China 9, Liberty 37

A frustrating curiosity, China 9, Liberty 37 (1978) is an ambitious spaghetti-western shot in Almeria, Spain by Monte Hellman.  Parts of the film are remarkably good and, as a Western, the movie is, by and large, successful and true to the genre.  But the film is flawed in various, almost inexplicable, ways.  The movie stars an unbelievably pretty Italian actor, Fabio Testi.  Testi is a sex-object and filmed shirtless as often as possible.  He seems a little too skinny and indolent, too much of a male odalisque for his role, that of a hired gunslinger working as an assassin for the villainous Great Southern Railway.  But the casting is effective because Testi's antagonist is played by the great Warren Oates looking particularly crestfallen and grizzled in this film.  Oates plays a former gunfighter himself, living with his much younger and beautiful wife, is a cabin marooned in a hollow in the badlands.  Testi, who has been condemned to be hanged, is pardoned on the condition that he agrees to execute Oates (and his wife) so that the railroad can seize possession of the sodbuster's property.  Testi rides to Oates' claim, drinks some whisky with the man, and grows to like him.  Even more appealing to the handsome gunslinger is Oates' comely wife, played by Jenny Agutter, and first seen bathing naked in a stream downhill from an impressive travertine deposit and hot springs.  Testi likes Oates a lot; but he likes Oates' wife even more.  The sodbuster has three brothers and a brother-in-law, apparently, living in the vicinity and they come for a visit -- the picnic involves lots of shooting at bottles and a sing-along and this part of the film is convincingly staged.  Of course, the assassin ends up having sex with the sodbuster's wife.  Oates confronts her and, while he is beating her, she stabs him in the back and, then, knocks him out with a rolling pin.  The adulterous wife thinks she has killed her abusive husband and so she flees into the wilderness, tracking down her gunfighter boyfriend and asking him to take her to Liberty.  (The odd name for the film comes from a sign in the desert showing distances to the hamlets of China and Liberty respectively.)  Warren Oates' recovers to some degree from his injuries and with his kin as posse hunts down his errant wife.  There's a gun-battle in a small village and the sod-buster recovers his wife, responding to some misogynistic abuse from his little brother (who keeps trying to rape the woman) with the exordium:  "If they didn't have cunts, there'd be a bounty on each and every one of them."  Meanwhile a number of assassins have been dispatched to kill the handsome gunfighter, apparently to punish him for reneging on his contract to kill Oates.  The fleeing lovers encounter a circus, complete with contortionists and dwarves, there's a gun battle in a brothel, and, at one of the hotels, the characters encounter Sam Peckinpah, no less, playing the role of frontier novelist.  Peckinpah wants to purchase the rights to the handsome gunslinger's life story, a commodity that the man refuses angrily to sell.  "My life is not for sale," the gunfighter says, to which Peckinpah, replies bitterly (in his own voice, I think):  "It's only a question of who pays and when."  A final gunfight at the sodbuster's ranch brings all the parties together and there is a satisfying showdown between Warren Oates and the pretty-boy gunslinger who has seduced his wife.  In summary, the film sounds pretty damn good -- and it is pretty good.  But there are awful flaws:  first, the characters all speak in polyglot accents; Testi in particular is very hard to understand -- most Italian films of this kind were dubbed.  But Hellman seems to have shot this movie with live sound and the strangely clashing accents and poor English spoken by Testi challenges the ear.  Second, the movie has one of the worst soundtracks I've ever heard -- there's some plaintive harmonica in imitation of a Morricone score, but totally vapid and, then, a sort of calliope kling-klang with accordion that sounds like third-rate circus music.  This is the score for the various horse-chases and the ambush scenes.  Finally, Hellman stages long and totally self-indulgent sex scenes between his pretty-boy gunslinger and Jenny Agutter.  Hellman is fascinated by a certain kind of late sixties Sissy Spacek - Goldie Hawn kind of flower child -- these women populate all of his films.  In this movie, Hellman has not one but two naked women of this type (there's a hapless whore in the brothel who gets naked only to be shot accidentally).  This type of female dates the film -- she's exactly like the hippie girls in Billy Joe or Easy Rider -- and seems too frail for the Old West.  Furthermore, Hellman clearly gets some kind of charge out of staging very long and elaborate sex scenes -- it feels icky, voyeuristic, and doesn't add anything to the film.  It's too bad that these obvious defects mar the movie because it has some wonderful scenes -- a shot of Warren Oates trying helplessly to extract a knife from between his shoulder-blades is both excrutiating and very funny.  A scene in which a widow glares down angrily at a grave while the posse of men riding to avenge her husband's death sweeps out of the canyon onto the prairie is beautiful.  The landscapes are gorgeous and the gun fights well-executed.  At the end of the film, the characters depart the badlands hollow on a wagon, a shot that seems to be a cliché until we see that the hero has set fire to his cabin and barn, the two structures blazing fiercely in the background.  I'm ambivalent about the final love ballad by Ronee Blakely just as I'm ambivalent about lots of aspects of this intriguing but deeply flawed film.