Looks like all of a sudden I've made my way into the "less serious" spaguetti westerns, the comedic type that followed the success of "My name is Trinity" and ultimately killed the genre. This one may be one of the best of the bunch, as it has Sergio Corbucci ("Hellbenders", "Django") at the helm. He reunites here with Franco Nero, the star od "Django", and assembles a fine cast to join him. We have Tomás Milian, this time in a quite broad performance, Jack Palance and Spanish star Fernando Rey.
The plot is very similar to the standard "Zapata western". We have a local (Milian) and a foreigner (Nero, playing a Sweden adventurer) who are sucked into the Mexican revolution as they fight for their own reasons, survival in the case of Vasco (Milian) and money in Nero's. I've mentioned comedy before, and that's for two main reasons. First of all, the cast seems to play the whole thing for laughs, as if parodying the whole "Zapata western" trend. Milian spends the whole film wearing a Che Guevara-type beret and is the more politically active character in the plot. Nero, meanwhile, is quite fun to watch as he struggles to look cool and flegmatic but fails every single time, and Palance... well he is the way you can expect, over the top but funny.
Then we have the, ahem, political message. Often the "Zapata westerns" position themselves on the side of the revolutionaries, although they resist the temptation of idealising them or their methods. Here we have Fernando Rey playing what easily could be the most annoying and useless revolutionary leader ever. With spectacles and a permanent beatific smile, Rey also seems to play his role tongue in cheek, and it's easy to understand why: his character is in favour of revolution, but also a pacifist (!) who spends most of the time reprimanding the people under his command for their excessive use of violence (!!) and advocating for peaceful approaches to end the civil war.
The problem is that Corbucci tries to reconcile this tongue-in-cheek approach with some seriousness, not because he takes the politics seriously, but because he knows he must keep things under a certain restraint if he wants the action bits to work. They do, true, but a price: this is, of all Corbucci's westerns I've seen, the most entertainning and fun to watch, but also the worst from an artistic point of view.
The Sweden had something to say about Franco Nero's accent.
