Corbucci, Sergio

b. December 6, 1926, Rome, Italy
d. December 1, 1990, Rome, Italy

After studying economics at university, which would loan a political nature to his later work as a filmmaker, Sergio Corbucci began working as a film critic for the journal Schermi del Mondo. After the Second World War, he contributed to the U.S. army magazine Stars and Stripes. Often in the shadow of Sergio Leone, and referred to at times as “the other Sergio”, Corbucci had a long friendship with Leone and they both would influence each other’s work. Although most people probably credit Leone with the birth of the spaghetti western, the idea to make a western in Spain came to Corbucci while doing second unit work for Leone on Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1959). He directed his first western, Massacro al Grande Canyon (Grand Canyon Massacre, 1964) just ahead of Leone’s iconic Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964). His first attempt at a western was more conventional than Leone’s, although Corbucci would become far more political and subversive. The spaghetti westerns of the ’60s came out of a left-leaning movement in Italy among students, artists and intellectuals comparable to political trends in France. As Corbucci left a legacy of over 60 films which run the gamut of comedy, peplum, western and drama, there is not space here to discuss all of them, and some will merely be touched on briefly while the more important ones will be addressed in more detail. 

Duel of the Titans

The beginning of Corbucci’s peplum film Romolo e Remo (Duel of the Titans, 1961) finds a fearful Rea Silvia (Laura Solari), head of the Vestal Virgins, abandoning her twin baby boys, Romulus and Remus, setting them afloat in a nest on a river. The boys are initially raised by a wolf, according to the myth, until a shepherd Faustulus (Andrea Bosic) kills the wolf and adopts the children. Romulus (Steve Reeves) and Remus (Gordon Scott), now grown, wage war against tyrant Amulias (Franco Volpi), ruler of Alba Longa, and the Sabines, dreaming of founding a mythic city. They find out that they are not mere mortal men, but born of a god. Strife between the brothers grows while they are leaders of a rebel group. Romulus eventually kills Remus, who, while dying, says that it was their fate. The film is perhaps flawed with its visions of freedom and prosperity when one considers how Rome was built on Empire and slavery, so it must be taken with a grain of salt. One thing it does convincingly is to delineate the qualities of leadership in its portrait of Romulus. These rebels, from rural stock, long for the benefits of civilisation but lament that they can only enter urban life as a slave or the equivalent of a slave. However, the shepherd Faustulus says that he has no land, although he is free to roam with his flocks, which suggests that the benefit of a commons was still available to these men. Co-written with Sergio Leone and another spaghetti master, Duccio Tessari, the film makes breathtaking use of widescreen with no wasted shots, along with a riveting choreography to the brawling scenes.

The Slave

In Il figlio di Spartacus (The Slave, 1962) a.k.a. The Son of Spartacus, we have Steve Reeves starring again, this time as Roman centurion Randus, unknowingly the son of crucified slave Spartacus. Randus is assigned by Caesar to spy on Crassus, a corrupt official in Zeugma who controls the eastern provinces. Thrown overboard trying to save slave girl Saida (Ombretta Colli), when they reach land they are enslaved by a Lycian caravan where Gulbar (Enzo Fiermonte), an ex-gladiator, tells him that he can tell by his amulet that he is the son of Spartacus, and that he must finish the work of his father. Just as they are freed, Randus meets Roman friend Vetius in the desert and the other slaves flee, Gulbar telling him they can be found in the “City of the Sun”. Meeting with Crassus, Crassus apologises, but orders the death of the slaves who escaped. Crassus will spare Saida but no others. In the ruins of a sand-coloured city, Randus enters one of the decayed dwellings to find a Corinthian helmet, a shoulder guard and a sword with a cross guard with decorations which match his amulet. It is his father’s grave. Exiting the dwelling he meets Gulbar and the freed slaves, and Gulbar declares that the sword in the hands of Spartacus’ son is a prophecy. Randus soon starts a slave revolt against Crassus. The Corinthian-style helmet was something featured heavily in Maciste contro il vampire (Goliath and the Vampires, 1961), a film to which Corbucci contributed some direction. In Goliath, the helmets obscure the faces of evil men, increasing the sense of menace. In The Slave, the helmet masks the face of a hero, something common in the superhero flicks – a different type of strongman film, which has supplanted peplum in popularity. This trope of concealment will become one of Corbucci’s signatures. The widescreen photography in The Slave is even better than that of Duel of the Titans, exploiting well the Egyptian landscape. There are some powerful shots where a figure crowds the foreground, muddying the frame, which will become another Corbucci signature. The film is a worthy low-budget sequel to Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) and is a must-watch for fans of Kubrick’s film. To those who believe that all peplum is pablum, both films have a social currency in how they evoke a keen sense of the value of personal freedom.

The Slave

The Slave

In Grand Canyon Massacre, we have something of a landmark in it perhaps being the first modern spaghetti western, although it’s hardly Corbucci’s finest work. The film was released four months before Leone’s first western, A Fistful of Dollars, in May of ’64. Right from the outset, the camera often seems hesitant, and the film is mostly lacking in the painterly frames distinguishing Corbucci’s peplum work and his greatest westerns. We have James Mitchum as Wes Evans who, returning home after shooting the men who killed his father, becomes embroiled in a territorial dispute between the Dancers and the Whitmores. While it hardly encroaches on the revisionist territory of his later work, a theme of note is again, as in Duel of the Titans, the qualities that make a man a good leader. Like Plato’s philosopher king, Wes is most suited to power in not seeking power for its own sake. The cinematography improves around the choreography of the shootout scenes, where the white Croatian rock perhaps doesn’t look so American, but is aesthetically appealing and rugged nonetheless. Corbucci’s uncertainty with the film, in trying to feel his way in a new genre, was perhaps the reason he released it under the pseudonym of Stanley Corbett. 

Grand Canyon Massacre

Grand Canyon Massacre

In Django (1966), we have Corbucci fully coming into his own as director. At the film’s opening we are met with a large expanse of mud, and our protagonist, Django (Franco Nero), dragging a coffin through it behind him. The mud is a suitable pathetic fallacy for our hero’s depressive state, and it is in accord with the slippery and amorphous morality which most of the characters in Django encompass. The mud is difficult to navigate, like Django’s bleak reality. Pausing on top of a hill, Django watches a scene of violence unfold below. Biracial Mexican and Yankee Maria (Loredana Nusciak) is first whipped by Mexican revolutionaries, who are then shot by some members of Major Jackson’s band, who plan on burning Maria on a cross. One of the men has a red hood with eye slits… These men are modelled on the Ku Klux Klan. It seems that both groups of men have a sense of ownership about Maria. Django descends and shoots the men, promising Maria that she will be safe with him. In town, Django takes Maria to the brothel, the only business thriving – a Switzerland of neutrality in the war between Major Jackson’s men and the revolutionaries, the prostitutes servicing both groups of men. 

Django

Django

Here, in contrast to the muddy exteriors, the women are decked out in polychromed attire and look straight out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. These painterly colours, and the colour red donned by Major Jackson’s men, are operatic in mud’s contrast, just as the violence is operatic. Although Maria is not wanted there, Django arranges for her to stay the night. One of the women tries to convince Maria to ingratiate herself to Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo). The people in the brothel know about Maria and her problems, and while they don’t attack her with violence like the revolutionaries and Jackson’s men, they want to be rid of her if she doesn’t act like one of them. Next, we see Major Jackson and his men killing Mexicans for sport, letting them run ahead some distance before shooting them in their tracks. After killing, they ride through the mud to the brothel, which is their habit. Django creates some controversy with Jackson’s men when he sides with a Mexican prostitute who is not interested in their company. Jackson tells Django that he must be courageous, or crazy to speak that way, then mentions his five men shot by the river. He says that the man had a “white trash” woman with him, who sold herself to the Mexicans. Django says that these things don’t matter because the war is over. Jackson says that he has his own private war going on. Jackson makes a move to shoot his shotgun and Django shoots several of his men in a matter of seconds. 

Django

The gun pointed right at the Major, Django says he has just one bullet but has an advantage so it wouldn’t be right. He asks how many men he has left. 48, replies Jackson. He says he wants to see all of them next time so that Jackson has the advantage. Django goes upstairs and Maria tells Django that he made her feel like a real woman, someone to be protected and loved. Django pushes her shawl off her shoulders and from the fadeout it is implied that he and Maria have intimate relations. Django pulls his coffin out into the street behind a big section of a weathered tree. Brothel owner Nathaniel (Ángel Álvarez) asks why he let Jackson get away. He asks Django if he has seen the hoods they wear, and says that they are fanatics, that it is a religion with them. Django assures Nathaniel that he has all the help he needs. Back inside the brothel, Nathaniel tells the girls that it would be best if Django were killed, because he would lose less customers that way. Major Jackson appears on the road with dozens of men, most of them wearing red hoods. Django lays waste to them with a machine gun he takes out of his coffin. In this scene of high revisionism, the expressed or unexpressed racism inherent in many early westerns is also laid waste in the mud. The mud is amorphous as a genre.

Django

Django

The exteriors here look like a neglected theatre set, and it adds much to the film’s operatic appeal. Some men retreat into the distance, including the Major. Brother Jonathan, in league with Major Jackson, appears and pointing at Maria says that “she’s the incarnation of sin and evil.” Mexicans ride into town, threatening Jonathan with their guns. General Hugo Rodríguez (José Bódalo), accusing Jonathan of spying for Major Jackson, cuts off one of his ears as punishment, then shoots him dead on the road. It is a gruesome deed, which calls to mind Cormac McCarthy’s antiwestern novel Blood Meridian. In the brothel, General Hugo tells Maria that running away was a bad idea and threatens to cut one of her ears off. Women are commodities to both sides in this war, and Maria, of mixed race, who might ideally be a pacifying influence, is more despised than anyone. When Django comes into the brothel, Hugo seems elated and introduces him to the others – “This is Django, a thief, a murderer and an outlaw, but he means more to me than a brother.” Looking at Maria, Django tells Hugo that he brought his woman back, and that she was lonesome for him. “She’s not my woman… She’s anybody’s,” laughs Hugo.

After demonstrating his machine gun in the bar, Django and Hugo make a plan to hold up a Mexican fort (Charriba) where the Major will be stopping with his gold bullion. Nathaniel goes there every week with a wagonload of girls, and they use the wagon as a Trojan horse, killing many of the Mexican soldiers. Once back, Django says to divide the gold as they agreed. Hugo says he’ll make Django a high-ranking officer in his army but Django declines. Asking for the gold again, Hugo tells him he’ll give him double when he takes control of Mexico. Hugo puts the gold in a guarded room, promising Django that no one will steal it. Django gets involved in a fight with someone who wants Maria. The man is killed accidentally when he falls back onto a pick. Hugo thanks Django and says of Maria that she can’t take her eyes off Django. “Take her… She’s a present” he says, throwing her his way. Django says no thank you, and says he would rather have another one, a Mexican prostitute. Everyone laughs at Maria. Django takes the Mexican girl into a room where his coffin is and gets her to undress at the window as a distraction. He pulls the coffin up the stairs and then down a rickety ladder outside above where guards are standing, then he goes below again into the room where the gold bullion is via the chimney. Django fills the coffin with gold, taking what appears to be all of it. He blows a hole in one wall with dynamite as an escape route and rigs the machine gun to fire on the one door of the room. 

As Django is getting a horse and buggy together, Maria comes pointing a gun at him, insisting on being taken along. He agrees. They reach the dilapidated bridge where they first met and where Django rescued her. He stops and tells her to take the wagon to the next town. He tells her he can finally bury Django in that box. She tells him to leave the gold, and that it will bring heartache. She tells him that they can build a new life. When she says she loves him, Django tells her that love is something he can never feel again. A woman he loved was killed and he can never forget. He fears that with him Maria might be killed too. Suddenly Maria’s gun fires accidentally, the horse rears up, and the coffin slides down into comic-book quicksand, irretrievable. Maria comes to the bridge and tries to get Django out of the quicksand where he was trying to get the coffin. She is shot by the revolutionaries, who throw Django a rope, only to destroy his hands with the butt of a rifle for stealing the gold. As Maria predicted, the gold was cursed. 

Django is flawed especially in his treatment of Maria, his broken promise to protect her and handing her over to others; like a Shakespearean character, he is made to pay dearly for his flaws. Hugo and his men ride off in the direction of Mexico, where they are slaughtered by Major Jackson and the Mexican army. Back in the brothel, Django enters carrying the wounded Maria, asking Nathaniel if he can get her medical help. Django tells Maria that he must kill Jackson, and then they can start a new life together. He tells Nathaniel to tell Jackson that he’ll be waiting at the cemetery. When the Major comes and Nathaniel gives him Django’s message, the Major shoots Nathaniel. His neutrality, sometimes overtly evil, never helped him to survive. At the cemetery, Django bites off the trigger guard of his revolver, allowing for rapid fire. The gun leans on the grave of his dead loved one, Mercedes Zaro. Despite his mangled hands, he kills the Major and several of his men. He leaves the revolver, stained with blood, in a metal scroll on Zaro’s grave, an offering. 

What we have in Django is a town mostly deserted due to violence, and then in its very corrupt machinations, centring around the brothel, we have the makings of an incipient town. Violence in incipient towns is a common theme in westerns. To use terms by the 17th-century thinker Thomas Hobbes, these towns are halfway between a state of nature, where life is “nasty, brutish and short”, and the social contract, which requires men to relinquish some of their freedoms for the protection of civilised society. These men will not relinquish their state of freedom to a sheriff or society in general, placing the entirety of the incipient town in a nether-region of chaos. In relation to Marxian economy, the towns in their infancy are yet to work out what will be unequal power relations and accrue enough capital to dominate, a necessarily violent proto-capitalist state known as primitive accumulation. Men such as Major Jackson profit from this unstable state in the way of protection rackets, a theme which was taken up in Corbucci’s Minnesota Clay (1964). In the way that Major Jackson and his men hunt dark-skinned Mexicans for sport, we are reminded of the horrors of colonial conquest. The first primitive accumulation in colonial territory, which is normally the setting of a western, is always slaughtering the Natives and then herding them off coveted land. Thus, as empires expand, primitive accumulation is a double process. Marx compared the idea of primitive accumulation with the idea of original sin in theology.¹  

Colonialist scars run deep in Navajo Joe (1966), starring Burt Reynolds. When a man named Duncan (Aldo Sanbrell), who killed Joe’s wife, and his posse of scalpers-turned-bandits plan on robbing the town of Esperanza, conspiring with Dr. Lynne (Peter Cross) who married the banker’s daughter, Joe steps in to help. After the bandits take over a train, Joe overtakes it from them, driving the money safely to Esperanza. The citizens, unsure of how to approach this Native man, treat him with some disdain and suspicion when he offers to help them rid themselves of the bandits for a buck a head from every man in town for each one he kills. One of the citizens says with contempt that they don’t make bargains with Indians. Lynne’s wife Hannah (Valeria Sabel) seems to think that Joe can help them and sends her servant Estella (Nicoletta Machiavelli) to bring him back. When Joe returns, he demands to be made a sheriff, taking the sheriff’s badge by force. When the sheriff says that only Americans can be sheriff, Joe reminds him that his ancestors lived on this land going back many generations. 

Navajo Joe

Joe is captured and tortured by Duncan and his gang, but escapes. He is wounded in a showdown with Duncan in a Native burial ground. He takes his wife’s necklace off Duncan’s throat, and after Duncan wounds him, throws a tomahawk into the centre of his forehead. Joe’s horse walks without rider into Esperanza, carrying the townspeople’s money in saddlebags. When someone asks about Joe, another man says that it doesn’t matter, that the money is what is important. Estella sends Joe’s horse back to him, and of his wounds and his fate we know nothing. Some might assume Burt Reynolds as a Native would be comical, but it is in fact a performance with sympathy and grace which doesn’t fall into caricature like so many other Native roles played by white actors. At the time, Reynolds was not happy with being in the film, partially from believing that he had signed up to do a film with the more famous Sergio, Sergio Leone. After some time had passed, perhaps Reynolds realised that Corbucci was the more radical director of the two, and what a special effort this film was for its time. Leone never deconstructed racial types in the genre in the way that Corbucci dared to do. The only glaring fault in the film is that if Corbucci sought to be truly radical, he would have found himself a Native actor to play the role. If they couldn’t find a trained actor, they could have found someone who had a quality as an amateur. It certainly worked for the films of neorealismo. 

Il grande silenzio (The Great Silence, 1968) begins with a slow pan over a completely abstracted white which reveals itself to be snow. The white is an existential white, key to the film’s atmosphere of hopelessness and dread, and akin to a marked absence of morality and law. It is the silence of the protagonist and the silence of annihilation. Like the mud in Django, the snow is physically difficult to navigate, and the shots where characters slog through it at a painful pace, their horses chest-deep in snow, underscore the harshness of the landscape they inhabit, both physically and psychologically. Next, we see a lone rider, mute outlaw Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) on an equally abstracted white ground, engulfed in white, after which the camera pulls back to reveal a treed and mountainous landscape. Figures lie in wait with guns behind mounds of snow. One might note here how Silence wears a fur collar similar to Boris Karloff’s vampire in Mario Bava’s I tre volti della paura (Black Sabbath, 1963), which was an influence on this film. The ragged furs donned by many characters give a feel of vintage Russia, as Bava’s film is about a species of Russian vampire, a Wurdulak. 

The Great Silence

Boris Karloff in Black Sabbath

Silence, sensing danger, releases his gun from a wooden case and lays waste to his enemies. We discover that the men remaining, who know Silence, have a price on their heads and that bounty killers lie in wait for them when they come down from the mountains to get supplies. When Silence leaves the scene, we discover that he only kills in self-defence, and that there is a promise of a new governor perhaps removing the price on their heads. One of the men turns himself in, saying he’ll finally get a fair trial, and is shot dead by a bounty hunter, Charlie (Bruno Corazzari). One might note at this point that the western theme of bounty hunter as hero is completely subverted here. The Great Silence is a film which explores the social reasons inherent in crime, the number one reason here being of course dire poverty. It is pure revisionist western.

The new governor of Utah (Carlo D’Angelo) appoints as the new sheriff of Snow Hill Gideon Burnett (Frank Wolff) hoping to restore order. Next, we see bounty hunter Loco (Klaus Kinski) mercilessly hunting a man in the snow with a whip. After the man reveals the location of another wanted man, Loco promptly kills him. Waiting for a stagecoach to Snow Hill, Silence outdraws Charlie, who killed the son of a woman who begged Silence to kill him. After, the woman comes into the bar and spits on Charlie’s corpse. Loco comes to Pauline Middleton’s (Vonetta McGee) house looking for her husband. He takes her outside and points a gun at her head, telling her husband James to come out of hiding. After promising not to kill him, Loco does anyway, telling the widow to keep the corpse fresh in the snow. Pauline cries for help and a few prostitutes gather around. One looks at a man leering in a window, the banker and storeowner Pollicut (Luigi Pistilli), and yells that his blood is on his hands, since he charges interest in advances on reward money. Pollicut, not content with being just a petty-bourgeois store owner, also owns most of the town, and is the banker and justice of the peace, while only employing one person. The rest of the men in the area have been driven to being either the hunter or the hunted. 

The Great Silence

Marx noted on such a situation of disparity: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”² This is yet another example of an incipient town in the violent throes of primitive accumulation, which acts as a force of natural selection. It is a lawless, totally free market where human life simultaneously is expensive and of no value. If towns in westerns mostly live between Hobbes’ state of nature and the social contract, Snow Hill remains in an almost-complete state of nature. While someone taking over a town is portrayed as evil in The Great Silence, one might note the contrast when compared to Leone’s C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968), where Claudia Cardinale is portrayed as a hero for owning a large piece of a town even before the railroad reaches it, winning the Monopoly game before it even begins. Leone’s portrait feminises, and thus softens, capitalist conquest. The two directors often are compared to each other, but at heart Corbucci’s films are far more political and subversive than Leone’s. 

Pauline writes to Silence for help and the two become lovers, after Pollicut tries forcing himself on her when she tries to sell him her house. It is a rare scene of interracial lovemaking for its time, and the only love scene by Corbucci in his vast oeuvre. We discover (after Silence shows Pauline the scar across his throat) that Pollicut was responsible for disabling him and murdering his family. In the bar, Silence throws a match and then a cigar into Loco’s drink, trying to incite him to draw. Loco lets him know that he knows what Silence is doing. Loco gets someone to take his gun belt off, then he punches Silence in the face, so hard that Silence falls to the ground. Silence grabs a log, clubs Loco with it, who flies right through the wall to outside, and then shoots all his friends he was playing poker with. Silence throws Loco his gun, who with his bloody mouth looks like a great white vampire on a white backdrop of snow, another reference to Bava’s Black Sabbath. 

The Great Silence

Vampirism is an excellent metaphor for a completely lawless free market society. Marx compares the capitalist to a vampire in Das Kapital: “The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no ‘free agent’, that the time for which he is free to sell his labour power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him ‘so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.’”³ The film concludes brutishly with the large, muscular and ultra-white Kinski murdering the interracial couple. Pollicut and the sheriff now dead as well, a new capitalist has taken over the town. He executes en masse the desperate men who came in from the mountains with the promise of food. As Brecht so eloquently said in The Threepenny Opera, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” First comes the grub, then we can talk about morality. The conclusion of the film subverts the western norm of a tidy ending where good conquers evil. Here, Corbucci wishes to show us how history mostly has been, rather than how it should be.

Corbucci’s Zapata western Il mercenario (The Mercenary a.k.a. A Professional Gun, 1968) opens with Sergei “Polack” Kowalski (Franco Nero) attending a rodeo and recognising his old revolutionary friend Paco Roman (Tony Musante), who is now a rodeo clown. “Well, better a live clown than a dead hero,” he says of it. In flashback, the story begins with Paco as a peon in a silver mine. In Latin America, many have been forced into this state of slavery or semi-slavery, the mines being a key hub of such servitude. Speaking of forced labour in Peru, a system known as the mita, Patrick Greenfield notes how many Native Peruvians were subject to forced urbanisation and “then given the back-breaking task of carrying the daily quota of 25 bags of silver ore, each weighing around 45 kg, to the surface.”⁴ Many died from pneumonia and silicosis. To quote Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America, locals say that “You could build a silver bridge from Potosí to Madrid from what was mined here – and one back with the bones of those that died taking it out.”⁵ 

The Mercenary

Paco revolts and crosses orbits with Kowalski when Kowalski comes to the mine to pick up a shipment of silver, only to find the mine taken over by the revolutionaries. Kowalski helps Paco against an attack by the Mexican army for a fee. This establishes a working relationship between the Native Mexican and European through the course of the film, which in many ways resembles the relationship between Native Latin Americans and their colonial rulers. Kowalski offers aid, but only in order to exploit Paco as much as possible, and forces Paco into a permanent state of dependence. At one point, Paco asking Kowalski what revolution means to him, Kowalski says that it unites the rich (which are the head) with the poor (which are the bottom and other lower parts of the body), pointing to a naked woman beside Paco in bed. Kowalski says that as you can see, there is a whole back between the parts, so revolution is difficult. This kind of biological metaphor is powerful, often used by Marx himself, but Kowalski’s conclusions are more than a bit classist. He doesn’t acknowledge the barriers to education for an illiterate peon like Paco, instead thinking his superior education is inherently appropriate or deserved. The one thing that is accurate about the image though is in expressing the difficulty of revolution. The revolution is always flawed, which is a recurrent theme in the Zapata subgenre. 

The Mercenary

The Mercenary

In Vamos a matar compañeros (Compañeros, 1970), we again have the Zapata formula of a Mexican revolutionary with an opportunistic European, but it is a film far more complex in its relationships and themes than The Mercenary. Here we are met with Modesto Servando Irureta Goyena (“El Vasco”) (Tomas Milian) who is set to work as a revolutionary under General Mongo (José Bódalo), a supposed proletarian leader who has more than a share of self-interest, who brutally slaughters followers of rival leader Xantos, and who sends men into dangerous situations while staying safely far from the action. In town to meet with Mongo, arms dealer Yodlaf “Penguin” Peterson (Franco Nero) first crosses paths with young Xantistas who try to recruit him for their cause. They explain how their leader, Xantos (Fernando Rey), turned to the Americans for help with his cause, but because Xantos would nationalise Mexican oil production, threatening American interests, the Americans hold him in a jail in Yuma.

Compañeros

El Vasco and some men go up to Peterson’s room to find only one of the Xantistas left, a young woman named Lola (Iris Berben), pretending to be the lover of Peterson. As punishment for going with a white man, El Vasco cuts Lola’s hair with a knife. El Vasco, although he doesn’t too much care for Peterson, mockingly referring to him as “Penguin” because of his suit, accompanies Peterson to Yuma to try to free the pacifist professor Xantos, who is the only man who knows the combination to a safe that Mongo and his men have been trying to get into. They manage to free the professor, who is an advocate of non-violence. Not only having to worry about the Mexican army and Mongo, an old weed-smoking arms dealer associate John (Jack Palance) is also on their trail. 

Compañeros

John was left crucified after selling defective arms, and his pet hawk Marsha, his only friend, had to chew his hand off to get him free. American businessmen offered 10,000 dollars to John to kill Xantos. They brought him some “loco weed” as an advance, handing him a leather case filled with joints. Xantos, finally caught, is to be executed for murder and treason. Peterson and El Vasco save him, breaking a hole in the wall behind him and opening fire. They escape with a band of Xantistas. Peterson blows up part of the bridge to secure their escape. Xantos, however, judges the revolutionaries for freeing him from execution, saying that part of their ideals should be to not fear death. When one of the men says that violence must be met with violence, Xantos slaps him, then apologises. Ultimately, El Vasco and Peterson change their allegiances to the Xantistas, and after Xantos is killed by John, Peterson, who was going to leave town, turns around when he sees the army approaching, and cries for his compañeros to join him in the battle. This is a rare case in a Zapata western where a white man joins a cause for its own sake, and in this case, greatly outnumbered by the army and with fewer arms, what will probably be a lost cause. In the figure of Xantos, we have a case of ivory tower pacifism that lies in stark contrast to the gaping wounds of the revolution.

Endnotes