Duello nel Texas - The Extras: Difference between revisions

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==Title Chaos==
==Title Chaos==

Revision as of 19:30, 11 June 2012

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Title Chaos

One of the first spaghetti westerns, this movie also started a thing called title chaos, a phenomenon inevitable associated with the genre. He who has never mixed up several movies because of the different titles given in different (or even one and the same) countries (country) is not a real fan. In Italy it was called Duello nel Texas, in Spain El Gringo or simply Gringo. The international title became Gunfight at Red Sands, a translation of an alternative Italian title that was never used, Duello nelle Sabbie Rosse. It even got a third Italian title, a working title (as far as I know) never used officially: I Lupi del Texas (The Wolves from Texas). As more often, the German title is quite bizarre: Drei gegen Sacramento (Three against Sacramento).

Because Richard 'Gringo' Harrison's foster father (a Mexican) is killed by three men, I supposed that Gringo's name in the German version was changed to Sacramento. Accordng to the German Wiki, this is not true. So where does this name Sacramento come from? The film set in and around a village near the Mexican border, so not in Sacramento, California. The murdered foster father had found gold on his land (and is therefore killed), could that be the - dubious - link to Sacramento (and the Californian Gold Rush)? Who knows. Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country was called Sacramento in Germany, but it’s doubtful whether that movie was successful enough for other movies to be retitled with the name ‘Sacramento’ in it. So maybe it’s just one of those nonsensical German titles. If virtually every avenger is Django, virtually every town might be Sacramento.


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Top row, second from the left: Leone
Top row, second from the right: Morricone

When Sergio met Ennio

Leone didn’t like the score Morricone had written for Duello nel Texas. He thought it was a typical old school score, ‘un Tiomkin dei poveri’ (a poor man’s Tiomkin). He therefore wanted to ask Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (who had done The Colossos of Rhodes for him) for a score for A Fistful of Dollars, but Papi & Colombo wanted him to talk to Morricone first. When the two finally met, Morricone showed Leone a picture which showed that they had been class-mates at the elementary school Saint Juan Baptiste de la Salle, a school run by a catholic educational order known as the Scolopi (Poor Clerics of the Mother of God).

Morricone proposed two compositions, the first one was a piece that had been rejected by the producers for the previous film. It was different from what he had done before, more solemn and plaintiff. Leone liked it but asked Morricone to chance a few things. It would become the dramatic theme, used during the finale, prior to the shootout. The second composition was called ‘Pastures of Plenty’, a song by Woody Guthrie (based on a traditional folk song called ‘pretty Polly’), for which Morricone had done the orchestration. It had become a small hit in Italy in the version of Peter Tevis, who had also recorded the theme son A Gringo like Me for Duello nel Texas (in the movie it was sung by Dickie Jones). Leone didn’t like the idea of a theme song with lyrics, but couldn’t get the melody out of his head. Instead of a human voice, a human whistle was added to it, plus some strange choral chants, and the sound of whips and gunshots, and the thing became one of the most spectacular theme songs in the history of film making.


Richard Harrison, the Man who wouldn’t be No Name

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He was one of the muscular American actors who came to Europe in the early 1960s to appear in sword and sandal movies. Unlike his colleagues Brad Harris and Steve Reeves, he successfully made the transition to other genres such as westerns and spy movies. After completing Duello nel Texas, he was asked by producers Papi & Colombo to do a second western for them, one that was to be directed by a man called Sergio Leone. Harrison had never heard of Leone and was also offered another role, in yet another sword and sandal movie, The Giants of Rome. The name of the director of that movie was Antonio Margheriti. Harrison asked several people and they all told him that Margheriti was the better director of the two. He then decided to do the peplum. The biggest screw-up of my life, he later confessed in a couple of interviews.

Harrison was not Leone’s first choice. He had wanted Henry Fonda for the part of the magnificent stranger, and a copy of the script was indeed sent to Fonda’s agent, who sent it back without showing it to Mr. Fonda. A copy was also sent to Charles Bronson and James Coburn. Bronson read the script but thought it was rubbish, Coburn showed some interest but wanted $ 25.000, which was way beyond Leone’s means. Many people have claimed that they were the very person who advised Leone to take Clint Eastwood. The person who attracted Papi & Colombo to the actor, was an employee of a local agency who had seen him as Rowdy Yates in Rawhide. Clints name came on a list with two others (nobody remembers the other two names), which was shown to various people, among them Richard Harrison (and probably Mark Damon as well). Harrison told Jolly Films to take Clint … because he could ride a horse. These days he talks with a smile about this biggest screw-up of his life: My biggest contribution to world cinema was turning down the the role of No Name and recommending Clint for it.


A Man called Band, Albert Band

Albert Band was an American director, producer and writer, who was involved in a handful of spaghetti westerns. He was born in 1924, in Paris. So far, there’s no discussion.

It’s also confirmed that he worked in Hollywood in the late forties, early fifties. He directed his own Hollywood western in 1956, The Young Guns. In the late fifties he went back to Europe, and was involved in the production of five spaghetti westerns, among them the key movie Duello nel Texas (1963). Band’s next project was Massacro al Grande Canyon, now best known as the first western (co-)directed by Sergio Corbucci. Band and Corbucci would meet again on the set of The Hellbenders, the first as producer, the second as director, a loose sequel to Band’s The Tramplers. Band also contributed to the script of A Minute to Pray, a moment to Die, directed by Franco Giraldi).

In other words: We know a lot about the man, and yet he is one of the most enigmatic names in the history of the genre. According to various Italian sources, Band was an ‘Italo-American’, an American of Italian descent. It seems likely that a man who was involved in all these early productions had an Italian background, but on facebook, in a reaction to one of my writings, William Connolly denied that Albert Band’s real name was Alfredo Antonini and that his real name, Alfred Band, appeared on his birth certificate.

I later found out that the Band family came from Lithuania, not from Italy. Albert Band’s father was the painter Max Band, born in 1901. The family was Jewish and fled the country (like may Jewish and/or wealthy families) after the communist revolution of 1917. This seemed to exclude that he was an Italo-American, but Marco Giusti, the author of the Dizionario del western all’italiano, has spoken to many people who have worked with the man, and according to them, he spoke reasonably well Italian. Giusti also mentions that Band told him that he had been dreaming of bringing the western genre to his ‘home country’. Was his mother by any chance Italian, or of Italian descent? I have not been able to find any conformation of this, but it seems the most likely explanation.

The Band family left Lithuania, which would become a part of the Soviet Union, after the communist revolution. Before reaching Paris, where Albert was born, they might have settled in Istria, where many 'Italians' lived who had a Slavic background (the Garko family came from the Italian enclave Zadar, their original family name was Garkovich). Being Jewish, they escaped from France prior to the German occupation and went for the US. Albert Band had two children, Charles and Richard, who both work within the film industry, Charles as a writer, producer and director of horror movies, Richard as a film composer.

On the blog ‘WesternsallItaliana’ it is suggested that Band used Antonini as a pseudonym. So in this version, he was doing the direct opposite of the Italians in the business: while they were Americanizing their names, he was Italianating his. I like that.



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--By Scherpschutter

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