Article published in Orsitto, Fulvio, ed. Reflections Upon Contemporary Italian Cinema. Jura Genium Cinema [20 Jun. 2011] <http://www.jgcinema.com/singledossier.php?id=32> The Role of Humor in Western Italian Style the Cinema of Tonino Valerii by Sciltian Gastaldi Oddly enough, there have been few studies on Tonino Valerii’s oeuvre. The Catalogo centrale delle biblioteche italiane (Central Catalog of Italian Libraries) has only two monographic records dedicated to the Abruzzan film maker, who nevertheless has been one of the most relevant “Spaghetti Western” or “Western Italian Style” genre directors. I shall say that both these two labels are today acceptable, because the once pejorative “Spaghetti Western”, coined by first American critics, has been later on co-opted and rehabilitated in an educated and more convincing way by René König (1973) and Christopher Fraying (1981). The Central Catalogue tells us about the existence of just one volume, edited by Roberto Curti, printed by the Lilliputian publishing house Un mondo a parte. If we compare this scant bibliography on Valerii with his cinematographic production-he was the author of twelve movies, eight of which he also co-wrote--it would seem that Curti’s reflections (2008) on the aftermath of the tumultuous controversy with bigger celebrity Sergio Leone regarding the authentic authorship of Il mio nome è Nessuno (1973) [My Name Is Nobody, a.k.a. Lonesome Gun], undoubtedly the most notable of Valerii’s movies, are in fact correct. The resulting fallout not only brought about the end of the professional and personal rapport between the two directors, but also that said aftermath might have cast a considerable shadow of the author’s opus. A shadow from which Valerii was finally able to get escape shooting other five movies after 1973, becoming president of the Festival of Roseto degli Abruzzi, and having been summoned as special guest expert on Italian cinema in many European festivals. Moreover, in 2008, the prestigious Middelbury College asked Valerii to conduct a Cinema course during the college’s Summer Term. Therefore, the intention of this paper is to shed some light on the shadow that Leone and some critics such as Staig and Williams (1975), Cumbow (1987), Simsolo (1987), Mininni (1994), have cast on Valerii. In terms of format, this study will limit its analysis to the first portion of Valerii’s filmic production, focusing on the Westerns I giorni dell’ira (1967) [Day of Anger], Una ragione per vivere, una per morire (1972) [A Reason to Live, A Reason to Die], and the already cited Il mio nome è Nessuno (1973), emphasizing aspects of psychological introspection and ironic commentary. It is opinion expressed in this paper, in fact, that Valerii’s cinema is characterized by a manifest attention to a specific type of character development, and by the Oedipal rapport between the younger generation and that of their fathers, as well as to the passage from one psychological state to the next. A cinema far from being Manichean, in which the allgood hero has no place just as the all-bad hero has no place, and thus, distinguishing itself from a certain trend in the American Western. In Valerii’s Westerns are rather present a vast range of characters who are both good and evil, on whom the spectator is free to build his or her own opinion, in full respect of Eco’s theories on the importance of the potentialities of the “open work.” Methodologically, this study is based on the vision of the cited movies, on the reading of Curti’s volume, on the analysis of various other secondary sources on the “Spaghetti Western” as a genre, on a lengthy interview that Valerii and Ernesto Gastaldi, the screenwriter of the movie Il mio nome è Nessuno, granted me during the Summer of 2009, at Valerii’s Roman apartment in the Vescovio neighborhood of the city. Ernesto Gastaldi is also an old-time friend of Valerii since the years of the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia (Italy’s National School of Cinema), where both graduated in 1957. The movie that more than any other best introduces the ironical and coming of age elements is Il mio nome è Nessuno, in which irony works on two different levels, at least. The first one is explicit, and it is the one portrayed in twenty-one scenes of the film. I shall briefly list them: the gun of Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda) pushed against the fake barber’s testicles in the opening scene; the money that Beauregard pays to the fake barber once the service is rendered, money that once the gun fight has come to an end, is later taken back by Beauregard and left in the real barber’s ceramic mug; the dialogue between the real barber and his son, which essentially ends with the quotation of the film’s title: Boy: “Who’s faster than him on the draw?” Barber: “Faster than him? Nobody”. Moreover: the introduction of Nobody, which happens while he is intent on catching a massive jackfish using only a stick and his bare hands; the episode of the bomb carried by Nobody in a wicker basket to the restaurant where Beauregard is having a rest, in which the following exchange takes place: Beauregard: “What’s in that basket?” Nobody: “Oh, probably a bomb”. Completing the list of the twenty-one scenes in which irony is the key, we have: the comment that Nobody makes, as he throws the same basket outside of the bar back to his assailants: “He said he doesn’t want it!”; the renowned scene of the Navajo cemetery, with the name of “Sam Pekinpek”, written exactly in this wrong way, recalls the name of the famous American Westerns director; in the same graveyard, when Nobody reads the name of Nevada Kid on another grave, Beauregard betrays a strong emotion when he suddenly asks: “Do you know where he is?” but Nobody replies in his way: “Well, he has to be down here…” pointing to the grave. Again: the multiple shootings against Nobody’s hat, after which Nobody takes Beauregard’s for a ride saying: “Four shots--one hole! Just like the good ol’ days!”, while in reality Nobody covers a second bullet hole with his thumb, which Beauregard spots, and replies “There was never any good old days”. Furthermore, the whole sequence in which Nobody passes through the village fête, where he takes an apple from a baby in a lady’s arms while her back is turned and doesn’t notice the “theft”--Nobody ends by mocking the baby silently with menacing gestures. Then, the “special hard cake” that Nobody throws at the charlatan’s face, owner of the “throw the cake stand” where two black men are used as target. The specialty of Nobody’s cake is that he takes as well a portion of the wood table under it, thus breaking the face of the racist charlatan, and commenting to him: “The funny thing is to hit the face, uh?” Some more, the whole sequence of Nobody in the saloon, when he pretends to barely be able to handle the flavour of whisky and asks a cheering audience: “Can I do with milk?”; the two fast-forwarded sequences in which Nobody humiliates the reversed guns gringo, who has challenged him, by slapping his cheeks and stealing his two guns over and over again; the scene in the mirror labyrinth, which substitutes the traditional indoor saloon shooting; the wooden puppet scene, which recalls the Saracen puppet, further emphasized by the scoring of the scene which introduces the only Italian lyrics of the entire movie, the a children’s nursery rhyme “Oh che bel castello” [Oh What a Merry Castle]. The song is even more nonsensical, as it goes “Oh che bel pupazzo, ma con diro, ‘ndiro, ‘ndazzo” [Oh What a Merry Puppet, where the word “pupazzo” and the the following nonsense “diro, ‘ndiro, ‘ndazzo” rhyme with the Italian bad word “cazzo”]. The 20th scene is the train robbery scene, which happens by exploiting the bladder problems of the engine-driver; and, last but not least, the ending scene, when Nobody finds himself in the hands of a fake barber, who is about to butcher him, though Nobody of course saves his own life by pushing his bare middle finger against the anus of the killer, in the shape of a gun’s barrel. This first level, which is explicitly ironic as said before, risks making the movie shift to the comic arena, and one cannot exclude that this was precisely Leone’s intention, as if the eminent director had wanted to diminish the final product made by Valerii. It is important to remember that Leone was not only the producer of this movie, but he also shot three takes punctiliously recited by Ernesto Gastaldi: “The one in the public urinal, the one with the glass challenge in the saloon, and the one in which Nobody knocks out his opponents by means of the wood turning puppet” [Interview with the author, 14 June 2009; also restated via E-mail, 30 October 2009]. The same nonsensical rhyme was, according to the screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, wanted by Leone as the soundtrack of that scene. In any case, the fast-forward takes used by Valerii and also the theme from the Ride of the Valkyries used by Ennio Morricone to emphasize entrance of the Wild Bunch, contribute to a possible shift to the field of the comic or parody. The second level of irony is, on the other hand, implicit and inter-textual; as Alberto Crespi writes: Trans: Nobody is not a character. Nobody is a bizarre creature who lives in the text and is, at the same time, extra-textual. Nobody is a spectator because, one understands this very well, he has watched so many Westerns (and you can bet they all featured Henry Fonda) and his head is full of quotes. Nobody is also a screenwriter, because it is he the one who dictates times and modes of the movie plot. Nobody even becomes a director in literally preparing the mise-en-scene of some sequences (the clash with the Wild Bunch; the fake final duel) giving direction to the actors. But Nobody is also a creature of the collective unconscious, who penetrates in the individual unconscious of Beauregard [Crespi 1994, 23]. Yet, Nobody is not only a spectator who embodies the screenwriter of Beauregard’s life, in a full metanarration à la Calvino, but he also embodies--as many critics have maintained (among them Cumbow, 1987)—the Spaghetti Western genre, too. The Spaghetti Western genre and its tricks, its poor and scanty craftiness, its irony, its imprecision in comparison to the American Western Cinema, whose evident metaphor is accessible through an always authoritative–but now old–Henry Fonda. Cumbow emphasizes the demythologizing peculiarity: “He wants to behave as unlike a legend as possible. In a sense, he’s the Hollywood western trying to be realistic, adult, contemporary and anti-mythic” (1987, 102). Nobody is not only acted by Terence Hill, who in 1973 was a worldwide celebrity for his character of Trinità [Trinity], but he is also dressed as Trinity, with “his” classic dirty vest and “his” classic beans eaten by means of a wooden spoon or a ladle. Terence Hill transposes as well–willingly or not willingly–the same facial mimicry and the same acting register of Trinity on Nobody. Therefore, on an aesthetic level, it is difficult to notice any difference from Trinity and Nobody. On a psychological level, on the other hand, the differences are striking: Trinity acts and behaves as a Peter Pan, while Nobody resembles more of the Jiminy Cricket of Pinocchio. Trinity is all action, cunning, free of any moral concerns, all of which often results in a comic effect. On the contrary, Nobody is awareness and astuteness, the bring of a positive moral, which often translate into ironical effect, holder of a positive moral: those men who have become myths—thinks Nobody—must go forward in a lofty manner and must exit the stage in a noble way, or at least “in style”, as Nobody himself says to Beauregard. In this sense, this paper does not agree neither with the definition that Fridlund gives of Nobody as a “malignant partner” (2006, 169), nor with the hasty one given by Weisser of Nobody as “a cowboy groupie” (1992, 223), nor with the definition by Curti (2008, 60) who describes Nobody “agli occhi di Valerii come Peter Pan” [in Valerii’s eyes, Nobody was as a Peter Pan]. Peter Pan too, as well as Pinocchio, has a character who acts as his stooge and embodies his conscience: Tinker Bell, while Nobody is Beauregard’s conscience. Therefore, if it is acceptable the comparison here offered, one might say that Nobody is on a psychological level more similar to Tinker Bell than to Peter Pan. Following the polemics between Leone and Valerii about who is the real main character in Il mio nome è Nessuno, as Garofalo refers (1999, 175-6), we may discuss whether Nobody is Beauregard’s stooge (in the same way as Jimmy the Cricket and Tinker Bell are the stooge of, respectively, Pinocchio and Peter Pan) or if the two characters are pretty much co-protagonists to be placed on the same level of importance. This paper maintains that—at least on a celebrity level and taking into consideration the cachet received—Henry Fonda was the protagonist of Il mio nome è Nessuno, and Terence Hill the deuteragonist. Moreover, it is very well known which of the two actors was more excited to be working with the other: Terence Hill, not Henry Fonda. A further element, albeit funny but in no way meaningless, which persuades the author of this paper in pairing of Nobody to Tinker Bell, is the presence of wings that the two character show: Nobody in an allegorical key, Tinker Bell in an actual one. The saddle that Nobody bears on his shoulders at the beginning and at the end of the movie, is in fact designed as an ample and rigid structure: a fictitious characteristic, since it is well known that the Western saddles were much smaller than that and—above all—they had a leather thigh-protector. On the other hand, a rigid saddle of the dimensions that Nobody bears upside-down on his back would cause serious injury to the horse’s back—and not only to the horse back. Evidently, the huge rigid structure is needed in order to make the upside-down on Nobody’s back appear as a huge pair of angel wings. Not by chance, Beauregard calls Nobody “My blue-eyed angel”. The confirmation of this hagiographic profile of Nobody is also given by the screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi in an E-mail message dated 30 October 2009 with the author of this paper. As this paper maintained before, the ironical element is not there just in Il mio nome è Nessuno, but is evident also in other Valerii’s movies. Per il gusto di uccidere (1966) [Taste For Killing], his debut movie, is the story of a sort of a bounty killer who has a predilection for finance and speculates on an imaginary “Stock Exchange” with the heads of his victims. The idea, Valerii recounts, is shared with screenwriter Gastaldi: “I was seeking for a story, and Gastaldi told me that he had had an idea: that of a bounty killer who “speculated on the Stock Exchange of the Most Wanted” and used to say ‘what’s the value of this head? 5000 dollars? Come on, let’s make him become a bit more valuable’. On this idea of Ernesto I wrote a script in a few days (…) the title was given by Bompani, a friend of mine whom I usually met at the restaurant Buca di Ripetta; he was general organizer for the Titanus Production, too”. [Interview with the author, 14 June 2009] In the same way, in the far more dramatic Una ragione per vivere, una per morire (1972), the character of Major Ward, played by a Telly Savalas in a state of grace, these ironical elements are not forgotten. Not by chance, the point of the statue shaping a naked boy where the Major lights his matches is the testicles. Such a peculiar point lead some critics to believe that there is an embedded homoerotic relation between the Major and his subordinate aide, lieutenant Brent. Valerii, who admits the ambiguity between the two soldiers, ascribes this peculiarity to an intuition of Savalas: “The idea of leaking a certain ambiguity between Major Ward and his aide was already in the script and Savals emphasized it with the idea of lighting a match on the scrotum of the statue. I only had nine days to shoot with Savalas and in the end we pulled it off. He suggested to design the character in a certain way: the flower greenhouse, the cigar-lighter, etc.” [Interview with the author, 14 June 2009] In general, Valerii recognizes the irony bent of his own first movies but, interestingly enough, disclaims the authorship: “I did not have a particular inclination towards irony, but it is something I acquired while working with Ernesto. The first inputs in this sense have come from him. For example, considering the bounty killer as a Stock Exchange speculator. But also in Day of Anger there’s Billy the Blind who enjoys throwing little stones in the bottlenecks, or the judge who likes to mortify this poor kid just because he dared to speak to his daughter”. [Interview with the author, 14 June 2009] The element on which Valerii claims his authorship is the attempt of creating complex characters that are constantly changing. As many critics have noticed, and among them Curti, the relationship of mutual admiration that springs up between Scott Mary (Giuiano Gemma) and Frank Talby (Lee Van Cleef) in I giorni dell’ira (1967) is not so far from the one that develops between Nobody and Beauregard. After all, Scott too is lacking a real name, since he has no family name as the son of a prostitute, and his fictitious surname is given to him directly by Talby, on the basis that “every respectful man must have a family name”. Beauregard asks for Nobody’s name more than once, but at the end he concedes in calling him “Nobody”, as the young cowboy proposes. At the end, both Scott Mary and Nobody will be able to overcome the myths of their childhood, even though Nobody does so on a level of complicity and “happy ending”, while Scott Mary does so in a dramatic key, by killing his mentor and applying one of the ten critical rules to live bythat Talby taught to him: “Quando spari a un altro uomo devi ucciderlo, o prima o poi lui ucciderà te” [“When you shoot a man, you must kill him, or otherwise sooner or later he will kill you”]. If Scott Mary and Nobody are therefore portrayed as the main characters of a Bildungsroman, characters that introduce themselves in a naïve way, demonstrating a total lack of naiveté in any way by the end, then Talby and Beauregard too, are a pair of mythical and revered characters. These are two quick drawing gunmen about whom all the kids of the West speak and dream of. Yet, these two legendary killers are shelved: Talby gets killed, and everybody believes that Beauregard has been killed by Nobody. Although it is difficult to see Talby and Beauregard as “positive” characters, since they base their fame on the fact that they are two experienced killers, yet Valerii introduces them in a twofold way. In the end the one of the two that seems to be more merciless, Talby, is the one who begs for mercy from his underclassman; while the one who is portrayed as the nobler one, Beauregard, accepts being bribed by Sullivan, the man who had his brother killed. Beauregard takes the gold that Nevada Kid had “earned” for his services from a terrorized Sullivan, who is fairly sure that the old cowboy has reached him in order to kill him, and not to be bribed. A little later on, when Beauregard, crosses paths with Nobody on the stairs of Sullivan’s place, the old man explains to the young one that he has no intention to risk his life in order to revenge his brother, because killing Sullivan would mean being hunted by the Wild Bunch. But Nobody has other plans for his hero… In conclusion, the characters of Valerii’s Westerns appear much closer to real people, rather than to comic heroes or those of a sub genre of the American Western. Valerii’s characters are often men who bear serious contradictions within themselves, and perhaps, that undergo to a continuous succession of difficult and dynamic choices. Those are men who do not fear to show their fear of death; those are men who always have “a reason to live, and a reason to die”. Works Cited Crespi, Alberto. Segnocinema. 68/1994, 23-6 July-August. Cumbow, Robert C. Once Upon A Time: the Films of Sergio Leone. Metuchen, N.J. e Londra: The Scarecrow Press, 1987. Curti, Roberto. 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