Hollywood Westerns Tame After European Version

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31128, 3 August 1966, Page 10

Hollywood Westerns Tame After European Version

(N.Z,P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) MADRID.

Europe’s new cowboy films, which are packing cinemas in Spain, make the Hollywood originals look tame and pallid.

The shooting, fighting and screaming seldom stops in a European western, while the hero kills mobs of outlaws with his bare hands. Most of the exterior scenes are filmed in Spain, where production costs are slightly lower and where there are many horses and landscapes resembling the American West.

“We have improved the American western by removing all the boring parts,” explains the Italian director, Sergio Corbucci, whose westerns earn a million dollars profit a year in Italy alone. “We have taken out the love scenes and all that talk, talk, talk.” The result is pure action which pins an audience to its seat from beginning to end. Fifteen miles south of Madrid, Corbucci is filming “A Dollar A Head,” a Dino de Laurentis production starring the United States actor, Burt Reynolds and the Italian actress, Nicoletta Machiavelli. Reynolds, playing an Indian half-breed, kills 30 men—--11 of them at one time in the film. There are 150 killings in the 114-page script. ' As in most European westerns, the hero of “Dollar A Head” is too busy fighting to pay much attention to women. “The hero loves shooting and money—shooting to get the money,” explains Corbucci. At the end, a European cowboy ham played by an I

American or Englishman, usually rides off into the sunset alone —a questionable character who seems to have deserved all the loot which fills his saddle bags. Miss Mjachiavelli said that

her role as a heroic Indian maid is fua because “there are no emotional conflicts.” The Indian, in a European western, is equal tn the white man in dignity, bravery and intelligence. Corbucci has made a few westerns in which white bounty hunters scalp Indians.

Forty-five westerns were made in Spain last year, most of them by joint ItalianSpanish companies. They are exported throughout Europe and are beginning to reach the United States. Corbucci, who has made such European box-office successes as “Minnesota Clay,” “Jango,” and “A Handful of Dollars,” is a good-natured heavy-weight, who arrives on the set at noon sporting a 10gallon straw hat

Worried assistants swarm around him to report that things are going badly. He embraces two at a time and smiles broadly. There is no camera set up, nor technicians fussing over Tight meters and lens filters. Corbucci simply tells everyone to get in place, calls for a cameraman and wonders what he is going to do next. On one particular day recently during the shooting of a scene at a railway station, : Corbucci’s cameraman put the camera in place and was ready to start as soon as the director had squinted through the lens. But Corbucci ordered the camera to be taken off the tripod and placed on the ground while he called for a horse and rider. With little sticks balancing the camera, the scene was shot through the horse’s legs—all in 15 minutes.

"You have got to have a sense of humour bust<mm," Mid Corbucci.