The Specialists Review

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TheSpecialist FrenchPoster.jpg
Director:
  • Sergio Corbucci

Cast:

  • Johnny Halliday
  • Françoise Fabian
  • Mario Adorf
  • Gastone Moschin
  • Sylvie Fennec
  • Serge Marquand
  • Gino Pernice
  • Luciano Rosato
  • Angela Luce
  • Mario Castellani

Music:

  • Angelo Francesco Lavagnino

The Specialists (Gli Specialisti / Le specialiste)

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  • 1969


Made in 1969, Gli Specialisti is the least popular of the four westerns Sergio Corbucci made in the late sixties, that often appear on people's lists of favourite spaghetti westerns. The previous year he had made both The Mercenary and The Great Silence, the next year would bring Compañeros. With a hero who wears a bulletproof vest, a group of pot-smoking hippies, and a Mexican bandit who dictates his own biography to a clerk, The Specialists is also the most extravagant of the lot. The genesis of the film is rather obscure. It was announced as a movie about a specialist in warfare, under the working title Lo specialiste a mano armata, and Lee van Cleef was mentioned as both leading actor and co-author of the original story. Recently a draught of a script has been unearthed, signed by both Corbucci and van Cleef, but bearing an alternative, and very suggestive title: Il Ritorno del Mercenario (1). Somewhere, somehow Van Cleef dropped out of the picture and apparently Corbucci decided to make a different film, using only a few ideas of the unfinished project (the bulletproof vest and Mexican revolutionary bandits clearly are remainders). According to Halliday, the script was written, scene for scene, on the set, which could well explain some of its anomalies.

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In the opening scene four young people, looking like hippies, are dragged through the mud by Mexican bandits after a stagecoach robbery. One of the Mexicans throws a coin between them, saying that the one who will return it, will be saved (Barboni would use this idea again in Trinity is still my name). The camera follows the leader of the Mexicans inside a house, where he is surprised by a man dressed in black, who kills all bandits and is identified by the stagecoach passengers as the famous gunslinger Hud. The stagecoach passengers tell him he is their friend, but Hud, unimpressed, answers that he hasn't got a single friend in this world. He is on his way to Blackstone, Nevada, to find out why his brother was hanged by the townsfolk and what happened to the money he was supposed to have embezzled. A former friend, now a bandit leader, puts him on the trail of his old flame Virginia Pollicut, the widow of the bank owner, who virtually controls the town by using every possible weapon, including sex ...


At first sight, Gli Specialisti seems a rather straightforward revenge western, but according to Corbucci it is a political movie. If the specialist is an avenger, then he's not acting against an opponent, but against an entire community, representing the bourgeois society, loathed by Corbucci for repressing all revolutionary initiatives with brute force. This all culminates in the famous scene with Halliday burning the money of the people of Blackstone before their very eyes. When Corbucci started to work on Gli Specialisti, it was clear that the Parisian student uprising of May '68 had failed and that there would be no radical political change in Europe. Hud has no friends in this world, the only people he can trust are an angelic girl, a prostitute and a sympathetic, but clumsy sheriff. His former friend El Diablo is an ex-revolutionary who has turned to banditry, and the sheriff, who has some ideas about non-violence (peaceful revolution?) is brutally murdered when facing a ruthless opponent unarmed. But if El Diablo's has become a 'normal' bandit, his contempt for the bourgeoisie of Blackstone is unbroken: to him they're only a bunch of idiots taken in by a woman, Virginia Pollycut (note that this is also Luigi Pistilli's name in The Great Silence). The most scornful characters of them all, are the four hippies (one of them wears a Sergeant Pepper like costume!). They are presented as scum of the lowest kind, who beg the specialist to teach them how to shoot, harass the visitors of the saloon, and force the people of Blackstone to undress and crawl down the town's main street in the film's outrageous finale.


The presence of the hippies has bewildered even some of Corbucci’s most loyal fans. Note that the girl is called Apache, and that their leader bears the Shakespearean name Rosencra(n)z. Some have suggested that the hippies were a reference to the historical 19th Century New York Molasses gang (3/4), but it’s more likely that they were a direct reference to the hippy movement. Both Corbucci and Halliday hated them. Halliday wrote a song called Cheveux longs, idées courtes (Long hair, short ideas) (2), in which he describes them as naïve and unworldly. Corbucci thought they were parasites and blamed their pacifism for the failure of the ‘revolution’; it’s an idea that he would further develop in Compañeros, where the followers of the pacifist professor Xantos start to doubt their master’s principles and finally turn to violence.


Halliday was (and still is!) a remarkably successful French rock artist, who sold over 80 million copies of his albums. His acting range is of course limited, but it's refreshing to see an unfamiliar face in the lead, and his slender stature and melancholic facial expression seemed to fit the part pretty well. Hud may be a specialist, but he's not a mercenary. He is a lonely, almost pitiable character, closer to Silence than any other of Corbucci's characters. Italian actor Moshin turns in an endearing performance as the sheriff, but it's Swiss actor Mario Adorf who steals the show as the verbose and swanky El Diablo. The Specialists was shot in the pre-Alps region of the Dolomites, near Cortina D'Ampezzo (where Corbucci had shot The Great Silence), in the summer of '69. The Blackstone scenes were shot in the Elios studios, Rome. It had been cool in the Alpes, but in Rome the crew met with a heatwave and Adorf nearly suffocated in his fur coat. The film was shot in French, under the title Le Specialiste. Corbucci 'changed' the title of the Italian language version in The Specialists (plural). Who are those specialists? The citizens from Blackstone, specialists in lynching? Are all the main characters supposed to be specialists in their own, special trade? Initially the atmosphere was excellent on the set, but problems arose between the French and Italian crew and Françoise Fabian complained about sexual harassment during some of her scenes. Dario Di Palma's photography of the Alpine locations is superb. The score, by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, seems a bit too up-beat for this moody, deeply pessimistic movie, but I found it quite nice. The main theme will stay with you for days.


The film was very successful in France, where it even spawned a comic strip, but not in Italy, where the censor cut the entire ending as well as most of the crude rape scene, ruining Corbucci's intentions completely. In retrospect the film maybe has too many flaws to be called great. There are several slow stretches and uninspired moments, but the action scenes are intense, tight, sudden and beautiful, among the best of Corbucci's career, and the ultra-weird ending, culminating in the heavily wounded specialist facing and chasing the hippies with an empty gun, is one of those unique film experiences you never forget once you've seen it. If the flaws of this movie are bit bigger than usual, it also contains some of the best scenes of this brilliant director. Don't miss them.


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Notes:

  • (1) Marco Giusti, Dizionario del western all'italiana
  • (2) The song is not very special. As far as know, Halliday is not a political singer, and the song probably reflects more the opposition between 'rockers' (who liked Elvis) and 'hippies' (who preferred The Beatles) that was quite strong in those days. The hippies blamed the rockers for being politically uncommitted, the rockers blamed the hippies for being naive and lazy, and that's exactly what Halliday is saying in his song: those hippies sit on their arses, arms crossed, and scream about love and peace, but do nothing, they have long hair, but no ideas. After finishing this review, I received a message from Breccio, reviewer of a French site on western movies, who informed me that "Johnny Hallyday's song "Cheveux longs, idées courtes" was written in reaction to a song by Antoine, "Les Elucubrations d'Antoine". Antoine was a self-professed long-haired hippie (the first verse of the song was: "My mother told me, 'Antoine, get a haircut!'"), who made fun of Johnny in his lyrics, suggesting his place was in a zoo." Merci, Breccio !



--By Scherpschutter

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