'Now I Believe Only In Dynamite'

I tend to find the opening scene of Duck You Sucker unsettling. Partially for the rape and robbery, mostly for all the extreme close-ups of arrogant bourgeois eating. It's really disgusting. The ending, of course, has the flashback I discussed a couple of weeks ago that I find confusing. The 135 or so minutes in between I really enjoy.

The movie follows Juan (Rod Steiger) and John (James Coburn). Juan's a bandit, essentially, with his legion of sons as his gang. He dreams of someday robbing the bank at Mesa Verde. John's an Irish revolutionary skilled with explosives, down in Mexico to help a wealthy German mine for silver. The early stages of the film are Juan trying everything he can think of to get John to lend his expertise to help rob that bank. John spends this time mostly trying to get away from Juan, and when he finally does agree to help, it turns out he's actually tricked Juan into aiding the revolution.

From that point forward, the two are caught up in that battle. I don't quite agree with something I read in the materials included with the DVD, where it describes the film as looking at societal revenge, rather than personal, but perhaps I'm thinking on too small a scale. John certainly seemed most interested in killing soldiers, and Juan is at first looking for a way out, and later, I think he wants revenge as well. I found it interesting that even when John decides that perhaps it has been enough, and he and Juan should look for greener pastures, they find themselves again in the midst of the revolution. It's beyond their control by that point, they're simply caught up in it. That scene was bookended by two slaughters. In the first, the soldiers have dumped lots of, I presume rebels or suspected rebels, into trenches are are firing down on them. The second one is when victorious rebels force the soldiers in to huddled mass and gun them down.

Which leads back into something Juan had said earlier to John about the revolution I found interesting. That the people who read get the people who don't (or can't) to do the fighting and dying. And it never really ends because either the people who read aren't satisfied with the results, or a different group of people who can read decide it's time for a revolution. I tend to think Juan's right, though I don't know the solution for it.

Once John and Juan meet the movie zips along, with lots of humor and reversals of fortune. There's a fair amount of action, as might be expected from a Sergio Leone movie, especially one about a revolution. It might be interesting to compare how he shot the battle scenes and the aftermath in this to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, since that story took place amongst the Civil War. The earlier film was definitely more humorous, but also more open about showing the costs and darker aspects that can run free in a war.