the unhappy place
by Douglas Messerli
Franco Arcalli and Giulio
Questi (story and screenplay), Giulio Questi (director) Se sei vivo spara (Django
Kill... If You Live, Shoot!) / 1967
In Italian director Giulio Questi’s 1967 gay Spaghetti Western Se sei vivo spara (Django Kill... If You Live,
Shoot!), no one is spared, particularly the members of the audience.
There are no heroes, but the closest character to such a designation, simply
called The Stranger (Tomas Milian) along with one of his Indian saviors are the
only two central adult figures who survive. The only others left are a few of
the townsmen from “The Unhappy Place” and their abused children. And given
their generally violent behavior it is hard to imagine that they will get on
alone for very long. This
is a western without heroes, without
leaders—no sheriff, no wise and loving saloon girl, no one. Even the dead
corpses from the town cemetery have been dug up to rot, and there is no one
left who might imagine burying the dozens of corpses left behind as The
Stranger slowly rides his horse outside of the hellish world which he has
miraculously survived.
This
is certainly the most violent film ever produced.* Dozens of men and one woman
are shot to death, some forced to dig their own graves beforehand. Several men
are blown up by explosives tied to a horse. Three men are hung. A man and a
woman burn to death in a fire the woman has herself started, the man also
suffering burns from molten metal pouring over his hands and face. A young boy
shoots himself after being gang-raped by the dozens of ranch hands who have
kidnapped him. Another man is scalped alive. And yet another is killed by the
doctor and others trying to extract gold bullets from his wounds. Children are
regularly stomped and kicked. The Stranger, who himself has accomplished a
number of these murders, is tortured—perhaps the least of his sufferings given
the fact that he has been previously shot and left for dead, and is in danger
of being shot and killed again throughout the entire film. The Stranger’s
Indian friend finally kills two men with blow darts in order to free The
Stranger from his torture. Even a jabbering parrot is shot to death.
There is also a lot of sex, none of which—strangely enough given the
almost joyful depiction of every last drop of blood and pained agony of
violence—is actually shown, despite the fact that we know that a whole gang of
gay ranchboys have had sex with the seemingly unwilling young boy Evan Templer
(Ray Lovelock); The Stranger has sex, with her husband’s knowledge, with that
man’s supposedly “mad” wife Elizabeth Alderman (Patrizia Valturri); and
Templer’s woman Flory (Marilù Tolo) almost has an orgasm on screen while
listening to her lover Bill (Milo Quesada) and Reverend Alderman (Francisco
Sanz) argue over gold. One pre-teen boy is shown naked (although only from the
back) early in the film.
As
you might guess since the local “Reverend” is one of the villains of the piece,
there is little value given to religion in this film, and, as I mentioned
above, even the dead are dug up, their coffins mutilated. No one that I
ascertain, except perhaps for the two Indians who save The Stranger’s life have
any moral scruples. Flory and Bill are perfectly happy to hide their gold
nugget horde in Evan’s coffin. And even the town’s doctor kills his patient,
the head of the gang killed by The Stranger’s gold bullets, in his hurried
attempt to get to pull out the valuable lure of his operation.
Women are not only treated brutally, but this work actually portrays, as
in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the mad woman in the attic, locked
away, in this instance by Alderman because she has attempted to escape the
horrible inhibitions of his household. And like another woman forced to suffer
something in the attic, Paula Alquist Anton in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944),
Elizabeth has even been made to believe she may actually be going mad.
Templer’s unmarried lover Flory, moreover, is represented merely as a
money-grubbing whore without any real desires except her endless lust for gold.
This sad town is controlled by a gang of gay rancheros headed by a man
named Sorrow (Roberto Camardiel), who has evidently taught the band of boys he
has gathered around him how to love gay sex, food, and liquor. They are
portrayed, as several critics have noted, like Mussolini’s blackshirts (the
paramilitary wing of the National Fascist Party) in Italy, or Hitler’s
brownshirts headed by the homosexual Nazi Ernst Röhm. These gay ranch boys are
all decked out in all black attire with the ranch insignia’s embroidered in
white. This film has no sympathy whatsoever for any LGBTQ behavior.
Even the young Evan, who attempts to team up with The Stranger in order
to get out of town and seek something better, sounding very much like a gay boy
stranded in a small US town, spends his spare time in taking a scissors to his
step-mother’s dresses and robes, which surely represents a kind of vengeance if
not also a fetishistic act.
The
only one who seems to care for anyone other than himself is The Stranger, who
appears to care about the boy, and even suggests he will try to help Elizabeth
escape. Yet he is not a man who can keep his promises. He not only takes Evan
into harm’s way as he temporarily joins up with Sorrow’s ranch gang—which
forces one to wonder what he is seeking in accepting employment from a man who
he must recognize is just as dangerous as Templer and Alderman back in town,
but also is clearly interested in The Stranger’s good looks—but, after saving
the boy’s life, at least for one more night, he apparently watches the
men having sexual intercourse with the boy as a willing voyeur. For all we
know, in his drunken state he might even have joined in.
As Sorrow
and his men sleep, satiated by their liquor, food, and sex—reminding one of a
scene in Mauro Bolognini La notte brava (The Big Night) (1959),
after a similarly all-male orgiastic event—the boy steals one of the men’s’
guns and, and as I mention above, shoots himself.
Since he has no gun and no way to escape being recaptured by Sorrow’s
men, The Stranger has no possible way of coming back for and saving Elizabeth.
When tortured by Sorrow and his gay soldiers—quite ludicrously given that the Gila
monster they send after his near-naked body seems to have no interest in
attacking the man, and the so-called vampire bats mostly hover near him without
even attempting to bite—he breaks down and tells them what they want to know,
who in town has the gold and where it’s hidden. And he seems to have no
compunction in destroying an innocent animal in order to make his escape—far
too late to save anyone, including his Indian friend who the townspeople, as
they seek out The Stranger’s whereabouts, scalp. And he leaves town without any
of the gold and little of the righteous vengeance he sought. Moreover, we must
recall, he was one of the original robbers of the gold stolen from the
governmental Wells Fargo shipment. The reason why he was killed was because the
evil head of the gang of which he was part was so racist that he couldn’t bear
to have Mexicans or even half-breeds like The Stranger around him once he had
helped accomplished the robbery.
No,
there is not even subtle thread of moral salvation in this story!
But
for all that, if you’ve got a strong stomach and you keep your wits about you
to realize that this is all an absurd, surrealist fiction using ketchup or spaghetti
sauce instead of
real blood and that the contortions of
suffering on the faces of those we see are really little different from the two
children at the end of this film, forcing their faces into contorted and
grimacing expressions in order to entertain through the use of a few threads of
twine, this film is utterly fascinating to watch.
It
reminds me some of the graphic S&M fiction written by the great Italian
poet Guillaume Apollinaire who wrote such porno works for a wealthy male who
presumably paid him well for violent
sexual fantasies; if you don’t read them as expressing real worlds, their
language and images are thoroughly absorbing as entertainments—even if, as in
my case, you have absolutely no particular interest in violent images of sex.
In
both cases, it is as if the Apollinaire and director Questi (who was Fellini’s
assistant director on La Dolce Vita) were suggesting in their absurdist
extension of the myths surrounding their genres—in the writer’s case porn
fiction and in the director’s case the violence inherent in cinema Western
myths, particularly those as explored by Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad
and The Ugly and Sergio Corbucci’s Django, both of a
year earlier—that death and destruction can be fascinating to watch. Their
argument might well be that if there is no longer any moral resonance remaining
in the genre, then art is all you have left.
Ignoring the ridiculously badly dubbed English of the characters (two
scenes in Italian remain, cut from the US showings), the complex story is
interwoven between four strands of evil groups—the original Oaks’ gang who rob
the Wells Fargo stage, Templer’s men, Aldermen and the local townsmen, and
Sorrow and his ranch workers, all of whom attempt to manipulate and desire to
kill The Stranger—is equally intriguing: the screenplay is written by Franco
Arcali, who with Bernardo Bertolucci wrote The Conformist and Last
Tango in Paris and with Michelangelo Antonioni penned Zabriskie Point
and The Passenger.
And
finally, the film, despite its endless splashes of blood, is truly quite
beautiful to watch (under the camera of cinematographer Franco Delli Coli, who
shot Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone and Mamma Roma and Luchino
Visconti's The Leopard).
Through both the plot and its images, this is story about trapped
individuals, figures who truly cannot escape their destinies, mostly because
they have sold their souls, like Faust, not precisely to the devil but to the
monster of greed, to money and, in particular, gold. Gold may represent for
each of them, in different ways, a kind of escape: in Sorrow’s and his gangs’
case an escape into the body (through food, drink, and sex), in Templer and his
lover an escape into luxury, for Alderman to a refuge of himself alone with his
Narcissus-like spirituality, for Oaks simply a way out of the desert into some
more pleasant world, and for figures like Evan and Elizabeth simply a ticket
out of town to a “better” place; but in each case in order to get the money or
make their “escape,” they have to find some way to control everything else
around them which obviously leads to the violence we witness throughout.
But
the very knotted nature of this tale into which each of them is tangled, like
the images we observe make it clear that there is no way “out” for any of them.
Moreover, they live in a world haunted by imprisonment and burial. The Stranger
begins this story as a buried man clawing his way back to life from the grave,
and from then on is constantly witnessed in tight window frames, locked rooms,
and true imprisonment. So too is Elizabeth imprisoned. But then all of these
figures, as we witness, are locked away in their ranch (Sorrow), home
(Alderman), and saloon (Templer) and before the end of the tale will be buried,
perhaps like all the others to be dug up without The Stranger’s
transfiguration. Only the dead and dying are visually allowed any space.
If
in his rebirth The Stranger becomes a kind of Christ, he has no moral value in
this world and is forced to remain passive when it comes to preventing human
destruction. He is the Christ of the spirit rather than the flesh. And
throughout the film all he seeks out is a good night’s sleep, something he is
never truly permitted.
In short, even though he rides out of The Unhappy Place alive, his desire is to
sleep perhaps for a very long while, perhaps forever given what he has just
experienced.
And
yes, finally, this film is also somewhat campy with its army of gay rancheros
who are, after all, in control of things. But make no mistake, this is not a
gay friendly film. As Vito Russo argued, if in early cinema LGBTQ figures were
almost invisible, sometimes so difficult for the ordinary audience goer to even
perceive as being queer that we describe them as coded, as time progressed
queerness, if more visible, was represented as evil, something surely worth
being destroyed as much as the greed of selfishness of other evil characters.
Questi’s film is worth watching—as are the other so-called gay Spaghetti
Westerns such as Alberto Mariscal’s Los
marcados (They
Call Him Marcado) (1971), Carlo
Lizzani’s Requiescent (Kill and Pray) (1967), and Giorgio
Capitani’s The Ruthless Four (1976)—as evidence of how the growing
visibility and power of gay figures was met at first with a sense of horror,
fear, and hate. In the myths of these films gay men lived in power-hungry
groups seeking out the innocent to convert or destroy in their lusts.
*In saying this, however, I am aware that in
many of day’s films based on comic book heroes and fabulist adventures
thousands of men are mowed down with all kinds of magic weaponry and armies of
robots in a way that someone like Questi could not even have imagined. But I
have the feeling that in those works the deaths are more like gaming statistics
instead being representative of actual human deaths. Perhaps it is better to
just describe it as the most gruesome movie ever made.
Los Angeles, July 16, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2021).
