Where the classical Hollywood western offered filmmakers the opportunity to erect, confront or deconstruct the myths about the creation of the American West, spaghetti westerns function as their warped, foreign counterparts, allowing Italian directors to refract these cinematic reflections through a funhouse mirror from the other side of the pond. In these films, where America is captured not through epic grandeur of Monument Valley but the dusty, barren vastness of the southern Iberian Peninsula, the brutal history of greed and violence of a nation is often expressed more forcefully and disdainfully than even the bleakest of America’s revisionist westerns.
Released in 1976, late in the cycle of both revisionist and spaghetti westerns, Enzo G. Castellari’s Keoma plays less like the last gasp of dying genre than a final barbaric yawp—a cri de coeur against the inescapable moral decrepitude of a country built on genocide and slavery, forever trying and forever failing to escape the sins of its past unscathed. Set soon after the end of the Civil War, Castellari’s film almost immediately takes the form of a biblical parable, with Keoma, an ex-Union gunslinger played by a long-haired, ragged-bearded Franco Nero, returning to his hometown to find it plague-ridden and run by the fascist ex-Confederate soldier Caldwell (Donald O’Brien) with the help of Keoma’s three racist half-brothers: Butch (Orso Maria Guerrini), Lenny (Antonio Marsina) and Sam (Joshua Sinclair).
Keoma literalizes the “Brother against brother” slogan that was frequently used to describe border state families whose loyalties were divided between the Union and Confederacy. This, and its obvious allusions to Cain and Abel, is even further complicated by Keoma’s half-Native American blood, which, in the eyes of his brothers, makes Keoma not only an illegitimate bastard but less human and undeserving of the love their father William (William Berger) continues to give him.
Keoma, however, is less interested in teasing out the specificities of this fraternal conflict than in the symbolic fracturing of America it represents. The Reconstruction Era is typically represented as a time of hope and rejuvenation, but the unabated rottenness of the town, and, by extension, the country, can be found in virtually every frame of Castellari’s film. In a shot that recalls The Searchers, Keoma is first seen through an open doorway, but unlike Ford’s film, it is not shot from within a welcoming homestead but through the broken screen door of an abandoned shack. Meanwhile, William’s farmhand George (Woody Strode), a Black man whom Keoma was always close to, is now an alcoholic who responds to Keoma’s statement about being free by saying “That freedom wasn’t worth much.” He’s no longer a slave, but his situation isn’t radically different than when he was.
Even the land itself is indicative of the moral rot that continues unabated even after the War Between the States has ended. Polluted wells are the cause of the plague and the town as a whole is haggard and weather-beaten, every ounce of promise and prosperity of the post-war years already fully drained out of it. Caldwell’s iron grip on the town, and his refusal to let anyone in or out of the town without his permission, speaks to the regressive forces that are still very much at play. “The South Will Rise Again” was a Confederate rallying cry after they lost the war, but Castellari’s film captures the insidious ways that their ideals lived on after their surrender. That these themes clearly echo Italy’s own failure to expel fascism after World War II—in 1976, they were at the height of the social and political violence of the Years of Lead—only further solidifies how well the film works on both literal and metaphorical planes.
With its melancholy, often folky score by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis and its cynical vision of the American West, Keoma is reminiscent of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller in more ways than one. Admittedly the De Angelis brothers’ score clearly seems to be aping Leonard Cohen at least a few times, and its lyrics, which often refer directly to what’s happening on screen, are unintentionally funny. But, man, does it ever set the perfectly mournful tone that’s perfectly in tune with the downer western yarn Castellari is spinning.
For all its downbeat cynicism, however, Keoma is also a wildly entertaining film, with Nero’s hero running amok, creating trouble and racking up bodies like a sharpshooting Cowboy Jesus who’s willing to die for the sins of his brothers, unless he can kill them first. As in his poliziotteschi films, like the equally wonderful The Big Racket, Castellari has a distinctive knack for filming action sequences, creating tension through sharp editing rhythms and unusual framing of bodies. Here, the director also uses a good deal of slow-motion—whether one sees it as an homage to or a rip-off of Sam Peckinpah is in the eye of the beholder, but it lends an undeniably epic sweep to a film that’s already full of big swings and bigger ideas. As one of the darker, more anguished spaghetti westerns, Keoma packs a pretty powerful emotional punch and also represents an avenue that the genre, with few exceptions like Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence, rarely went down.
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