My library is doing a project where we are putting RFID tags in every single item in our collection (300,000 items, and staff is doing most of it.) I was in the back room behind the Circulation desk one Sunday, tagging dvds so that they would be ready for the weekend rush, and I saw this. A Sergio Leone western! with JAMES COBURN!!! Needless to say, I grabbed that puppy right up.

And after about four days, got a chance to watch it.

And...well...

Firstly, it wins the 'least prepossesing movie title' award. The Italian title is the same, Giu la Testa (literally, Down the head). The subtitle is A Fistful of Dynamite, riffing on one of Leone's Clint Eastwood westerns, but two badly cut versions were released under that title, so for the full restored version, they went with this one. Okay. It's a running joke throughout the movie, being what Coburn, the explosives guy, says when something is about to go off that is not expected (usually when Rod Steiger least wants it to.)

So Rod Steiger is a Mexican bandit who is robbing anyone who comes by with his bandit crew, many of which are his sons. They run into suave James Coburn, an IRA explosives expert on the run from the British. They end up (after a lot of snarling and threatening) taking on a bank in Mesa Verde, then getting involved with Pancho Villa and his revolutionaries.

This was the penultimate western for Leone (the last one being My Name is Nobody, which I remember as being HILARIOUS...gotta rent it...), coming after the Man with No Name trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and Once Upon A Time in the West. It's got a little more social commentary, and also Leone obviously didn't need to worry much about the censors, with a lot of profanity and some pretty earthy scenes (the scene of the naked people tumbling out of the cart with all their body parts waving around comes to mind...)

Coburn is distant and enigmatic, looking down on Steiger's mannerless lowlife, and yet by the end they have become buds.

And in fact, these are pretty much the same characters we're used to- James Coburn is the Clint Eastwood character, Rod Steiger is Eli Wallach, and the guy who is the Mexican Army guy, out to get them, is Lee Van Cleef.

Unfortunately, the movie really isn't that good. There are a few good scenes, and it did keep me watching, but there were several times when I thought, do I want to sit through 2 1/2 hours of this? Well, the second half of the movie was better than the first, or I would never have made it. Steiger's annoying character eventually grew on me, and Coburn is, of course, charm itself. And very cute.

But...there kept being all these flashbacks from when he was in Ireland, and he and a buddy and their girlfriend (at first I thought she was the other guy's sister, but they were BOTH kissing her) are hanging around all carefree but then they get involved in the Irish Nationalist movement, and you know that's not going to end well.

And what makes it worse is that Ennio Morricone (who did a brilliant score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and also did this one) composed one of the most ANNOYING scores I have ever heard. Whenever Coburn has a flashback, the movie switches to this rinky-dinky soundtrack that sounds like Burt Bacharach on a sugar jag- very sweet and cloying and awful, with a voice repeating Sean...Sean...Sean in a kind of singsong. Damn, that was just teeth-clenchingly awful.

And speaking of teeth-clenchingly awful, Steiger's accent, which kept veering from pseudo-Mexican to German or Russian and then back. <shudder>

And the ending was NOT satisfying at all. I'm not sure if Leone had no idea where to go, or if the last scene was a final comment on that particular character, but it didn't work for me. Lowered the rating from a five to a four, truthfully. After all that, I wanted more...

So if you are a big Western movie fan, or a Leone aficionado, by all means, rent this and watch it once, it does have moments. Everyone else? give it a miss, and go watch something good by him instead.