Once Upon a Time in the Revolution revisited: how Sergio Leone's last spaghetti Western starring Rod Steiger and James Coburn was as good as his Clint Eastwood films
Famous for his spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name and distinctive scores by Ennio Morricone, Sergio Leone set his final Western during the Mexican Revolution in 1910.
James Coburn and Rod Steiger star as an Irish revolutionary and explosives expert and a Mexican bandit.
Sergio Leone is best known as director of classic "spaghetti Westerns" — among them The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). He is also known as the man who made Clint Eastwood an international star. But one of the Italian filmmaker's more overlooked productions deserves a place alongside those other canonical works.
Once Upon a Time in the Revolution (1971) is one of those rare movies whose dichotomies amplify rather than hinder its quality. Part of what makes this work — whose alternative titles include Duck, You Sucker! and A Fistful of Dynamite — such a remarkable film is the ways in which its contradictions work so well. How many Westerns open with a Mao Zedong quote?
Set in Mexico in 1913, against the backdrop of the major armed struggle that began in 1910 and lasted for the better part of a decade, the film tells the story of Mexican bandit Juan Miranda (a "browned-up" Rod Steiger) and Sean Mallory (James Coburn, left), an Irish revolutionary and demolitions expert on the run from the British.
It is at first hard to see what sets this film apart (or above) Leone's other Westerns. On the surface, it seems to fall squarely within generic bounds: there is violence, coarse humour and dialogue, and a setting that is both literally and figuratively fictional (the film was shot in Spain, Ireland and Italy). White men (albeit one in make-up) drink, shoot and laugh their way across an alien landscape with seemingly no concern for anyone else. Such a presentation dovetails with the time, genre and culture in which it was conceived and produced.
Yet the film fits well within the post-colonial Third Cinema framework, making a trenchant statement about autonomy, revolution and the perverting nature of power. Mallory is an embittered killer who wearily admits, "When I started using dynamite, I used to believe in a lot of things … Now I believe only in dynamite."
The movie can even lay claim to being among the first postmodern cinematic works. Its willingness to toy with narrative, the audience and ideology were new for the time.