Il buono, il brutto, il male chauvinist

Eli Wallach as Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966).

One of my favorite shots of the whole movie.

Writing this, I just realized that Eli Wallach is still alive. At least according to IMDb and Wikipedia. The guy is like a century old! When he was born Abraham Lincoln was still just a twinkle in his father's eye, and Europe had not yet converted to Christianity. He's like that old!

Just a thought.

So I watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo., 1966) with my beau yesterday, and it's as amazingly fudging awesome as ever. The obligatory goose bumps all over my arms when I heard the first tunes of "Ecstacy of Gold" teasing in the far background of the soundtrack, where of course present.

But I actually just wanted to share one tiny little observation with you all: If you are really, really perceptive... you might just spot a few women in this film! I know, it sounds totally ridiculous and unnecessary. But I can, off the top of my head, mention a total of three women that I managed to spot. Chronologically, here they are:

1)
In the very beginning, there is the wife and mother of a family. Remember her? She does of course not have any lines of dialogue. That's not necessary for putting the food on the table, is it? Apart from feeding her husband and the strange visitor, she faints when family is suddenly decimated.
...That's, like, it.

Woman 1.1

Woman 1.2

2)
The Bad One, Angel Eyes, needs to extract some information from... some woman. The only way to get that stupid bitch to talk is, of course, to beat her up a bit. It's her own fault, really - not being clever enough to sell out her lover before getting physically abused. Duh.

Look! Her character has a name. And several lines.


Maria: Is that you Bill? Bill!
Angel Eyes: Go on talking about Bill Carson.

 Woman 2.1

 Woman 2.2

Woman 2.3

3)
The Ugly, Tuco, and his men are looking for The Good One ("Bloooondiiiiieeeee!!!"), and a woman dares to speak up when a man is pressed for information:

- You leave him be, He doesn't know who rides every horse!"
- You stay quiet, old hen!

And of course, she had no clue about anything. The man with a gun in his face did have information. Stupid old hen, indeed.

Woman 3.1

Now, don't get angry with me. I realize that women were pretty much either breeding stock or prostitutes in the Wild West era, and to portray that society as egalitarian would be revisionism. But I don't really buy that there was only one woman in each village either, and that all women were peripheral in their existence.

And YES, I can watch these kinds of films as entertainment only, and I do. I don't need to analyze everything, especially not something as tiring as the portrayal of women in classical movies. But why is it a tiresome subject? Because it's such an obvious issue! You can not NOT notice the skewed gender roles in popular culture. But I'll leave it for now. Cheers, darlings of mine.




The theatrical trailer, where Lee Van Cleef is branded ugly. That's kind of mean.*


* Copy-pasta from IMDb's trivia page:


In the theatrical trailer, Angel Eyes is "The Ugly" and Tuco "The Bad," which is the reverse of their designations in the actual film. This is because the Italian title translated into English is actually The Good, the Ugly, the Bad, not The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and the Italian trailer had "The Ugly" and "The Bad" in that order. When the trailer was transferred to English, The Ugly and The Bad were not reversed to coincide with the altered title, causing the incorrect designations. 

Daisies (1966)

Sedmikrásky aka Daisies
Director: Vera Chytilová
Czechoslovakia 1966
74 min
Starring: Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, among others.

Trivia: Was banned by Czech authorities, since it was considered "depicting the wanton" in a Communist country.

Nobody understands Marie I and Marie II - They don't even understand who is who.

This film may be difficult to review, since it has no linear story whatsoever and the only characters have no history, future or meaning - they don't even have their own names, they are both named Marie (Cerhová and Karbanová - I dare you to figure out who is the blonde and who is the brunette, I tried and failed). But I will do my best to write a review, since this is an awesome movie. People will disagree violently with me, because this is a film you either love or hate.

Director Vera Chytilová.

The film begins with a montage of world war film clips, presumably from WWII. What is important to remember when viewing this film is the politics of the 1960's, which the opening sequence surely wants to remind us of. The previous two generations of the 1960's youth had experienced a world war each, and the 1960's did not look any more hopeful. It was the Cold War and Communism a threat that needed to be fought - Czechoslovakia has been taken over by a communist regime in 1948, and the film movement that came to be called the Czechoslovak New Wave was a response to this. As will become apparent when taking a closer look on Daisies! (Note that this film was made two years prior to the "Prague Spring" in 1968, Czechoslovakia's liberalization period.)

With the circumstances hastily cleared up, it's time to go on with the film. After the opening sequence we are introduced to the main characters, Marie and Marie. While sunbathing they talk about how nobody understands them, and how the world has gone bad. When they move their arms and legs squeak like rusty machinery. The squeaks only stops when they get the brilliant idea that if the world is bad, then they don't need to care about anything - they can do whatever they want without concern for the consequences.

I have an inkling that the squeaky machinery sounds might be a reference to the Soviet people, that en masse are like... machinery, doing whatever Big Brother tells them is for the good of the country. But I may be wrong. (Oh yes, the movie and its weirdness has only begun. Time to get nerdy and frustratingly interpretive!)

Next, Marie slaps the other Marie, and they fall down onto a flowery field with a lone fruit tree. They jump like rabbits, dance and behave like children. Kind of cute children, of course. The cool thing with this sequence is the transition to the next scene, via a weird eye-line match in the middle of a dialog. Just watch:

Why does it have to be more difficult than that? Classic Hollywood editing is sooo 1950's!

Marie and Marie start doing random things without caring about what other people think about them, and they quickly get more and more extreme. They begin with dating old men with doubtable intentions, only to lure them on trains by themselves. They snatch food and wine from restaurant tables, stuff their mouths full with desserts and as a whole weird people out.

If you didn't already notice - the editing and aesthetics of the film follow the same whimsical pattern as the girls. Going from black and white to color, to sepia and different coloring of the black and white films à la tinted silent film. None of the screenshots from the film have been manipulated in any way - the film just says "f*** you" to all traditional editing, like most New Wave films do in one way or the other.

[Yes, I know that I usually write the word "fuck" without those silly stars, but the CMBA thought that my readers may have difficulties understanding the content of my posts using naughty words like that. You know, there are nicer words to use! Well, if I need to self censor like it's fucking 1935 and the hight of the Hays Code era - fuck you. I believe my readers have intelligence enough to understand my posts, ain't I just naïve?]

We'll have a little phallus cutting on that:

There are some reoccurring themes in Daisies. The snipping of phallic symbols is one thing, scissors another, and apples yet another. What they are supposed to mean can be interpreted a hundred different ways, but to me the first thing is (quite obviously) an act of feminism, something that too was controversial in Czechoslovakia at the time. My first thought about the scissor theme is that it could be self-referential to the New Wave style, of cutting films to millions of pieces in a controversial way of editing. About the apples... I don't know. The symbol of wisdom?

The ending of the film is really fun to analyze. The climax begins with the Maries finding a banquet hall full of extravagant dishes - the ultimate symbol of the bourgeoisie society. They start to feast on the food, using different plates for everything and drinking liquor from several glasses at the time. It ends up with them having a food fight, dancing on the tables and crashing all the tableware.

The scene cuts to them drowning in a lake, and the informational text "What had to happen happened". They hang on to some oars, shouting to the men on the boat that they are drowning because they are depraved. "Can the evil be repaired?"  They beg for their lives, saying that they will be good from now on.

[My interpretation: "What had to happen happened" may be a sneer to the classic Hollywood theme of a naughty woman having to pay for her wrongs toward the end of the film, by either sacrificing herself, get killed or reform. And obviously these girls have been bad, and needs to be put into place.]

"If we were to give them a second chance, this is what would happen."
The film cuts back to the banquet, crashed and filthy. The Maries tiptoe around with newspaper clothing (see screenshots), cleaning up the mess while chanting that everything will be fine, they are so nice and to the right thing when they clean up their mess, everything will be the same.

[Possible interpretation: I read somewhere that the newspapers and the chanting could symbolize the brainwashing messages to the people under a Communist regime: you will be happy if you work, you will be happy if you do good for your country.]

 As you can see, the result is not that good. But the girls keep cleaning up, trying to be good.

[My interpretation: What would happen is someone managed to quiet a revolution, for example a feminist revolution? No matter how hard they tried to get everything back to what it was, it could never be. When women has started to think for themselves and revolt, they will likely not forget all about it. A broken plate can never look like it did before.]

 So, what happens when a person has been a good citizen, worked all his/her life and never thought about him/herself?

They die. That's the payment you get.
The last message to the viewer is:

"This film is dedicated to all the people indignant only when their salads are trampled."

Well, is that a message to a country on the verge of a revolt, or not? Daisies is an awesome movie. Watch it.
 And don't feel bad if you haven't watched an Eastern European film before. I haven't either, but that will probably change. (If not by my own will, by being forced to in film school.)

And... cut!