The Grand Duel Review: Difference between revisions
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'''Director:''' Giancarlo Santi - '''Cast:''' Lee Van Cleef, Peter O'Brien, Horst Frank, Marc Mazza, Klaus Grünberg, Jess Hahn, Antonio Casale, Dominique Darel, Sandra Cardini - '''Music:''' Luis Bacalov | |||
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|<center> BRIEF REVIEW </center> | |<center> BRIEF REVIEW </center> | ||
|A late spaghetti western of the violent kind, with some influences of the detective story. O’Brien is the man on the run who is accused of having killed a patriarch, Van Cleef is the lawman who believes in his innocence. Often also called Van Cleef’s last great western. Bacalov’s music was used by Tarantino in ''Kill Bill''. | |A late spaghetti western of the violent kind, with some influences of the detective story. O’Brien is the man on the run who is accused of having killed a patriarch, Van Cleef is the lawman who believes in his innocence. Often also called Van Cleef’s last great western. Bacalov’s music was used by Tarantino in ''Kill Bill''. | ||
<center>[[File:Trennlinie01.jpg|250px]] [[Grande duello, Il|THE GRAND DUEL]] </center> | |||
Unlike the moody twilight spaghetti westerns of the second half of the seventies, or the numerous comedies spawned by the Trinity movies, this film tries to recreate the myth of the previous decade. It was director Giancarlo Santi's first spaghetti western, but he had been assistant-director to both [[Sergio Leone]] and [[Giulio Petroni]] on movies like [[Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il|The Good, the Bad & the Ugly]], [[Da uomo a uomo|Death Rides a Horse]] and [[C'era una volta il West|Once upon a Time in the West]]. | Unlike the moody twilight spaghetti westerns of the second half of the seventies, or the numerous comedies spawned by the Trinity movies, this film tries to recreate the myth of the previous decade. It was director Giancarlo Santi's first spaghetti western, but he had been assistant-director to both [[Sergio Leone]] and [[Giulio Petroni]] on movies like [[Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il|The Good, the Bad & the Ugly]], [[Da uomo a uomo|Death Rides a Horse]] and [[C'era una volta il West|Once upon a Time in the West]]. |
Revision as of 14:14, 24 April 2017
Director: Giancarlo Santi - Cast: Lee Van Cleef, Peter O'Brien, Horst Frank, Marc Mazza, Klaus Grünberg, Jess Hahn, Antonio Casale, Dominique Darel, Sandra Cardini - Music: Luis Bacalov
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|A late spaghetti western of the violent kind, with some influences of the detective story. O’Brien is the man on the run who is accused of having killed a patriarch, Van Cleef is the lawman who believes in his innocence. Often also called Van Cleef’s last great western. Bacalov’s music was used by Tarantino in Kill Bill.
Unlike the moody twilight spaghetti westerns of the second half of the seventies, or the numerous comedies spawned by the Trinity movies, this film tries to recreate the myth of the previous decade. It was director Giancarlo Santi's first spaghetti western, but he had been assistant-director to both Sergio Leone and Giulio Petroni on movies like The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, Death Rides a Horse and Once upon a Time in the West.
A man called Philip Vermeer - probably not a great painter but certainly an excellent shot - has been found guilty of murdering a local patriarch, but has escaped and is now on the run. He is persecuted by both a group of bounty hunters, paid by the patriarch's sons, the Saxons, and an ex-sheriff who claims Vermeer is innocent. The first half of the picture is action-oriented, Vermeer and the sheriff fighting off and escaping from an army of bounty-hunters, the second part is largely set in Saxon town and deals with the question of who actually killed the patriarch. Although the action is well-executed, the second part, with influences of Giallo and Noir, is by far the best. Lee Van Cleef has more to do and the final twist, although a bit obvious, is well-prepared in a series of flashbacks, shot in de-saturated, heavily filtered colours.
Still cast as a Colonel Mortimer type of character, good old Lee hangs around most of the time, hiding his face under his hat or grimacing at O'Brien. Even without looking he seems to know what is about to happen (or not): when O'Brien tells him that an attack is imminent he orders him to lie down and not to worry about anything: there will be no attack, tomorrow will be a long day and they need their sleep. O'Brien, on the other hand, has a hyper-active role, jumping from roof to roof and making somersaults during the gunplay. The villains are particularly well-cast; spaghetti western regular Frank plays both the patriarch and his oldest son, a cunning, knowing man with political ambitions, who bides his time; French actor Mazza (best known for a small part in My Name is Nobody) is the middle son, a simple and impatient man of action, and Austrian actor Grünberg steals the show as the youngest son, a homosexual maniac who kills an entire community of Dutch immigrants just for fun, in a scene so over the top it will leave you cringing. Grünberg had become popular thanks to his appearance in the cult movie More, today largely forgotten (some may be familiar with the Pink Floyd score). His character seems to be modeled after Jack Palance's sadistic hired gun in Shane (1953), in a sense that he looks quite the reverse of the type, dressed in white and putting on white gloves before executing a defenseless old man.
O'Brien had only two un-credited cameos on his account, the kind of cameos most actors wouldn't even want to be credited for: he had been a naked hippie in Franco Bursato's Tenderly (English title: The girl who couldn't say no) and a hippie with a hat in the episodic Capriccio all'italiana. After The Grand Duel he spent some time in India and finally he earned a living as a journalist for Espresso, under his real name Alberto Dentice. Personally I'm not very fond of the score, but most people seem to like it. This score is attributed to both Luis Bacalov and Sergio Bardotti, but Bacalov sustains he wrote all compositions. This is confirmed by director Santi. According to O'Brien/Dentice the music played over the end credits was written by the De Angelis brothers. He also mentioned an elaborated striptease scene that didn't make it to any known final cut of the movie (1).
The Grand Duel is not one of the great spaghetti westerns, but the combination of western and detective story works quite well and the movie is not pompous, pretentious or self-indulgent (like some other 'serious' efforts from the Seventies). Nor is it too silly. Parts of the score were used by Tarantino in Kill Bill Vol. 1.
Note:
(1) * Marco Giusti, Dizionario del western all'italiana
--By Scherpschutter