Keoma

Director Castellari is nowadays perhaps best-known (if at all) by the younger generation of film buffs for one thing: making the original INGLORIOUS BASTARDS (1977), which Quentin Tarantino has been threatening to remake for years now. However, in my opinion, he should instead be remembered for making this impressive, belated Spaghetti Western gem.

An odd blend of violent action and heady mysticism apparently concocted by one of the credited screenwriters Luigi Montefiori (better known to hardened Euro-Cult fans as an actor under the alias of George Eastman) but, as star Franco Nero and Castellari himself state in the Anchor Bay DVD supplements, the script took so long to get written that they decided to work without one and make the dialogue up as they went along! That the end result is so satisfying (and practically unique in the subgenre) is a remarkable achievement in itself.

Keoma is a half-breed returning home from the American Civil War to find his hometown ravaged by the plague and overtaken by the villainous Caldwell (Donal O' Brien); among his cohorts are Nero's three half-brothers who had made his childhood a living hell, with his surrogate father (William Berger) and colored mentor turned banjo-playing town-drunk (Woody Strode) unable to do much to counter Caldwell's oppression. A Bergmanesque, cadaverous old woman is frequently seen roaming the streets dragging a cart behind her...

What follows is the typical confrontation between Good and Evil but Castellari infuses the familiar mixture with several directorial flourishes: occasionally striking compositions (particularly a memorably Fordian opening shot), frequent use of slow-motion in true Peckinpah-style, flashbacks in which Keoma is a spectator to his own past experiences (inspired by Elia Kazan's THE ARRANGEMENT [1969]!), a touch of elliptical editing, Christian symbolism (Keoma is crucified at one point) and, most distressingly of all, a folksy soundtrack (inspired by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, no less and warbled...er...sung by a shrill, high-pitched female singer and an out-of-tune deep-voiced male) which narrates in song the action we're seeing on the screen. I say distressingly because the Guido and Maurizo De Angelis compositions found here have forever been a thorn in the side of even the film's staunchest admirers!! Personally, I didn't mind the female singer so much after a while but when her (possibly drunk) male companion took over in the last half hour, I was in for some cringe-inducing moments for sure...!

Despite these misgivings, the film is still one of the best Spaghetti Westerns out there (and certainly the last great example of the subgenre); its undoubted highlight is provided by a terrific, lovingly protracted action set-piece in which Nero, Berger and a reformed Strode (back to his former arrow-shooting glory - perhaps a nod to the role he played in Richard Brooks' splendid THE PROFESSIONALS [1966]) wipe out most of Caldwell's gang. Their triumph is short-lived, however, because both Berger and Strode lose their lives in the ongoing struggle (Berger poignantly so, while Strode's death scene is particularly great), with Nero almost bowing out himself under the strain of his siblings' torture - who have subsequently disposed of Caldwell and taken over the town themselves; the final confrontation, then, between Keoma and his three half-brothers is eerily set to the "strains" of Olga Karlatos' (playing a woman Keoma had earlier on saved from a plague-infested colony) wailing and screaming as she lies giving birth to a child amidst the carnage!

While at first I was disappointed that the Anchor Bay DVD only included the English dub, having watched it now it seems clear that the actors were all speaking their dialogue in English on the set - although, as connoisseurs will certainly know, this was all re-recorded back in the studios anyway (as was common practice in the Italian film industry). Still, if ever it gets shown again on Italian TV, I'll be sure to check it out just for completeness' sake. Thankfully, however, Castellari contributes a highly enthusiastic and informative Audio Commentary in which he discusses his major influences while making the film, among them Sidney J. Furie's THE APPALOOSA (1966), Altman's McCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971) and Peckinpah's PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973).

Ultimately, Franco Nero in the title role is almost as iconic a figure as Django and, hopefully, I should be getting to another fairly obscure but highly intriguing Spaghetti Westen of his - Luigi Bazzoni's MAN, PRIDE AND VENGEANCE (1968), an eccentric updating of Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen", co-starring Klaus Kinski and Tina Aumont - pretty soon...

This film has so much that works so well, it's a shame one thing keeps it from working entirely l: the music. The single most annoying song I've ever heard in a film. Secondly the newest "restored" version inexplicably has two totally different English voices dubbed for Nero. His first few lines are delivered in a deep clear "radio announcer" pure English baritone, the rest of the film is in a poorly faked accent. What exactly would be the reason for this? Other than those two distractions, a great late era entry to the genre.

I have to pretty much agree with the two negative reviews below, and I'll explain why in a minute.

Franco Nero plays "Keoma" a half-breed Indian raised by a white man named Shannon (William Berger) who also has three sons (adoptive brothers of Keoma) who hate him and have never accepted a 'half-breed' as their brother.

There's also George (Woody Strode), an ex-slave and friend of Shannon's who teaches Keoma all he knows about fighting.

Cut 20 years later after some flashbacks and Keoma returns to the town near where he was raised and finds that a plague has engulfed the town with a quarantine imposed by a wealthy mine owner Caldwell (Donald O'Brien) who would just as soon have it's inhabitants all die off so he can fully control the area. Keoma steps in to save a pregnant woman who Caldwell's men suspect as a plague carrier and all hell breaks loose.

Yeah, some of the knife throwing does look ludicrous, but the fist fights look good and there's an excellent gun battle in town between Keoma, Shannon and George vs. Caldwell's men. It's really done well and it looks like it was filmed in the same western set built outside of Rome as DJANGO was ten years earlier. By this time though, the place looks pretty run down and cluttered which makes a good setting for a plague-infested town.

As far as negatives go, the music sucks. It's an annoying high pitch (mostly female) whine that appears periodically throughout the move, inter sprinkled with 'singing' done by Franco Nero himself. It sounds awful as he tries to imitate Leonard Cohen but winds up sounding like a lame Tom Waits. I don't know why anybody likes it. To each his own, I guess.

There's also the annoying Sam Peckinpah-like slow-motion effects that become a cliché used over and over. It ruins some of the great gunfights, especially at the end where Keoma is battling his brothers in a barn while the pregnant lady's screams drown out all the gun battle sound. A little too arty for my tastes.

The dubbing is OK and it sounds like Nero dubbed in his own voice which comes off as strange and foreign for a half-breed American Indian. I suppose one gets used to it as the film goes along.

The Anchor Bay DVD uses an anamorphic widescreen print that looks pretty good. Only a few scratches during the opening and closing titles. No closed captioning. Nero also does a 10 minute interview explaining how the film came about, along with a secondary audio track by director Enzo Castellari giving details about the filming. Yeah the spaghetti western genre was dead by the time this film was made, but Castellari says it did very well in Italy although not enough to revive the genre. Tastes were moving towards gangsters and crime dramas by the mid-70s, so this film was an exception, not the rule.

It has some good ideas but I wouldn't consider it a masterpiece for the genre or anything. However I did enjoy some of the gun play and fistfights.

6 out of 10

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Castellari's Keoma was part of the late 1970's second wave of spaghetti westerns. It is typically considered one of the better entries in the genre, some even rate it as a classic alongside Leone's masterpieces. However, while it has clearly been attempted to make the film look stylish and sophisticated, and at a casual glance it does look pretty well made, a more in depth look shows that it falls quite a long way off the mark.

Basically, it's clear that what Castellari has is a bunch of director's tricks up his sleeve - slow motion, unconventional camera angles, subtle merges into flashbacks and so on - all of them thieved from the work of other filmmakers. That in itself is no bad thing - after all Tarantino has made a career out of doing the same - but the difference is that Castellari clearly has no idea how and when to use these techniques. He simply throws them in at every opportunity, so that they actually stick out rather than enhance the film. The most obvious example is the Sam Peckinpah style slow motion deaths after someone is shot. In Peckinpah's films it was used skilfully to highlight the brutality of certain killings here and there throughout the movie. In Keoma it is used more or less every time someone is shot - about forty or fifty altogether - totally losing any impact it might have had.

Add to this that Keoma is a completely boring spaghetti western character - basically just a hippy with a colt - and not one of Franco Nero's better performances. The dialogue is terrible. The plot is text book spaghetti western back-for-revenge. This movie doesn't really have a lot going for it.

And then there is the music, famous itself among spaghetti western fans for being almost unlistenably bad, which seems to sum up the feeling of the entire film. Quite a nice melody, but either sung in a piercing shriek by the female vocalist or an unnerving growl by the male vocalist.

In short Keoma is a perfect example of style over substance - it's all dazzling flair in an attempt to cover up a pretty poor film. Viewers should stick to the real classic spaghettis like Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci's work.

Review of English-language Blue Underground version:

My, my these Spaghettis. In Keoma (Franco Nero), we have a man who has descended into hell, he has become an annihilator. The landscape is infernal, from the Breughelesque sets to the leering henchman to the blasted mountains. For his enemies, he has two barrels of a shotgun, and no pity. The hell is as much in his mind as it is in the town he rides into. He is a man with no place, ideology or purpose. Unlike Eastwood's characters in the dollars trilogy who are without history or neuroses, with Nero as Keoma we have a profound psychological portrait of a man in spiritual agony, on the road to obliteration and self-immolation.

The scenario is also hellish, we have a town and a region that has been taken over by a warlord. He and his henchman block access from and to the outside world. The townsfolk are all infected with a plague, and rather than given access to medical aid, they are put in a concentration camp and forced to mine for silver, or simply murdered. The town is left to the henchmen and their trollops. This for me is very unlike a western in the traditional American sense. In the American western, there are always the upright people of the town to appeal to, there is a sheriff, or as a last resort the cavalry. People may be run off their land or be claim-jumped, but they are never forced into slave labour.

What we have in Keoma, and in similar movies such as Django and Django Strikes Again, is a fundamentally African western, which is probably why Spaghetti goes down so well on that continent. The town in Keoma is more reminiscent of somewhere in Sierra Leone than the Sierra Nevada. There is total brutal oppression of the populace. There is a reckless attitude towards the value of life. Keoma is likewise a more fitting hero for such a landscape, he is almost a Christ-like figure in the sense that he is betrayed or deserted by everyone in this movie, his family, the oppressed, and the liberated. When Keoma is crucified on a wagonwheel the artisans, politicos, henchmen and whores celebrate a change of leadership in the saloon that was entirely down to him. He is constantly grimy, his hair is totally overgrown, he is hirsute, sweaty, and wears no overshirt. Seeing him shove his pistol down the back of his trousers against his bare back will make the ladies a little queasy.

This movie has a very dreamlike atmosphere. The reason for this is that there is no real cohesive plot. Apparently Castellari threw the script in the bin immediately prior to shooting and adopted a completely improvisational approach. The only consistency to the movie is that of image and emotion. Throughout the movie is laced with the anguish of haunted souls, and punctuated by the slow-mo killings after the fashion of Peckinpah. The improvisation can unfortunately be quite clear. Some of the actors were writing their own lines the night before shooting. The dialogue is not always brilliant to say the least, and it is not helped by Nero's far from accent-less English. However this is about the only film where improvisation could work, simply because it is entirely beneficial to the oneiric, logic-less atmosphere.

The De Angelis brothers' soundtrack will be interesting to some because of the untrained voices. Nero sings quite a lot of it himself, and you will have to suspend disbelief and accept it, because although the man clearly has no singing talent, there is an authenticity to his singing that is refreshing.

I'm not sure what Woody Strode was doing in this picture, but flashbacks of him shooting his bow add to the trippiness. Keoma the movie is not quite as far-out as something by Jodorowsky, but it's on the way.