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Alex Cox, who is probably still familiar with Alex Cox, is a good film he directed, "Repo Man" and "Sid and Nancy," which he directed.
The Seeker
Sid and Nancy
Cox and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were law classmates at St John's College, Oxford, but Cox became obsessed with film and abandoned film to study film at Bristol University and UCLA.
Ten Thousand Ways to Die was written in the late 1970s, when he was majoring in film studies at UCLA. Cox really wanted to learn directing, but he was mistakenly recruited into the direction of critical research, and finally wrote such a book on Italian Westerns as a graduation thesis, but then he got what he wanted to move to film production, the thesis was useless, and it has not been published.
He also gave the manuscript to some publishers, and one of them almost agreed to publish it, but Cox's agent broke up with the publisher for a small amount of money, and eventually failed to publish it. The manuscript was pressed to the bottom of the box for nearly 30 years, until recently, when Cox made it into a PDF format file and sent it online.
He found that although Italian Westerns are "dead", there are still many people who like them, such as Japan once produced 50 DVDs of Italian Westerns in one go, which shows that young people have not forgotten this period of history. Between 1963 and 1973, Italy produced more than 400 Westerns, and with the addition of Spain, France and Eastern European countries, there were at least 600 Westerns shot in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Cox has also done a review track with Christopher Frayling on the DVD of "Once Upon a Time in the West."
Around the end of 2005, Cox posted the manuscript online, and I never saw any mention or citation of his book in materials specializing in Westerns, probably because it wasn't widely circulated, or because people didn't take the treatise of a hairy guy seriously.
Then again, although there are still many books about Sergio Leone, Leone alone is not equal to all Italian Westerns, and there are not many works that focus on Italian Westerns. To be sure, Cox's research is not always justified, and some ideas now seem to be outdated, but many of the arguments still have some research and discussion value.
Twilight Double Dart
In the book, Cox first analyzes the appearance of characters in Italian Westerns, the difference between them and the classic American Westerns, such as "For a Few Dollars More" began as a distant scene, a man riding out on horseback, accompanied by incoherent whistles, and a faint collision in the money bag, but suddenly a shot from nowhere killed him, which is the opening of the Italian Western, the environment is hot and desolate desert, uninhabitable for human habitation, violence without warning.
Grand Canyon
Identity doesn't matter either, it doesn't matter who the good guys are or who the bad guys are. This is very different from American Westerns, such as "The Missouri Breaks", which is much later than "Twilight Doubles", which uses a similar shot, but to account for the protagonist's appearance.
For audiences who were already familiar with American Westerns in the 1960s, watching Leone's first two works was a constant challenge to the experience of watching movies, the protagonist's values, the meaninglessness of life, and the ambiguity of good and evil. These ideas seem to be clichés today, but audiences at the time were really taken aback, with some critics writing in the Monthly Film Bulletin that this was not a Western at all, but a melodrama of landlords and peasants in a western context.
Cox summed up three ways in which the sheriff's role in Italian Westerns was set up: cowardice, such as Today it's me, Tomorrow You; corrupt, with the sheriff becoming an accomplice to the bandits, which may have been the most numerous; and third, being upright but ultimately dying in vain.
The number one villain in the Italian Western, often living in elaborate estates on the edge of the town, has formed genre rules, with the exception of Leone, whose big bad guys are sometimes homeless and dirty in several of his films.
Django Rescued
Brookston in "The Big Gundown," Solo in Django, Valerco in "I Want Him Dead," the other kind of bad guys, like Fargo in "No Room To Die," Precutt in "Big Silence," and Virginia in "The Specialist," This setting takes into account socio-political factors.
And these big bad guys basically have a group of thugs, basically Mexicans, and these lackeys haunt bars and salons to maintain order in the town. Bankers often die early, and it is important to understand that the social status of bankers is lower than that of the ultimate controller, so in the end it is the ultimate controller who completes the ultimate duel with the protagonist.
The Golden Three
There is a category of Italian Westerns that deal with the Mexican Revolution, which is more black and white, where the Mexican populace is a suffering mass, the middle class includes mid-level military officers, priests and successful robbers, and Tuco said in "The Good The Bad & The Ugly" that if you want to live well, you have to be a priest or a robber. On the next level were generals, politicians and nobles.
This class division is inseparable from the Marxist trend of the left in the late 1960s, and from a cinematic point of view, it is somewhat monotonous. Cox didn't give much credit for the kind of films, thinking it would be best to be superficial entertainment like Sergio Corbucci's Mexican Westerns, and if it's not done well, it's nothing.
Some Italian Westerns feature foreigners, such as Japanese samurai, Prussian bodyguards, Irish gangsters, and Greeks.
The more important issue is the difference between Italian Westerns and American Westerns in shaping male number one, but when it comes to the differences between the two westerns, this problem cannot be circumvented. Alex Cox compared the bounty trilogy to Ted Post's Hang 'Em High, an American Western.
"Hanging Man's Rope"
As the first American Western starring Clint Eastwood, Hanging Man's Rope was actually quite influenced by Leone's work. Some cameras copied Leone, close-ups, wide angles, casually inserted handheld shots, and even a plot was copied from Italian Westerns.
In eastwood's role, he's no longer a nickname-only tramp, he's been a police officer before, he's now a cowboy named Jed Cooper, and like classic Westerns, the protagonists tend to have a rough past — Sean, Ringo Kid, Ethan.
The more significant difference from the Italian Western is what happened to Cooper: he was initially suspected of stealing cattle by a group of people, almost killed, and decided to take revenge after being rescued. Cox believes that the protagonists of American Westerns basically have a process from valuing peace to rebelling in anger, such as "My Darling Clementine" and so on. The fundamental way for American Westerns is to happen something that changes the protagonist's behavior.
One would argue that there is revenge in the bounty trilogy, but revenge does not form the main driving force behind his actions. Although the protagonists are also tortured and humiliated, even without these personal vendettas, their pursuit of money will lead to action.
Although the bounty trilogy has revenge as a secondary plot, it is undeniable that many other Italian Westerns other than Leone have revenge as the main theme, but a closer look reveals that they differ from American Westerns such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976, still using Eastwood's film as an example) in that American Westerns often take a long time to gradually approach and commit atrocities. And Italian Westerns do not have this process, always directly into, should fight, should kill.
To sum up, in Italian Westerns, motivation gives way to action, and action depends on what kind of person the protagonist is. The protagonists also never practice drawing guns, and their fighting and shooting skills are based on instinct or genetics, so sometimes Italian Westerns are ineffectual.
This may explain the protagonist's attitude toward violence, in american Westerns, Sean and Ringo kid have to use one last resort because they have no other way: violence to solve the problem. In Italian Westerns, violence is not the last choice, but the first choice.
There are usually two types of male protagonists in Italian Westerns: cold-faced and ruthless bounty hunters, and revengers with bloody revenge. The former usually has some flavor, a sense of humor and compassion, such as the golden retriever and the ugly ghost in "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly", who also handed a cigarette to the dying man.
But the latter is different, more taciturn and impersonal, with only the light of hatred in their eyes. Sometimes the bounty hunter will transform into an avenger, but the avenger will always be the avenger, and this will not change halfway unless he completes the goal, and probably only one of these films has learned to forgive.
Cox's final chapter, on the audiovisual style of Italian Westerns, devotes a great deal of ink to explaining how Carlo Simi designed sets, costumes, and then how these were involved in the film's style, which is less discussed. In any case, Cox spoke highly of Simi, saying that in terms of visual style, his credit was not under director Leone.
Red Dead Redemption
Not described in detail, interesting is the application of clothing. Cox said costumes in Italian Westerns have two functions — revealing and covering, meaning that an actor's attire provides the audience with certain information about him. In Fistful of Dollars, John Baxter's clothes show that he is rich and idle; Joe's line indicates his identity, and he is dirty and torn, wearing a Mexican-style poncho, indicating the identity of a wanderer and giving the impression that he will not be loyal to any faction.
In the second "Twilight Double Dart", Leone even took advantage of the audience's stereotype of the character's clothing to deliberately mislead the audience.
Comparing Sam Peckinpah's early Westerns, such as Ride the High Country and Major Dundee, with Leone and other Italian Westerns in particular, the costumes of American Westerns focusing on who wears what and what Italian Westerns do not wear, deliberately confusing, with the result that the Perkin Act was affected, and by 1969's Sunset Sands. (The Wild Bunch), he also played a counter.)
There is also the problem of uniforms, which are usually a symbol of authority and strength, but in Italian Westerns the opposite is true, such as the most common uniform of the Mexican armed forces, which, when presented, is often the target of attack.
The last part is devoted to the discussion of music in Italian Westerns, which is very important, not to mention other soundtrackists, at least Ennio Morricone is a household name.
"High Noon"
Italian Westerns can be considered subversions and improvements on American Westerns, but there are several classic American Westerns that are undoubtedly the source of them, the first of which is High Noon, which knows the film's McCarthyist background, so for the creators of Italian Westerns, it does not matter whether Or not The High Noon depicts life in a frontier town is true, the key is that it is used as a fable that inspired Sergio Corbage and Sergio Sollima), the small town pattern in these two Selgio's later films is more or less derived from "High Noon". If there is another source to find earlier, it may be "The Ox-Bow Incident".
Then there's Sean, whose one-of-a-kind feel influenced Italian Westerns on the other. In particular, sean's composition, lighting, deep-focus lenses and use of exteriors have had a profound impact on the best Italian Westerns.
One-Eyed Dragon
The 1950s American Westerns had some outrageous works that coincided with those of the Italian younger generation a decade later, such as Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar and Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns. The two films did not receive a response in Europe that year, so it is not necessarily credible that they influenced Sergio, and it is better to say that Marlon Brando's only directorial work, One-Eyed Jacks, was a precursor to italian Westerns.
There are still some points that Alex Cox did not mention in his writings, such as the influence of Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz in 1954 on Sergio Leone.
With the demise of the Italian Western, Cox believes: "It was comedy that killed the Italian Western." Comedic Italian Westerns should be a natural contradiction. Aside from the bunch of films starring Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia (these two are well-known Italian comedy groups, mainly acting in various types of parodies, not just spoofing Westerns), there were not many comedies in Italian Westerns, but by the end of the 1960s, things changed.
First appeared Bang Bang Kid (1967), then God Forgives... I Don't, the film that made Terence Hill and Bud Spencer popular, forming what's known as a good-ugly combination.
In these comedy Westerns, the theme of revenge is sometimes left behind and patronized as funny. Comedies became more and more popular, and Kabusi also made a lot of comedy Westerns, Salima occasionally made them, and Leone also participated.
In 1973, authentic Italian Westerns became niche, costs were limited to a low price, the production was crude, and if a shot happened to meet a plane flying in the sky, it was obvious that no one wanted to reshoot it.
Later, Italian-style kung fu movies and erotic films appeared, not to mention authentic Westerns, and even comedy Westerns began to disappear. Cox saw "My Name Is Khan" as the epitaph of an Italian Western, directed by Tonino Valerii, and of course, Sergio Leone was instrumental in the background.
Then there's the question of the coffin-based evaluation, with Cox making Leone the best Italian director of the 1960s, which apparently excludes michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, the accomplished masters, and Caubussi and Francesco Rosi), Marco Bellocchio and other newcomers.
If Leone is John Ford in the Italian Western, then Kabusi is Howard Hawks, who occasionally makes bad films, but most of the time makes people overjoyed, Salima is a bit like Kabusy, and his worst "Run Man Run" seems to be a reason not to take Italian Westerns seriously, but his best "Face to Face." Face) but it deserves careful analysis.
The book concludes with an interview with Alex Cox and Lee Van Cleef, a veteran who talks a little about his experiences with Italian Westerns.
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