A spaghetti western that's good, bad, ugly, and the funniest film of the summer

Interview, August, 1995 by Graham Fuller

It's been a generation since the spaghetti Western achieved its apotheosis with Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Leone is dead. So is Sam Peckinpah, whose newly restored The Wild Bunch (1969) and valedictory masterpiece, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), were elegies for the West that Leone camped up. Clint Eastwood, Leone's heir, has turned away from the bloody Expressionism of High Plains Drifter (1973) toward the sobriety and introspection of Unforgiven (1992), and who knows whether he will head out West again?

Of course, Eastwood's The Bridges of Madison County is a kind of Western - a mid-Western - in which Clint reprises his archetypal role as the enigmatic stranger in town, one carrying a camera instead of a gun, although the premise is scarcely phallocentric. His character, Kincaid (the name suitably outlawish), is actually the "parfit gentil knight" of both Chaucerian and oater lore.

Like Alan Ladd in Shane (1953) and Eastwood in the Shane update Pale Rider (1985), Kincaid rides off at the end, ostensibly to die, having invested the married heroine's life with illicit passion and given her a reason to go on. I am not making the comparison spuriously; Eastwood's skillfully directed melodrama is hewn from the same rock as the Western mythos, replete with the rugged individual who can never stay put, the grieving woman he leaves behind, and the children who inscribe their tale. That foreplay, not gunplay, sparks The Bridges of Madison County indicates just how supremely secure Eastwood is as director and actor.

Bridges is not a spaghetti mid-Western - despite the pasta quotient dutifully supplied by Meryl Streep's Italian homesteader - but there is plenty of spaghetti, and plenty of ham, too, in Robert Rodriguez's Desperado. A $7 million Columbia Pictures-produced follow-up to his $7,000 El Mariachi (1992), Desperado is technically a tortilla Western, since it was shot, like its predecessor, on location in Acuna, Mexico. Virtually a retread of that attention-getting, Spanish-language festival-buster, the new movie boasts not only a studio gloss but a thick veneer of hipness.

This time the mariachi - an itinerant troubadour dressed in black, whose guitar case contains an arsenal of assault weapons - is played by the smoldering Antonio Banderas, seeking revenge on the white-suited drug lord (Joaquim De Almeida) who had his woman killed. (It's worth noting how black and white have exchanged places in the Westerner's wardrobe: Black now connotes "cool" instead of "bad"; white connotes "sleazy" instead of "good.") En route, Banderas bonds with a guitar-picking muchacho and blows away a saloonful of creeps. Wounded in the fray, he's patched up by a beautiful, tweezers-wielding bookstore proprietor (Salma Hayek), who's fronting for the drug lord's business. He is then attacked by a silent Mexican assassin who whips omate blades from his vest at dervish speed.

The plot is negligible, but you don't really care because the bloodletting, as entertainingly tumultuous as the slaughter in a John Woo movie, is brilliantly calibrated and edited, the guitar-case Gatling guns and soaring bodies spoofing Peckinpah's balletic violence. The crackling guitar track by Los Lobos stands in for Ennio Morricone, and the gallery of greasy, unshaven ne'er-do-wells might have stepped out of Leone's Dollars trilogy. But Rodriguez hasn't got time for Leone's oozing pace; he's a director in a hurry, desperate to throw in as many narrative jokes as possible: A particularly filthy toilet leads to a secret room; Banderas, a gun in each hand, lines up a double hit while the oblivious Hayek serenades him in bed; a cholo ritually inducted as one of the drug lord's most trusted henchmen is dispatched with indecent haste.

Whereas The Quick and the Dead is a sleek, semiserious period Western, made by Raimi with Italianate flair and specific nods to Leone and to John Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Desperado, like El Mariachi before it, is a strictly contemporary comedy. Featuring Steve Buscemi and Rodriguez's friend Quentin Tarantino in the roles of shaggy-dog storytellers who are gorily expended once they've let us know what a smart flick we're watching, it's also strictly postmodern. Virtually everything in this movie is referential: The mariachi is a Latino amalgam of Eastwood's "Man with No Name" and Once Upon a Time in the West's "Harmonica" (Charles Bronson); the knife-thrower is modeled on James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven (1960); and the sultry Hayek is a dead ringer for Jane Russell in The Outlaw (1943). In terms of style, too, Rodriguez is no straight shooter. If the operatic artifice of spaghetti Westerns parodied the southwestern frontier experience, Desperado insouciantly parodies the parody.

Tarantino's presence naturally canonizes Rodriguez's film and gives us the sense that we're participating in an almighty pop-culture joke. One feels a little sorry for Alex Cox, the English expatriate filmmaker - like Tarantino, a disciple of Peckinpah and the cult Western director Monte Hellman - who has traveled in the opposite direction than Rodriguez. Cox's anti-Contra spaghetti Western, Walker (1988), shot in Nicaragua, irreparably damaged his standing in Hollywood, and the spaghetti send-up Straight to Hell (1987) didn't help his cause, although it has curio value now because of its Courtney Love cameo.