California Review (Scherpschutter)

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UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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CALIFORNIA

California

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In the second half of the Seventies, when the glory years of the spaghetti western were becoming a distant memory, the genre had its last upswing with a short cycle of movies called the Twilight Spaghetti westerns; more pessimistic and darker in tone than the movies from the heydays, these movies were also a homecoming for some of the genre's biggest names: in Keoma Enzo G. Castellari had directed Franco Nero, in California Giuliano Gemma was reunited with director Michele Lupo, eleven years after their collaboration on Arizona Colt. In what may be a reference to the earlier movie, Gemma's character is called California - not California Colt, because for most part he is an unarmed man on the run for ruthless killers.


California is set in the final days of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. The inmates of a Unionist prison camp are given a week to find work or leave the state. A young officer, Willy Preston, decides to walk home, all the way to Georgia, and thrusts himself upon a veteran called Michael Random, a man with no particular place to go. The two steal a horse but are trapped by the owner in a ghost town: Willy is shot in the back and subsequently hanged. Michael then decides to travel to Georgia, to tell the boy's parents about his death. Willy's father offers him a job on the ranch and Michael falls in love with Willy's sister Helen. The events seem to take a happy turn, but there is no escape from that damn war and the misery it brings in its trail ...


Like Keoma, California was partly shot in the neglected and ramshackle western town of the Roman studios that had produced dozens of westerns each year in the previous decade. Legendary set designer Carlo Simi also used the El Paso set near Almeria - destroyed by a hurricane in early 1977 (1) - to create a perfect background for what would become one of the most low-spirited, depressing movies in the history of the genre. Especially the first half is downbeat and grim, with the ex-POWs trying to stay away from bounty hunters, looking for Southerners with a price on their head. The film takes a more classic turn after the romantic interlude on the Preston ranch, but it remains a pessimistic movie. Like most other Twilight westerns, California tries hard to be a final statement: it evokes themes and stylistic features from genre classics, but it also assimilates iconic images and narrative elements of Hollywood movies such as John Ford's The Searchers and Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales. However, the movie does not only mourn the decline of a genre, but is also a sour comment on the semi-anarchic state the Italian Society went through when the film was made. The period is known in Italy as gli anni di piombo, the years of lead (2), and was marked by a wave of terroristic acts by both left-wing and right-wing paramilitary groups.


Most westerns from the Twilight cycle are more graphically violent than the movies from the previous decade (Peckinpah had done his bloody work and censors had become more lenient), but the violence in California is unusually gruesome and for most part different from what we're familiar with: people are shot in the back, fall on their knees and pray for their life, and instead of traditional shootouts we get executions, with graphic depictions of what a bullet does to the human body. The post-Civil War society depicted here, is lawless, barren land, in which innocent people are at the mercy of bloodthirsty militias and the hunters can become the hunted overnight. Even the fisticuffs, usually of a good-natured kind in Italian westerns, are brutal and savage.


California has generated some very mixed comments. French author Giré thinks it's one of the last great examples of a genre in decline, but others - like for instance - Marco Giusti have called it a tad too melancholic and too low-spirited. Gemma's performance, on the other hand, met with general praise; Alex Cox thinks he delivers his best acting job in an Italian western. Personally I think that it's the best of the twilight westerns, along with Keoma, but to me it works better as a political allegory than as a reflection of historic events. Alejandro Ulloa's cinematography, in the style of Vilmos Zsigmond, with lots of scenes taken against the light, and Gianni Ferrio's emphatic score - a plaintive harmonica alternated with pumped-up synthesizer sounds - contribute to the idea of a movie that tries a little too hard.



References:

  • Kevin Grant, Twilight's last gleaming, in: Any Gun Can Play, p. 345-347
  • Jean-François Giré, Le Dernier Feu, in: Il était une fois le western européen, p. 328-331


Notes:

  • (2) For Gli Anni di Ferro/The Years of Lead, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Lead_(Italy)
    • (The original title of German film by Margarethe von Trotta mentioned in the article (called Marianne and Julainne in English) is Die Bleierne Zeit, which means The Leaden Times)

--By Scherpschutter

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