BEFORE SCROLLING TO THE WEB PAGE BELOW ABOUT TINTO BRASS, PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT THESE NEWS ITEMS, WHICH ARE FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING I’VE EVER HAD TO SAY:

AMY GOODMAN:     A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team. “Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months,” reported Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, “the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” Disturbingly, she writes that “they may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control” as well. The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced “sea-smurf.” These “sea-smurfs,” Cavallaro reports, have “spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,” in a combat zone, and now will spend their 20-month “dwell time” — time troops are required to spend to “reset and regenerate after a deployment” — armed and ready to hit the U.S. streets....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

It gets worse:

NAOMI WOLF:     On October 1, 2008, President Bush deployed a brigade — which means three to four thousand warriors — somewhere in America. We do not know where they are deployed though citizens have informally reported to me having seen military vehicles and troops in Georgia and Alabama. We do know that their official mandate according to the first report is “crowd control” as well as action in the event of a mass civilian catastrophe. Initial reports described their technology “module package” as involving Tasers and rubber bullets.... The First Brigade is Bush’s force: they are not answerable to Congress or to the Governors of states: they are answerable to the Commander in Chief. In an Alternet posting, I interviewed Air Force Colonel (retired) David Antoon who noted that the troops must obey the president, even if he asks them to arrest Congress or fire on civilians or attack media outlets. If they do not obey orders, he notes, they face five years in prison.... Antoon himself calls the deployment “ominous.” Troops on our streets makes us something less than a democracy: one definition of a police state is when a leader sends his own military units into civilian streets. Meanwhile the civilian policing of citizens is becoming more brutal. Hundreds of preemptive arrests took place in St Paul, dozens of journalists were arrested.... In St. Paul, funds were sent in advance to pay off the lawsuits against police forces that were guaranteed to arise from the planned abuse of citizens. This sort of thing is happening across the country. The tactic has established a closed circle that has turned citizens’ law enforcement agencies into contractors of a state that is directing acts of increasing severity against US citizens. Now a military brigade is being deployed....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

Click here to see an interview with Naomi Wolf conducted in early October 2008.

For the past five years or so I hve been hearing rumors that Halliburton has been building (and has now finished building) 800 prisons throughout the USA, not yet functioning, but just waiting for the right crisis. I have not found reliable evidence for the specific quantity, readiness, functionality, locations, or details, but you might be interested in taking a look at page 5 of this Halliburton press release dated 26 January 2006: KBR has been awarded a contract announced by the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component. The Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contingency contract is to support ICE facilities and has a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States, or to support the rapid development of new programs.... Now, really, what are the chances of “an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States”? And what are the “new programs” that could come under “rapid development”?

FOR THE FULL PRESS RELEASE, CLICK HERE.

NOW, BACK TO THE MAIN PART OF THE WEB PAGE:

Did you happen to record Monty Python’s Flying Circus when it was shown on PBS back in the 1970s?
Do you still have the tapes?
Is there a TIME-LIFE logo at the end?
If so, please write to me. Thank you!

THE WORKS OF TINTO BRASS

Appeasing Producers—Continued

Yankee

(a.k.a. L’americano, 1966)

Junichirô Tanizaki’s novel Kagi (The Key) was first published in Italy in 1965. Brass fell in love with it and tried to purchase the film rights, only to discover that they were tied up for another five years. But another promising project came along when a studio offered him the job of making a “Spaghetti Western.” He accepted eagerly. He had been deeply impressed by Sergio Leone’s B-movie, Per un pugno di dollari (Fistful of Dollars), which became a surprise hit, and so he wanted to try his own hand at the genre. Leone’s film plagiarized Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which in turn was based without attribution on Dashiel Hammett’s novel Red Harvest. The Yankee script, by Alfonso Balcázar and Alberto Silvestri, took its inspiration from Leone’s film. It was probably Tinto Brass who doctored the script to bring it into line with the comic books he so loved.

SYNECDOCHE: In addition to wanting to make a comic-book movie, Brass endeavored also to take film grammar one step further by the use of visual synecdoche, inspired by Chinese and Japanese pictographic writing, in which a part is used to represent the whole. So instead of showing a gunman, he would show the tip of the gun barrel; instead of showing a horse approaching, he would show the horse’s ear; and so forth. Sadly, his ideas have largely been removed from the film, since the producer, horrified by the dailies, fired Brass just as he was completing the editing, and even got into a fistfight with him.

DISOWNERSHIP: The studio boss hired Juan Oliver to fix the movie and delete the bulk of the synecdoche. Brass sued the studio and won the right to delete his directorial credit from the movie. That’s why the original prints of the film were credited as “Un film di Antony Luc,” a play on the name of the co-producer. Finding that having a fake name and no director’s credit was impeding boxoffice sales, the producers reached a financial settlement whereby the film would be “Un film di Tinto Brass,” though there would still be no director credited.

Detail from an original-release poster	From the opening credits of the French dub (Frame capture from the VHS released by American European Pictures, C.N.C. EDV 94, retitled Chasseur de primes [Bounty Hunter])
What’s that blue blotch? Looks like some cinema manager blotted out “UN FILM DI ANTONY LUC”!

RECONSIDERATION: The VHS releases — cropped, battered, smudgy — do no justice to the original film, and I found that I, like others, was almost entirely unimpressed. But the new DVD, with its sharp, colorful, crisp images, clear sound (and English subtitles!) makes a world of difference. The movie has now come to life, and it’s surprisingly entertaining. The story is quite typical and unexceptional: A stranger wanders into a lawless town in New Mexico to discover that the locals live in dread fear of the invincible bandito who has driven them all into poverty and subservience. When he is warned to leave, he sees a money-making opportunity, meets up with the bandito’s gang, and in a series of slick moves double-crosses them time and again, until, at the end, he has killed them all and walks off with their loot. The story is small, trivial, insignificant, but the manner in which it’s told is unusually compelling and quite funny in its own strange little way. Most entertaining, for me at least, is the appearance of famous circus equestrian Osiride Pevarello. He and Brass met on this film and became fast friends. Pevarello has appeared in the bulk of Brass’s films ever since.

HISTORY: The set decoration is intentionally bad. The WANTED posters are entirely wrong. The tinted windows in El Grande Concho’s residence are entirely anachronistic. The coins seem right, though, but I haven’s checked them against listings in numismatic references. We are to assume that this nameless desert village is within maybe a day’s ride of Los Alamos. No, I don’t think so.

MUSIC: Very little, but it’s great. Clearly inspired by what Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai had done for Fistful of Dollars.

The 45rpm single

The promotional edition, nearly impossible to read

MACHISMO: One of Brass’s strong points is his ability to write for women. He seems to have no use for machismo. Yankee, though, is pure machismo — but absurdly, ludicrously, farcically so. If it can be taken seriously at all, it can be seen only as a condemnation. But it probably can’t be taken that seriously. Philippe Leroy is certainly perfect as the macho man, but his attitudes are French, not American. Once you get used to the idea that it is someone who is so obviously steeped in European culture, someone who has no feeling at all for the American west, who is playing a down-and-dirty American, though, it’s rather fun to watch.

FLATTERY: Two years later Sergio Leone took a momentary image from Yankee and expanded it to epic, almost archetypal imagery for Once upon a Time in the West (C’éra una volta il west). And another one year after that Sam Peckinpah took the sequence concerning the scorpion in a ring of fire and greatly expanded upon it for The Wild Bunch.

AN EXPLANATION, AT LAST!: Thomas Weisser’s Spaghetti Westerns: The Good, the Bad and the Violent (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1992, p 356) tells us why it was that an actor of such brilliance as Adolfo Celi was so hopelessly unconvincing in this movie. He was doing an imitation of Fernando Sancho. A ha! Well, I don’t know who Fernando Sancho is, but it explains a lot anyway. By the way, Weisser quite liked Yankee. So did Bill Everson, for that matter.

MYSTERY: The Internet Movie Database once listed Brass’s next film as Uccidi se non vuoi essere ucciso (Kill If You Don’t Want to Be Killed). If there ever was such a film, I would hazard a guess that it was an alternative title for Yankee. Or perhaps it was the title of the little behind-the-scenes documentary, an excerpt of which you can see by clicking here. If you know, give me a holler.

GERMAN PREVIEW: Take a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmmEbXvUs98.

THE RESTORED VERSION ON DVD! Yankee (Italo-Western Collection #2), from Koch Media in Germany, released on 17 October 2007. Optional German and English subtitles, though the English subtitles are not mentioned anywhere on the packing or in the advertising and can only be selected by the remote’s SUBTITLE button after the movie starts. All the opening credits were redone entirely, and they’re a little bit different from the original, with added effects (wipes and so forth), but they look good! A mistake is retained from the original Italian release, though: Pevarello is credited twice! First as Renzo and later as Osiride. But, alas, there is only one of him, not two. Mysteriously, the color timing during a late-evening scene is terribly inconsistent, and that is the only real flaw I detected.

WELL I’LL BE GORMED. IT WAS ALREADY ON DVD, BUT DUBBED INTO SPANISH:

AND SOMEBODY LIKES IT! Antonio Bruschini: 32 pallottole di western all’italiana — Yankee

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE SEE:
CDVideoManiacs Corporation
ANICA listing
DEAD LINK. OY:
http://www.filmomania.com/Alucine/Spaghetti/Spaghetti123.htm

VHS from DeltaVideo (1990)	DVD from Koch Media (2007)

Una coproduzione italo spagnola
Tigielle 33 (Roma) P.C. Balcazar (Barcellona)
Un film di Tinto Brass

Yankee

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