Matalo! Review
Mátalo - Kill him! (Mátalo!)
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| MÁTALO! (1970) |
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Alternately described as ‘Leone on mescaline’ and ‘John Ford on acid’, Matalo! occupies a seat of honour in the collection of curiosities of the spaghetti western. Telling a rather traditional spaghetti western story about villains falling out after a successful robbery, it tries to alienate the audience with its psychedelic rock score, anachronistic costume design, dazzling camera movements, out-of-focus shots, and erratic political and sexual metaphors.
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As said, the basic story is simple. In the opening scene, Burt (Corrado Pani), a hippy like outlaw, is about to be hanged in a small western town, but is saved by a hired gang of Mexicans. But even such a simple premise, is turned by director Canevari into an outlandish sequence when the liberated Burt is confronted with a mourning woman, who first wants to shoot him, then answers his kisses, and finally commits suicide (!) when he walks away from her. The next scene, is even more unsettling: instead of being grateful, Burt shoots the Mexicans in the back when they ride away. This is most probably a metaphor for the ingratitude of the Capitalist world towards third world people it has mercilessly exploited, and is ‘mirrored’ in the film’s finale, when Lou Castel uses boomerangs, Third World weapons, to beat the intruders. Burt joins two friends and a female member of the gang (Claudia Gravy) in a ghost town, and planning a stagecoach robbery with them. But during the robbery Burt, the supposed protagonist of the movie, is shot and left behind, and we won’t see him again until very late in the movie. The gang members take the loot to the ghost town, where they are joined by a mysterious stranger (Castel) and a woman who has lost her husband in an accident. The lunatic Theo (Luis Davila) starts torturing the stranger and finally threatens to beat him to dead, but the stranger, an Australian and the pacifist son of a preacher man, is saved by his horse. An old woman, the only inhabitant of the ghost town, who dreams about reviving the place, tries to join hands with the Australian in order to chase the last members of the gang, but then Burt enters the scene again …
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Canevari had worked on a western before, the obscure Per un dollaro a Tucson si muore (1), but is best known for producing and directing the first official Emmanuelle film, Io Emmanuele (written with two m’s), in which Erika Blank had played the character made famous by French director Just Jaekin and Dutch actress Silvia Kristel in the years to come (to avoid legal problems, they wrote the name with one ‘m’). He was an independent Milan based film maker, who wanted to stay away as far as possible from the Roman production companies. Italian actor Pani and Spanish actor Salines had both appeared in a prestigious adaptation of Dostoievski’s The Brothers Karamazov, made for Italian television, while Gravy was a well-known sex pot from Spanish B cinema. Expectations were quite high, but the movie failed miserably at the box-office (and largely frustrated Canevari’s career as an independent film maker). Hippies didn’t visit westerns, and western fans didn’t like hippies. But it found its audience more than a decade later thanks to VHS and TV showings.
Although Matalo! is a remake of an earlier Kill the Wickeds, it is quite a unique western. There are vague similarities to the Monte Hellman westerns, but the film often feels closer in spirit to movies like The Wild Angels and Easy Rider, with the gang members acting like 19th Century Hell’s Angels and Gravy who could be anybody’s girlfriend, but submits herself to Pani, the leader of the pack. Most story elements from the original script were respected, but one minor change seems quite essential: in the original film it was not the ‘Burt character’ but one of his lieutenants (the Braxter from this movie, played by Luis Davila) who was to be hanged in the opening scene. It is a definite improvement: by book-ending the film with his presence, Pani really becomes the central character of the narrative, even if he is absent during the bulk of the movie. In an interview with the magazine Nocturno, Canevaro stated that the expunged all dialogue from the original script, until only one line was left, the infamous order ‘matalo!’, spoken to a kid during the stagecoach robbery. This is not true, but dialogue is indeed very sparse. After the bizarre, fascinating first ten minutes, with Burt’s near-hanging and the massacre of the Mexicans, the narrative fades into the background, making way for Mario Migliardi’s loud, particularly obtrusive score, and a series of erotic and violent scenes with strong sado-masochistic overtones. The best of them have the incredibly sexy Gravy subjugating the men in her company with her seductive, provocative behaviour. The funny thing is that we are made clear, in a very suggestive way, that the absent Burt, isn’t absent at all: from time to time the barrel of his gun penetrates the screen, in glorious erection. Sometimes a gun is just a gun, but it’s very hard to miss the Freudian symbolism here. When Burt finally shows his face again, Gravy immediately starts kissing him, echoing the scene with the mourning woman in the opening minutes.
The psychedelic, ‘hip’ look of the movie – including bell bottoms, hot pants and flower power regalia such as fertility signs - feels of course dated today, and the rock score - a fusion of a whining Jimmy Hendrix style guitar, pulsating Iron Butterfly rhythms and early Pink Floyd experimental sound effects - will drive some people crazy. The political metaphors may feel awfully laborious too, but note that some of the symbolism is quite off-beat (to say the least), with degenerated, voracious hippies representing the World Gone Wild and Pani as the incarnation of evil, a self-obsessed erotomaniac whose kisses seem to be poisonous: women who kiss him die shortly after. Matalo! occasionally is too weird for its own good, feeling more like a trip than a real movie. Moreover the finale with the boomerangs is oddly inadequate, even a bit laughable. But to me this outrageous exercise in hallucinatory madness simply seemed to work. If you’re looking for an unusual, but still rather straightforward spaghetti western, try Kill the Wickeds, if you’re looking for something completely different, this might be the film for you.
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- (1) Actually, Canevari often said he only took over when the Spanish director, with the incredible name of Pasquale Vincenzo Oscar de Fina, walked away from the project, but according to some De Fina, a journalist and director of B-movies of dubious content, was never involved in the project, and according to others the name is just another pseudo of Canevari (he used several). In the interview with Nocturno, Canevari said that he avoided close-ups because he wanted the make the film look like a stage play (!). I have never seen it, but Stanton says about it: “Hard to believe, but this amateurish early Italian western from 1964 was really made by Cesare Canevari, the director of Matelo! Some weird scenes in this one too, but amongst the overall clumsiness they may only be caused by accident. If Matalo! was a western possibly made under drug influence, Per un Dollaro a Tucson si muore looks like the film of a druggie on withdrawal, shot in the woods behind your home (actually it was a tidy looking Yugoslavia). One of the worst SWs I’ve seen. Acting, story, dialogue, atmosphere, everything is sub-standard. To be seen to be believed.”
--By Scherpschutter
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