Tonino Valerii: The Films

233 Pages·2016·59.826 MB·English

by  Curti, Roberto(Foreword)

Tonino Valerii
ALSOBYROBERTOCURTI
ANDFROMMCFARLAND
Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1957–1969(2015)
Italian Crime Filmography, 1968–1980(2013)
Tonino Valerii
The Films
R C
OBERTO URTI
Foreword by Christopher Frayling
Afterword by Ernesto Gastaldi
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-6468-2
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-2618-5
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© 2016 Roberto Curti. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover: United States movie poster for Day of Anger(1967)
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Christopher Frayling 1
Preface 5
Introduction 7
One. Childhood, Vocation and Early Experiences 13
Two. In the Lion’s Den 24
Three. A Taste of Directing 31
Four. Oedipus in the West 39
Five. Death of a President 50
Six. The Anomalous Venetian 57
Seven. “There once was a little girl…” 66
Eight. Once We’re Dead… 71
Nine. Nobody’s Fool 79
Ten. Beware the Gorilla! 99
Eleven. A Sting in the Desert 107
Twelve. The Long Silence 115
Thirteen. The Naked Charm of the Bourgeoisie 121
Fourteen. Too Late the Hero? 125
Fifteen. Yojimbo vs. Cosa Nostra 130
Sixteen. His Master’s Voice 133
Seventeen. Twilight’s Last Gleamings 141
Epilogue 146
Afterword by Ernesto Gastaldi 149
v
vi Table of Contents
Appendix: Interviews 151
Andy J. Forest 151 Saverio Marconi 175
Gianni Garko 153 Franco Nero 177
Giuliano Gemma 154 Pasquale Rachini 178
George Hilton 159 Beatrice Ring 180
Peter Hooten 161 Bud Spencer 184
Marco Leonardi 163 Bo Svenson 185
Roberto Leoni 165 Pamela Villoresi 186
Filmography 189
Chapter Notes 207
Bibliography 217
Index 219
Foreword
CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING
I first met Tonino Valerii during a Festival of “Euro-Westerns” at Udine in April 1997;
one of the reasons the organizers had called them “Euro-Westerns” was to get away from
the phrase “Spaghetti Westerns” which they thought was a put- down. In my presentation
I tried to persuade the audience that “Spaghetti Westerns” was intended as a term of endear-
ment—but opinions were still divided, especially among Italian film students. Some of the
Westerns Tonino Valerii had directed in the 1960s—notably Day of Anger (1967), with its
classic r ifle-l oading duel on horseback—were prominently featured in the Festival, and I
took the opportunity to interview him at length as part of the research for my biography
of Sergio Leone. After all, Tonino Valerii had worked for Jolly Film/Unidis as head of the
editorial department—as the whole of the editorial department, actually—while Leone was
preparing Ray the Magnificent or The Mysterious Stranger (later renamed Fistful of Dollars);
he was involved in p ost-p roduction on that film; he was Leone’s assistant director on For
a Few Dollars More and took part in early preparations for The Good, the Bad and the
Ugly—plus he directed My Name Is Nobody, Sergio Leone’s first film as a producer. So he
had been intimately involved in Leone’s working life during those crucial years, and had
experienced it first- hand. He was a key witness.
I had researched and prepared an interview with Valerii, which had been filmed for
the BBC television documentary Viva Leone!first broadcast in the year Sergio Leone died,
in 1989. But I had never met him face to face before Udine. When we did meet, in a hotel
foyer, I found him to be a w ell-i nformed, cultured, articulate filmmaker—not an extrovert
or an e go-t ripper—with clear memories of the period of 1963 to 1973 and a quietly forceful
way of expressing them. It was a surprise to discover that he was a graduate of film school,
CSC in Rome, and that he had studied under the distinguished veteran director Alessandro
Blasetti. Until then, I had assumed that the directors of I talian-S panish Westerns in the
1960s tended to be hardened professionals who had worked their way up in the industry
since the glory days of “Hollywood on the Tiber”; Valerii was clearly an exception. He rem-
inisced to me about Sergio Leone’s fateful visit, with his wife Carla, to the Arlecchino Cin-
ema in Rome in autumn 1963, to see Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which had been made in
Japan a couple of years before; about the casting of Clint Eastwood, his arrival in Rome,
and the choice of locations in Spain for The Mysterious Stranger. He recalled the p ost-
synchronization of the film—the shooting script had somehow been mislaid in all the
excitement—and the shaping of the release print. And he described the initial distribution
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2 Foreword
of Fistful of Dollars, around which several myths about miraculous happenings were in cir-
culation. On the subject of Kurosawa’s understandable reaction to Fistful, Tonino Valerii
admitted that it was his idea to introduce Carlo Goldoni’s play Harlequin, or The Servant
of Two Masters into the case for the defense—giving lawyers the opportunity to claim that
both Fistful and Yojimbo were distantly derived from the same source—a mid- eighteenth-
century Italian one! After sharing his memories of the casting and locations of For a Few
Dollars More—I immediately travelled to Almeria to check them out—and the evolution
of the character of the bad guy Indio (originally called Tombstone), he described in detail
the background to the making of his own Westerns Taste of Killing (1966); Day of Anger;
The Price of Power (1969); and A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die! (1972, which I had seen
as Massacre at Fort Holman). All of them had reached England in truncated forms, in the
p re-v ideo age, as “B” movies on the bottom half of double bills. The print of Day of Anger
screened at Udine was the longest I had seen: part of his aim in making these Westerns,
he said, was to avoid the pyrotechnics of some directors, to adopt a more “classic” style,
and to try and put some heart—and some credible relationships—into an increasingly cyn-
ical genre.
Then we turned to My Name Is Nobody (1973). Tears welled up in his eyes, and he
became noticeably more emphatic, as he explained to me the exact circumstances of Sergio
Leone’s personal involvement in the film—and the ways in which Leone had, over the years
in published interviews, claimed more and more responsibility for directing as well as pro-
ducing it. Leone’s well- known tendency to exaggerate, in a Falstaffian way, here had real
human consequences. This had evidently cast a shadow over the rest of Valerii’s professional
life, and as he passionately expressed his reaction—more in sorrow than in anger—I could
see for myself how deeply he still felt about it many years later. He was evidently conflicted
between gratitude for the opportunity Leone gave him, and bewilderment about why Leone
was claiming credit for someone else’s work when he didn’t need to.
I met Tonino Valerii several times after this, at festivals including Madonna di
Campiglio in July 2001 and for a BBC World Service radio interview as part of my series
“How the West Was Shot.” On that occasion, he showed me one of his treasured posses-
sions—a very competent, small landscape painting by Lee Van Cleef. He sent me articles
he had published on film history, including a fascinating one on the origins of the “wan-
dering stranger” figure in Italian film culture—the stranger of Fistful of Dollars and countless
derivatives—in the Gino character (played by Massimo Girotti) from Visconti’s Ossessione
(1943), itself based on the drifter Frank Chambers in James M. Cain’s crime novel The Post-
man Always Rings Twice (1934)—an American figure radically reworked in an Italian cul-
tural context, just like Clint Eastwood. This man certainly knew a lot about film history.
His own Western, A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die!, had its long- term origins in Augusto
Genina’s L’assedio dell’Alcazar (1940), which Valerii remembered seeing as a child in his
local cinema, growing up in Fascist Italy; instead of Republicans besieging Nationalists, it
became Confederate and Union troops. When my book Sergio Leone: Something to Do with
Death(2000) was first published in English, Tonino Valerii was generous enough to say—
publicly—how highly he regarded it, and he campaigned for the book to be published in
Italy (which it eventually was, in 2002, as Sergio Leone—Danzando con la morte).
In my earlier book Spaghetti Westerns (1981; a controversial title in Italy!) I had made
an error about My Name Is Nobody—and I felt bad about it. I had claimed that Leone
Foreword(Frayling) 3
directed the opening sequence in that film—the sequence in the b arber-s hop—as well as
the drinking/shooting contest in the saloon involving Terence Hill, part of the village car-
nival and the jokey interlude with the t rain-d river in the public urinal. And I had claimed
the barber- shop sequence, I subsequently realized, through the misinterpretation of a pub-
licity still which showed Leone directing Henry Fonda in a b arber-s hop chair for Once
Upon a Time in the West—a comedy sequence, and a reference to John Ford’s My Darling
Clementine (1946), which was deleted by Leone from all versions of Westwhich went into
release. The only trace of it in release prints was that Fonda as Frank suddenly walked
clean- shaven and well- groomed into the Flagstone saloon, for no apparent reason. I had
also o ver-i nterpreted the publicity stills of Sergio Leone posing on location in the Spanish
desert for the climactic showdown with the Wild Bunch in Nobody—a sequence which,
incidentally, inspired one of Ennio Morricone’s best- ever musical gags, The Bride of the
Valkyries, rearranged for car- horns, as if it was a traffic jam at rush hour in the Via Veneto!
Roberto Curti’s book conscientiously puts the record straight on My Name Is Nobody,
and on much else besides. It covers Antonio (“Tonino”) Valerii’s early life in Abruzzi, his
time at film school—“Blasetti had shown me the way, Leone gave me the opportunity to
follow it”—and contributions, with fellow graduate Ernesto Gastaldi, to scripts for horror
movies; his apprenticeship in the industry, and work for Papi and Colombo at Jolly Film.
Valerii, it transpires, gravitated towards Italian Westerns almost by chance, at a time when
they were flavor of the month: Blasetti had advised him not to miss opportunities as they
arose—even when they were far from ideal. And the Western gold- rush was in full swing.
There follows a detailed analysis of each of Valerii’s films in turn (he made nine of his four-
teen films in just eleven years), including the ones which came after the five Westerns—
much less well known outside Italy—notably Go Gorilla Go (1975) and Sahara Cross (1977).
It is extraordinary that this is the first f ull-l ength study of Tonino Valerii’s life and work to
appear in English, half a century or so after the events it describes.
If you search the internet for “Valerii,” you currently encounter (a) a pilot from Bat-
tlestar Galactica, (b) assorted ancient Roman generals, members of the Valerii tribe, and
(c) a dietary supplement derived from Valerian root…
Maybe after the publication of this book, you will at last find Tonino Valerii there as
well—heading up the references. It is where he deserves to be. His finest film—the one
Steven Spielberg rates more highly than the other Leone films, perhaps because Nobody
treats Henry Fonda and the world he represents with childlike wonder—has been misat-
tributed and underrated for far too long. His name is, or should be, Somebody.
Christopher Frayling is a former rector of the Royal College of Art, chairman of Arts Council England and of
the Design Council, trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum and a governor of the British Film Institute. A
radio and television broadcaster he has published more than 20 books about art, design and popular culture.
He was knighted in 2000 for “services to art education,” and is currently a professor emeritus of cultural history
at the Royal College of Art, a research fellow at the V&A and a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.