03 · 06 · 25

Sergio Leone: DUCK, YOU SUCKER! and Mexican Censorship

Rafael Aviña

The Italian Sergio Leone (1929-1989) became the greatest creator of a subgenre that acquired an enormous popularity in the sixties and seventies: the so-called spaghetti western. Leone conceived a fabulous trilogy of masterpieces in its most ironic, shameless and cruel phase that consisted of: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), all starring Clint Eastwood, an actor who had to emigrate to Italy to become a star. These were fundamental films within the spaghetti western trend in which Leone —supported by a stunning cinematography, a skillful editing and, above all, by the masterful and characteristic music of Ennio Morricone, his regular collaborator— achieved a crude portrait of the “Old West” and the American civil war.

Indeed, one of the greatest renovations to a genre that seemed to have died in the beginning of the seventies was brought by the talented Leone with his stories full of cynicism, action and black humor. Characters of a delirious amorality and constant plot twists, in storylines where ambition and sadism reign. Anthological scenes, such as that brilliant circular tracking shot around some graves while the theme “The Ecstasy of Gold” by Morricone is played, the sequence of the final duel in the cemetery, or the confusion between Confederate and Union soldiers because of the dust on their uniforms in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

With those films, Leone turned around the quintessential Hollywood genre and would confirm it with the masterpiece that is Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), with a spectacular cast that included Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Charles Bronson and Gabrielle Ferzetti, and a screenplay written by Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento, Leone and Sergio Donati. A film with enormous violence and beauty and a metaphor about civilization with the arrival of the railroad, filmed in the Italian Cineccita Studios, Almeria, La Calahorra (near Granada, in Spain) and in the same American locations where the great John Ford (Stagecoach, The Searchers) shot most of his films.

Something similar happens with Duck, You Sucker! (1971) —also known as: Giù la testa/ A Fistful of Dynamite/ Once Upon a Time... the Revolution—, filmed in Italy, Spain and Ireland, although it was set in Mexico and Dublin during the period of Victoriano Huerta's dictatorship; a project that Leone avoided as far as he could, because, originally, he would only produce it. The film focuses on a bandit who becomes a hero by chance and who also is the father of several children by different women. He befriends an Irish revolutionary that reads Bakunin’s work and who carries a bitter experience of betrayal in his homeland.

Sam Peckinpah declined to direct it for economic reasons, then the production company United Artist recommended Peter Bogdanovich; however, they never got along with him. Later, Leone’s assistant, Giancarlo Santi, took over as director, but the film’s stars, James Coburn and Rod Steiger, refused to continue if Duck, You Sucker! was not directed by Sergio Leone, who by then was trying to develop his dream project: Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

Leone made an entertaining and brutal story: a vision of the Mexican Revolution as extravagant as it was excessive, and Morricone composed one of his most exceptional soundtracks as well as a beautiful theme song: “Dopo l’esplosione”, used in the impressive sequence of the dynamite explosion. The film was censored in Mexico for almost 10 years —it premiered in 1979 in the original Cineteca Nacional—. The reason: the treatment that Leone and his screenwriters made of the country and the Revolution, by the way, not very far from the films starring Pedro Armendáriz and María Félix.

Rod Steiger plays the Mexican bandit Juan Miranda who meets James Coburn in the role of John H. Mallory (also called Sean), a member of the Irish Republican Army, betrayed by a friend and who arrives in Mexico to support the Revolution. Juan comments that the Revolution is planned by the rich while they eat opulently, but it is carried out by the poor, he also clarifies that he is very well endowed like Pancho Villa, in a film where a reality is stated: all social outbursts end in massacres where the masses are manipulated and end up in misery, and a small group grabs the power and wealth, betraying all ideals.

Translated by Adrik Díaz