Keoma
(1976)
Director: Enzo G. Castellari
Cast: Franco Nero, William Berger, Olga Karlatos
In all the years I have been living on this earth
(though I assure you not that
many years), I have observed many things many times, and I have come to
some conclusions about things that are unbreakable truths. For example,
if you go to any bank anywhere in the world, you will find that the
more tellers that are behind the counter helping customers, the line of
people that you stand in waiting for one of those tellers will advance
more slowly than if there were a lot less tellers behind the counter.
(And the line will move especially
slowly if you happen to be in a hurry at the time.) Another thing I
have observed is that all things come to an end. Some of these things
happen to be bad things; I remember how much I hated school growing up,
and how happy I was on graduation day, knowing I would never have to
face another day of grade school again in my life... but then I started
college a few months later, which came with its own unique share of
problems, but that's another story. But I have also learned that there
are plenty of good things in life that all come to an end sooner or
later. With my top hobby being movies and the movie industry, I have
found that many good things about movies have come to an end in the
more than one hundred years of movie making. When I was a teenager, my
favorite movie studio was The Cannon Group, and it was a sad day indeed
when it stumbled and eventually closed its door a few years later.
Later in life, I discovered PM Entertainment, but my joy was
short-lived, with that studio closing several years after I discovered
it.
After facing disappointments of beloved movie studios
closing, I have learned that when it comes to film, there is new stuff
to look forward to when old stuff dies out. Possibly the best way to
illustrate this is to take a look at the Italian film industry. Until
it pretty much died in the late 1980s, the industry was always quick to
cash into a craze, and come up with a new one when the craze they were
presently exploiting died out. They started off on shaky ground right
after the Second World War ended, making stuffy art movies like Bicycle Thieves
and Shoeshine
that I don't understand and I'm sure no sane person cares about (They
are not real movies after
all.) Then they moved into making real
movies, starting with the peplum
genre, muscleman movies like Goliath And The Dragon
that showed what real men were like. When that craze died down, the
Italians moved on. In the 1970s, no doubt inspired by American cop
movies like Dirty
Harry,
the Italians made a string of tough cop movies, though with their own
spin like having cops who liked to shove hot curling irons up the butts
of attacking kung fu transvestites. (If you must know the name of that
particular movie, send me an e-mail.) Other genres followed after the
tough cop genre died, like the zombie genre and the post-holocaust
genre. But perhaps the most missed Italian film genre of all was the
spaghetti western. In its heyday, this genre lasted more than any other
Italian film genre, running approximately from the mid 1960s to the mid
1970s. The genre made such an impact that it is still beloved enough
that every few years the genre is revived, from theatrical films such
as the David Bowie/Harvey Keitel-starring Gunslinger's Revenge
to good old Terence Hill in comic westerns like Lucky Luke and Doc West.
But
it's true that the output of spaghetti westerns
today is far, far less than what was cranked out in those ten years or
so. I've heard that over 500 spaghetti westerns were made in that
timeframe. Though when the craze came to an end, it didn't exactly
peter out. True, by 1976 westerns had become a rarity, but in
that year
one specific spaghetti western came out that seemed to say, "We may be
leaving, but we are going out with a bang." That western was Keoma. It was a
western that had rounded up some serious talent - in the cast were
William Berger (If You Meet Sartana...
Pray For Your Death), American actor Woody Strode, and
Franco Nero of Django
fame. In the director's chair was the great Enzo G. Castellari (The
Inglorious Bastards).
Many people feel it was indeed the last great spaghetti western, a
perfect way to cap the end of the genre. Is it really as great as its
reputation? Well, first a plot synopsis. The setting is somewhere in
the western United States, some time after the Civil War has ended.
Former Union soldier Keoma (Nero), who happens to be half Indian, is
finally returning home. But when he gets to his home turf, he discovers
that things have changed greatly since he left. A fellow named Caldwell
(Donald O'Brien, Quest For The Mighty
Sword)
has taken over the local mine, and with the help of his gang has been
taking over the town bit by bit, no doubt helped by the fact that a
plague has been killing the townspeople. Keoma discovers that his
father William (Berger)
has been abandoned by his three other sons, Keoma's half-brothers, who
have joined Caldwell's gang. Also, William's former slave George
(Strode, Once
Upon A Time In The West)
has become a drunk after being disillusioned by what his new freedom
has given him. It soon becomes clear to Keoma that it is up to him to
restore things to what they once were.
Reading that plot synopsis, I am pretty sure that it
sounded very familiar to you, and you would be right - this particular
plot has been done to death by both westerns and non-westerns. But Keoma
is made in a way that takes a basic formula and injects it with an
original atmosphere that makes it a unique experience, sort of what
happened with the spaghetti western The
Stranger's Gundown - you will remember that western was given the
atmosphere of a horror movie. Keoma
doesn't feel like a horror movie, but it comes close at times, because
Castellari directed it in a surreal and otherworldly fashion. The
closest I can come to describing its style is that of a filmed dream.
Right from the start, the movie has a feeling of not being quite like
real life, like how our dreams often are. The air is often filled with
mist, though most often dust flies around and becomes mist-like. Out in
the wilderness, the skies overhead are often overcast, and the
landscape is not desert, but instead a mix of green and yellow grass,
with grey rocks - plenty of rocks - lying around. Back in civilization,
the buildings look especially worn and weathered inside and outside,
with junk and mud lying on the streets. The people in the movie wear
clothes that look very worn and almost like rags. When they are shot,
they are usually shown falling to the ground in very slow motion. When
people have flashbacks to their younger selves, they sometimes imagine
themselves standing right in their memories of their younger selves and
almost interacting with these visions. And everything that I have just
described to you has been photographed with muted colors that just add
to the feeling of being in some kind of fantasy world.
Although I haven't seen every western that's been made
(though I'm working on it), I think I can say with confidence that
there has never been another western made that has the dream-like
quality of Keoma.
I was sucked into the movie's visuals immediately, and they held me
captive until the end of the movie. But Keoma
doesn't just have a dream-like quality with its visuals, but also with
its audio as well. Naturally there's stuff like echoes and rushing
winds that make the movie unsettling at times, but there are also the
songs composed by Italian film music composers Guido and Maurizio De
Angelis (who also composed the music for films such as The
Last Shark and Crime Busters.)
There has been much debate about the songs in Keoma
from those who have watched the movie - people either love or hate the
songs. Me, I loved the songs. Yes, I will freely admit that the man
chosen to sing his songs does it in a very low and raspy way that may
provoke a few giggles, and the woman singing the other songs sings her
songs in a way that's hard to understand her words at times. And the
words in the songs often tell us nothing we already know. (Sample
lyrics, during a scene when Keoma encounters his family: "There's my
father... and my brothers... and meeeeeeee / Tell me now... father...
why they hate me soooooooo.") But even then, the songs feel just right
for a world that has an equally unconventional feel in its look. I
think it would be just wrong to have the standard pounding spaghetti
western music for this particular spaghetti western.
I've spent a lot of time praising Keoma's
visual look and its soundtrack, but that does not mean the movie
doesn't have any other pleasures. The movie has some good action
sequences (particularly one exciting lengthy shootout around the town
in the last third
of the movie), Nero as usual makes a charismatic and compelling
protagonist, and director Castellari keeps the movie going at a pretty
brisk clip so that there is not one boring moment in the movie's 101
minute running time. But despite all that, I don't think Keoma
can be considered a classic spaghetti western, despite the fact that I
would love to be able to give it that label. It's still a good movie,
but it has some flaws that hold it back from true greatness. Most of
these flaws fall around the construction of the various characters in
the movie. Take the characters of the chief antagonist Caldwell, as
well as his henchmen, Keoma's three half brothers. In the first third
of the movie, I don't think the movie at any point gives them any real
time to show what kind of people they are or what their opinion of
anything is. Later in the movie they get some time devoted to them, but
it's not much, making Caldwell in the end a pretty bland villain, and
the three half brothers completely interchangeable with each other.
This movie is really lacking villains who truly exude evil. Also in
the movie, there is a pregnant woman (played by Olga Karlatos) that
Keoma takes under his wing, but we never get the feeling of any
relationship building between the two, because the movie repeatedly
keeps her offscreen for lengthy periods of time. And the characters
that Berger and Strode play don't get as much to say or do as you may
want. These weakly written characters are probably due to the fact that
Keoma
was reportedly rewritten over and over during its shoot. It is amazing
that they managed to make a good movie under those circumstances, but
the end results may have been more amazing had they had time to really
think things through before the camera started rolling.
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