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Simply A Masterpiece

A different way of telling a story

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Despite being well aware of his name in creating the original Django,I for some reason have never seen a title by Spaghetti Western auteur Sergio Corbucci. Taking part in a poll on ICM on the best films of 1968,I was excited to find two Corbucci's from '68,which led to me joining the mercenary.The plot:At a circus, mercenary Sergei "Polack" Kowalski recognises performer Paco Roman from their battles against the Mexican government. Unexpectedly meeting Roman afterwards,Kowalski learns that Roman and his gang of revolutionaries have done a deal to take silver safely across the border. Cutting a deal with Kowalski to help fight the army and get the silver across the line,Roman soon discovers that his new brother in arms is a gun for hire mercenary.View on the film:Saddling the audience in the middle of the Mexico Revolution,co- writer/(with Franco Solinas/ Giorgio Arlorio/ Luciano Vincenzoni/ Sergio Spina and Adriano Bolzoni) director Sergio Corbucci & cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa light the fuse for a red-hot Western atmosphere, which shoves the viewers face in the dry dirt of war with ultra-stylised whip-pans and invented,circling camera moves capturing the urgency of the Revolution. Backed by an enchanting score from Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai, Corbucci closes works with editor Eugenio Alabiso for a lightning fast,action pace,as razor sharp edits and an earthy,sun-kiss appearance is cast on the revolution Kowalski and Roman are firing up.Replacing James Coburn after he quit over not getting the top billing, Franco Nero hits the audience with both barrels in his performance as Kowalski,thanks to Nero playing on the gun for hire ambiguity of Kowalski,which allows Nero to turn Kowalski from a devilish ladies man to a firebrand revolutionary with one shot. Personally chosen by Nero for the role, Tony Musante gives a superb performance as Roman,who is given a playful, mischievous side by Musante,which gets punched by Roman's fiery howls for revolution.Loaded up from a difficult writing phase which saw the original writers and directors quit,the new writers impressively keep all the troubles off screen, with the revolution "tour" that Roman, Kowalski and their fellow revolutionaries take around Mexican towns giving the tale an excellent episodic feel,as resentment grows with each town they visit. Crossing guns,the writers make the relationship between Kowalski and Roman wonderfully conflicted,as Roman's hopes of finding a brother in arms are shot by the mercenary gun for hire.

"Django" director Sergio Corbucci's Spaghetti western "The Mercenary" about an itinerant Polish pistolero Sergei Kowalski (Franco Nero of "Camelot") in Mexico at the turn of the century who takes a poor ignorant peasant (Tomas Musante of "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage") under his gun arm and elevates him to the status of hero of the Mexican revolution beat Sergio Leone's "Duck, You Sucker" by three years. In "Duck, You Sucker," an Irish revolutionary (James Coburn) took a penniless peasant (Rod Steiger) and elevated him to the status of Pancho Villa during the Mexican revolution. Indeed, the basic plots of "The Mercenary" and "Duck, You Sucker" resemble each other closely, except the characters and the endings differ drastically. The peasant here in "The Mercenary" is Paco Roman, a young, wifeless, childless, blue-collar laborer toiling in the mines of a wealthy aristocrat with a taste for opera. In "Duck, You Sucker," the peasant was much older, with a brood of trigger-happy sons, and a passion for thievery. In retrospect, the similarity between "The Mercenary" and "Duck, You Sucker" shouldn't seem too surprisingly when you consider that the same scenarist, Luciano Vincenzoni—who penned "Death Rides A Horse," "For A Few Dollars More," and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"—wrote both "The Mercenary" and "Duck, You Sucker." "The Mercenary" was Corbucci's first Mexican revolutionary western that he would follow up with "Companeros" starring Franco Nero as a Swedish arms dealer, Tomas Milian as the Mexican peasant, and Jack Palance as the villain."The Mercenary" opens in an arena with clowns simulating a bullfight. The main clown is really Paco; he is on the run from wealthy mine owner Alfonso García (Eduardo Fajardo of "Bad Man's River") and a deadly but dandified gambler Curly (Jack Palance) who is in league with Garcia. The Polish gunman Kowalski (Nero) sits in the stands and watches Paco until the time for the sundown comes. At that point, Corbucci and his multitude of writers—among them Franco Solinas of "A Bullet for the General" and Vincenzoni—flash back to the first meeting between our heroes who later become fast friends. Two Mexican mine owner pay Kowalski to get their silver. Curly follows them after he sees them talking to Kowalski. Curly is deeply interested in them because he had to have one of his henchmen, Studs (Franco Ressel of "Sabata"), killed for trying to kill Kowalski. You see, Kowalski caught Studs gambling with loaded dice and made him swallow the dice with a glass of milk.Anyway, Curly kills the two Mexicans and rides out to get the silver and Kowalski. Meanwhile, at the mine, Paco and his fellow miners—exploited at poverty wages—dine on execrable food and Paco discovers a lizard in his food. Everybody has a good laugh about the 'meat' in the grub. Later, in Garcia's office, the mine owner comes face-to-face with Paco holding a pig on a platter with a pistol sticking out of its mouth. Paco hand feeds Garcia the lizard and the two are enemies for life. When Kowalski shows up to pick up the money, he finds himself surrounded by Paco and his men. They are going to kill the Polish gunman until the Mexican army, with a vengeful Garcia in the ranks, intervenes with an artillery barrage. Vincenzoni wrote a similar scene in Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" as Tuco was about to hang Blonde from a hotel rafter. In the middle of all the shooting, the wealthy Paco explains that the silver can never be gotten to but he has fistfuls of paper money. He pays Kowalski to teach him how to operate a machine gun and the two become revolutionaries.Kowalski takes his hard earned money and leaves Paco, only to be trapped in the desert by Curly and his gunmen. This time Paco intervenes in the showdown between Kowalski and Curly and kills all of Curly's men and forces Curly to walk away without a stitch of clothing on in humiliation. Now, Curly has it in for Paco as well as the Polish soldier-of-fortune. Essentially, Kowalski teaches Paco how to run a revolution until an interfering woman Columba (Giovanna Ralli of "Cannon for Cordoba") joins them and turns Paco against his pal. As they make more money, Kowalski's demands become outrageous. He prefers to be paid in coin and he forces Paco's army to stop in the middle of the desert so that he can improvise a shower to cool himself off. No sooner have Paco and Columba wed and left Kowalski tied up in a stable than Garcia and Curly arrive, again with the Mexican army and a bi-plane that drops bombs.Spaghetti director Sergio Corbucci wrote and directed twice as many westerns as Sergio Leone. Corbucci lacked Leone's flamboyant style and his lucky break in establishing the Italian western. Nevertheless, he was his equal when it came to staging gunfights and helming snappy action stories. Franco Nero became his Clint Eastwood and Corbucci gained fame as Burt Reynolds called him 'the other Sergio' for his diverse oaters. Corbucci bucked the 'southwest' look of Spaghetti westerns with his oddball oater "The Great Silence" and his muddy western "Django" where the hero dragged around a coffin with a machine gun stashed in it. Corbucci maintains a furious pace throughout "The Mercenary," even though it starts up with a flashback and sacrifices some suspense—because you know the principals cannot die until the flashback ends. Predictably, the body count is as high as the film's cynicism. At one point, Curly jams a hand grenade into a revolutionary soldier's mouth and blows him up. However, Corbucci shows uncharacteristic flair when he stages a killing and a torture scene and declines to show the violence in each scene. In one scene, a thug batters the truth out of an unwilling victim while we watch Curly ride around in a circle. This kind of subtlety is very unusual for a Spaghetti western.

This is probably one of the first spaghetti western's I ever saw, and whilst I made sure that I watched many, many more (the good, the bad and the naff) over my youth and early adulthood, what it did most was give me a great appreciation of Ennio Morricone, whose score made the film the masterpiece it is.The film has everything you want in it: solid protagonist, creepy bad guy, entertaining side kick and kicking action sequences, all rounded off with a score so good that has been reused in Kill Bill.Like many early spaghetti's its probably never going to be shown on the telly again, and DVD's probably don't exist, but if you can get hold of a copy its well worth the effort.

The second collaboration of Sergio Corbucci, the Italian Western's most important director besides Sergio Leone, and Franco Nero, one of the genre's greatest actors, after the ingenious "Django" from 1966, "Il Mercenario", a movie set in the time of the Mexican revolution, and therefore late for a Western, is a must-see for every fan of the genre. Sergei Kowalski (Franco Nero) gets hired by short-tempered revolutionary Paco Roman (Tony Musante), in order to help his squad of unexperienced rebels with their campaign for a free Mexico. While Paco is a crook, but also an idealist, becoming more and more idealistic after his troop is joined by beautiful and idealistic Columba, a woman whose father was a revolutionary , the Polish is a typical anti-hero, witty and cool and somehow sympathetic, but mainly concerned on his own benefit.The acting is great, specially Franco Nero as the Polish, and Jack Palance's performance as one of the villains. Another villain is played by Eduardo Fajardo, who played the villainous Major Jackson in Django. The score of this movie, composed by Ennio Morricone, is just brilliant (how couldn't it), the cinematography is great as well as the locations. My favorite film by Corbucci is still the incomparably brilliant "Il Grande Silenzio" ("aka. "The Great Silence") of 1968, "Django" of 1966 being my second-favorite due to its immense entertainment- and cult-value. Maybe not quite as brilliant as "Il Grande Silenzio" and not quite as influential as "Django", "Il Mercenario" is nonetheless an exceptional Spaghetti Western with a great sense of humor that I would recommend to everybody, not only genre fans. 9 out of 10!