A Book Review by Roberto Curti.
A treasure trove of material, presented in an intriguing manner….”
The title for the late Tony Williams’ final work is nothing short of appropriate: returning to the wide-open plains of the Italian Western, the British film scholar completed a journey that began in 1975 with the release of his first book, co-authored with Laurence Staig, Italian Western: The Opera of Violence. Published at a time the so-called Spaghetti Western was critically reviled in its home country and abroad, Staig and Williams’ pioneering study represented the first serious academic approach to the phenomenon and still remains one of the best books on the subject. Fifty years later, there was no need to return to widely explored terrain and restate the obvious (“Who cares about the animus against Leone and Eastwood 60 years ago?” he once told this writer), and Williams wisely opted to construct the new book as a complement to the earlier one, covering several major titles not discussed in it, such as Bandidos (1967, Massimo Dallamano) and Corri uomo corri (aka Run, Man, Run, 1969, Sergio Sollima; see top image) (Chapter Ten, “Missing Links,” pp. 267-325), while moving on “to different landscapes in a now familiar and less reviled territory” (p. 11).
Rounding the Circle provides a treasure trove of material, presented in an intriguing manner. Its fourteen chapters stand out as mini essays on their own while providing readers with a comprehensive overview of a production counting hundreds of titles squeezed in a decade or so. Chapter subjects vary from an exploration of womenfolk in Italian Westerns (addressing such little-known titles as Little Rita nel West, 1967, starring singer Rita Pavone) to a study on priest figures (“Italian Western priests are the real thing. If not Lucifer’s fallen angels, then they are different incarnations of “The Devil Inside Me,” like Jim Thompson’s Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me … embodying the dark disciplinary and punitive desires of Mother Church in its most wayward forms,” p. 72). Furthermore, several are centered on single actors, characters, or films (Klaus Kinski; Tony Anthony’s Stranger cycle; the Sartana series starring Gianni Garko and George Hilton; Peter Lee Lawrence’s films directed by Rafael Romero Marchent; Duccio Tessari’s 1985 adaptation of the comic book Tex) or on curious hybridizations such as the so-called Gothic Westerns, in which the author discusses such works as Black Jack (1969, Gianfranco Baldanello) and Django the Bastard (1969, Sergio Garrone, an intriguing forerunner of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter). One of the highlights is “Franco and Ciccio Go West,” a detailed and often brilliant examination of the comical duo’s Western spoofs: here, Williams shows that language barriers do not prevent in-depth analysis of comedy mechanisms, and his astute parallels between two Sicilian comedians’ use of their dialect and the “nonsense” Cantonese dialect in Stephen Chow’s cinema (p. 111) show an admirable capacity of connecting the dots and going beyond the boundaries.
Williams’ stature as a film scholar is undoubtable, but his profound knowledge (not just of Italian cinema, as the enlightening cross-references to opera, literature, Elizabethan, and Jacobean tragedy amply prove) does not come at the expense of the text’s readability. He sincerely loves the genre (“Nothing can take away the pleasure of seeing a Klaus Kinski performance in an Italian Western,” he writes on page 92, and I fully agree) but doesn’t give in to simplistic cinephile enthusiasm. He is consistently accessible but never banal; he doesn’t make the mistake of taking for granted that viewers are familiar with the movies he is talking about and always manages to provide plot information and data. Furthermore, he lays down his arguments with an engrossing prose, never indulging in academic mumbo jumbo but quite often spicing the observations with an ironic attitude and clever humorous bits. In this light, the chapter titled “Deemophilia vs Deemophobia” (pp. 144-180), an appreciation of director Demofilo Fidani (aka Miles Deem), an Ed Wood-type cult auteur among Western connoisseurs for his bizarrely titled and even more bizarrely directed films, is priceless. Williams clearly has his tongue firmly in his cheek here, whether commenting on a scene from Arrivano Django e Sartana… è la fine (aka Django and Sartana Are Coming… It’s the End (1970), where Gordon Mitchell’s character plays cards with his reflection in a mirror (!) with a comparison to Jacques Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (premising, “I am not suggesting that Deem directed the film with Lacan’s [book] in his pocket,” p. 165) or describing an interminably long shot of outlaws riding at the top of the horizon in Straniero… fatti il segno della croce! (aka Make the Sign of the Cross, Stranger!, 1968) as an “homage to the realist long take tradition favored by André Bazin as opposed to the montage technique also condemned by Siegfried Kracauer” (p. 147). His obvious target is not poor Fidani’s “cinema of deliberate incoherence”—actually, Williams is never, ever condescending toward the movies or filmmakers he discusses—but rather the absurdist and shaky construction that pompous would-be historians come up with, more interested (like Mitchell’s character) in their own reflection than in the films they are commenting on.
That said, it would be unfair not to mention that Rounding the Circle came to print in an unfinished, rough-around-the-edges form due to Williams’ death last April. The text could have benefited from tighter editing and proofreading, especially concerning the many typos affecting Italian titles and names discussed. Still, it remains essential reading for scholars of Italian genre cinema and an invaluable map for those daring enough to step into unfamiliar, yet often surprisingly rewarding, territories.
Roberto Curti is an Italian film historian and the author of numerous published books and articles, with a study on Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing forthcoming from Channel Academic/BearManor. He lives in Cortona, Italy.