Spaghetti Westerns by Howard Hughes Read Free Book Online Page B

featured an extended, musical, montage-driven duel at the climax. And as if that wasn’t innovative enough, Van Cleef had a pistol with a 12-inch barrel, a Derringer hidden up his sleeve and an arsenal of pistols and rifles hidden in his horse’s blanket roll, which later influenced the gadget-led ‘Sabata’ movies.
The Verdict
     
    The untrustworthy partnership between the bounty-hunter heroes has never been bettered, the arid Almerian landscapes never looked more beautiful and the Italian Western was never the same again.
The Return of Ringo (1965) 
     
    Directed by : Duccio Tessari
    Music by : Ennio Morricone
    Cast : Giuliano Gemma (Ringo), George Martin (Paco Fuentes), Fernando Sancho (Esteban Fuentes), Lorella De Luca (Hally Brown)
94 minutes
     

Story
     
    Following the Civil War, a young Union captain called Montgomery Brown (known as ‘Ringo’ to his friends) returns to his home town of Mimbres. He finds that a group of Mexican bandits – led by brothers Paco and Esteban Fuentes – have taken over the town and the sheriff is powerless to stop the injustice. Ringo finds out that Paco has designs on his wife, Hally, and that the Mexicans are also responsible for his father’s death. The Mexicans are living in Ringo’s house and are holding his wife and daughter prisoner. Paco plans to marry Hally and pretends that Ringo has been killed in battle. Ringo disguises himself as a Mexican peasant, goes into town and shelters in the house of a florist named Morning Glory. Eventually Ringo contacts his wife, but is captured and has his gun hand crippled by Paco. Plotting revenge, he gathers a small group of allies, including the florist, an Indian medicine man and the cowardly, drunken sheriff. Threatening Hally that her daughter will be harmed, Paco convinces her to marry him. But during the ceremony Ringo returns – not in his beggar’s rags, but in his true guise, his cavalry uniform. While a dust storm rages, Ringo and his accomplices rout Paco and the Mexicans, and save his wife and daughter.
Background
     
    Notoriously economical when it came to deploying its resources, the Italian film industry flourished by re-using sets, costumes and actors (not to mention plots) throughout any given ‘genre explosion’. The Return of Ringo epitomises this. It was made by the same director and production team responsible for the first ‘Ringo’ film ( A Pistol for Ringo ) with the same cast and locations. But to give the impression that the sequel is far removed from Pistol , they all play different characters (for example, George Martin plays the villainous Paco rather than the sheriff). All except Giuliano Gemma, who reprises his role as the young hero, Ringo. Even then, his characterisation is only vaguely related to the original Ringo – instead of a young outlaw, he’s a cavalry captain returning from the Civil War.
    This time Tessari is more specific with his reference points. There are allusions to Howard Hawks’s Westerns (in particular Rio Bravo [1959], with its drunken sheriff and ragtag bunch of misfits facing tyranny) and Ringo’s ride through the desert at the film’s opening recalls John Ford’s cavalry movies, but Tessari’s sources go back a lot further than the late forties. The Return of Ringo is basically a rewrite of Homer’s The Odyssey , the mythical story of Odysseus’s voyage home after the Trojan War. For Odysseus read Ringo, for Penelope read Hally. Paco Fuentes and his gang represent the suitors, jostling for Penelope’s hand. The Trojan War may have become the Civil War, but Tessari intelligently Westernises the story, creating a film of power and complexity.
    And not only that, for Tessari also cleverly parodied A Fistful of Dollars , the most popular Spaghetti scenario of the time – the irony being that, to everyone in town, Ringo (disguised as a beggar) is a stranger, when in reality he’s a local. Only at the end, on Paco and Hally’s wedding day, does Ringo reveal his true