Spaghetti westerns do not appeal to me, but I felt like reviewing this one because it has some historical and other camp values. For acute example, it was the last to be filmed spaghetti in Almeria. I have been there and a lot of the site is all broken down now, though some is doing its best to be a tourist attraction. There were other films too like the Dollars trilogy of Sergio Leone.
As a Monte Hellman picture, this was his final Western. He is accredited both as a director and a producer, although some European prints have Tony Brandt as the other director. Even for his surname, Brandt sounded rather Anglo American, he was actually from Lazio, and if I’m not wrong, he worked as a second unit director. As you might be aware, Hellman attended Stanford for drama, and UCLA for film, and he linked up with legendary B-movie filmmaker Roger Corman in the late 50s. His body of work (really a classy expression, body of work) has amassed a following, heck, or at least has a reputation for being artistic. He collaborated a lot with Jack Nicholson, directing those two moody/oddball Westerns The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind in the mid-60s, and then in 1971 he directed with probably his best-known actor Warren Oates in Two-Lane Blacktop. And in 1978 he chose Oates again for the Italian-Spanish Western China 9, Liberty 37.
Interestingly, Oates primarily focused on Westerns even though he worked in other genres, though Western features were mostly for television which is a product of the era he did. He was in just about all Western TV series that you can think of at one point or the other. His first major motion picture western was playing a Corporal in the 1959 Clint Walker film Yellowstone Kelly and that seemed to be the end of that, but then he struck it lucky with Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country in 1962. You will certainly not forget him as the raven tattooed on one of the five murderous and disgusting white trash named Hammond brothers.
He worked with Peckinpah for Major Dundee and of course, was unforgettable in The Wild Bunch and he was Alfredo Garcia whose head was in such demand in 1974. He was in The Shooting and he was also in Peter Fonda’s Western The Hired Hand. He was the rough nut in Barquero in 1970 and in fact, Hellman mentions Barquero. It was a remarkable career in Westerns in a period when the genre was rapidly going down He was the last person to do a Western. He died in 1982 of a heart attack at a mere 53.
The second star is Fabio Testi. One good aspect about this spaghetti movie is that the dialogue was not post-dubbed, though the sound effects were stupidly loud clip-clops and the like. The downside of that is Signor Testi’s Italian accent when speaking English is so strong (and the sound is so poor) that now and then you have to “surprise” yourself. Testi gained notoriety in 1970 for his part in Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Before China 9 he had featured in 12 spaghetti westerns, 5 of which he had a leading role in. Testi’s hat is somewhat reminiscent of Buck Jones.
As for the sound, it is pretty awful on China 9. Italian filmmakers tended to use post-dubbing on everything, allegedly it was because Cinecittà was underneath the flight path of the Fiumicino airport, and when they recorded directly with boom mikes onto other things (at least if this picture is anything to go by) they were terrible at it. In addition, a lot of the time, the music overpowers the speech.
The music is pitifully low as well, pop-like 70’s ballads strangled through the microphones and slushy ‘film music’ probably the worst kind of elevator muzak. And of course, we have some very ghastly wailing harmonica in the first scenes as a hangman is on his way to China (population 132) and he’s pretending to play harmonica, rather unsuccessfully. All this ‘music’ is credited ‘debited, I’d say’ as Donaggio and Rubinstein did. Still, at least it’s not as bad as Morricone. The best musical part came when the actors had a rather drunken sing-along at the dinner table outside the ragged ranch. They weren’t the best of singers but why should they be? And it adds charm to the scene.
Shocking to see what some movies people consider ‘romantic’. Anyhow, we have Jenny Angutter playing Oate’s wife as the rest of the cast who sometimes tries out an ‘Irish’ accent but happens to fail to mask her cut-glass vowels. Her character is quite fascinating for the 1970s when things such as nude scenes were considered daring. Her character shifts mid-film as she backstabs her husband and runs away with glamor-boy Testi, but is reluctant in the end to reconcile with her husband who somehow survived her dagger and treachery. “I ain’t gonna hurt you. Not no more,” says some curious husband. Quite a statement huh? Perhaps not the couple never had a chance, romance or otherwise. They certainly raised the bar on ‘romance’.
We also have Sam Peckinpah, as a dime novelist, saying that everyone has “the lies we all crave” and helping himself to a cigar from a blind man with little care. He sometimes dabbled in acting but not that frequently in Hollywood, and so it is known. He had been a bank teller in Wichita, a bar patron in Junior Bonner, both of which were left uncredited, and rather unforgettable as the undertaker in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. There existed a rich tradition of a dime novelist/ observer being apportioned some role in Westerns one thinks of Saul Rubinek’s WW Beauchamp in Unforgiven, Hurd Hatfield’s Moultrie in The Left-Handed Gun, and of course Bob Dylan in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. I admired Sam’s headgear so much in China 9.
The title is itself peculiar. Perhaps the peculiarity was the only concern. It is really what is indicated at the post which appears in the first frame, which says it is nine miles to China and thirty-seven miles to Liberty. The background is located in the southern part of the state of Texas. Liberty is in Missouri and China is, ahem, in China. But that’s spaghetti westerns for you. It was called Amore, Piombo e Furore in Italy (Love, Lead and Fury). It sounded even more. That’s a nice term.
I found those matters interesting. There are some quotations from old westerns like the scaffold, the condemned man spinning cards into a hat in the jail, the scene in the whore house, an evil railroad company hirings killers, and a derringer in a boot.
There is a dwarf and a circus. For some strange reason, the Italians could not create a Western without using acrobats.
And a Sharps plays an important part, and, oh, every once in a while, when Testi is nightshirting blue and wearing his blue shirt, he looks a little like Tom Selleck when he’s using it.
Regardless, the movie is overly lengthy (even in this cut version, which is preferable although some of the cuts are a bit rough) and exceedingly slow. But that’s Hellman. But I’m afraid he worked that way. He did not go for shoot ‘em-up action, more for ‘atmosphere’ styles. Sigh.
But for China 9, and I do undertake to be fair to it (not always succeeding), it is a visual sprightliness far better than the run of spaghetti westerns. Of course, that period was extreme for that specific genre, the late sixties, then they gave way to those early 70s slightly more mainstream Terence Hill type junk which were even worse in my opinion. By 1978 the super 80s show was long overdue and in fact, some reverse engineering had taken place whereby spaghetti-influenced american westerns were being made the aforementioned Barquero was an example. By the time of China 9, the spaghetti western had nothing more to say, and maybe thouigh this is stretching and we do not want to be elitist, do we, the fact that Tesi and Agutter walk away from the dime novelist and his myth making suggests that the western as myth was also gone. (It wasn’t, of course) China 9 has some decent acting and makes a below-average attempt at mood and subtlety here and there. I still do not think it is a good film or anything like that but well, you know, we have definitely seen worse.
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