10,000 Ways to Die

A Director's Take on the Spaghetti Western

Alex Cox

• Publisher: Kamera Books
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781842434024
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

"40 years ago as a graduate student I wrote a book about Spaghetti Westerns, called 10,000 Ways to Die. It's an embarrassing tome when I look at it now: full of half-assed semiotics and other attenuated academic nonsense. In the intervening period I have had the interesting experience of being a film director. So now, when I watch these films, I'm looking at them from a different perspective. A professional perspective, maybe . . . I'm thinking about what the filmmakers intended, how they did that shot, how the director felt when his film was recut by the studio, and he was creatively and financially screwed. 10,000 Ways to Die is an entirely new book about an under-studied subject, the Spaghetti Western, from a director's POV. Not only have these films stood the test of time; some of them are very high art."  — Alex Cox

1967

‘I never liked Italian Westerns. I made one, and to tell the truth,
I only like one; the one I did myself.’

– Giulio Questi, interviewed, Spaghetti Cinema #67

Sergio Leone was busy working with two young writers – Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento – on the treatment of his next Western, Once Upon a Time in the West. Sergio Corbucci was engaged in a spasm of filmmaking – directing two Westerns and a spy thriller in one year. But 1967 is noteworthy for the release of a Spaghetti Western made in the summer of ‘66: Giulio Questi’s Django Kill. Apologies in advance to Don Giulio, for using a title he hates. The film is also known as Oro Maldito, and Oro Hondo, and If You Live, Shoot! It is a famous film maudit, an authentic filmmaker’s statement, which requires no prior knowledge of, or interest in, Westerns. The film is complex, mysterious, and personal. Its dense structure demanded extra time in the cutting room, and it ran into immediate problems when it was done. There were difficulties with the censors, and also with distributors, who – struggling for something ‘marketable’ – branded it as a Django sequel. Django Kill is as perfect a statement of the director’s intention as Corbucci’s Django – but a very different film.

Django Kill

aka Se sei vivo, spara!, Gringo uccidi, If You Live, Shoot!,

Oro hondo, oro maldito, Tire encore si tu peux

(Italy/Spain)

Director: Giulio Questi W Producer: Alessandro Jacovoni W Screenplay: Giulio Questi, Franco Arcalli, Benedetto Benedetti W Director of Photography: Franco Delli Colli W Art Director: Enzo Bulgarelli, Jose Luis Galicia, Jaime Perez Cubero W Editor: Franco Arcalli W Sound Designer, Assistant Director: Gianni Amelio W Music: Ivan Vandor W Cast: Tomas Milian (The Stranger), Piero Lulli (Oaks), Milo Quesada (Tembler), Paco Sanz (Alderman Ackerman), Roberto Camardiel (Sorro), Marilu Tolo (Flory), Raymond Lovelock (Evan), Patrizia Valturri (Elizabeth), Daniel Martin, Edoardo De Santis, Miguel Serrano, Angel Silva, Sancho Gracia, Mirella Panfili

The story

Two Indians encounter a wounded bandit, crawling from his grave. They nurse him back to health. In flashbacks, he recalls an assault on a ‘Wells Fargo’ covered wagon, guarded by the US Army. The Stranger and his partner, Oaks, massacre the guards, caught swimming in a river, and steal a strongbox full of gold. Oaks doublecrosses the Stranger and his fellow Mexicans, making them dig their own mass grave, then gunning them down. The Indians believe the Stranger can tell them about the Happy Hunting Ground, so they stick with him. Recovered, the Stranger follows Oaks to town.

Oaks and his men have shown up in the saloon and tried to buy horses. He is recognised from a ‘Wanted’ poster. An armed mob, driven by the saloon keeper, Tembler, and the pastor, Alderman Ackerman, lynches the bandits. Oaks escapes, and holes up in a store. The Stranger arrives and accepts a bounty of $500 to capture the bandit. He shoots Oaks, who is carried to the saloon and operated upon. When they discover the Stranger has shot Oaks with gold bullets, the locals tear the living bandit apart, and extract the gold.

The Stranger spends the night in the saloon, haunted by bad dreams. Tembler’s mistress, Flory, spies on her husband and Ackerman as they argue over the bandits’ gold, which they have piled on Tembler’s desk. Tembler’s son, Evan, slashes Flory’s finery with a knife. Sorro, an eccentric rancher who wears white and dresses his henchmen in black, rides into town. He orders Tembler to surrender the bandit’s gold.

When the Stranger and the Indians cut down the hanging corpses of his former partners, the townspeople order them to leave. Horse hunting, the Stranger encounters Sorro and his men – kidnapping Evan. All repair to his ranch where Sorro offers the Stranger work, throws a pork-eating party for his men, and sends a messenger to town. Told of the kidnapping, Tembler lies and insists that Ackerman has all the gold. Sorro orders the boy killed. The Stranger intervenes and saves his life, via a drunken shooting game. Sorro has the boy cut loose, the Stranger becomes oblivious through whiskey, and Evan is surrounded by increasingly amorous muchachos. In the morning, while Sorro and his men sleep, Evan takes a gun and commits suicide.

The Stranger returns Evan’s body to town. Furious over the boy’s death, he slugs Tembler, and gets in a savage fight with several locals. Tembler and Flory, knowing that Sorro’s men will search the saloon, stash their gold in Evan’s coffin. Ackerman invites the Stranger to live in his house. He encourages him in an affair with his half-mad wife, Elizabeth, who is usually kept locked in her bedroom. Turning against the Stranger, Ackerman steals his gun and shoots Tembler with it. The townspeople, hunting for the presumed killer, scalp one of the Indians; Ackerman shoots Flory with a borrowed rifle; Sorro’s men capture the Stranger and torture him by crucifixion and ordeal-by-bats. The Stranger swears he’ll never tell; but, terrified by bats, iguanas and a mole, he cracks and reveals that the gold is in the cemetery. Sorro’s muchachos uproot the entire graveyard but find nothing: Ackerman has already dug the money up. The surviving Indian frees the Stranger, who kills Sorro’s henchmen, and their mounts, via a horse laden with dynamite. He then shoots Sorro, in his boudoir.

The Stranger returns to town. Ackerman’s house is ablaze. Elizabeth, locked in her room again, has set it on fire. Ackerman opens the cabinet to retrieve his gold; molten gold pours out onto his hands and face. The Stranger and the townspeople watch Elizabeth, and Ackerman, covered in boiling gold, die in the flames. The Stranger rides off, passing two kids making distorted faces – insisting ‘I’m uglier than you’.

The film

Django Kill happened by chance. Westerns were a big business by the mid-1960s; there were large audiences for them; there were financial incentives to make Italian films; also to shoot co-productions. A producer, Alessandro Jacovoni, had made a deal with a distributor to supply several Westerns. Having no Westerns at all, he needed to shoot some – fast. He knew a director named Giulio Questi, who had co-directed several films and was preparing a comedic horror film, Death Laid an Egg. Jacovoni asked Questi if he had any Western scripts. Questi didn’t; he wasn’t particularly interested in Westerns, but this was also a chance to do something he wanted, cloaked in a Western guise. So Questi and his partner, Kim Arcali – co-writer and later editor of Death Laid an Egg – quickly wrote a screenplay (falsely credited to a Spaniard, Maria del Carmen Marinez Román, in order to qualify for co-production status). Though set in the Wild West, it was based on Questi’s experiences as an anti-Fascist partisan in World War Two.

Questi was born in Bergamo, a small town near Milan. He joined the partisans at the age of 18, and fought with them for two years, in the mountains, until the collapse of Fascism. The bizarre events of Django Kill, the specificity of the killings, the ongoing attention to the disposition of corpses, and the homoerotic behaviour of the villains, suggest that those two years of Questi’s life were pretty intense. But he doesn’t discuss them much in interviews: what he wants to say is in the film. Questi did explain why he rejected invitations to direct other Western scripts:

For me, the Italian Western was only a way to tell stories that I had more than in the head – in the heart… I didn’t use the movie Western formula, only the look; but I wanted to recount all of the things, the cruelty, the comradeship with friends, the death, all the experiences I had of war, in combat, in the mountains.

Questi called Django Kill ‘a unique experiment that I can’t repeat mechanically’. It’s certainly a film where all the elements are in synch. Tomas Milian, who seemed mannered in The Bounty Killer, is relaxed and confident in this more complex role. So Questi was a good influence on Milian, reducing his tendency to emote without meaning. Still, the actor, interviewed in Westerns all’italiana #25, felt ambiguous about the director:

It was like working with Antonioni in a way because Giulio Questi is an intellectual revolutionary… Giulio’s a very creative, crazy man… it’s like working with Antonioni because he likes the images more than the acting. I tried to do my best.

I find the acting in Django Kill excellent. But it’s a certain kind of acting. There’s a ludicrous, ‘coarse actor’ quality to some of the supporting characters: the ‘mystical’ Indians and the subsidiary townspeople who look like they’ve been shot from a cannon, through a jumble sale. All this is in keeping with the film’s state of extremes. There are two strong women, played by Marliu Tolu and Patrizia Valturri, and four fine villains – Oaks (Piero Lulli), Ackerman (Paco Sanz), Tembler (Milo Quesada), and Sorro (Roberto Camardiel). Sanz, as the black-clad Alderman, has some outstanding villainous moments, particularly when he argues with Quesada about sharing the money:

ALDERMAN: No man can say I was anything but honest. I’ve defended the morals of the folk here, always. I’ve never been afraid to teach the way of justice and the fear of God. (caressing the bags of gold) I taught half of them to pray. Now we must divide this gold. Split it equally – or do you want to cause trouble that will attract the attention of Sorro?

But it’s Roberto Camardiel who steals the show. Sorro, as written by Questi and Arcali, and played by Camardiel, is a big, hairy-bear aesthete. He plays with toy soldiers, converses with his pet parrot, and operates a hand-cranked barrel organ. He dresses his henchmen in all-black cowboy outfits with white piping; himself in a white dress shirt, black vest, and long white planter’s coat. He’s like the aristocratic villains of In a Colt’s Shadow – but more terrible, more dangerous, more personally involved. Sorro tortures his victims with lizards and what he claims are vampire bats. He’s shocked that Tembler could stoop so low as to lie, in order to keep the money, risking his own son’s life. He’s also a heartless killer, instantly ordering Evan’s death. Sorro has the best dialogue, especially when he’s trying to recruit the Stranger to his gang.

SORRO: You see what a good time my boys have, here? Why don’t you join them in their entertainments?

Cut to shots of the muchachos tearing at a roasted pig: the image recalls an earlier one of Oaks, on the operating table, torn open by townsmen digging for golden bullets. Delighted by the scene, Sorro continues:

SORRO: The best of everything! I taught them well to enjoy good things.

CUs of the muchachos stuffing their faces with pig. Cut to ECU of blond, expectant Evan, their prisoner.

The Stranger is utterly uninterested in joining Sorro’s gang. But Sorro has interesting things to say about the importance of food, drink, and the refined pleasures of crime. Milian does a good job with his strangely passive character. After the initial robbery, the Stranger takes revenge on Oaks, then falls into a mysterious lassitude – spending a night with each of three strange families: Tembler’s, where the son harbours homicidal hatred of the mistress; Sorro’s all-male clan of black-clad fascisti; and Ackerman’s horror-movie household, with its kabuki-white madwoman.

Django Kill strongly resembles a horror movie: the lighting in the saloon when the bandits first arrive is intensely moody: Oaks’ henchman remarks how dark it is. The sets – all of whose interior walls seem painfully distressed – recall the depressing, peeling sets of one of Corman’s Poe movies. Ivan Vandor’s music adds to the horror-movie tone, as does Questi’s focus on corpses: as they are moved from place to place, the camera lingers on them, at a length which makes Corbucci’s morbid preoccupations seem mainstream. Tembler, with his avarice, piety and sadism, his wife locked behind a heavily barred door, is straight from a horror film – and so is she. Though her scenes with the Stranger are tender, Elizabeth really is insane. Let out of her cell to seduce him, she acquires matches and the means, finally, to burn down her happy home.

So, including the Oaks gang, this Stranger is given a choice of four evil ‘families’, all of them mad, all apt to betray him. Plagued by nightmares, he suffers from horrific flashbacks. His return from the dead (hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Background
• 1963
• 1964
• 1965
• 1966
• 1967
• 1968
• 1969
• The Seventies
• 1608
• Copyright
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