Keoma Review
From The Spaghetti Western Database
- 1976
- Dir: Enzo G. Castellari
- Cast: Franco Nero, William Berger, Woody Strode, Olga Karlatos, Donald O'Brien (O'Brian), Gabriella Giacobbe, John Loffredo (Joshua Sinclair), Orso Maria Guerrini, Antonio Marsina, Leonardo Scavini, Ken Wood, Alfio Caltabiano
- Music: Guido and Maurizio De Angelis
1976 is often called the year in which the western had its last upswing before it fell into a decline and slowly became a moribund genre. John Wayne made his last movie, The Shootist, a goodbye to the genre as well as a homage to his own contribution to it, symbolized by the clips former films, used to illustrate the both the actor's and the protagonist's history. Clint Eastwood made the ambitious The Outlaw Josey Wales, that was a critical success but a (relative) failure at the box-office and would stay his last western for nearly a decade. And Enzo G. Castellari gave the already suffering spaghetti western a worthy conclusion with his twilight spaghetti Keoma.
The halfbreed Keoma (Nero), son of an Indian mother and a white father (Berger), comes home after the Civil War, but finds his hometown ravaged by the plague, the sick people interned in a sort of concentration camp by the evil Caldwell (O'Brien). To make things worse, his three half-brothers, who have mistreated him when they were young, have turned their back on their father and chosen to side with Caldwell. Keoma saves a pregnant woman when she is brought to the camp, and takes her into town, which makes him unpopular among the evil forces terrorizing the surroundings. Eventually Keoma decides to oppose Caldwell and his half-brothers, only helped by his father and a friend, a former slave (Strode), now the town drunk. In a furious battle Keoma manages to eliminate most of Caldwell's man but his father and friend are killed and he himself is captured and tied to a wheel in the town's centre. Keoma's half-brothers turn against Caldwell and kill him, but at night Keoma is liberated. . . . .
At first sight Keoma seems a very traditional spaghetti-western. The differences are the film's mood and - especially - its large-scale pretentions. Like most spaghetti westerns made in the second half of the seventies Keoma is very melancholic. It's also mystic, symbolic and referential, with some references quite unusual within the western genre. With torches illuminating it at night, the town in this movie looks more like a medieval town than the traditional western town, while the atmosphere of despair and decay - the country ravaged by the plague , the people exercising purifying rituals - is reminiscent of the world of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. When he is asked by an old woman why he has come back, he answers her that the world keeps turning round and round, so a man always ends up in the same place. Originally this woman was to symbolize death, but the idea was changed and although she looks like a Shakespearean witch, she ultimately is functioning more like the classical Fate from Greek and Scandinavian mythology, a goddess of destiny who has the power to decide over life and death. She tells Keoma how she saved his life when his tribe was massacred, by leading his white father to the battlefield. She will exercise this power again near the end of the film, when she frees the 'crucified' Keoma from the wagon wheel, bringing the pregnant woman he saved himself to his feet. It's in the custody of this older woman that Keoma will leave the newborn child after the child's own mother has died in childbirth. This is all very symbolic, maybe too symbolic to some people's taste, with Christian ideas about death and resurrection fused with the cycle of destruction and rebirth of natural religion. But that's what this film is all about.
I first saw this movie in the eighties on a fullscreen VHS that must have ruined its look, and saw it, much later, once or twice on German television, in the right format, but in cut form, and thought it was good-looking but slow-moving and over-sentimental. But watching it recently, uncut, in the right format, on a superb DVD, I was more impressed. The uncut version is better balanced and actually seems shorter than the version shown on German television. Of course, the multiple re-writings and improvisations have left some traces; the mid-section of the movie is plodding and some scenes, like Keoma's fistfights with his half-brothers, are not particularly inspired (in fact, they're even a bit silly). But the atmosphere is great and the elaborated shootout between Caldwell's gang and Keoma is violent and exciting, with a terrifying death scene for Woody Strode. Castellari's use of slow-motion lacks those qualities that made Peckinpah's so special, but is still quite effective. However, what makes the film really work, are Castellari's meticulously elaborated compositions. The use of often disorienting angles culminates here in a scene in which Nero and Berger are seen through the holes they shoot in their target during a shooting practice. Even more impressive, is his innovative use of flashbacks, in which Nero seems to walk through his own past, completely breaking with the Leone flashback style that had dominated the genre. They give the film its dreamlike atmosphere, that is even further emphasized by the impressionist visual touches and colour palette. The film begins with a shot that seems reminiscent of the opening shot of The Searchers (1956): from what seems a shadowy porch of a house, we see a rider approaching, but this time the rider is not entering a house, but a western town that has been a battlefield during the civil war. During the entire movie, we see streaks of light fall through windows, cracks in walls or gaps in roofs. Apart from Leone's Once upon a Time in the West (C'era una volta il West), this is probably the most breathtakingly beautiful looking spaghetti western you'll ever see. And it is this visual flair that makes some of the weaker aspects of the movie digestible.
Castellari has often called this his best movie. He has always been very proud of it and of his work with Woody Strode, who called him, when the film was finished, an heir to John Ford, which was, in Castellari's words, as much honour as an Oscar. It was also Strode who came up with the title of the movie: he had read it on the front page of a book he once read. He couldn't remember what the book was about, but had always liked the title. It turned out to be an autobiography of a prostitute, but Castellari didn't mind: he liked the title too.
--By Scherpschutter
