Somehow, Once upon a Time . . . Never Comes Again; or, Revolutions of the 1970s, Transatlantic and Transhistorical

This summer, I finally got to chance to watch one of those movies that I've been meaning to see for years: Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker! (1971) aka A Fistful of Dynamite aka Once upon a Time--The Revolution. It's supposed to be the middle piece of Leone's capitalism trilogy, between Once upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once upon a Time in America (1984). Since I like the earlier movie and am vaguely fond of the later one, I figured I might as well make the acquaintance of Signor Leone's middle child.

It's awful, really really tedious at points. In a couple of ways, though, it's interesting. The rhythm of the story is very similar to the rhythm of West, right down to a teasingly revealed flashback stretched out across the narrative, this one emanating from James Coburn's exiled IRA revolutionary. Unlike Charles Bronson's slowreveal flashback in West--and unlike the flashbacks within flashbacks that provide a lot of the fun in the full cut of America--the point of this one is pretty much clear from the beginning, which makes its slow revelation across two and a half hours pretty much pointless. Then there are the Nixon-era, Butch&Sundance high voices singing "Sean-Sean! Sean-Sean!" during his happier flashbacks, which obviously detract from them as well. And even though I love him, Coburn is pretty hollow (in the bad sense) as the IRA man, although Rod Steiger is surprisingly good at points as the Mexican thief turned revolutionary hero.

The most fascinating thing in the film for me at least was the treatment of revolution. I'm not sure the story even needed Ireland or Mexico as a setting. Truth be told, even though they were pitched at nine-year-olds, the relevant episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles do a better job of capturing the real issues at the heart of Villa's rides and the Easter Rebellion than this film does. Instead, Duck, You Sucker! is just a generalized story that ends up trying to proclaim that blowing things up for a cause is more important than blowing things up to seize wealth.

Really, though, the point seems to be blowing things up. You could do a male-bonding, queer reading of some of the scenes, particularly the flashbacks, but in truth Leone's characters all seem to all be isolatoes, even when they're not played by Eastwood. It's all pointlessness, alienation, and nihilism, not really because of anything--the flashbacks here seem like red herrings--but because blowing things up seems to be a good way to kill time before you die.

That and smoking. [And I'll give Coburn credit for this: from Our Man Flint through Silverfox, the man knew how to smoke a cigar.] In other words, the Mexican revolution was to decadent westerns of the 1960s and 1970s what the French foreign legion was to films of the 1930s and 1940s: a place to fake heroism while fulfilling your death wish. And yes this movie is released three years after The Wild Bunch (which as several of you know, I mostly don't like).

What's most interesting to me is that this film is coming out of Italy, where there really were significant numbers of revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the culture that produces a filmmaker like Bertolucci--and I'm not just thinking of the on-point Before the Revolution (1964) or The Dreamers (2003) here, but even more of a political film like 1900 (1976). Moreover, Bertolucci, we should recall, actually contributed to the screenplay for Once upon a Time in the West. However, a later film like Reds (1981), which is a decent pop critique of the internal workings of a revolutionary organization, is made by Americans and Brits, not Germans and Italians--by people, in other words, from countries whose 1960s youth movements produced reformers, not revolutionaries.

Moreover, if the Once upon a Time movies really do count as a trilogy, it's interesting to trace the decline of ideology as they go on: the West ends with a make-our-garden-grow moment (with Claudia Cardinale distributing beverages); the Revolution ends with Rod Steiger allegedly moving on to be a revolutionary general (although his freeze-frame stare suggests that's not going to work out so good); but America just completes DeNiro's opium dream circle without even a pretense at forward motion. Communitarianism in the 1860s/1960s; nihilism in the 1910s/1970s; consumption in the 1930s/1980s.

Maybe all that difference can be laid down to Leone's collaborators on the separate screenplays. Or maybe, as usual, I'm reading far too much into a bad movie. But based on comments he made, Leone clearly thought he was making a political statement with these films, performing the usual work of historical fiction by mythologizing the movement from past to present in order to project a possible movement from the present into the future. As Simon Schama for one has rather eloquently argued, however, the one sure thing about revolutions is that, once you get them started, they tend to take on a life of their own. The future that revolutionaries map out in advance is very seldom the future they end up with, as anyone who has lived and hoped more than a few decades probably knows all too well.