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THE BIG GUNDOWN
1967
Director
Sergio Sollima
Starring
Lee Van Cleef
Tomas Milian
Nieves Navarro
Runtime
110 minutes
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The central problem facing Lee Van Cleef in THE BIG GUNDOWN is that he keeps trying to catch Tomás Milian.This turns out to be a mistake. Milian plays Cuchillo, a knife-wielding fugitive rapist who spends most of the movie running across Mexico with the chaotic energy of Bugs Bunny. Even a man as cool as Van Cleef can barely keep up.
Sergio Sollima’s THE BIG GUNDOWN is a pivotal film in the genre of Spaghetti Westerns. Unlike the usual ‘buddy’ westerns featuring two opposite characters who end up working towards a common goal, majority of The Big Gundown is about Van Cleef’s search for Milian’s heinous criminal. But the journey becomes an investigation into how we perceive crime, the economic forces which dictate social actions, and how an individual makes a judgment on fellow human beings. Sergio Sollima adapted a story by Franco Solinas (THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS), to create a rare spectacle that directly confronts race, class and crime. Sollima directs the material with unusual patience. Instead of building toward a showdown between hero and villain, he gradually reveals that the real conflict is between power and truth.
“One of the finest attacks on the rule of law ever put on film. Political revisionism instead of revisionism (so rare) and all the more powerful because it so expertly recognizes its forms. True radical populist politics.” - Filipe Furtado
THE MORRICONE CONTRIBUTION:
One of Morricone's strangest western scores: shrieking voices, pounding percussion, nursery-rhyme melodies, and sudden bursts of mariachi brass. It sounds like the circus leading a manhunt.
Sergio Sollima’s THE BIG GUNDOWN is a pivotal film in the genre of Spaghetti Westerns. Unlike the usual ‘buddy’ westerns featuring two opposite characters who end up working towards a common goal, majority of The Big Gundown is about Van Cleef’s search for Milian’s heinous criminal. But the journey becomes an investigation into how we perceive crime, the economic forces which dictate social actions, and how an individual makes a judgment on fellow human beings. Sergio Sollima adapted a story by Franco Solinas (THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS), to create a rare spectacle that directly confronts race, class and crime. Sollima directs the material with unusual patience. Instead of building toward a showdown between hero and villain, he gradually reveals that the real conflict is between power and truth.
“One of the finest attacks on the rule of law ever put on film. Political revisionism instead of revisionism (so rare) and all the more powerful because it so expertly recognizes its forms. True radical populist politics.” - Filipe Furtado
THE MORRICONE CONTRIBUTION:
One of Morricone's strangest western scores: shrieking voices, pounding percussion, nursery-rhyme melodies, and sudden bursts of mariachi brass. It sounds like the circus leading a manhunt.