Spaghetti Westerns – Blood and Porridge

June 15, 2024June 26, 2024

Furiosa and curiosa

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

What a strange beast Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) is. Yes, it’s a Mad Max movie, directed and co-written by the franchise’s mastermind George Miller. But it’s one (almost) devoid of Mad Max. Instead, it concentrates on Imperator Furiosa, the formidable warrior-woman played by Charlize Theron who partnered the title character in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. Furiosa fills us in on her backstory, from her childhood to early womanhood. Thus, it’s a prequel to Fury Road and a discombobulating departure from the customary format of the Mad Max films.

If you had to sum up the structure of the earlier four movies in one word, that word would be linear. Things just barrelled along in a straight line. Indeed, the two best ones, Mad Max II (1982) and Fury Road, were basically ongoing vehicle chases, with plot and characterisation having to scramble on board during the brief moments when people’s feet eased on the accelerators. Not that I’m knocking them. Mad Max II is one of my favourite films of the 1980s and I consider Fury Road one of the best films of the 21^st century.

But with Furiosa, Miller – bravely or foolishly, depending on your point of view – abandons the formula that’s hitherto served him so well and presents a movie with other things besides big, metallic, wheeled things hurtling after and crashing into one another. There are periods of quiet and calm, where the emphasis is on dialogue, characterisation and violence-free drama rather than on hectic, in-your-face action. Parts of it even get a bit slow.

Which isn’t to say Furiosa lacks action. It begins with an edge-of-your-seat (if small-scale) chase, and later there are two lengthy action set-pieces that rank among the most thrilling the franchise has produced, even if one of them incorporates a bit too much CGI. Overall, though, comparing one of the earlier Mad Maxes with this entry is like – to cite two examples from a sub-genre that heavily influenced the series originally, the spaghetti western – comparing Sergio Leone’s lean, taut A Fistful of Dollars (1964) with his sprawling epic Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

No, I’m not claiming that Furiosa is as good as Once Upon a Time in the West (one of my top half-dozen movies ever, incidentally). I also think it falls short of the greatness achieved by Fury Road. But I still found it pretty impressive. Before I discuss the movie in detail, though, I should warn you – from here on there will be spoilers.

The film gets going with the afore-mentioned chase. Some scumbag bikers abduct little Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from her community in the Green Place, a Garden of Eden-like hideaway that’s somehow survived the apocalypse that’s ravaged the rest of the earth in the Mad Max version of the future. Her mother (Charlee Fraser) pursues them into the Wasteland and the scumbag bikers are killed one by one, but not before the last of them manages to deliver Furiosa to Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), leader of a gang with a self-explanatory name, the Biker Horde.

A subsequent attempt to rescue Furiosa results in the mother’s death and Dementus keeps the little girl, partly as his gang’s mascot, partly as a surrogate daughter. “Do not look away, you mustn’t look away!” he urges her while he crucifies her mother in front of her, believing that the trauma will toughen her up and make her better suited to the Wasteland. He’s obviously a dad who believes in the ‘school of hard knocks’ approach to raising kids. He also muses, “When things go bonkers, you have to adapt.”

Later, he and his Horde stumble across the Citadel that figured, or will figure, in Fury Road and come face to face with the Citadel’s implacable, pustular ruler Immortan Joe. Here, Joe is played by Lachie Hulme. Hugh Keays-Byrne, the actor who played him in Fury Road (and also played the franchise’s original villain, Toecutter, back in 1979’s Mad Max) passed away in 2020. The Biker Horde manages to capture the Citadel’s satellite-settlement Gastown, responsible for producing the fuel for Joe’s vehicles. After some hard bargaining, Joe reluctantly cedes control of Gastown to Dementus, but demands some concessions from the biking warlord in return. These include him taking custody of Furiosa.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

Born in the healthy environs of the Green Place, Furiosa is genetically undamaged and Joe, desperate for some normal-bodied and able-minded offspring, fancies her as a future wife. As we know from Fury Road, he has a squad of young wives locked away for breeding purposes, though the results have been disappointing so far – as evidenced by the two sons he’s acquired, the hulking, thick-as-mince Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and the psychotic Scabrous Scrotus (Josh Helman). Not keen on the idea of ending up a spouse to Immortan Joe, Furiosa escapes from his harem, disguises herself as a boy, pretends to be mute and finds employment in the Citadel’s garages.

A few years later, after various adventures, and now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Furiosa becomes apprenticed to the tough but kindly Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), driver of the War Rig, the giant truck that’s the pride of Joe’s vehicular fleet. “You have about you a purposeful savagery,” Praetorian Jack informs her, which in the Wasteland is as close to a compliment as you can get.

Praetorian Jack and the now Praetorian Furiosa gradually bond, to the point where Jack agrees to help her return to the Green Place. But bigger events get in their way. Namely, Dementus’s running of Gastown becomes such a disaster that Immortan Joe and his allies vow to get rid of him, even if this means a full-scale war raging in the Wasteland…

One thing I liked about Furiosa was the chance to see certain characters from Fury Road again. Not just Immortan Joe, but subsidiary villains like Rictus Erectus, the People Eater (John Howard), the Bullet Farmer (Lee Perry, replacing the original actor Richard Carter, who died in 2019) and the Organic Mechanic (Angus Sampson), who’s the nearest thing in the Wasteland to a GP and has the thankless task of delivering Joe’s stillborn and / or mutant kids. But what pleased me most was a fleeting reappearance by the Doof Warrior, the goon who rides in front of a giant wall of speakers whilst playing a splendid, flamethrowing electric guitar.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

Furiosa presents us with some cool new characters as well, mostly in Dementus’s entourage. There’s the piratical Rizzdale Pell (Lachy Hulme in a second role) who, unlike normal movie pirates, doesn’t bother to conceal an empty eye-socket with an eyepatch. Also facially disfigured is the zombie-like Mr. Norton, who’s actually a Ms. and is played by Elsa Pataky, Chris Hemsworth’s real-life wife, no less. And I was impressed by the Octoboss (Goran D. Kleut), a satanic figure clad in black, horned armour who rides / flies into battle on a motorbike-cum-kite, trailing a long, black, tendrilous parachute behind him.

Dementus also employs two cheerleaders. He has a Gollum-like weirdo called Smeg (David Collins) acting out his ever-changing moods in a series of strange, performative dances. And he has a warm-up man called the History Man (George Shevstov) who warns potential adversaries about his boss’s ‘congress of destruction’, i.e., the thousands of motorbikes massed behind him. The History Man additionally serves the gang as a bard and as an archivist of knowledge, stories and language, which he has tattooed in tiny writing all over his body. He’s asked to dredge up appropriate words from the mostly-forgotten lexicon of English to mark special occasions: “History Man! A word-burger if you please!” And he provides the film with its narration, which implies the saga of Furiosa has been added to this anarchic society’s repository of legend and lore.

But among the new characters, the biggest star is Dementus himself. Chris Hemsworth obviously relished the opportunity to set aside his goody-two-shoes image as Thor in the Marvel cinematic universe and play somebody gloriously, evilly unhinged. While cunning and ruthless enough to make a credible post-apocalyptic warlord, there’s also a touch of ridiculous, Spinal Tap-style heavy metal-ness about him. This means that, ultimately, he’s never going to be smart enough to defeat Immortan Joe, still Top Dog when Fury Road rolls around. He’s merely likely to cause a lot of damage along the way. Inevitably, Dementus gets the best lines. He goadingly demands of Furiosa, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” or “Where were you going, so full of hope? There is no hope!” Best of all is a muttered aside when a minion disputes his orders: “Hmm, questioning my boss-ority…”

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

It says a lot for the more measured performances by Anya Taylor-Joy and Tom Burke that they manage to make their presences felt, and Hemsworth doesn’t walk away with the film.

With so many good elements, then, why do I feel Furiosa is less effective than Fury Road? Well, it’s a bit too long and, while earlier parts of the film are languidly paced, there’s rather too much happening, too much Machiavellian scheming and double-crossing going on, in its later stages. Also, the franchise’s long-term fans will be frustrated that the war between Dementus and Irmmortan Joe, when it finally arrives, is represented only by a brief montage and a voice-over from the History Man. Instead, the film’s focus becomes personal. It zooms in on Furiosa pursuing and confronting Dementus over her mother’s long-ago murder. I can see what Miller was trying to do, and respect his bravery in doing it, but I’d have preferred things to end with a bigger bang.

Still, after seeing it a few days ago, I haven’t stopped thinking about Furiosa. Things about it that didn’t occur to me in the cinema have occurred to me since. For example, the nature of Praetorian Jack’s relationship with Furiosa is kept vague and at the time I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a romantic one. Now I see him more as being a father-figure to her, which nicely fills the void left by her mother’s death. I also appreciate, with hindsight, how the script uses peaches – yes, peaches – as a motif. Furiosa is seen picking them at the start, her mother gives her a peach-pit as a memento shortly before she dies, and the same pit has a bearing on what Furiosa does to Dementus at the end (at least, according to the story she tells the History Man).

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

And during a Wasteland sequence that’s particularly brutal and traumatic for Furiosa, Miller’s camera leaps back into the surrounding mountains for a moment, and we see a familiar silhouette watching events from afar, next to his trademark V8 Interceptor. I wonder now if Mad Max’s cameo is meant to show he has a connection with Furiosa even before he meets her in Fury Road. Does what he observes here remind him of the loss of his family in the original movie?

Despite its quality, Furiosa has done badly at the box office. I suspect many blokes who enjoy action movies chose to skip this one because it wasn’t about Mad Max but about – ugh! – a girl. Conversely, it obviously didn’t appeal to family audiences. About a girl it may be, but Furiosa is also the most brutal Mad Max film yet. It’s got the highest body-count and, while the franchise has always managed to be violent without wallowing in gore, there are more moments than usual where bullets strike faces, flamethrowers torch bodies, throats get slashed and body-parts are severed. Sadly, Furiosa‘s underperformance has cast doubt on whether George Miller’s planned sixth entry in the franchise, Mad Max: The Wasteland, will ever be filmed.

To borrow two of Dementus’s quotes… It’s a pity that after Furiosa’s box-office flop, people are questioning Miller’s boss-ority. Because he still has in him to be epic.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

July 21, 2020July 26, 2020

Morricone no more

© enniomorricone.org

The death of legendary film composer Ennio Morricone a fortnight ago shouldn’t have been a surprise since he was at the big age of 91. But he’d shown such a cussed approach to life and art, still composing music, going on world tours and quarrelling with young whippersnappers like Quentin Tarantino while he was in his ninth decade, that you assumed he was going to continue living and composing forever. Anyway, a heavy workload earlier this month prevented me from penning a tribute to the great man at the time of his passing. Here’s my belated tribute now.

Ennio Morricone was the first film composer I knew. I recognised his work well before I recognised that of John Barry, Bernard Hermann, Leonard Bernstein or Henry Mancini and even before the blockbuster themes of Jaws (1976) and Star Wars (1977) acquainted me with the name of John Williams. As a boy I was daft about western movies and as soon as Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns started showing up on TV I realised that Morricone’s exhilarating music, soaring and swooping along the soundtracks with twangy acoustic guitars, electric guitars, whistles, chimes, bells, flutes and aah-ing choirs, was as much a character of the films as Clint Eastwood’s cigar-smoking Man with No Name. Remove Morricone’s music and they wouldn’t be the same. There’d be a gaping Clint-sized hole in them.

Morricone’s music for A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the film that put him, Leone, Eastwood and spaghetti westerns on the map, is great but I think his theme for the sequel For a Few Dollars More (1965), with added Jew’s harp and ocarina, is greater still. Maybe I’m biased since the film is my favourite of Leone’s Dollars trilogy. It has Eastwood, the Man with No Name, team up with the splendid Lee Van Cleef, the Man in Black, and take on Gian Maria Volonté as evil scumbag bandit El Indio. The climax sees Van Cleef facing up to Volonté in a duel whereby the participants can only draw their guns on the final chime of a musical pocket watch, which had belonged to Van Cleef’s murdered sister. It’s absolutely epic, thanks largely to Morricone’s music, which climbs majestically and drowns out the plaintive tones of the pocket watch, then plunges and dies away again a few palm-sweating seconds before the watch stops and the shooting starts.

The third and final movie of the trilogy, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), confused me when I saw it as a kid because although Lee Van Cleef starred in it alongside Eastwood again, this time he played a different character from the one in For a Few Dollars More and was as evil as Volonté had been in the previous film. I assumed he was the same guy and couldn’t figure out why he’d suddenly become so bad. Morricone’s theme here is perhaps his most famous work – I still hear blokes in the pub, after a few pints too many, going “Na-Na-Na-Na-Naaah…. NA-NA-NAAAH!” for no good reason. But it’s perhaps the accompaniment he provides for the Ecstasy of Gold sequence, in which an increasingly delirious Eli Wallach spends four minutes running around a cemetery while Leone’s camerawork becomes correspondingly frenzied, that’s the film’s musical highlight.

Of course, we hadn’t heard the last of Morricone as far as Leone’s westerns were concerned, because in 1968 he contributed to Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, a movie that regularly gets mentioned in ‘best film of all time’ lists. (It’s certainly in my top three.) Morricone’s magnificent score ticks all the boxes. At times, it does the customary soaring and swooping. At others, it’s playful and jaunty. And at other times, it’s marked by a haunting and pained-sounding harmonica. Like Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volontè and the musical pocket watch in For a Few Dollars More, we discover the tragic significance of that harmonica at the end when hero Charles Bronson has a showdown with villain Henry Fonda. Ironically, the film’s most breath-taking sequence, the lengthy opening where three gunmen played by Woody Strode, Jack Elam and Al Mulock await, with murderous intent, the arrival of Bronson at a remote, rickety train station, unscrolls without Morricone’s music (and indeed, without any dialogue) until nearly ten minutes in when that melancholy harmonica strikes up.

Morricone toiled away on many other Italian, and occasionally American, westerns and his CV surely makes him one of the great figures in the western genre. His work appears in Duccio Tessari’s The Return of Ringo (1965), Franco Giraldi’s Seven Guns for the MacGregors (1966), Carlo Lizzani’s The Hills Run Red (1966), Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown (1966), Giulio Petroni’s Death Rides a Horse (1967), Don Taylor and Italo Zingarelli’s The 5-Man Army (1969) and Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sarah (1970). He also contributed to a few westerns like Navajo Joe (1966), The Hellbenders (1967), The Mercenary (1968) and The Great Silence (1968) that were directed by another Sergio, Sergio Corbucci, who was honoured in Quentin Tarantino’s recent Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) when Al Pacino described him as “the second best director of spaghetti westerns in the whole wide world!” Meanwhile, Morricone was reunited with the first best director of spaghetti westerns in the whole wide world with Leone’s late-period western Duck You Sucker (1971), a movie that I like but don’t consider in the same league as Leone’s earlier efforts. (James Coburn’s Irish accent doesn’t help.)

By the early 1970s Leone had shifted from spaghetti westerns to another staple of traditional Italian cinema, the giallo – the horror-thriller hybrid wherein a group of people, usually affluent and beautiful, get despatched by a mysterious killer (whose identity is revealed only in the closing moments) stabbing, slashing and hacking his or her way through them for some unlikely reason. The results are often Italian films at their most stylish, glamorous, violent, ridiculous and politically incorrect.

Morricone’s giallo music is frequently mannered, genteel and dreamy, at odds with the bloody events happening onscreen but matching the well-upholstered lifestyles of the doomed protagonists. He contributed to Elio Petri’s supernaturally tinged A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), Paolo Cavara’s slick but dodgy Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), Aldo Ladi’s rather brilliant Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971), Massimo Dallamano’s fairly reprehensible What Have You Done to Solange? (1972) and Umberto Lenzi’s lovably barmy Spasmo (1974). He also did the music for Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), but I haven’t seen that one, so I can’t provide it with suitable adjectives.

He also worked on three movies directed by the man who’s arguably the maestro of the giallo, Dario Argento: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971). He didn’t, however, supply the music for Argento’s giallo masterpiece Deep Red (1976). That role went to the German prog-rock band Goblin and I have to say, with apologies to Morricone, that I think their baroque, intense Deep Red score just about pips his work as the best giallo music of all time.

By then, of course, Hollywood had discovered Morricone and his scores for such prestigious productions as Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven (1978) and Rolande Jaffé’s The Mission (1986) won him international acclaim. A digression here – I remember reading an interview with Will Carling, the nice but dull skipper of the England rugby team in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Carling told the evidently bored interviewer that before games, to settle his nerves, he listened to ‘The Mission’. The interviewer thought Carling was talking about the 1980s British Goth band the Mission and, believing he’d discovered something interesting about Carling at last, that he was a Goth, asked him if he liked Gene Loves Jezebel too. “No,” retorted a perplexed Carling, “The film The Mission. The music from The Mission!”

Morricone also enjoyed a final reunion with his old comrade Sergio Leone, creating a majestic but wistful score for Leone’s Hollywood gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

Leone didn’t just provide the music for good films. He also plied his trade with many bad ones and often the music coming out of the cinema speakers and what was happening on the screen seemed to belong to two different aesthetic universes. I’m thinking of Reagan’s Theme, the haunting guitar-and-choir piece he composed for John Boorman’s much-derided Exorcist II: The Heretic (1978), or the soulful, religious sounding theme he provided for Michael Anderson’s Orca: The Killer Whale (1977), totally at variance with the ridiculous plot that has Richard Harris going Captain Ahab against a vengeful cetacean.

Among Leone’s Hollywood scores, I particularly admire the one he did for John Carpenter’s excellent remake of The Thing (1982). At the time, disdainful mainstream critics (who also hated the film generally) dismissed his work as being like one of Carpenter’s own, pulsating synthesiser scores ‘slowed down’ or ‘played at the wrong speed.’ Heard today, its doomy sound encapsulates the film’s claustrophobic and literally under-the-skin horror, whilst reminding you that, yes, this is a John Carpenter film but it’s a special John Carpenter film. I also like his subtle, creepy score for Mike Nichol’s underrated Wolf (1994), wherein a tired, middle-aged and downtrodden publisher (Jack Nicholson) gets bitten by a werewolf and discovers that his newly acquired lupine powers actually serve him well in the aggressive, cutthroat world of the 1990s New York publishing industry.

One of Morricone’s last major commissions was for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015). The two men had previously fallen out over Morricone’s contribution, eventually non-contribution, to Tarantino’s 2012 western Django Unchained, but Morricone was back on board for this and contributed an urgent and ominous main theme. Appropriately, seeing as The Hateful Eight and The Thing feature the same star (Kurt Russell) and a similar scenario (a stranded group trying to identify an enemy hiding among them), Morricone also donated some pieces he’d created for but hadn’t used in the 1982 John Carpenter film. And as extra icing on the cake, Reagan’s Theme from Exorcist II: The Heretic was borrowed to accompany a brief, arty sequence of coach-horses making their way through the snow. So it was gratifying that near his life’s end Morricone got an opportunity to show his mastery again of the genre that established his name, the western.

From open.spotify.com