonderful string of very so successful
Speaker 9: films that had good box office and like, even when
Speaker 9: I was researching Cemetery Without Crosses, you know, one of
Speaker 9: the reasons that got greenlit is because the two stars
Speaker 9: were going to be box office and they knew, the
Speaker 9: investors knew they were going to get their money back.
Speaker 9: So this wasn't a minor fringe person on the margins
Speaker 9: of the French film industry. He just wasn't with the
Speaker 9: in crowd that got ballerized through a very particular mechanism,
Speaker 9: which is that both Henri Laningois with the French cinema
Speaker 9: tech and the Kayes editorship were able to steer a
Speaker 9: certain type of film into the pantheon, and everything else
Speaker 9: was dismissed with the great term, Oh, those are just
Speaker 9: in the tradition of quality, and those are just awful
Speaker 9: films traditional equality. Wait a minute, I like tradition equality,
Speaker 9: I like a good genre of film. And I think
Speaker 9: where I start to to bring this back to why
Speaker 9: I think he will be rediscovered and maybe outlive some
Speaker 9: of his earlier placement within the film historical trajectory for
Speaker 9: whatever that's worth, which basically is what films get most
Speaker 9: written about in which ones don't. I think he will
Speaker 9: continualy be reassessed by future scholars because he was a
Speaker 9: filmmaker who had his own distinctive feel for the types
Speaker 9: of roles he could play as an actor. So the
Speaker 9: one piece I always love about him as an actor, writer,
Speaker 9: director is he wrote scripts that he could act in
Speaker 9: and that he knew how to direct, which is not easy.
Speaker 9: Very few filmmakers are able to get out of their
Speaker 9: own head because those are three radically different arts, and
Speaker 9: there are a few people who can do that, And
Speaker 9: of course the one that always gets feted the most
Speaker 9: is a person like Orson Wells. In many ways, this
Speaker 9: is an Orson Wells level of talent, but it's channeled
Speaker 9: in a very different vein that didn't have any sort
Speaker 9: of lane in the literature. This wasn't going to be
Speaker 9: He wasn't like Leone really establishing the basic new version
Speaker 9: of a spaghetti western. He could take that innovation and
Speaker 9: then make it his own. And he wasn't necessarily taking
Speaker 9: French film noir and becoming the number one creator. That's
Speaker 9: going to be like having the breathless moment that says,
Speaker 9: this starts the whole genre. But he's doing work in
Speaker 9: these lanes in which his work is quite commendable, and
Speaker 9: I find his films all incredibly watchable. See the part
Speaker 9: that I think sometimes gets missed by the critics that
Speaker 9: the audience don't miss is that I have a good
Speaker 9: time after ninety minutes, or didn't I. And at the
Speaker 9: end of watching Cemetery Without Crosses for this podcast, for
Speaker 9: the first time of a few months back, I actually said,
Speaker 9: oh my god, how did I not know about this film?
Speaker 9: This is ridiculously enjoyable. Now again, what's that worth? I
Speaker 9: sometimes think we forget about pleasure when we are talking
Speaker 9: about these films. We can get into all the sidelights.
Speaker 9: I liked the Black Glove just because I thought it
Speaker 9: was so ridiculous, and I loved how ridiculous it was,
Speaker 9: and in my brain I loved what he put on
Speaker 9: the black glove because it's a signal to the audience
Speaker 9: that something cool is going to happen. And it's identical
Speaker 9: to the way that John Wick films work. It's identical
Speaker 9: to the way that Equalizer films work. It's you gotta
Speaker 9: have the cute to the audience. In the Equalizer, it's
Speaker 9: Denzel Washington starting a stopwatch. In this he put on
Speaker 9: a black clove. It's a genre convention. We all know this,
Speaker 9: But I love how ridiculously stupid it is and how
Speaker 9: poetically profound it is at the same time. And when
Speaker 9: stupid and profound intersect that's original to me.
Speaker 6: I want to talk a little bit about the structure
Speaker 6: of the film, and especially the structure of the characters,
Speaker 6: because I'm always fascinated. I'm always talking about like, Oh,
Speaker 6: I would love to make a chart of this, because
Speaker 6: it's so interesting to me that there are so many
Speaker 6: doubles in this film, because you've got, I guess with this,
Speaker 6: you've got the doubling of the three brothers. There's Thomas Caine,
Speaker 6: There's Eli, and I'm trying to remember the other guy's name,
Speaker 6: is it Ben?
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 6: So you've got the three brothers and the one gets killed,
Speaker 6: Eli gets killed, and then you've got the three brothers
Speaker 6: when it comes to the Rogers, so you've got Larry,
Speaker 6: Frank and Bud, and then you you've got the patriarch
Speaker 6: of Will over top of them.
Speaker 4: And then so you've got.
Speaker 6: Those two sides of things, and then you've also got
Speaker 6: the female characters. You've got the wife who we've talked about,
Speaker 6: Maria played by Michelle Mercier, and then you also have
Speaker 6: the daughter of Rogers, Diana, played by Anne Marie Balin.
Speaker 6: And so each side has their kind of the three brothers.
Speaker 6: The woman involved, and then you also have even when
Speaker 6: it comes to the way that Manuel comes in and
Speaker 6: tries to infiltrate the gang, which we've seen a bunch
Speaker 6: that was like the classic thing from both Fistful of
Speaker 6: Dollars and for a Few Dollars More, where you've got
Speaker 6: the way that East would come in and kind of
Speaker 6: pit people against each other, play people off of each other,
Speaker 6: or in a four a few Dollars More where he's
Speaker 6: infiltrating so that he can help out Colonel Mortimer eventually
Speaker 6: and also get the bounties. There is no bounty here.
Speaker 6: There's just the you know, I guess he is a
Speaker 6: I never bounty hunter, but he's basically just kill all
Speaker 6: of these people. But the way that he comes in
Speaker 6: the first time we really see him in action and
Speaker 6: murders these two Valley brothers, so two guys again, and
Speaker 6: it's like, oh, I save these two Rogers boys by
Speaker 6: killing these valley guys.
Speaker 4: That's v A L l ee. They're not like valley
Speaker 4: girls or valley boys.
Speaker 6: That the way that they then are like, Okay, We're
Speaker 6: going to take this guy in and thank him and
Speaker 6: maybe make him part of the gang.
Speaker 4: Kind of thing.
Speaker 6: I love that kind of subterfuge that they have, and
Speaker 6: just now he's always going to be on very rough
Speaker 6: footing because he knows something that they don't why he's
Speaker 6: actually there. And then we as the audience, like you said,
Speaker 6: which we're clued in on all of this stuff. And yeah,
Speaker 6: I also love that whole thing of Okay, when the
Speaker 6: gloves comes out, you're going to hear that very familiar
Speaker 6: well it's the movie where it's like, oh, did you
Speaker 6: hear that little clicking sound, like when you're getting ready
Speaker 6: to shoot the guns. It's basically get ready for the
Speaker 6: sound because he's putting the glove on.
Speaker 9: It is a film of doubles. I agree with that.
Speaker 9: It's also a film that when I start to like
Speaker 9: when I was listening to you, where my brain went
Speaker 9: to is something that I'd want people who maybe will
Speaker 9: watch this for the first time after hearing us discuss
Speaker 9: this is. It also alternates between very desolate frames and
Speaker 9: overpopulated frames, Like when I think about this film in
Speaker 9: my head, I love that in the saloon scenes, in
Speaker 9: the jail scenes, and in the bunk house scene, it
Speaker 9: is filled with humanity and Hussein does a brilliant job
Speaker 9: at narrating these very densely filled spaces that have other
Speaker 9: people in it, while you never lose sight of who
Speaker 9: he is within the mesan song, and you also are
Speaker 9: recognizing that he's setting up what the next act is
Speaker 9: going to be because all of those characters are going
Speaker 9: to come to fruition. Like when you're talking about the
Speaker 9: way he murders the valley boys. What becomes interesting is
Speaker 9: those densely artistically designed, really crowded frames with lots of
Speaker 9: faces and lots of people go in the opposite direction.
Speaker 9: And the part that I love is that he does
Speaker 9: a great job with these insane interior shots where you
Speaker 9: only are getting eyes or part of a face. And again,
Speaker 9: whenever I see these alternations between very lightly frames that
Speaker 9: are either filled with full close up or with desolate
Speaker 9: landscapes compared to these crowded scenes, you really keep putting together.
Speaker 9: I keep putting together in my mind what this story's
Speaker 9: really about. And there's always at every key point decision
Speaker 9: for who's saying. When he is in a crowded space,
Speaker 9: he is already calculating almost the bounty hunter or the
Speaker 9: gunslinger that he is, how he's going to eliminate all
Speaker 9: those threats, and so there's this threat calculus that is
Speaker 9: all implied, and then all the rumination, guilt, and remorse
Speaker 9: are in these incredibly sparse things. And so I bring
Speaker 9: that up in that this film not only has these
Speaker 9: double plots, but it's almost like it has these two
Speaker 9: different filmmaking styles. And it really is that in one level,
Speaker 9: just this very simple revenge story with very few characters,
Speaker 9: but then that those characters have to interact with this
Speaker 9: larger world and they're always in collision. And then that's
Speaker 9: why I think it sets up the ending so effectively.
Speaker 9: So I'll just leave it there. But that's where I
Speaker 9: went to when he started to talk about doubling, as
Speaker 9: I do feel he pulled it all the way through
Speaker 9: in the visual style of the film.
Speaker 8: I really whenever I look at a Hosain film at
Speaker 8: this point, because I've looked at all of them so
Speaker 8: carefully when when writing about him, I did a piece
Speaker 8: for Noir City about him, and so I can't, really,
Speaker 8: I almost can't take his movies just at the face
Speaker 8: of the one movie. I'm seeing his whole trajectory, this
Speaker 8: whole cinematic trajectory through every film, and a lot of
Speaker 8: these things are elements that carry over from the very
Speaker 8: first film. The duality part, for example, is something he
Speaker 8: dealt with a lot. There's blonde in a white car, Newton,
Speaker 8: a white car has doubles as basically you don't know.
Speaker 8: He's trying to figure out there's two sisters and he
Speaker 8: doesn't know which one tried to kill him. Vampire of
Speaker 8: this oldor if he plays a person with a double identity,
Speaker 8: sacred identity, sacred agents, it's him and his wife then
Speaker 8: Mari Marina Vladi, and they both play double agents and
Speaker 8: they don't know which one is which, so they're trying
Speaker 8: to figure each other out. Those are elements that come
Speaker 8: across in these films, and I think they're partially because
Speaker 8: of his own struggles with I'm not sure if his
Speaker 8: own identity, but his looking for meaning and trying to
Speaker 8: find a meaning in life, which is also why I
Speaker 8: think these type of movies end in nineteen seventy, because
Speaker 8: that's when he finds religion, and once he finds religion
Speaker 8: and he finds hope, his movies are those of young
Speaker 8: man who's searching for something, and I think throughout his
Speaker 8: filmography that search goes from maybe there is something. I'm
Speaker 8: not sure there's anything. There's nothing, and cemetery without crosss
Speaker 8: is there's nothing period.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 8: One other thing that happens throughout his movies is when
Speaker 8: you look at a lot of his earlier filmography, everything
Speaker 8: is contained within confined spaces. A house, a cabin, mainly
Speaker 8: houses in cabins, a prison, everything is very very confined.
Speaker 8: As soon as you open the landscape and as soon
Speaker 8: as the world burns up, it becomes even bleaker, and
Speaker 8: it basically it's death that the open landscape is death.
Speaker 8: And even in Cemetery without Crosses or in his film
Speaker 8: after that, Falling Point, which I think has a lot
Speaker 8: of very very similar elements to Cemetery, and I think
Speaker 8: there are three films that are worth looking at together,
Speaker 8: which is Taste of Violin, Cemetery without Crosses, and Falling Point,
Speaker 8: because there's a lot of very similar they're all about
Speaker 8: kidnappings and there's very similar elements. People don't die when
Speaker 8: they're in the cabin. People die when they're out of
Speaker 8: a cabin. When you're in the cabin, even though bad
Speaker 8: things happen, you're staying alive.
Speaker 4: That's very true.
Speaker 6: There's that scene where the three guys are coming to
Speaker 6: kill the two brothers, and they're on the outside. I
Speaker 6: don't even think they crossed the threshold. The door opens,
Speaker 6: and the brothers were already there, ready for them, and
Speaker 6: just one's got one gun, one's got the other gun,
Speaker 6: and they're pointing that the guys have managed to take
Speaker 6: care of all three of them right away without them
Speaker 6: ever entering into the cabin. That's a really good point.
Speaker 8: So when you look at like Taste of Violence, Cemetery
Speaker 8: without crosss, Test of Violence is nineteen sixty one, and
Speaker 8: when you look at that, this and then Falling Point,
Speaker 8: all of them are about the kidnapping of a woman
Speaker 8: and the Taste of Violence, which is also a very
Speaker 8: bleak film that basically tells you violence revenge has no
Speaker 8: it doesn't work. There's three Mexican revolutionaries headed by Hossein,
Speaker 8: who kidnapped the daughter.
Speaker 4: Of a general.
Speaker 8: One of them, Mario Dwarf, wants to give her back
Speaker 8: for money. He's doing it for greed. One of them
Speaker 8: is doing it. One of them wants to let her
Speaker 8: go because he falls in love with her. But Hossein's
Speaker 8: character is the idealist. He believes in the cause. He
Speaker 8: thinks they're doing it for the right reasons. Whatever they
Speaker 8: have to do, they have to do because it's going
Speaker 8: to be for better of the people. And all the
Speaker 8: way through the end of the film, when he realizes
Speaker 8: my idealism is idealism is misguided and that this was
Speaker 8: not and they both just go on their ways and
Speaker 8: they both lost everything, he comes to that sort of
Speaker 8: like final bleak realization when you move the Cemetery Without Crosses,
Speaker 8: the purpose of the kidnapping is not there's no idealism
Speaker 8: behind it.
Speaker 4: It's just revenge.
Speaker 8: But after that, the following point, she also has a kidnapping,
Speaker 8: and by the way, also starts in black and white
Speaker 8: and ends in black and white, and it's mostly set
Speaker 8: in a cabin, has even less dialogue than Cemetery Without Crosses.
Speaker 8: It's a movie that is completely motivated by the gaze
Speaker 8: of the characters, and they're literally looking at each other
Speaker 8: through walls. There's all these scenes of Johnny Holliday as
Speaker 8: the sort of like good looking kidnapper and the lead
Speaker 8: woman who've forgotted her name, I think her name is
Speaker 8: Catherine in the film, and they keep looking at wolves
Speaker 8: and you have these blows ups of them that just
Speaker 8: make you feel like they're looking at each other. And
Speaker 8: Hossein plays like a really horrible, like the villain, the
Speaker 8: most villainous villain in that film, and the kidnapping in
Speaker 8: that film is purely read for money. So you can
Speaker 8: really see then, like how much more nihilistic his movie's
Speaker 8: become throughout the years as you go what he does
Speaker 8: with this kind of kidnapping seguence in nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 8: nineteen sixty nine, and nineteen seventy, right before he finds religion.
Speaker 6: He's not afraid to play villains when this one, I
Speaker 6: guess he's more of an anti hero, but he's definitely
Speaker 6: not afraid to play villain villains, and he's not afraid
Speaker 6: to play outsiders. That was what I found interesting about
Speaker 6: I Taste of Violence is that he and so many
Speaker 6: of these actors are basically playing like Mexican peasants in
Speaker 6: that movie and with this one. I found it interesting,
Speaker 6: And I hope I'm not reading too much into this,
Speaker 6: but that's what I do. Is that he and the
Speaker 6: main female character, her name is Maria, his name's Manuel.
Speaker 6: All of the other characters, as I was saying before,
Speaker 6: like Tom Harry Dick all of these like American names,
Speaker 6: whereas he and Maria seem to be coded as Mexicans
Speaker 6: or outsiders in this way where they're on the outs
Speaker 6: of this new Western society that's going on, that it's
Speaker 6: all white people coming in here. And I don't think
Speaker 6: that his darker looks, his beard that he's got, like
Speaker 6: the scruff that he has in this one, the way
Speaker 6: that she's dressed, I think they are definitely coded as
Speaker 6: being more Latino than any of these other characters.
Speaker 8: I'm not sure if it's like an overall statement about
Speaker 8: anything more than just feeling like they are playing the
Speaker 8: outsiders just for the sake of being the outsider. I wouldn't.
Speaker 8: I don't know if it's it has like some big
Speaker 8: kind of political message behind it, I guess, But but
Speaker 8: it is true.
Speaker 6: Now I found more politics and it's violence, absolutely. And
Speaker 6: I wanted to talk a little bit about the title too.
Speaker 6: You're talking about the planes and just the danger of
Speaker 6: the planes. I know that Cemetery without Crosses was the
Speaker 6: American title for this. I love that image that there
Speaker 6: is a cemetery, that there are people buried here, but
Speaker 6: you would never know it because there are no crosses.
Speaker 4: There is no religion.
Speaker 6: I love that he's about to find religion here, but
Speaker 6: that this one there are no markers for these graves.
Speaker 6: But when it comes to the original title, Una corre
Speaker 6: colt that it's a rope and a gun and that's it.
Speaker 6: It's I guess the cult could be a horse, but
Speaker 6: I think it's really more the cult handgun. And I
Speaker 6: just love how that also gets worked into the lyrics
Speaker 6: of the main theme song. And that theme song and
Speaker 6: the music by Hossein's father is fricking fantastic, and I
Speaker 6: love that it's just the little theme but it gets
Speaker 6: played in all these different ways. We've talked about this
Speaker 6: before in spaghetti westerns, especially where you have these little
Speaker 6: motifs that are just being played again and again. And
Speaker 6: I really like what he's doing with this and that
Speaker 6: great rousing opening song. Recently we talked about Massacre Time,
Speaker 6: and the main theme of Massacre Time so jaunty and
Speaker 6: just kind of like these Johnny Ringo type of arching,
Speaker 6: rollicking pop songs. This one's no different. But then the
Speaker 6: way that the music gets transformed as we go along
Speaker 6: that it's that theme that hossein Stad had come up with,
Speaker 6: but just being played in all these different much more sinister,
Speaker 6: and there's a few points in here where the music
Speaker 6: just kind of goes off the rails, and I really
Speaker 6: like that.
Speaker 9: I loved the Scott Walker game song. I had to
Speaker 9: look deeper into Scott Walker for this podcast, and I
Speaker 9: really feel he was channeling his inner raw Hide to
Speaker 9: come up with just that rousing theme because it really
Speaker 9: fit a kind of propulsive energy that when this film
Speaker 9: needed that kind of genre moment to move things forward.
Speaker 9: I love that there is something about movies like this,
Speaker 9: just like a film like the Manu shot Liberty Balance,
Speaker 9: where you do want a quick encapsualization of some of
Speaker 9: the major themes in a actual song, not just in
Speaker 9: a score, and I think he hit a home run
Speaker 9: on this. I just found that tune instantly memorable and
Speaker 9: was great. Regarding de Andrea Hussein's score, I thought that
Speaker 9: was also incredibly well done, because you really needed something
Speaker 9: to underlie this fatalistic, nihilistic universe, and I think Andrea
Speaker 9: Hussein's score worked really well. The one thing that I
Speaker 9: thought becomes so fascinating about these trans literations of the
Speaker 9: American Western is this might be one of the few
Speaker 9: American Westerns that has a Spanish classical guitar in it,
Speaker 9: because that has nothing to do with any of the
Speaker 9: Hollywood basis or even the Italian spaghetti western. But because
Speaker 9: of a shot in Almera in Spain, I actually think
Speaker 9: Andrea Hussain wrote, I heard it there's pieces in the
Speaker 9: score that are done by Spanish classical guitar, and I'm like,
Speaker 9: that's new, That's not typically in a spaghetti Western. And
Speaker 9: so that again shows that there really wasn't an attempt
Speaker 9: by whu'sying to be a purist. He was going for
Speaker 9: feel in so many ways I see his style as
Speaker 9: a director is he paints for different moods and he's
Speaker 9: not going to dismiss an idea by going that's outside
Speaker 9: the box, that doesn't make sense. This is a my
Speaker 9: riff on the Western. I should stick more closely to
Speaker 9: what an Eni morricone would be doing, but he doesn't
Speaker 9: do that one of the things. And again this is
Speaker 9: where I love Orang's insights. And I did read your
Speaker 9: piece in Noir City and urged other people, if they're
Speaker 9: people who subscribed to our City, to read it, because
Speaker 9: it really is one of the ways that I learned
Speaker 9: more about Robert Hussain is he is a person who
Speaker 9: is a storyteller, and you're correct that in this film.
Speaker 9: Where I really do see the trajectory is he wasn't
Speaker 9: going to make a film like Cemetery Without Crosses until
Speaker 9: about nineteen sixty nine, because you do have this trajectory
Speaker 9: in his career where his films are getting bleaker and darker.
Speaker 9: And the title for the American audience's Cemetery with cross
Speaker 9: is precisely for the reason that Mike White brought up,
Speaker 9: which is that it really is that this is a
Speaker 9: godless world. All these dead bodies are just carnage and
Speaker 9: there's nothing redemptive about it. The Cemetery without Crosses signals
Speaker 9: in the movie poster, this is not a film about redemption.
Speaker 9: There will be no hope because across in the cemetery
Speaker 9: is at least the hope of a potential resurrection. There
Speaker 9: will be no resurrections here. This is all about crucifixions.
Speaker 9: But the dead steak dead.
Speaker 8: I think that's interesting, and Cemetery Without Crosses is about
Speaker 8: not being hope. But a rope and a cult is
Speaker 8: about violence, and that's also kind of what happens when
Speaker 8: he puts you know, in the sort of the other
Speaker 8: side of the camp like thing of putting the glove
Speaker 8: is that the violence is always chosen. Knows what he's doing,
Speaker 8: and he's not doing anything impulsively. Ever, he does not
Speaker 8: pull the gun unless he puts on the glove. So
Speaker 8: he's always making the choice to dig his own grave
Speaker 8: in no way because he's dealing you at the beginning,
Speaker 8: this is not gonna end well if I do this.
Speaker 8: And then every time he takes out the glove, he's
Speaker 8: taking some more dirt from the ground basically for his grave.
Speaker 8: That's as a very conscious choice throughout the film. Regarding
Speaker 8: the song and the score, I think, first of all,
Speaker 8: I think it's really interesting that Hussein basically every single
Speaker 8: movie he made up to in nineteen seventy that his
Speaker 8: dad did the score. So I think it's really nice.
Speaker 8: It's just kind of a cool collaboration to be like,
Speaker 8: my dad's going to do the score Andrea. Hussein was
Speaker 8: a very highly accomplished, celebrated Persian classical composer, so he
Speaker 8: comes from kind of a very lofty like he was
Speaker 8: a very very serious musician. Hussein's scores tend to do
Speaker 8: in general, what Cemetery does, where it's main score that
Speaker 8: just repeats itself again and again and again and again
Speaker 8: and again throughout the film. It's almost all of his
Speaker 8: movies are like that, and they're always infectious, just phenomenal scores,
Speaker 8: usually much much more jazzy than here. I think he's
Speaker 8: definitely going in a different direction here. The song is
Speaker 8: really cool, and I want, I guess I wanted to
Speaker 8: note a couple of things, and one is that I
Speaker 8: don't remember the song from Massacre time. It's been a
Speaker 8: long time since I watched that. Although Lucci Fool Cheese
Speaker 8: four of the Apocalypse is one of my favorite spaghetti westerns,
Speaker 8: perhaps my favorite, and that's a whole other type of soundtrack,
Speaker 8: but that's nineteen seventy five. But for sixty nine, the
Speaker 8: song feels very very sixties to me. And it also
Speaker 8: seems to, like Richard said, really hark back to like
Speaker 8: Rawhide and like American songs more than something like the
Speaker 8: Django soundtrack or Companero's or just their their I feel
Speaker 8: like it goes to the old American western thing a
Speaker 8: little more, even a little more than the Spanish thing
Speaker 8: in a way. Like with the song specifically not the score,
Speaker 8: which a lot of the other spaghetti western themed songs,
Speaker 8: they go a little more Spanish than American. Other than
Speaker 8: Scott Walker, we're also having Scott Walker. It just makes
Speaker 8: it sixties that you know, it's not a way it's
Speaker 8: like you it's beginning and it's like it's the sixties.
Speaker 8: Like it's not. It doesn't even try to make it
Speaker 8: feel like this is a real Western. It's just it's sixties.
Speaker 8: The other person that I just want to flag in
Speaker 8: terms of the score, because obviously it's under who's saying
Speaker 8: it's it's Scott Walker. But I think the lyrics were
Speaker 8: written by Hal Shaper, who had a very prolific career
Speaker 8: as a lyricist, definitely a lot of theme songs. He
Speaker 8: wrote the lyrics for the theme song for First Blood,
Speaker 8: It's Along Road. He wrote Freeze the Wind from Papion,
Speaker 8: which a lot of people covered. And he also started
Speaker 8: a publishing house called Sparta Music that signed originally signed
Speaker 8: David boy because before he left and then became famous
Speaker 8: somewhere else. He signed Ian Whitecombe, who has a great
Speaker 8: song called The Sporting Life that it did for him,
Speaker 8: and there's the Israelites was under him. John Holtz the
Speaker 8: Tidy's High that blonded It and Musical Youth Musical Youths
Speaker 8: as the Duchy. So this is also a guy who
Speaker 8: had quite a career behind the lyrics for the song.
Speaker 6: I want to talk about two incredibly different scenes that
Speaker 6: play out within a period of maybe ten minutes, and
Speaker 6: also where editing is just so incredibly important. There are
Speaker 6: two scenes that are almost back to back. It's the
Speaker 6: scene at the dinner table where You've got Well is
Speaker 6: part of the Rogers gang, He's on shaky ground, doesn't
Speaker 6: know if they necessarily know who he is, if they're
Speaker 6: buying his story, and there is all of this tension
Speaker 6: that starts to happen during the dinner and this is
Speaker 6: the scene that allegedly Leone directed, but obviously Hossein is
Speaker 6: in here. So like you were saying, the story doesn't
Speaker 6: necessarily carry that much water, but just the quick edits
Speaker 6: that are going on around all of these different faces
Speaker 6: at this table, something is wrong. We don't necessarily know
Speaker 6: what's happening. And then to end it with a joke,
Speaker 6: to end it that in this mustard jar, there's a
Speaker 6: jack in the box that pops up and scares a
Speaker 6: shit out of Manuel, and everybody has this amazing laugh
Speaker 6: about it. Everyone is just there's not a dry eye
Speaker 6: in the house. Everyone's going fucking crazy about this trick
Speaker 6: that they played on Manuel the new guy. And you
Speaker 6: can see the unease on Hossein's face and you can
Speaker 6: see just that he's Okay, I don't know what the
Speaker 6: hell's going on here, and eventually he starts to laugh.
Speaker 6: Chuckle a little bit about that. But just those quick
Speaker 6: cuts of the faces around there, and then compare that
Speaker 6: to so he goes out, lets all the horses out
Speaker 6: of the stable, punches this guy to knock him out,
Speaker 6: lets the horses out, and then goes in after everyone's
Speaker 6: running away, running trying to get these horses. He goes
Speaker 6: in the house and then kidnaps the Rogers' daughter, takes
Speaker 6: her to back to the ghost town. And you've got
Speaker 6: this scene where Maria comes in. She looks at this
Speaker 6: other girl, other woman, and yanks this heart pending off
Speaker 6: of her chest, then basically sets the wolves on her,
Speaker 6: sets the two brothers on her. Meanwhile, you've got Manuel
Speaker 6: there in front of that roulette table and the brothers
Speaker 6: come in and they very purposefully look at him like,
Speaker 6: are you going to try to stop us or anything?
Speaker 6: And he just kind of lets this happen. They take
Speaker 6: off their gun belts, they go upstairs, and there are
Speaker 6: so many again cuts in the sequence, and then you
Speaker 6: don't see the violence.
Speaker 4: But you the violence.
Speaker 6: You hear the scream from the woman as they are
Speaker 6: raping her in this upstairs room. It's just chilling, and
Speaker 6: just that it sets up that tension of all of
Speaker 6: those cuts as these guys are going up these stairs,
Speaker 6: the way that they're looking at each other, the way
Speaker 6: they're looking at her, and you don't even see her
Speaker 6: in the frame a lot of the time, and just
Speaker 6: to get that off screen scream. It's brutal, and that
Speaker 6: you have that brutality. Five minutes after you have the
Speaker 6: biggest laugh in the entire film, where everyone on screen
Speaker 6: except Hossein really is laughing, and then this horrific thing
Speaker 6: that's going on.
Speaker 8: The juxtaposition between them so close to each other. Actually,
Speaker 8: I didn't think about that before when I watched. Those
Speaker 8: are definitely two of the best sequences in the film.
Speaker 8: I think the violent sequences is the best part of
Speaker 8: the movie personally. I think for me that's like five
Speaker 8: star and then you have a lot of the usual
Speaker 8: spaghetti western type things where you're like, okay. But the
Speaker 8: dinner scene was interesting for me to watch right now
Speaker 8: because I'm prepping. I'm actually I'm prepping to shoot a
Speaker 8: new film in a couple of weeks and we're shot
Speaker 8: listing and I'm looking at the scene and dinner scenes.
Speaker 8: It's just one of the hardest things to film dinner
Speaker 8: scenes because how do you make that interesting? And I
Speaker 8: looked at that scene and I'm almost with anxiety of
Speaker 8: how did they cover this? Like how are there so
Speaker 8: many shots? There's so many like how did you think
Speaker 8: about all of these? And I'm like, I really watched
Speaker 8: this with anxiety when I watch it this time because
Speaker 8: I'm just trying to figure out in my head where
Speaker 8: how did they exactly like plan this whole scene and
Speaker 8: like which frame they're gonna do were So that was
Speaker 8: kind of like how we looked at that scene right now.
Speaker 8: But the other scene, the rape scene, is particularly interesting
Speaker 8: because it's a bad Manuel and Maria and it's about
Speaker 8: them looking at each other and how they're responding to it,
Speaker 8: and it's this acknowledgment between each other of we've become.
Speaker 6: Oh, yeah, that scene on the street right afterwards where
Speaker 6: they're just doing those pushings on him, doing the pushings
Speaker 6: on her.
Speaker 4: Oh man, I love it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's like this is who we are now. And
Speaker 8: by the way, the pushing thing. He does the same
Speaker 8: thing in Taste of Violence at the end when they're
Speaker 8: looking at the horizon and they're kind of like looking
Speaker 8: at nothing. Basically in Nowhere he does the exact same
Speaker 8: thing with music. I think it does it better at
Speaker 8: saying cemetery. In that part it's a little it's more
Speaker 8: emotionally resonant, but it's also the moment for you as
Speaker 8: a viewer to realize these are none of these are
Speaker 8: good character. There are no good characters in this film.
Speaker 8: They're all horrible. Because he's just saying, okay, fine, do it.
Speaker 8: Then he's going down and he's like, all right, I
Speaker 8: guess this is done out. I don't like it, but
Speaker 8: what can I do?
Speaker 6: You get the pushings on them, and then heart cut
Speaker 6: to the girl who's upstairs in the bed and you
Speaker 6: are on her eye like Marian Crane, basically you pull
Speaker 6: out from her. It's like that poetry of the push
Speaker 6: versus the pullout on this poor victim. I love that,
Speaker 6: and I love the contrast too, of the two dinner scenes.
Speaker 6: You know, you're talking about how hard it is to
Speaker 6: shoot dinner scenes. You've got the wealth of all of
Speaker 6: these guys sitting around this table and having their big
Speaker 6: dinner and the women are waiting on them. And that's
Speaker 6: contrasted with the scene that we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 6: where the three guys are outside talking about the whole
Speaker 6: sanctity of the cabin kind of thing. That whole sequence
Speaker 6: starts with one of the brothers killing a rabbit, basically
Speaker 6: hitting a rabbit on the head, and then Maria is
Speaker 6: preparing the rabbit. You see her butchering it. And the
Speaker 6: very final shot of that whole sequence, after we've got
Speaker 6: the three guys who are just killed, is her beheading
Speaker 6: this skinned rabbit. That it's disturbing. I'm never like to
Speaker 6: see animals get killed on screen, but I would say
Speaker 6: that the symbolism is very ripe in that sequence, this rabbit,
Speaker 6: in the that she's butchering it because she's about to
Speaker 6: that necessarily literally butcher the Rogers daughter, but she's about
Speaker 6: to have I think her she is so active in
Speaker 6: the revenge. She doesn't take Manuel and just use him
Speaker 6: like a goldam and say, okay, go out and do
Speaker 6: this thing.
Speaker 4: He does the thing.
Speaker 6: He kidnaps the daughter, but she is so active. It's
Speaker 6: not him that comes back and says, listen, I kidnapped
Speaker 6: your daughter. It's her that comes back and throws that
Speaker 6: heart necklace on the table, and it's like, listen, I
Speaker 6: got her. I'm gonna have to come to some sort
Speaker 6: of an agreement here because you killed my husband and
Speaker 6: now I have your daughter.
Speaker 8: She does, in a way, butcher the Rogers daughter in
Speaker 8: the sense that beyond the violent act, which is horrible
Speaker 8: and very disturbing. Definitely, when I just thought about it
Speaker 8: when you said about when you mentioned the cut to
Speaker 8: the Rogers daughter and the zoom out. By doing that,
Speaker 8: they've also doomed her for revenge because now she's going
Speaker 8: to try to seek revenge. And if the movie establishes anything,
Speaker 8: it's that if you seek revenge, you're done.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Now she's got her reasoning and it just keeps going.
Speaker 6: It's just like Manuel said, it never ends, right.
Speaker 9: I agree that these are two very critical moments in
Speaker 9: the film, and the part that thing with is in
Speaker 9: the first scene the dinner scene. It's a very crowded
Speaker 9: frame again, a lot of long shots of the entire
Speaker 9: Rogers Klan at the table, and then some close ups
Speaker 9: of Hussein who's starting to feel very surveilled and he
Speaker 9: doesn't know why, which is creating a twitchiness in him.
Speaker 9: What I found so interesting in the next scene that
Speaker 9: really does lay off of that is is it then
Speaker 9: becomes a sparse zon Sen again, but he's now wanting
Speaker 9: to look away. He's not feeling accountable, and I think
Speaker 9: what I find so forlorn about that is not only
Speaker 9: do I fully agree with Orrin that this triggers the
Speaker 9: final act of the film, because it keeps the train
Speaker 9: of revenge going, it is oddly without a certain amount
Speaker 9: of complicity on behalf of Manuel and Maria. There's some
Speaker 9: abdication of responsibility there that when I was watching, it
Speaker 9: was throwing me by why were they so willing to
Speaker 9: go with this brutalization, because it really, on one level,
Speaker 9: could have just been a straightforward kidnapping for ransom, and
Speaker 9: instead it turned into this ungodly horrific violence. And to me,
Speaker 9: it really that's what speaks to this film is what
Speaker 9: I find so fascinating, What sticks with me. What sticks
Speaker 9: to my ribs about this film is typically the man
Speaker 9: with no Name character has more agency than Robert Hussain
Speaker 9: is willing to take on. And that's the best phrase
Speaker 9: I have for it is it's almost like you're the
Speaker 9: man with no name character. You need to either settle
Speaker 9: all the scores, or you need to be the only
Speaker 9: figure outside the law that can restore justice, or you
Speaker 9: are going to be the most ethical of the unethical
Speaker 9: bounty hunters. Whatever it is that does not seem to
Speaker 9: be operative in this godless world. It's in that scene
Speaker 9: when the brothers are walking up the steps to perform
Speaker 9: the unspeakable violence. He is not the man with no
Speaker 9: name in that he just feels like a loser with.
Speaker 4: A Roulette wield.
Speaker 9: And that's not how that character is coded in the genre.
Speaker 9: So I applaud who's sang for Honestly, the way I
Speaker 9: would read it is giving the character a genuine human
Speaker 9: vulnerability that the other way to read the glove is
Speaker 9: a mask that when he puts the glove on, he
Speaker 9: then can adopt the persona of I am this omnipotent gunslinger.
Speaker 9: Without the glove, he's just a broken down breast guy
Speaker 9: living in a ghost town. And so the other thing
Speaker 9: that I think is interesting is in order for the
Speaker 9: filmmaker and the screenwriter to reconcile those two halves of
Speaker 9: the Manuel persona, he went with a piece of artifice.
Speaker 9: When the glove goes on, there is the best shot
Speaker 9: in the west, and he will eliminate all the violence
Speaker 9: in fifteen seconds or less, and no one can touch him.
Speaker 9: When he doesn't have the glove, he is just a
Speaker 9: list living in a nihilistic town.
Speaker 6: I'm trying to remember how often we don't see the
Speaker 6: man with no name when it comes to at least
Speaker 6: the first film, at least fistfull of Dollars, because there's
Speaker 6: a pretty good chunk of this movie where Hossein disappears.
Speaker 6: It's that whole sequence of Maria going to the Rogers's
Speaker 6: place and showing the dependent and all that, and then
Speaker 6: there's a funeral scene and he's not at the funeral,
Speaker 6: but the Rogers and the Canes are there. At least
Speaker 6: she's there and the Rogers family is there, and they're
Speaker 6: basically participating in the funeral of her dead husband that
Speaker 6: they killed. And then there is a cemetery and there's
Speaker 6: a burial that's taking place, and there are crosses. By
Speaker 6: the way, this whole movie's a lie. Basically, she starts
Speaker 6: the burial process and then makes them finish it up,
Speaker 6: and which is just fascinating to me, the way that
Speaker 6: she is the one with all of the power at
Speaker 6: that moment and just making them do this manual labor
Speaker 6: as opposed to Manuel labor. And meanwhile, Manuel is at
Speaker 6: the ghost town and he's not a very good captor
Speaker 6: when it comes to keeping the girl there because he
Speaker 6: walks upstairs with some coffee for and she's gone, and
Speaker 6: then he has to chase her across the plains trying
Speaker 6: to bring her back, and of course the brothers show up,
Speaker 6: and that's when she sees them and it's like, okay,
Speaker 6: is it the fire frying pan or the fire runs
Speaker 6: back to saying, but it's yeah, he's not like you said,
Speaker 6: the omnipotent person.
Speaker 4: He's not that guy.
Speaker 6: There was always the whole thing of Blondie and Tuco
Speaker 6: when it came to the good bed the ugly where
Speaker 6: no matter what Tucco tries to pull, I would say
Speaker 6: ninety percent of the time, Blondie is already on top
Speaker 6: of things. He already knows what's going to happen. Those
Speaker 6: two characters are very smart. The guys that are trying
Speaker 6: to tiptoe up and kill Tucco in the bathtub, and
Speaker 6: he's already got a gun and it's holding it under
Speaker 6: the bubbles. It's like he is very aware of what's
Speaker 6: going on, whereas Hossein, I don't think is that amission
Speaker 6: to at least person when it comes to this. And Yeah,
Speaker 6: I love when the brothers show up and they're like, hey,
Speaker 6: what the hell's going on and he just puts on
Speaker 6: the glove and they're like, Okay, we're out of here.
Speaker 4: And run right away.
Speaker 6: It's like they even have the symbol now that when
Speaker 6: the glove goes on, the gun comes out.
Speaker 8: I love that scene where he goes up and he
Speaker 8: finds out that she ran away and she's running and
Speaker 8: he goes after her. There's a very similar scene, almost
Speaker 8: literally the same scene in Falling Point, and I think
Speaker 8: there's a similar scene in a reverse in Taste of Violence,
Speaker 8: and in Falling Point, something similar happens when she runs away.
Speaker 8: The girl runs away and then Johnny Holiday finds her
Speaker 8: and catches up with her. In both of these films,
Speaker 8: there's this resignation of okay, you got me, let's just walk,
Speaker 8: and then the girl just it doesn't eat it, doesn't
Speaker 8: need to grab her, he doesn't eat it. She just
Speaker 8: turns around. She's like okay, and they just walk solemnly
Speaker 8: back to the cabin. That happens in both of those,
Speaker 8: and I think in the taste of violence, it's the
Speaker 8: resignation is almost it's the opposite, because the woman has
Speaker 8: a gun on Hossein and yet she she gives him
Speaker 8: back the gun and she's like, okay, let's just continue
Speaker 8: like you're You're like, I'm with you. Let's just continue
Speaker 8: with us, and it's those are all interesting. And I
Speaker 8: also think just in terms of a spaghetti western and
Speaker 8: that or you are a Western, because clearly it's not Italian.
Speaker 8: What sets it apart for me in a way. And
Speaker 8: I'm saying this loving a lot of I love spaghetti westerns.
Speaker 8: I love your westerns in general. The best genre films,
Speaker 8: the best westerns, the best noir films. They're not about
Speaker 8: the West, they're not about crime. They have something deeper.
Speaker 8: They might be about something in society now, they might
Speaker 8: be about some of the human condition and I think
Speaker 8: the majority of the Italian genre films, they are about
Speaker 8: the gunmen, they are about the crime also, and they're
Speaker 8: super fun, but they don't really go much below the surface.
Speaker 8: And I think this is much more like one of
Speaker 8: the great American Westerns, for example, where that's not it's
Speaker 8: not necessarily about the West. Henan is not about the West.
Speaker 8: The Man of Shot, Liberty, Valance, and definitely the revisionist
Speaker 8: westerns that I think came very much because of the
Speaker 8: Italian Westerns, because the Italian Westerns showed America you can
Speaker 8: make Westerns in a different style, in a different way,
Speaker 8: with a different but in America, the Americans took it
Speaker 8: and make movies that are a lot more profound than Django,
Speaker 8: which again I love Django, but Missus Miller is a
Speaker 8: much more profound movie. But I don't think mcavan miss
Speaker 8: Miller exists without Jango.
Speaker 6: No, I think you're right, And yeah, I love that
Speaker 6: kind of reflection, that echo that you get between just
Speaker 6: even though we were talking last week about The Wild
Speaker 6: Bunch and coming out the same year, I believe as
Speaker 6: once upon a time in the West, and it's this
Speaker 6: whole idea. If Nat I can't remember I for once
Speaker 6: upon a time it was sixty eight or sixty nine,
Speaker 6: but both of them taking on this whole idea of
Speaker 6: the West is ending and what happens to these figures,
Speaker 6: whether they be mythic figures like Cheyenne and Harmonica and
Speaker 6: Frank versus the Wild Bunch gang themselves, who are basically
Speaker 6: being forced out, forced down into Mexico, forced out because
Speaker 6: of technology. The scene with the car and they're talking
Speaker 6: about the airplane and not believing that there is a
Speaker 6: machine that can fly. It's one is more talking about
Speaker 6: the invasion of the railroad, but the railroad is very
Speaker 6: important in the Wild Bunch as well. And yeah, I
Speaker 6: love that these Westerns at this point are really so
Speaker 6: much more than just being I can't say cowboys and
Speaker 6: Indians because most of the time there are no Indians
Speaker 6: in these films, no Native Americans. It's just about for me,
Speaker 6: a lot of this is commerce. And you've got the
Speaker 6: whole thing of the rancher. You never see the cows
Speaker 6: because we don't have cows in Alamira very much. You
Speaker 6: never see what the ranchers are doing. It's much more
Speaker 6: about the horses. They got plenty of horses, but it's
Speaker 6: like the whole commerce of we rob you, we sell
Speaker 6: these They sold the horses before we could get there
Speaker 6: kind of thing, but we stole the money. So it's
Speaker 6: just this idea of who's got the money, who's in power,
Speaker 6: who's got the political clout.
Speaker 4: A lot of times, there's no cops in this movie.
Speaker 6: There's no there is a sheriff. The sheriff seems absolutely
Speaker 6: completely powerless. He's just a side character. He doesn't really
Speaker 6: do very much at all.
Speaker 9: This is a post May sixty eight French film. So
Speaker 9: one of the things that I think is so important
Speaker 9: to set up in a film like this is making
Speaker 9: a film in France that goes into pre production in
Speaker 9: because in researching for this podcast, this film goes into
Speaker 9: pre production while the events of May sixty eight are
Speaker 9: going on in France. So there's a nationwide strike that
Speaker 9: shuts down society, there's the battle between conservatives and socialists.
Speaker 9: We're dealing with all the violence in America with the
Speaker 9: major assassinations that happened in nineteen sixty eight, and so
Speaker 9: the world in sixty eight does appear to be on
Speaker 9: fire for a variety of reasons, from the Vietnam War,
Speaker 9: which touches. We always think about it in a very
Speaker 9: American context. The Vietnam War was also a French war,
Speaker 9: and so there's a lot going on in the cultural
Speaker 9: zeitgeist as Robert Hussain is putting this film together and
Speaker 9: even said it was hard to get financing pulled together
Speaker 9: in a mid nineteen sixty eight because of all the
Speaker 9: disruptions to French society and all of the chaos of
Speaker 9: nineteen sixty eight. So within this moment, and because he
Speaker 9: is doing a film that is quite Autorius and this
Speaker 9: in the sense that he's going to have a lot
Speaker 9: of control over the casting, the tone, the music, the setting,
Speaker 9: the narrative trajectory. Is writing a bleak story in a
Speaker 9: bleak time. He is authentically channeling, like when I watch
Speaker 9: a film like this, I actually find this to be
Speaker 9: better than news reports about just how bleak the French
Speaker 9: imagination was getting in nineteen sixty eight, because there was
Speaker 9: a intellectual movement that was being stunted, and this was
Speaker 9: actually going to be the pivot that actually eventually trans historically,
Speaker 9: now that we can look back sixty years, this is
Speaker 9: actually the pivot moment for all of Western culture. But
Speaker 9: I'm not going to turn this into a sociological discussion.
Speaker 9: Bottom line delbeing is I like films like this when
Speaker 9: you start to recognize that films are of their time.
Speaker 9: I can watch this film and fully understand the intellectual
Speaker 9: crises that are going on in France in nineteen sixty
Speaker 9: eight and nineteen sixty nine, and instead of doing it
Speaker 9: in a essay in a literary journal, Robert Whuson, Thane's
Speaker 9: putting it up in the big screen as a genre story.
Speaker 9: But ultimately, if what is this the story about? This
Speaker 9: is a story about Western culture is reaching a dead end,
Speaker 9: that there is no way out of these elements, and
Speaker 9: on some lay May sixty eight and again, this is
Speaker 9: going to be a complicated analogy that I don't have
Speaker 9: time to fully unpack. But one could argue that there
Speaker 9: was a leftist revenge plot that was trying to remake
Speaker 9: conservative society that was failing, and you really are dealing
Speaker 9: with these trans historical moments about revenge and Hussein being
Speaker 9: an artist, is channeling the emotions of the society at
Speaker 9: that time. And I think that's also why this film
Speaker 9: was a hit in France. The audience bleakness, just like
Speaker 9: film noir, matched the bleakness of the post war audience.
Speaker 9: This was a film made for the post May sixty
Speaker 9: eight audience in France, and they ate it up because
Speaker 9: they saw their own truth and pain in this film.
Speaker 8: There's a couple of other really good, sort of more
Speaker 8: political spaghetti westerns, but this is nineteen sixty seven. A
Speaker 8: Bullet for War General was really good. And there's one
Speaker 8: that's a little more obscure. I think it's nineteen sixty
Speaker 8: nine by Tonino Voaleri, who also directed Day of Anger,
Speaker 8: The Great Day of Anger with leave On Cliff. There's
Speaker 8: a movie called The Price of Power with Joanno Jama
Speaker 8: and that inspired by j the JFK assassination. So that's
Speaker 8: kind of a also a cool like spaghetti western of
Speaker 8: that era that's very political.
Speaker 6: And yeah, I think we mentioned that way back in
Speaker 6: the Executive Action episode because we were talking about when
Speaker 6: was the first time Kennedy's assassination was on film, and
Speaker 6: Executive Action definitely was breaking new ground on that. But yeah,
Speaker 6: Price of Power where it was what Garfield, I think
Speaker 6: they were to make a period accurate. It's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 6: we're going to assassinate James Garfield or something. Well, it's
Speaker 6: actually really the Kennedy assassination that we're showing. I love
Speaker 6: this echo too, of so talk about pure cinema that
Speaker 6: they send. At one point, the brothers come to the
Speaker 6: Rogers's and they basically like, we'll get the daughter back.
Speaker 6: Get the snopbeat out of them. They said, okay, we'll
Speaker 6: get the daughter back. They send off the one brother, Thomas,
Speaker 6: I think to go back to the ghost town and
Speaker 6: get the daughter. And you get this the whole thing
Speaker 6: of him coming in. And I love, by the way,
Speaker 6: we're talking about Leone, and I love the thing that
Speaker 6: Hossein does, which is for me just such a great
Speaker 6: Leone shot, which is the empty frame and the person
Speaker 6: walks into it and then stops, and you get that
Speaker 6: nice close up of the person like they give themselves
Speaker 6: their own close up almost it's like a profile shot.
Speaker 6: And you've got Thomas coming in. He takes off his
Speaker 6: spurs so he can sneak around. He comes into this
Speaker 6: scene into the shot, this nice Leone shot, and he
Speaker 6: goes up to the saloon, the empty saloon, where's Diana,
Speaker 6: And there's the light coming from inside and it's on
Speaker 6: the planks in front of the saloon. Doors, those batling doors,
Speaker 6: and I love how he comes to the one side
Speaker 6: and looks in and he sees the daughter, and then
Speaker 6: he goes around the outside of the light. It's almost
Speaker 6: like a Raiders of the Lost Dark kind of thing,
Speaker 6: don't put your hand in the light kind of thing.
Speaker 6: But the way he goes around and then goes to
Speaker 6: the other side and he looks in and he doesn't
Speaker 6: see Hosein, he doesn't see Manuel, I should say, and
Speaker 6: he's just kind of I'm not really sure what's going
Speaker 6: on here. Eventually he gets shot by I think Maria
Speaker 6: is the one that shoots him. And then you have
Speaker 6: this great echo of the earlier scene with Eli where
Speaker 6: he's riding and he's struggling and he's on his last legs,
Speaker 6: just about to die. And then you get this the
Speaker 6: echo that I'm talking about, which is everybody in town,
Speaker 6: the Rogers and the other brother in town waiting for
Speaker 6: Thomas to come back. And Thomas comes riding down the
Speaker 6: street and you get this POV shot from behind the
Speaker 6: back of the horse's head. It couldn't necessarily be Thomas
Speaker 6: because it's too close to the horse's head, but seeing
Speaker 6: the way that's coming down the street. Cut back to
Speaker 6: him and he's's got his head down, the hat is down,
Speaker 6: and then eventually just the horse stops and he falls off.
Speaker 6: He's been dead the entire time. That, to me, is
Speaker 6: just one of those it's up there with the dog
Speaker 6: carrying the hand in fistful of dollars or Yo Jimbo.
Speaker 4: It's one of those.
Speaker 6: Really iconic shots of just this dead man on a
Speaker 6: horse coming down the middle of the main road in town,
Speaker 6: and I think it's all being shot day for night,
Speaker 6: so you've got that kind of creepy effect of the
Speaker 6: too dark photography and just him falling off, and then
Speaker 6: also by his dead body falling off, you immediately cut
Speaker 6: to the other brother and you're just like, dude, you
Speaker 6: are fucked. You were the only thing that was going
Speaker 6: to help you was your brother coming back into town
Speaker 6: with his daughter. Here's your brother and he's fucking dead,
Speaker 6: and you're going to be fucking dead soon.
Speaker 8: To me, that's partially why, partially why he had a
Speaker 8: lot of trouble with the new wave people, because he's
Speaker 8: not very new wave. Is almost like a traditionalist in
Speaker 8: terms of how he makes films. He's not trying to
Speaker 8: deconstruct the form. He's trying to work within the form.
Speaker 8: So when he was making noirs, he wasn't trying to
Speaker 8: deconstruct noirs. He was just trying to make he and honestly,
Speaker 8: he was making the type of noirs that the same
Speaker 8: French critics used to celebrate from him coming from America,
Speaker 8: like you know, like detour and stuff like that. That's
Speaker 8: what he was doing, and they celebrated from America, but
Speaker 8: when it came from within them, if you're gonna do
Speaker 8: a noir, then it's got to be breathless, it's got
Speaker 8: to be like deconstructed, do something new with it, and
Speaker 8: it's and he he was things that were I don't
Speaker 8: actually think they're traditional, but I think maybe people saw
Speaker 8: them as like b or traditional or whatnot, the same
Speaker 8: as some other noir directors. I don't know that Juli
Speaker 8: Endovva a lot of like his noirs, they're not exactly
Speaker 8: celebrated what we kind of only look at a few.
Speaker 8: We have Melville Cluseau, amazing directors, but we're not really
Speaker 8: looking at all of these guys. To me, that's a
Speaker 8: part of why this is a cinematically superior to a
Speaker 8: lot of spaghetti westerns. I'm not gonna say to all
Speaker 8: of them, like Leoni was obviously the master, but is
Speaker 8: it cinematically superior to Korbucci. Maybe in terms of knowing
Speaker 8: how to construct the scene, possibly because I think he
Speaker 8: is a traditionalist very much.
Speaker 9: Yea, and I would agree with that. I do think
Speaker 9: that the part like when you start to talk about
Speaker 9: iconic moments in Cemetery without crosses, the dead guy on
Speaker 9: a horse is incredibly well framed, and it is even
Speaker 9: still surprising, even when that would be the most logical
Speaker 9: outcome of how it goes. It's still when I was
Speaker 9: watching it the first time, came across as a bit
Speaker 9: of a shock, which is again a testament and a
Speaker 9: nice pacing that Hussein was able to do. I think
Speaker 9: what I like in particular about Cemetery without Crosses is
Speaker 9: when I think about a film and I try to
Speaker 9: pull up memories of it, I'm always thinking about what
Speaker 9: are those moments that just stick to your ribs? And
Speaker 9: I think he did a couple things that were very
Speaker 9: much things that he learned from Leoni. Now where I
Speaker 9: think Leoni was slightly stronger than Hussein was on using
Speaker 9: sound cues like the beginning of how Once upon a
Speaker 9: Time in the West, Like, nothing can beat the sound
Speaker 9: design opening ten minutes, And I don't think he had
Speaker 9: as good and strong as sound record as as Sergio did.
Speaker 9: But I love the sounds of the Roulette wheel, of
Speaker 9: the spurs, of just these very recurring natural sounds. This
Speaker 9: is not a walled wall score film. There's a lot
Speaker 9: of times where he defaults to natural sounds, and because
Speaker 9: he's also dealing with this is going to be dubbed
Speaker 9: into a lot of different languages, he makes a bunch
Speaker 9: of different conscious choices slightly different than Leoni, frequently as
Speaker 9: characters when they're talking with their backs to the camera,
Speaker 9: which is going to make dubbing so much easier. And
Speaker 9: he doesn't try to do a lot of lip syncing,
Speaker 9: so that there would be no need for a lot
Speaker 9: of very careful dubbing as it goes into different markets.
Speaker 9: But what I'm trying to get at is this is
Speaker 9: a very auditory environment. So you have the Scott Walker theme,
Speaker 9: you have the Andrea Hussein ding, but I really do
Speaker 9: remember some of these other sound effects, and I thought,
Speaker 9: while it's always a cliche, I thought the spurs were
Speaker 9: incredibly well done. They always were a very nice sound.
Speaker 9: And I do that scene you were talking about when
Speaker 9: they took off their spurs, because you got we didn't
Speaker 9: even realize just how much that was coding the way
Speaker 9: characters were moving through this space. But I think again,
Speaker 9: part of what is really fun when we think about
Speaker 9: spaghetti westerns is Leone. While he was clearly the master
Speaker 9: of natural sounds in the Spaghetti Western, I think Hussein
Speaker 9: did a very credible job understanding the power of audio
Speaker 9: motifs along with visual motifs, and so I just wanted
Speaker 9: to give him a shout out for that.
Speaker 8: By the way, did you guys in English or in Italian?
Speaker 6: I think I watched it in Italian actually, which yeah,
Speaker 6: which was not usual for me. I don't tend to
Speaker 6: watch these in Italian, I knowing that they were shot
Speaker 6: usually mos. I am okay with watching it English and
Speaker 6: enjoying the dub, which I don't enjoy dubs very often.
Speaker 6: Though it was rather strange when I watched the Taste
Speaker 6: of Violence. I just kept thinking how strange it was
Speaker 6: that they were speaking French even though they were dressed
Speaker 6: like Mexicans.
Speaker 4: Which is just bizarre.
Speaker 6: Because I'm okay with Nazi speaking English. I'm okay with
Speaker 6: French resistance fighters speaking English when I watched these movies,
Speaker 6: but just to see a bunch of French people dressed
Speaker 6: up as Mexicans and hearing French coming out of their mouths,
Speaker 6: I was just like, this is really odd.
Speaker 8: I would usually just default to whatever the language of
Speaker 8: the lead characters, because I assume they will dub themselves
Speaker 8: in these movies, but this was clearly they were clearly
Speaker 8: both dubbed because Osa and speaks French. Even I have
Speaker 8: to say that it kind of looks like maybe they're
Speaker 8: speaking English him and Michelle Mercyeah, because the English dubbing
Speaker 8: really fits their lips, even though it's not them. But
Speaker 8: it seems like maybe they were speaking English just for
Speaker 8: the camera. I'm not sure. But taste of Violence is
Speaker 8: really interesting, I think in general as a Western, because first,
Speaker 8: I'm not familiar with too many euro Westerns from nineteen
Speaker 8: sixty one. I know Germany had all the Karl May stuff,
Speaker 8: but other than that, I'm not I don't really know.
Speaker 8: I can't really name too many pure Westerns from that era.
Speaker 8: And the other thing is that even for a Western
Speaker 8: in nineteen sixty one, it's so bleak, so bleak, I
Speaker 8: can't think of I mean, I'm sure there are but
Speaker 8: American any American Western that has that level of despair
Speaker 8: when the film ends, and which I think makes it
Speaker 8: even more unique in a way than Cemetery. I like
Speaker 8: Cemetery as a movie a little better, but I think
Speaker 8: it's it makes it so unique within just the landscape
Speaker 8: of making westerns that it's in nineteen sixty one, it's
Speaker 8: really just loved westerns and they're like, I'll make one,
Speaker 8: but I'll make one the way that I make them,
Speaker 8: which is just hopeless.
Speaker 9: It's not a.
Speaker 6: Really fun, rousing film at the end of the day,
Speaker 6: but I definitely am glad that I saw it. He
Speaker 6: telegraphs it to us, right, he tells us, revenge never
Speaker 6: ends well. It doesn't end well for him either.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we've got such a what could be a typical
Speaker 4: ending of this, like the literal walking down the main.
Speaker 6: Street of the ghost town versus the other gunman and
Speaker 6: everything versus the Rogers brothers. But it doesn't end like
Speaker 6: a typical Western. This thing doesn't have that, Like you said,
Speaker 6: it's much more of a noir. Like we spent so
Speaker 6: many hours and days debating at Noirk on what is
Speaker 6: the definition of noir? And my favorite still goes back
Speaker 6: to I think Kristaphaus that hole you're fucked when you start,
Speaker 6: and you're even more fucked when it's over.
Speaker 4: That is this definition. He is fucked at the.
Speaker 6: Beginning and he's even more fucked at the end, And
Speaker 6: I just think that it's such a satisfying way to
Speaker 6: go out.
Speaker 9: At the end. The part that when I was watching
Speaker 9: it for the first time, there's he basically it ends
Speaker 9: in an act of resignation, and we've seen this. This
Speaker 9: is actually a trope in the Western that the hired
Speaker 9: gun decides to hang it up. And it really is
Speaker 9: fascinating because this would be the true full spoiler like
Speaker 9: so as he he's walking. The first time I was
Speaker 9: watching it, I was like, this can't possibly end well
Speaker 9: because what type of possible reconciliation does he think is
Speaker 9: possible here? And it is just a fascinating moment because
Speaker 9: there are so many other choices he could have made.
Speaker 9: He doesn't have to disarm he really he pretty much
Speaker 9: has resolved all of the narrative tensions except one, which
Speaker 9: is as we've been talking about, he activated a revenge
Speaker 9: plot within a revenge plot. But it is just so
Speaker 9: fascinating to me that he wanted to end it on
Speaker 9: such a noir beat because there was nowhere for him
Speaker 9: to go there is there was no further frontier. The
Speaker 9: frontier was closed when he took this job on. This
Speaker 9: was a dead man walking film that you knew that
Speaker 9: there was never going to be any sort of resuscitation here.
Speaker 9: Emanuel and Maria were never going to ride off on
Speaker 9: horseback into the wild blue yonder. But I also didn't
Speaker 9: think after the climactic Babel in the street that he
Speaker 9: would make the final choice he made. And I keep
Speaker 9: wondering in my own head, was he actually just was
Speaker 9: there almost like a suicidal ideation going on there, or
Speaker 9: did he, in his own mind as the character, have
Speaker 9: some sort of bizarre hope that there was over, like
Speaker 9: that he could go back and I guess just be
Speaker 9: a depressed guy in his ghost town.
Speaker 8: Well, he makes a very active again, like with the
Speaker 8: glove of the choice, because he throws it away, right.
Speaker 8: He basically said, I'm not doing this anymore. But the
Speaker 8: cycle of revenge that he started does not end with
Speaker 8: his death, because now she's going to carry it forward,
Speaker 8: so he also has there is some recognition of you
Speaker 8: have the disease.
Speaker 9: Now, if you've been listening to the discussion, it's definitely
Speaker 9: this is a film worth seeking out. There is a
Speaker 9: really good restoration of it that's been released by Arrow,
Speaker 9: and so this film is easier to find. And the
Speaker 9: version that I did watch had the black and white bookends,
Speaker 9: which I do think are very important that this film
Speaker 9: is bookended as a cinematic story. I like the artifice
Speaker 9: of black and white to color because it really the
Speaker 9: interior story exists within this cinematic framing. That feels very
Speaker 9: rewarding to me. And also the thing about black and
Speaker 9: white is it is the draining out of color, just
Speaker 9: like a death is the draining out of the bud
Speaker 9: and of the color of the human body. So I
Speaker 9: think it is only natural that it starts in a
Speaker 9: frame of death and ends in a frame of death
Speaker 9: where all color, just like all blood, is just washed away.
Speaker 9: And so that that works for me. So I would
Speaker 9: just urge people who have been listening this conversation to
Speaker 9: watch this film on their own and make your own conclusions.
Speaker 9: But I am very excited that late in my career
Speaker 9: I learned about this film and am glad. I think
Speaker 9: it is a very worthy film in the euro Western
Speaker 9: canon of the nineteen sixties. This is not an imitative film.
Speaker 9: This is not even an homage film. Even though I
Speaker 9: love that ending credit, I love the ending credit for
Speaker 9: my good friend Sergio's That's just a lovely end credit.
Speaker 9: That just speaks to the genuine cinematic ship that is
Speaker 9: at the heart of this. And I don't care about
Speaker 9: whether or not Leoni ever actually directed a scene. He
Speaker 9: was occupying some of the space within Hussein's brain, and
Speaker 9: Hussein's film was better for channeling some of the insights
Speaker 9: that Leone rightfully is credited for in the revisionist Western.
Speaker 9: So I just would want to end on the note,
Speaker 9: go find this film. You will find yourself at the
Speaker 9: end of ninety minutes happier in your depression than if
Speaker 9: you don't seek out this film.
Speaker 8: And I will add to that, you can also find
Speaker 8: Radiance put out a really cool box set, a blory
Speaker 8: box set of do we Can Go to Hell? Blonde
Speaker 8: in a White Car, That's how I knew it, and
Speaker 8: a taste of violence, maybe beautiful restorations, great special features.
Speaker 8: It's out so I will say sick that out too,
Speaker 8: because it's definitely worth it, and the more people buying
Speaker 8: it probably the more chance that all of his movies
Speaker 8: will be restored.
Speaker 6: Once I see this, Once I see that box set,
Speaker 6: where else should they go?
Speaker 8: The Radiance box Set is a beautiful box set. I
Speaker 8: have to say, I don't think it's the three best films.
Speaker 8: I think Blonde in a White Car is. The Taste
Speaker 8: of Violence is not up there as one of my favorites,
Speaker 8: even though it's very good. Could Go to Hell is okay,
Speaker 8: it's his first film. He's still learning what he's doing.
Speaker 8: The Wretches is, in my opinion, is masterpiece. It's just
Speaker 8: an absolutely incredible movie. The first time I watched it
Speaker 8: and then my wife got back home and I was like,
Speaker 8: we gotta watch it because you have to see this.
Speaker 8: I'm gonna watch it again immediately. So I watched it
Speaker 8: twice in one night. Vampire of Dizzeldorf is really powerful,
Speaker 8: and it's about Peter Curtin, the same serial killer that
Speaker 8: Fritz lying based m on, so that that would be
Speaker 8: for me like Blown in a White Card, The Wretches
Speaker 8: above Anything, and Vampire of the Dizeldorf. And also there's
Speaker 8: a movie called Marked Eyes, which is a great noir.
Speaker 8: They're honestly there a lot of them are really good.
Speaker 8: But yeah, I would definitely say if you can find
Speaker 8: the Wretches, just watch it. It's phenomenal. It's a phenomenal film.
Speaker 6: All Right, We're going to take a break and play
Speaker 6: a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.
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Speaker 4: What's the tiging Master fen Cabs?
Speaker 3: Next time? Time?
Speaker 9: Do the.
Speaker 3: Boys that scared.
Speaker 8: When I mean Consistnei Bostarsky fucking du gabbit.
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 3: That's the copse the boceps dmitting that name.
Speaker 4: You should time, God, skin of my name. Mm hmm,
Speaker 4: why it's that skate.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 6: We'll be back next week with a look at the
Speaker 6: German Nouveau Western Deadlock. Until then, I want to thank
Speaker 6: my co hosts Orren and Richard so Orn. What is
Speaker 6: the latest with you, sir?
Speaker 8: Two weeks ago my film The Frontier was re released
Speaker 8: by the Catalog and there's a beautiful blu ray released
Speaker 8: that you can buy on Vinegar Syndrome on the Vinegarson
Speaker 8: website if you go very excited about this one. Other
Speaker 8: than that, I have a sub stack called Pop Music
Speaker 8: and Popcorn, which I do with my wife, Nicole Morier,
Speaker 8: and it's about the intersection of music and film and
Speaker 8: in This Is Your Life fifteenth. So I'm technically right
Speaker 8: now in the middle of shooting a new film that
Speaker 8: I can't say too much about. My wife wrote it.
Speaker 8: It's gonna be great, but we'll talk about when it's done.
Speaker 6: Fantastic congratulations. Yeah, I definitely want to have you back
Speaker 6: on the show. We talked about The Frontier a few
Speaker 6: years ago. One of the saddest episodes I think we've
Speaker 6: ever recorded, because we were getting live results of the
Speaker 6: election in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was bad.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I remember breaking in the middle for this and
Speaker 8: Rich what's going on in your world, sir?
Speaker 9: Yeah, So a couple things to announce, so people are
Speaker 9: out in the Palm Springs area. The Hitchcock retrospective that
Speaker 9: I host has been re upped for our fourth year,
Speaker 9: So starting in September of twenty twenty six, on the
Speaker 9: first Friday of every month, the Camelot Theater in Palm
Speaker 9: Springs will be finishing our four year retrospective of the
Speaker 9: major films of Alfred Hitchcock, and all of that stuff
Speaker 9: can be found online by just googling the Hitchcock Retrospective
Speaker 9: at the Camelot Theater, it's the first Friday. Come out
Speaker 9: and join us. It's really been a great series and
Speaker 9: I'm excited that it's been extended into a fourth year.
Speaker 9: We're going to actually, probably by the end of year four,
Speaker 9: have shown forty five of his fifty one feature film,
Speaker 9: so we're getting close to being able to show every
Speaker 9: single one. And we're also repeating in the fourth year
Speaker 9: some of the crowd favorites from the previous three years,
Speaker 9: while still finishing up some more obscure titles like Stage
Speaker 9: under Capricorn in the paradigm case for those of you
Speaker 9: who are Hitchcock completists. And then the other one is
Speaker 9: we are going to be starting active planting for newarkon
Speaker 9: twenty twenty seven, which is going to be a centennial
Speaker 9: year for David Goodis, and there will be screenings of
Speaker 9: Goodest films in Philadelphia, New York and Palm Springs throughout
Speaker 9: twenty twenty seven as part of newarkon twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 9: So just more announcements will be forthcoming, but we're starting
Speaker 9: to planet and excited about that. It'll probably be in
Speaker 9: three cities over three different months, so hopefully you will
Speaker 9: be able to attend one of the nwarkhan events in
Speaker 9: a city near you.
Speaker 4: Fantastic, that's great news and.
Speaker 9: I'm excited about it.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much guys for being on the show.
Speaker 6: Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear
Speaker 6: more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
Speaker 6: of the other shows that I work on. They're all
Speaker 6: available at Wirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community.
Speaker 6: If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot
Speaker 6: com slash Projection booth. Every donation we get helps the
Speaker 6: projection booth take over the world.
Speaker 5: I seek the man who killed my friend, and when
Speaker 5: we meet, my life for me, My life depends upon
Speaker 5: my Then my gun smells hope.
Speaker 3: In the land with a rope in the cold. I
Speaker 3: swore a bow on my dying brother.
Speaker 5: To ride a trail that ends in there, and death
Speaker 5: could strike with a frightening shoulder, a lightning hold in
Speaker 5: the land.
Speaker 3: With a rope in the cold arcide.
Speaker 5: Oh, my darling, If I should die, it's not a
Speaker 5: soul will ever know that I loved you.
Speaker 3: So was the reason why these are dustin the knight,
Speaker 3: saw black old my doll and a fire get back.
Speaker 5: I'll trade my gun for what ring, and I'll turn
Speaker 5: my hand to the land with a rope and the
Speaker 5: colt okay.
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