Spaghetti westerns, beyond Leone - my 20 faves

I was about to admit I haven't seen enough of these

Gotta go with Il Grande Silenzio just for Kinski's unhinged performance.. and of course the snow

Yes, I love me a wintry western and The Great Silence is a top rank one.

A Bullet for the General is probably the 'best' of these that I've seen, but as a Fulci loyalist I had to vote for Massacre Time, which does in some ways anticipate his gorefests later on, it's really intense in an unhinged way (again, similar vibe to Django Kill).

Last Italian Western I saw and enjoyed was Castellari's Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (1968), which sort of reminded me of a Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movie like Five Deadly Venoms - Chuck Connors leads a gang of mercenaries all with different mad skills, almost non-stop action.

Thank you for this, I've only seen Django.

Not seen too many of these but then you can't always rely on the titles as a guide, I've heard plenty of the soundtracks though! Silence, General, Django all top notch.

The occasional spaghetti western used to show up at odd hours on some of the Freeview channels but I haven't seen any for years.

write in vote for tombstone

Haven't seen many of these, tbh, but one title on my watch list that is not on this one is "They Call Me Trinity."

Il Grande Silenzio is incredible, so bleak, so beautiful. And my favourite Morricone score to boot

Winter westerns are few and far between but they rule.

Now we're talking. I think I've seen every one of these except for Bandidos and Johnny Hamlet. My pick is A Bullet for the General, which nails the political angle that so many spaghettis strive for, plus it's exceptionally well acted.

Runners up: The Great Silence, The Great Gundown (aka The Big Gundown), Django, and A Pistol for Ringo. The first two Ringo films are very different and both worthy, and I just like Giuliano Gemma as a gunslinger.

Ok, it's a Leone film, but an overlooked one: Duck You Sucker! aka "Fistful of Dynamite" with James Coburn and Rod Steiger... it's starts out kinda lighthearted almost and then goes just completely bleak and nihilistic.. great score as well

The Great Silence

Ive only seen that and Django off the list though

¡Vamos A Matar, Compañeros! needs to be here.

also The Mercenary by Sergio Corbucci

I've not seen Companeros or The Mercenary yet, saving them up cause it'd be kinda sad to have no more Corbucci classics to look forward to. Also haven't seen any Trinity, I fully endorse the farting and punch ups ethos of Spencer and Hill in theory but worry that sitting through an entire film might be a bit much.

Damiani fully rejected the label of course, arguing that Italians making a film about Mexico has zilch to do with westerns. Which is true but come on, Gian Maria Volonté shooting people in the desert, that's a spaghetti western baby!

In the hater department: I found Kill Them All to be severely lacking in the cast charisma department (Wolff excepted) and the fact that the baddies behaved like grunts in a video game on easy mode really undercut the action. Fistful Of Dynamite, despite the great score, feels like Leone flailing, struggling to keep up with the zapata/political western trend; the pathos is overblown and the worldview conservative bullshit. My Name Is Nobody is also him flailing but this time he's trying to incorporate the comedy western.

Josefa, Bandidos is by the guy who did the cinematography in the first two Dollar films and it really has that Leone sheen, just a very visually striking film. Johnny Hamlet is Castellari doing Hamlet in the West, very silly but I dig it.

My list would include The Price of Power, another Giuliano Gemma vehicle that reimagines the JFK assassination in the Old West. Fascinating.

The plot summary of Bandidos rings a distant bell, but I couldn’t swear I’ve seen it. And come to that I’m not totally sure I’ve seen Matalo. I’ve been fortunate to see most of these on the big screen as Film Forum in NYC showed a massive spaghetti western series some years ago. Something like 30 films and I caught the majority of them but some films blur together in memory.

Sweet, I own (but have not yet seen) most of these, and the ones I have seen have been great. Django is certainly the best of those, Ringo or Massacre Time the most 'fun'.

I think it's between Gundown and Massacre Time for me, although the first Sartana film captures something the later ones don't and I think $10,000 is underrated.

thanks for this, lots of great stuff to check out here. "Johnny Hamlet" is a great name!

BTW, quite a lot of these are on YouTube in pretty decent versions.

ha i started looking for them last night but was apparently too pished to operate youtube

No love for Face To Face on ilx? Gian Maria Volonté is a big city intellectual whose fascination with bandit Tomas Millian leads him down a criminal path of Nietschean madness. Political, psychosexual and weird as fuck, plus a great Morricone score.

I wonder if anyone has seen all the Sartanas. I think there’s about eight of them. I have a dvd boxed set that I doubt I will ever make it all the way through.

I've got the 'Complete Sartana' box set that Arrow put out, which has five films, though there may well be Django-esque Sartana knock-offs not included in it. I've only watched the first one in the set so far, If You Meet Sartana... Pray for Your Death, which was fine, but certainly not top tier. Will have to give Daniel's picks a go too.

Confusingly (for me!), I also have the three-disc Masters of Cinema Sabata set.

It’s confusing bc most classic Sartanas have Giuliano Carnimeo directing Gianni Garko, but Carnimeo directed one with George Hilton instead of Garko, and Garko acted in one not directed by Carnimeo. And then there are the less reputable ones…

Giuliano Carnimeo meaning, er… Anthony Ascott

lol, just did a Sartana search on Letterboxd (which includes alternate titles in the results) and...yeah. Looks like at least 18-ish Sartanas? Probably still nowhere near the number of ersatz Django films.

(It looks like half the films in this poll were branded as Django sequels at some point/in some market.)

I once saw Tony Musante, Franco Nero’s costar in The Mercenary, do a brief speech before a screening of that film. Seemed like a very nice guy (and is a New York actor), but imo he’s a little too hammy in The Mercenary. I like him a lot more in Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage just two years later.

Killer ( no pun! ) thread by the way!

Thanks!

The first Sartana film is no great shakes, it's trying for a giallo thing but by that I mean a mystery plot and lots of scenes set at night, not psychedelic freak out sequences and elaborate killings. Things imo get much better once Carnimeo takes the reins and the franchise becomes this quirky comic book thing. Of the two I picked, I Am Sartana... has Klaus Kinski as a character called HOT DEAD and a climax at an all-gambling town; Sartana's Here (which is the George Hilton one) has a British dandy character called Sabbath and for some reason Sartana really loves hard boiled eggs now. If you own the Arrow set tho it's worth it to watch the interview with Gianfranco Parolini, the director of the first Sartana, to see him use the interview to try to get financing for a terrible looking peplum project. Gotta respect the grindset, that dude's whole ecosystem had collapsed decades ago but he was still trying.

Then there's the crossover Django And Sartana Are Coming...It's The End, which unsurprisingly is not directed by Corbucci, Canimeo or Parolini and does not feature Franco Nero, Gianni Garko or George Hilton.

Watched I Am Sartana... at the weekend, and yes, definitely a big step up from the first one (and the Arrow 2K restoration looked lush). Could watch a whole Hot Dead franchise: love the scene where he kills a group of gunmen who have ambushed his stagecoach and he straps their corpses to the roof so that he can claim the rewards and fund his gambling habit. Also, the stick of dynamite in the wagon wheel - lots of good paraphernalia business throughout. Laughed at the way it so obviously wasn't Garko's hands doing all the card tricks.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Not a bad result. More people need to check out Sollima tho.

People have mentioned having the Sartana boxed set from Arrow w/ five films... I have a different set titled 'Sartana: The Complete Saga' that has 10 films on 3 discs, from a company called Videoasia. Picture quality may not be ideal.

And yes the poll winner is deserving. I wonder if Sollima's The Great Gundown/The Big Gundown would get votes if were seen more. It's kind of the quintessential Tomas Milian performance and boasts an incredible theme song performed by the Italian singer known as Christy.

the john zorn / morricone LP is called (and opens with a seven-minute version of) "the big gundown" -- tho i don't have my vinyl copy to hand and it isn't on spotify or youtube afaics

Great Gundown theme is so great that there's a wedding scene and after just a few beats of the wedding march the band reverts back to playing the main theme.

Forgot to vote, would have been Gundown

China 9, Liberty 37 is one of the filthiest and most profane westerns ever, and I love every minute of it. I was very fortunate to see it once in 35mm at the American Cinematheque with Monte Hellman in perfect. How can you not want to see a film that has Jenny Agutter AND Sam Peckinpah in the cast?

It's kind of crazy, imo, how much better the Leone films are than most (all?) of these others I've seen. I watched "The Great Silence" last night, and while I appreciate its bleakness/nihilism, it's just such a technical mess, with lots of stuff out of focus and the camera kind of aimless. Now I'm watching "The Big Gundown," and again, it's kinda ... missing something. I do recall "Bullet for the General" being pretty good.

Anyway, I kinda want to watch more written by Sergio Donati. He's credited with lots of Leone and some other OK stuff: "For a Few Dollars More," "Big Gundown," "Once Upon a Time in the West," "Duck, You Sucker!" Spaghetti westerns are mostly visual experiences, imo, but they can also be witty and fun. Makes me wonder what other good stuff Donati wrote. (I know he has a subsequent credit on "Orca," lol, and Schwartenegger's "Raw Deal," which was co-written by Donati and Luciano Vincenzoni, who had his own share of spaghetti western credits, like "Death Rides a Horse".) Donati wrote "Face to Face,' too.

Regardless, these movies are all worthwhile for Morricone alone.

Well yes, you really have to recalibrate your expectations once you go past Leone. And then again once you've exhausted the other Sergios lol. But while much is lost - the operatic tone, the amazing visuals, the sadness for the most part - there's also things in the genre that Leone didn't do - much more extreme violence, more interesting politics, a more gleeful attitude towards following trends.

There's a post somewhere in the days of ILX yore where someone says that after having watched so many spaghetti westerns they can no longer get excited about the Leone stuff because the other stuff is so much weirder and more interesting. That really stuck with me, and having watched my fair share now, I can say: more interesting for a cultural studies essay? Sure. More interesting to watch? Very much no.

Donati's filmography is very typical of the writers of his era, jumping from western to giallo to eurocrime to cannibal flicks. I read a hard boiled novel he wrote, wasn't much cop.

The Leone collaborator I would recommend is Fernando Di Leo, especially his crime films.

it's just such a technical mess, with lots of stuff out of focus and the camera kind of aimless

this is punk rock fyi

I'm assuming Leone's budgets were a degree of magnitude higher - after "Fistful of Dollars" anyway.

No doubt, and it's not like Parolini or Fulci could call up Henry Fonda or Claudia Cardinale. Aside from that I think there's a certain sentimentality to Leone that's very potent - there's dozens and dozens of spag westerns about betrayal, but he really invested in the idea of (male) friendship and the fallout when that turns sour and that gives his movies a particular feel.

this is punk rock fyi

Hah, yeah, kinda. I know it's partly the era, but I wished they would just stop with the zooms, especially if they don't got the technical goods. I like a good zoom, but not if the result is a set of blurry boots stomping through the snow, further obscured by out of focus foliage. Still mostly solid, in its defense. And I ended up liking "The Big Gundown" a lot. It's as much a comedy as anything else, with Van Cleef and Tomas Milan a good pair, in the Blondie/Tuco mold.

In both cases, I had trouble tracking down copies online, and the ones I found were only in Italian, so I watched them with subs, which was kinda meta. Especially "The Big Gundown." In fact, I think the first copy I found had Van Cleef in English and everyone else in Italian, so I figured, well, if he's going to have to get subtitled, anyway, I might as well have Van Cleef dubbed, too. But then you get an American actor dubbed in Italian, talking to Texans (also speaking Italian) about catching a Mexican (who speaks Italian), which adds to the fun.

Started A Pistol for Ringo, but man, I was just not feeling it. Seemed like cheap amateur hour.

is he not?

He is definitely a stone cold killer.

Sorry, wrong choice of words, then. I should have said something like "he is not the sort to sit in ambush with a machine gun and mow down a village of baddies," which is the model adopted by a lot of later action heroes. My Bond knowledge is pretty weak, but I assume Alex Cox is pretty familiar. He's the one that made the observation. Iirc his take was more or less that the (anti) heroes of the spaghetti westerns are typically not really good guys or bad guys, they are more often than not mercenaries with a pretty flexible moral code, very "shoot first." Otherwise, dunno why he overlooked/ignored Bond as a quipping killer.

ok and ok but

bond!

absolutely a mercenary with a flexible moral code and the austin powers henchman family gag isnt out of nowhere

Do you think the Bond movies had an influence on the spaghetti westerns?

Possibly?

The film was initially shunned by Italian critics, who gave it extremely negative reviews. Some American critics felt differently from their Italian counterparts, with Variety praising it as having "a James Bondian vigor and tongue-in-cheek approach that was sure to capture both sophisticates and average cinema patrons".[46]

Interesting! I found this essay discussing this subject:

https://dcairns.wordpress.com/2022/07/01/coxs-orange-pippins-the-pink-desert/

Anyway, Sartana: “You look just like a scarecrow!” sneers a henchman after the black-clad gunslinger shows up, in the middle of nowhere (an Italian quarry, faded to a strange pink hue) without anyone seeing him coming. “I am your pallbearer,” he replies, and kills them all (save Kinski). He does it a couple of ways: with a gimmick tiny pistol (of the kind Sabato would also enjoy) and with a shotgun. But he never bears their palls, that was just a figure of speech I guess. These guys’ bones are gonna bleach in the sun.

The pithy quip in the western does have some antecedents in John Wayne (“That’ll be the day!” “Fill your hand you sunnovabitch!”) but it becomes a thing in Italian westerns via Leone’s transposition of the “Cooper, prepare three coffins,” bit in YOJIMBO from Mifune to Eastwood in A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. At the same time or slightly earlier actually, Sean Connery’s James Bond had started quipping after a kill (“Shocking!”). The Italians led the world in cheap Bond knock-offs, many of them made by people who also made westerns — Michele Lupo, Sergio Sollima, Duccio Tessri, Gianfranco Parolini (who gives us Sartana, here, and then Sabata), Mario Bava, and writers like Ernesto Gastaldi, Sergio Donati, Fernando Di Leo… It seems to be a matter of temperament whether you went from gladiator movies to spy films or to westerns or to Gothic horror or to gialli or to polizioteschi or soft porn. With only Bava having a go at virtually every genre on the list, sometimes two at a time.

Lots of good observations in that piece:

Despite his lethal array of dad jokes, Bond’s catchphrase is just a lame introductory statement: “The name’s Bond. James Bond.” And likewise the spaghettis seem obsessed with naming their heroes: MY NAME IS NOBODY, THEY CALL ME TRINITY, MY NAME IS PECOS, MY NAME IS SHANGHAI JOE, MY NAME IS MALLORY… M MEANS DEATH!, THEY CALL ME HALLELUJAH, I AM SARTANA YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH and, a bit desperately, TRINITY IS STILL MY NAME. Plus numerous Joes, Johnnies, people with Colt or the name of a state in their name…

The Bond films, though, were directed by British traditionalists who shot things in fairly staid ways, but then had Peter Hunt pick the pace right up in the cutting. No crash zooms, zip pans, bizarro POV shots or gratuitous camera movements for Eon Productions. It took Sid Furie’s compositional eccentricity on THE IPCRESS FILE to bring the spy flick closer to Leone’s exuberance.

Yeah, I was going to mention that the Italians also made Bond ripoffs, none more blatant than this!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.K._Connery

Spotted this at another forum:

Got the Dollars Trilogy for Christmas on Blu-Ray (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly) and was watching the historian's commentary for all of them.

On the commentary for A Fistful of Dollars they discussed how much Bond had influence the direction of Sergio Leone as well as elements of the story.

The only trailer I can find for this film (horrible screeching theme song by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk1gNgjrfPg

Apparently Morricone also scored a 1967 Bond knockoff called "Matchless" (also known as "Mission Top Secret").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x34WIuC_bc4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjAajM35yl0

I remember that Operation Double 007, as it was also called, was featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. I've seen it, but I can't remember a thing about it! The other Eurospy films that featured on the programme were much more memorable. Secret Agent (doot doot) Super Dragon (doot doot) and Danger!! Death Ray, where the hero was called Bart Fargo and the script kept throwing in random US cities to give the impression that the film wasn't Italian.

In fact it's at 01:32:12 in this official upload of MST3K spy movies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytF5dTGp_fs

Co-starring the lovely Daniela Bianchi, the lovely Bernard Lee, the lovely Lois Maxwell, the lovely Adolfo Celi, and Anthony Dawson, all from the actual James Bond films, who all appeared to treat it like an all-expense-paid foreign holiday. The director also filmed one of the Secret Agent 077 Bond clones. My hunch is that Boeing prevented them from using the number 707.

It strikes me that in order to understand Spaghetti Westerns you'd need to be Italian. The country had survived a ruinous war and post-war poverty and was rebuilding by the 1960s, just like Britain, and I suspect the population wanted a glamorous power fantasy in an unusual environment, starring macho supermen and attractive women, although curiously the heroes of Spaghetti Westerns seemed far less interested in women than James Bond.

Which is something else they have in common with 1980s action films. The men were sexless and the women were usually big sister types - platonic pals of the hero, often played by women from South America so that no-one could accuse the white star of being racist. I long ago gave up on trying to understand Italy.

Yes spaghetti westerns absolutely borrowed from Bond a lot. Characters like Sabata are gadget obsessed in the same way and the opening titles to the Leone films are v much influenced!

Ha, I'd never even thought about it before, but that's totally true about the opening credits.

And then in the 70's you get Bruce Lee's Way Of The Dragon doing similar titles - at that point, is he doing Bond or spaghetti homage? Who knows?

And yet, I'm not sure you'd call Bond an influence on the violent action heroes of the 70s and esp. 80s. Like, Eastwood is Eastwood, but Eastwood as Dirty Harry is a pretty different animal than his Leone roles. Less cynical/mercenary, more reactionary and mean/angry.

As to understanding Italy through the genre: it is indeed connected to the experience of wartime and the economic boom thereafter. Spaghetti westerns often feature betrayal, separate desperate factions fighting it out over prizes that prove underwhelming or absent, a general lack of a moral centre - all of which makes sense for a generation whose parents saw the turmoil and confusion of WWII Italy, many of whom at one point or another betrayed or were betrayed as the tides turned. Likewise the absolute obsession with wealth - which yeah absolutely trumps sex in this genre's world, easily so - found its paralells in the cutthroat capitalism of the boom years.

As to race: there's a concerning amount of movies where the confederates are protagonists, partially I think this is just unexamined consumption of US cinema but it also must have struck a nerve to portray the losing side of a war; the dynamics between Italy's own North and South further complicate things. But for all of this they pretty much have to take slavery out of the equation, and most of the time end up at "both sides are greedy and corrupt, there are no good guys" anyway. The idea of an Italian western from the 60's doing ANYTHING because they wanted to avoid accusations of racism is amusing to me - like most European media depicting the Old West I think mostly spag westerns are self satisfied in their certainty of being better than those Bigoted Americans, so poc are almost always positive characters, though usually handled with a lot of noble savage tropes.

Big generalizations here ofc, individual writers and directors did sometimes succeed in making credible anti racist films.

spaghetti westerns are set as a rule in be or be killed towns, or the unforgiving wilderness. its usually only a question as to why our lone ?hero? is out there, if we ever find out.

the bounty hunter figure is one that can play either way

cops and spies are i feel built into a longer developmental arc of a career in the chosen cutting edge of recognisable structures and as such are speaking a lot more directly to an audience, yer spaghetti clint is a figure out of herzog. be smart, be quick, be deadly, the desert doesnt care

bond is constantly being reminded how much everyone cares, he smells great his hair is done and he is constantly freshly fucked.

thats not the energy clint is giving us in his dusty poncho, hes fucking wrecked and his groin area is absolutely rife with boils

so thats the context there imo

dirty harry its halfway. i havent seen his groin

Feels like a lot of action heroes/vigilantes in the '70s were cops or civilians. By the '80s a lot of them were crypto-military, former Special Forces and the like, which maybe explains their way with giant guns and creative kills. I suppose that's what made Die Hard special, he's essentially a cop *and* a civilian, but in his own way owes a lot to Eastwood's wry Leone (albeit in a different context); rather than playing two towns against one another, his warring factions are cops and robbers.

I love how dirty all the spaghetti westerns are. Much of Django is literally just slopping through mud.

"Death Rides a Horse" on Freeview (London Live) right now. I was sure I'd seen this before but apparently not.

... it's a good one, even though John Philip Law isn't very good, but was he ever?

Yeah, JPL is the big downside to that one.

His eyes were right for the part but unfortunately he proved to be no Terence Hill or Franco Nero.

No love for "Requiescant", which stars Pasolini as a priest? Saw it years ago and don't rememeber much about other than it stars Pasolini as a priest. Pasolini of course had the perfect face for Spag westerns.

https://onceuponatimeinawestern.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Piero-Paolo-Pasolini-as-Juan-religious-leader-of-the-revolutionaries-in-Requiescant-1967.jpg

The Ebert review is particularly colorful:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/death-rides-a-horse-1969

Fave bits:

From time to time you will laugh, or be thrilled, or distract yourself by noticing that some of the outdoor scenes are shot in a studio with backdrops (at one point, the hero casts a shadow across an entire mountain range).

The heroes of these films would save a lot of time if they’d accept one simple rule of thumb: Generally speaking, everyone they meet is either (a) the man who killed their families 15 years ago, (b) a stranger who is after the same villains for mysterious reasons of his own, or (c) their father, brother or son.

Van Cleef’s face, in closeup, has the lean, hardened, embittered expression of a man who has either (a) been pursuing his lonely vengeance across the plains of the West for 30 years, or (b) realizes he will be making spaghetti Westerns the rest of his life. These two feelings are nearly indiscernible.

for several years i'd been looking for the title of one i caught the last half of and was intrigued, but i'd had no luck narrowing it down with my memory-limited search terms (gold! former confederate soldiers! uh, gambling!).

last night i put on light the fuse...sartana is coming and bingo! that's the one! very entertaining, and increasingly bizarre as it moves along. you'll never trust a pipe organ parked in the middle of the street again.

and it looks like i've seen several of carnimeo-directed things over the last few years, including most recently the absolutely wretched rat man. woof.

Ha, echoing your process, reading "you'll never trust a pipe organ parked in the middle of the street again" I thought, huh, I could have sworn I saw another Western with an organ in the middle of the street. And I did! "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid," which iirc prominently features a steam calliope on the sidewalk.

Just watched the new 4K of "The Great Silence," and boy does it look good.

did the same yesterday. hard to resist on a snow day.

If I'd ever seen "A Bullet for the General" before it had been decades, and who knows what cut I saw then. I just saw the so-called "international" cut, though, and the movie is pretty good. The set I have includes a couple of cuts, the one I saw (which is around 2 hours) and a US cut that runs a couple of minutes shorter (for some reason). Ironically, back-when the UK apparently did not screen this "international" cut but reportedly had a radically truncated cut that ran almost 30 minutes shorter, which is insane; this movie features lots of gunplay but not much in the way of blood or spaghetti western sadism.

Anyway, a couple of weird things about it that I've tried to untangle. One is that the score is by Argentinian composer Luis Bacalov but Ennio Morricone gets a credit, too, not as a composer but as some sort of overseer. Supposedly Bacalov was the first choice but the producer insisted on Morricone, so Morricone was tapped to assist. Bacalov was his friend, anyway, so Morricone stayed hands-off, and yet when the movie premiered Morricone got the only on-screen credit and Bacalov had to sue.

The other is the odd dubbing. Of course any version of many of these movies will be dubbed, but while I watched this cut in Italian (with English subs) sometimes the Italian would switch into Spanish and other times even a bit of English. I was trying to make sense of when/why this would happen but it seemed sort of random. Odd.

Watched They Call Me Trinity the other week, which is silly but highly entertaining, the mass fistfight at the end goes on for too long though. Terence Hill somehow manages to be charmingly smug throughout, which is quite something to pull off. Farley Granger is great in it too.

A lot of cuts for the UK from this era are as likely to be about run time and programming as they are about blood and violence i think

This is one thing I found:

The UK theatrical version ran only 77m. These cuts were made by the distributor post BBFC screening as was usually the case, The best source for actual UK cinema running times up until its discontinuance in the 1990s (I think) is the Monthly Film Bulletin, a monthly magazine produced by the British Film Institute.

The UK theatrical version had an A (children under 16 admitted if adult of 16 and over present) rating not an X (over 16 only) rating. The distributor did not want the adults only rating. The following cuts were made to get the A rating:

Reel 1 - general reduction of violence when bandits attack train in particular removal of bandits executing two soldiers.
Reel 3 - After Adelita blows up compound, remove scene of bandits seizing three whores, shots of man being kicked into and drowned in water trough and three soldiers being executed.
Remove Adelita’s dialogue “I was only 15 when someone like Don Felipe raped me”.

I have no information as to the extensive diistributor cuts which reduced the running time to 77m.

So it sounds like it was cut down for morality reasons to get the lower rating - showing executions, mentioning rape or showing prostitutes - but why down to a scant 77 minutes, quien sabe?

a lot of movies would still be showing as double bills, especially the non-Hollywood variety

I couldn't imagine cutting this movie by 30 minutes. I bet the results were totally incoherent, lol. I could have sworn I've seen reference to a 90 minute cut of Good/Bad/Ugly, which sounds insane!

A lot of cuts for the UK from this era are as likely to be about run time and programming

a lot of movies would still be showing as double bills

Anyway, a couple of weird things about it that I've tried to untangle. One is that the score is by Argentinian composer Luis Bacalov but Ennio Morricone gets a credit, too, not as a composer but as some sort of overseer. Supposedly Bacalov was the first choice but the producer insisted on Morricone, so Morricone was tapped to assist. Bacalov was his friend, anyway, so Morricone stayed hands-off, and yet when the movie premiered Morricone got the only on-screen credit and Bacalov had to sue.

Bacalov originally Argentinian yes but was working in Italy at the time and pumping out soundtracks just like Morricone; "the guy you called when Ennio wasn't available", he self-deprecatingly put it. His masterpiece imo is his collaboration with prog rockers Osanna on the soundtrack to eurocrime classic Milano Calibro 9:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vj1E-N96eg

But also Sugar Colt, Django!, We Still Kill The Old Way, lots of stuff.

but while I watched this cut in Italian (with English subs) sometimes the Italian would switch into Spanish and other times even a bit of English. I was trying to make sense of when/why this would happen but it seemed sort of random. Odd.

One thing that happens is different dubs aren't available for different scenes, due to being cut as discussed, so well intentioned curators will try to piece together definitive versions and sometimes forget about providing subtitles. The version of Footprints On The Moon (a strange, bloodless semi-giallo) on Tubi, for instance, is entirely dubbed in English, except for some odds and sods, mostly just stray lines, that are in Italian.

Damiano Damiani, who otherwise mostly made serious leftist dramas, would have gotten angry at seeing A Bullet For The General described as a western - west of what? It's not set in America - which is fair enough, but come on man, there's guns and desert and Klaus Kinski, that's a spaghetti western.

Yeah, if it looks like a western and walks like a western and quacks like a western, it's a western.

Great Silence is currently back in stock, but not many copies ...

https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/the-great-silence-1

I'd never seen but enjoyed "A Pistol for Ringo." It was kind of like a live action Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam cartoon.

Started A Pistol for Ringo, but man, I was just not feeling it. Seemed like cheap amateur hour.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, October 27, 2023 11:06 PM (two years ago)

What changed?

Holy shit, that's funny. I have no idea! The weird thing is, as I watched it, for the first few minutes I had this odd sense of deja vu, like I'd seen it before. I kept thinking I must be confusing it with something else, since I'd definitely never seen this. Anyway, that feeling passed after those first few minutes, and other than the very first scene, I indeed had never seen it before. So I guess what changed is that ... I made it past those first couple of minutes? Dunno! It's possible that watching the bluray vs a bad rip might have made a difference, too.

I had never seen "Four of the Apocalypse." It's a pretty crazy movie, but better/better made/more interesting than other Fulci films I've seen. That said, as I was watching I googled Lynne Frederick, who I wasn't familiar with, and hoo boy, what a tragedy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Frederick