Thursday, January 20, 2011

If You Can Afford It, If You Can Shoot, and If You Can Drink

My Name Is Nobody (1973)
directed by Tonino Valerii
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix

Ten minutes of My Name Is Nobody were filmed at Acoma Pueblo, and I'd guess that what separates the work of director Tonino Valerii from his producer, Sergio Leone (also uncredited behind the lens, according to IMDB), is that Valerii's Western interests are specific, not general. That scene at Acoma is breathtaking; the first shot is a crane shot that drops down to follow Henry Fonda as he winds along the same rain pool that tourists see today. The camera pulls back and takes in the entire great sweep of valley, and lingers long enough to watch clouds color and darken the far floor.

The movie is a comedy, but Valerii is a romantic with clear things to say about age and myth. Fonda's last stand is in New Orleans, on a street with St. Louis Cathedral behind him. The crane comes back and takes everything from the Mississippi River to Jackson Square in its arms. "Nobody" is a rascal who aspires to be the justified gunslinger embodied by Fonda's Jack Beauregard, but all Beauregard wants to do is retire. Backed by one of Ennio Morricone's best scores, the two fight their way from New Mexico to Louisiana, from a hall of mirrors in a carnival funhouse to a train track massacre told entirely with still images, like La Jetée.

There's plenty of slapstick - a lot of it funny - and sometimes the thread of the plot gets lost, but take the railroad fight, for example. It begins with a 360 degree pan of the foothills of one of those Spanish land grants out there, a two-minute drift just to soak in the emptiness and beauty of the place. When offered a bribe to live like a king until he's 100, Fonda - 68 when this was made - replies, "I don't intend to get that old." But he takes the bribe anyway, and thinks on it later in a pea coat and watch cap, sitting on the deck of a boat in the Big Easy.

Hardly perfect, but an essential Western in spite of its faults, if only for the homoerotic final frame that reinvents those close-up eyes as the love story behind Valerii's love for the land.