Tinto Brass
Yankee

FROM YOUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT HAPPY PIPPO. September 4, 2007, Venice Film Festival, retrospective "Spaghetti western".

When he doesn't have to play the character of the "Great Pig", Tinto Brass reveals himself to be a true man of cinema, passionate, sincere, competent, and humble. Invited on September 4 to talk about his only western, "Yankee, the American" (1965), unlike others, he did not disavow the film even though, paradoxically, at the time he removed his signature as it was brutally manipulated by the production. Brass's idea was to make a film of ideograms, where the detail represented the whole. To show a horse, a close-up of an ear or a hoof was enough and so on...

This is only partially preserved in "Yankee", in its best moments; the plot is essentially the same old story: a stranger (Philippe Leroy) arrives in a village dominated by the gang of a tyrannical Mexican, Concho, (Adolfo Celi). Needless to say, Yankee, after various ups and downs, will defeat the gang, with a final duel between him and Concho (not the usual duel; no deguellos, no close-ups). Let's leave aside the plot because at this point the fixed formula of the descendants of "A Fistful of Dollars" can be seen as "variations on a theme of", box-office implications regardless. Brass was and is an author, however one wants to judge him. A personal author, raised at the Paris Cinemateque and under the guidance of Alberto Cavalcanti; an expert in light games and language, a serene and playful face of the nouvelle vague. In "Yankee" there is the partial attempt to bring comic strips to film, which was done freely and substantially in the following and certainly beloved by Brass "Deadly Sweet", where there was collaboration with Guido Crepax to create the mix between image and drawings and think of the storyboard as the partition of comic layouts. Naturally, "Yankee" turns out to be a partially successful attempt, a film of mediocre setup, although supported by the excellent dialogues of the great screenwriter Giancarlo Fusco, the beautiful lighting by Alfio Contini (dominance of Prussian blue and red and orange neon) and the decent music by Nini Rosso.

Memorable, even if "alone" in the midst of the plot, are certain scenes, like the dazzling red light illuminating Yankee tied to the wheel while Concho's woman clings to him at the moment when the bandit reveals he has realized that the woman had been to bed with the gunslinger, or the scorpion torture seen from the ground through a glass base to shoot it from below. Or even the Mexican-style paintings, all self-portraits of Concho, which Yankee will scatter throughout the village; one of the ironic moments in a film still underlined by moderate irony. Sometimes, even when rewatching a minor film like this one in the director's career, it seems that Brass never really took himself seriously as an author nor fully believed in his sometimes considerable potential; caught as he was between the lashing out at costumes first and, in the senile phase, the unbuckling of corsets later. Or perhaps he is just a small master who couldn't have given more than that. Returning to the film, Leroy's performance is just decent as it is out of character (he is dressed like Fonda in "Once Upon a Time in the West"); Adolfo Celi hams it up in heavy makeup, fresh off the triumphs of "Thunderball". A great actor here at minimal performance, still adequate. Effective supporting actors like the usual Jacques Herlin or Osiride Peverello. Two women, beautiful babes (after all, we're still talking about Tinto Brass), simple figures with curvaceous flesh.

Detail of utmost importance; Brass mentioned Tarantino only once. A record, considering everybody fills their mouth with it.