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Mexico, 1917. After assaulting a stagecoach with the help of his many sons, the bandit Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger) meets the Irishman John Mallory (James Coburn), an explosives expert who claims to be a silver prospector. The meeting is not the most amicable; nonetheless, Juan convinces the unwilling John to join him in his dream venture: robbing the prestigious bank of Mesa Verde. However, along the way, John escapes, and Juan finds him in Mesa Verde, where he learns that his beloved bank has been turned into a maximum-security prison where Pancho Villa's revolutionaries are imprisoned and executed. Miranda thus discovers the truth about Mallory: he is not a silver prospector, but rather a revolutionary terrorist who fled his homeland as he is wanted, seeking glory in Mexico among Pancho Villa's army. John himself will involve Juan in the revolt, led by Dr. Villega (Romolo Valli), which will oppose them against the army of regulars led by General Gunter Ruiz (Antoine Saint-John).
Alongside the so-called "Dollars Trilogy" and "Once Upon a Time in the West", "Duck, You Sucker" (1971) is counted among Sergio Leone's westerns, despite the rather atypical setting: it is not the canonical nineteenth-century Wild West (Texas, Arizona, ...), but the Mexico bloodied by the Zapatista revolution. Apart from this peculiarity, the film exhibits all the characteristics of a Leone western: remarkable duration (162 minutes), picturesque landscapes, confrontation between leading actors (with extraordinary performances by Steiger and Coburn), plot twists, and a soundtrack by the incomparable Ennio Morricone (unforgettable is the theme of "Sean Sean", which accompanies Mallory's visions and flashbacks). Yet, the film rises a notch above the already impressive spaghetti-westerns of the Sixties, further proof of the director's artistic maturation, closely linked to the historical transformations of 1968.
"Duck, You Sucker" exudes the rebellious spirit of the era, portraying its pros and cons, noble causes, and contradictions. Leone's leftist political inclinations and anti-conformist spirit are well-known: this is immediately apparent from the first scene, in which Juan pretends to be a poor simpleton seeking a ride to infiltrate the stagecoach he plans to assault. During the journey, the passengers, snobbish and racist aristocrats, mock him while greedily eating in his face: memorable are the close-ups of mouths, filmed while they gorge and unjustly gossip about Juan and the peons, the Mexican proletarians. It goes without saying that these sequences contain a subtle critique of consumerism and its related society. Moreover, doesn't the reactionary General Gunter Ruiz, standing stiff and equipped with a tank, resemble a Nazi commander?! Meanwhile, the contradictions of '68 emerge in the scene where a furious Juan bursts out at John that revolutions originate from "those who know how to read, who read books and then tell those who can't read what they have to do", only to result in nothing: in a period like the year the film was released, when revolts and social transformations were the order of the day, the director demonstrates with lucidity and awareness that at the base of revolutions there can be incongruities since they are often theorized and hatched by intellectual minds (Dr. Villega in the film) and then fought by the poor.
Moreover, the character of John Mallory is emblematic: how many terrorists of the Years of Lead can be identified in the character played by Coburn? A wanted demolitionist, who fled his homeland without completing his mission, hence dissatisfied and in continuous search of himself through violence, in the name of a cause whose righteousness is uncertain; somewhat like the disillusioned and angry members of '68 who gave rise to terrorism in the Seventies.
Acute and reflective more than ever, Sergio Leone creates an apt parallelism between the era in which the film was made and the one it is set in to demonstrate that, as the saying goes, the truth lies in the middle. And it is also thanks to this message that "Duck, You Sucker", 36 years after its appearance in theaters, is far from outdated.
An intelligent film, as well as engaging and enjoyable. An indisputable masterpiece.
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