Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Variously known as "Duck, You Sucker" (the title of its original American release in 1971), "A Fistful of Dynamite," "Once Upon a Time... the Revolution," and "Gił la testa," the first thing that has to be said is that by whatever name, this is not as great a film as the one Sergio Leone made just before it. But how many movies can top "Once Upon a Time in the West"?

Leone wanted to use Jason Robards again for the role of Juan. I have a hard time envisioning Robards as a Mexican peasant. The late, great Rod Steiger played the part not only with relish but credibly. Although his accent comes and goes, there is a continuity of a peasant cunning through all the changes in how others perceive him. These conceptions include stupid bumpkin, bandito, and revolutionary hero. Costar James Coburn is unflappable as a dynamite wizard who fled Ireland after the failure of the Easter Rising and the painful spectacle of his best friend being tortured by the British into identifying fellow IRA members. Sean is not as cynical as he pretends, but he is cool in the 1960s James Coburn manner of "In Like Flynt," etc. (Leone wanted Malcolm McDowell for the part!?!)

Juan sees Sean's demolition skills as exactly what he needs to rob "the bank" ("not a bank, the bank"). Sean goes along and the caper becomes tied to some faction of the Mexican revolution. Several major battles follow. About 45 minutes before the end the humor ends and it seems to me that Leone was thinking about Nazi reprisals against Italian partisans after the fall of Mussolini. The army commander even looks like a Nazi soldier.

There are some puzzling jumps of plot continuity, although Leone's pace for many stretches of the movie was very leisurely. I don't know anything about the history of releasing this movie, but suspect that like Leone's masterpieces "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "Once Upon a Time in America" that it was even longer and released (under three different titles) hacked up by others. What happens between the battle of the bridge and the next scene looks like a lot was cut.

Most of the super-tight close-ups are in the first 15-20 minutes of the film, though no one not color-blind could come away from viewing the film without knowing that James Coburn and the unnamed antagonist I see as prefiguring ruthless Nazis as have blue eyes.

Here and elsewhere, it is obvious that Leone had a sense of humor, often a very morbid one, along with a tragic view of the always compromised struggles against evil(s).

As in John Frankenheimer's "The Train," which is also rarely screened, the explosions were real, shown in real time. Though it sometimes seems that American movies of the 1990s existed for their explosions, Leone's still seem spectacular. . . and meaningful.

Ennio Morricone's score is less memorable than those for earlier Leone movies but uses a wide range of sound materials.

Coburn's Sean is as ingenious as the whole team in Richard Brooks' "The Professionals," which along with Sam Peckinpagh's "The Wild Bunch" carried the western film south of the Mexican border with American stars after the end of Indian wars in the United States and statehood for the territories of Arizona and New Mexico. (See my list of best westerns set outside "the west" at http://www.epinions.com/content_2807275652.)

I am not sure how concerned Leone was with examining peasant revolutions. At the time the film was made, the Vietnam war was burning, Leone's compatriate Gillo Pontecorvo was between making "Battle in Algiers" and "Burn!", and Maoists walked the earth. The film has an epigram from Mao. Like Pontecorvo's films (and The Assault), it shows the very high cost in misery for the civilian population of rebellion and massive reprisals. It turns from light-hearted to very dark. . . while providing scope for Rod Steiger to act out. I doubt that he had as many close-ups in any of his other films! Although he will be missed, he left a large and often impressive body of film work, of which this Leone film, much less known and much less often screened than dollar trilogy (with Clint Eastwood) and the epic masterpiece "Once Upon a Time in The West" is a major instance -- between Napoleon and Mussolini in the chronology of Steiger's film roles.

My favorite Coburn movie is another western, Sam Peckinpagh's (also sprawling) "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," in which Coburn plays Pat and Kris Kristofferson plays an amiable Billy (observed by Bob Dylan), though I also remember fondly the satire in which Coburn played the title role of "The President's Analyst." He was plenty scary winning an Oscar in (as?) "The Affliction" with Nick Nolte, too, but for range he could not compete with Steiger (indeed Steiger's range of killers in "No Way to Treat a Lady" is wider than that of Coburn across his whole career.)



Recommended: Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age