Wednesday, June 22, 2022

China 9, Liberty 37

 China 9, Liberty 37, a film title that seems to be a sporting events score, is a curious and obscure 1978 Western directed by Monte Hellman.  (Notwithstanding its American director, the movie is a Spaghetti Western shot with a mostly Italian cast somewhere in the deserts of Andalusia.)  All of Hellman's films are "curious and obscure" and so this description doesn't really distinguish China 9, Liberty 37 from his other pictures, most notably two strange Westerns shot back-to-back in 1966 and both starring Jack Nicholson, Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting.  Although these films have a cult following, they aren't very good and it's impossible to determine if their pretentious and nihilistic vacuity is by intentional design or merely incidental to the tiny budgets on which the two movies were made.  Hellman directed a few other pictures and achieved a cult following, as well, with Two Lane Blacktop (1971), a bleak, humorless and existentialism-inflected road race movie starring Hellman's alter-ego and muse, Warren Oates (along with James Taylor with some songs credited to Joni Mitchell).  China 9 features Warren Oates as well -- ultimately, Hellman made three pictures with the actor including Cockfighter released (the term is a misnomer because it's doubtful that this picture was ever really shown anywhere) in 1974.  Hellman who died in 2021, worked on a number of low-budget horror films for TV and, even, made  one picture that I (cautiously) admire, the extremely idiosyncratic Road to Nowhere also not really released in 2010 -- I think the picture went straight to video. 

The Italian title for China 9 is more lurid and better represents to exploitation aspects of the movie -- it was shown in Italy and Europe under the name Amore, Piomba e Furore (Love, Lead, and Fury).  At heart, Hellman was a Roger Corman alumnus who never really ascended above the trashy stuff that he was contracted to turn into drive-in movies.  China 9 is a lurid Western crossbred with soft-core porn -- the movie features lots of nudity starring Jenny Agutter, a British-Irish starlet, who appears in about half of her shots naked, many of them involving stiff and absurd-looking love-making with the Italian heart-throb Fabio Testi.  (Testi is so absurdly pretty that he makes Agutter, a glamor girl herself, seem frumpy -- this guy also spends a lot of his screen-time naked or half-naked; with the heroine, the camera spends several minutes inspecting the gunfighter hero, bare-chested, chopping wood or bathing.  (People do a lot of bathing in this movie since it's a way to get the characters stripped down for the delectation of the audience.)   About half of the movie is pretty good in the misogynistic and bitter style of a subpar Peckinpah imitator.  (In fact, "Bloody"Sam has a cameo role in the film -- he plays a dime-novel writer who tries to enlist the gunfighter, Clayton Drumm, Testi's character, in his enterprises.)  Unlike Hellman's other Westerns, the movie actually has a cast of about fifteen speaking parts and some of the shots are nicely staged -- there are some rudimentary town sets, mostly unpeopled but faintly plausible, and, even, a Spanish church pressed into service as a Mexican mission.  In the middle of the film, the picture deviates into Fellini territory when the characters get involved with a traveling circus, a painfully impoverished troupe that seems to consist of unattractive players who spend most of their time hanging limply upside-down.  (Exploitation reigns here as well -- there's a dwarf and a woman in a skin-tight body stocking who impersonates Lady Godiva.)  The film's plot is pretty good.  A vicious gunfighter is about to be hanged.  (Cue the little kids waiting for the execution after the manner of Peckinpah).  The gunfighter, Clayton Drumm, speaking with an unintelligible Italian accent (he seems to have learned his part phonetically) is spared execution, although the hangman does get to kill a couple of inscrutable Chinese coolies (why and for what is never explained).  Some bad guys, RR moguls, send Drumm out to murder a settler who lives with his beautiful wife in the middle of nowhere.  The settler, Matthew, is played by Warren Oates and the sodbuster's much younger lissome wife is acted by Jenny Agutter.  As in the great Once Upon a Time in the West, the vicious railroad execs need to get Matthew off his homestead -- Matthew has found a vein of coal and plans to sell this resource to the railroad at premium prices.  Drumm likes Matthew and decides to defy his bosses and not kill the settler.  Drumm's also intrigued by Matthew's wife who he has seen bathing in a frothy creek somewhere near the pioneer's little spread.  Drumm and Matthew's wife have sex, in fact, several times in the movie, and when the sodbuster, himself an old gunfighter, discovers the couple making love, a fight ensues.  Katherine, the wife, stabs Matthew and beats him over the head with a rolling pin (I'm not kidding), leaving him for dead when she flees with the handsome hired gun.  Matthew recovers sufficiently to enlist his four brothers as a posse pursuing Drumm and his errant wife.  Most of the brothers get gunned down, there's some scenes in a picturesque brothel, and the circus is in town and selling a medicinal concoction made with cocaine -- this leads to some interesting drunk scenes.  Matthew kidnaps Katherine and Drumm, somewhat lacking in gallantry seems to just ride off. When Matthew returns to his humble abode, he's ambushed by a half-dozen railroad gunmen.  There's a protracted battle in which Drumm arrives just in the nick of time to slaughter most of the bad guys.  By this time, Matthew and Katherine are working as team -- she loads his six-shooter for him.  The movie ends with Matthew and Katherine riding their buckboard  out of the desolate cleft in the rocks where the homestead is located with the cabin and barn set afire and burning spectacularly behind them.  

Some of the picture isn't half-bad.  A scene with Matthew's brothers features some old songs and is sentimental -- an imitation of some of Peckinpah's sequences of this sort which, in turn, harken back to John Ford.  There's some gritty dialogue of the kind that would not be tolerated today:  could an actor really get away with observing of the women in the story:  "If they didn't have cunts, we'd put a bounty on them."? But the movie is negligible and peters out in its violent second half.  There's a neat song by Ronee Blakly.

China 9, Liberty 37 is a sign post pointing the way to two hamlets and, helpfully, providing travelers with the mileage to those places as well. 

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