DUCK, YOU SUCKER Directed by Sergio Leone United Artists

Duck, You Sucker deserves a prize of some sort for having the least appetizing title of any major film released this year. In France, where I saw it, the film was called “Once Upon a Time There Was a Revolution,” a much more sensible title, and one which links the film to Sergio Leone’s previous film, Once Upon a Time in the West. If the two titles suggest a fairy tale quality, it’s not entirely inappropriate. Leone (he’s the Italian director who started the spaghetti western craze with his Clint Eastwood movies) creates an old West like none you’ve ever seen before: vistas so sprawling they’d make John Ford drool, hazy chiascuro hanging over his interiors, and some of the most shamelessly baroque camerawork since Max Ophul’sZo/a Montez. His plots resemble nothing less than opera — crammed as they are with sentimental flashbacks, cheap ironies, and twist endings — and his directorial conceptions are so outrageously oversized they make the word epic seem puny.

Duck, You Sucker is really an extended parable — the relationship of its two leading characters has a purity and simplicity that often seems Biblical — about the forging of a revolutionary spirit within one man. The man is Juan (Rod Steiger), a simple, lusty peasant who has been using the Mexican Revolutio as a pretext for robbing the rich. He meets up with Sean (James Coburn), an improbably attired Irishman, veteran of the Red and Tan Rebellion and a man who’s paid his dues. The film moves through acres more plot (a bank robbery, the dynamiting of a bridge, a massacre, several executions, and a climatic battle) as Leone reins the two men into a mutually anatagonistic relationship. Juan finally learns the true meaning of revolution in a climatic scene which includes a train crash, a battle, and a tear-jerking bit of selfsacrafice. The whole thing begins with nothing less than a quotation from Chairman Mao. Or at least it did in Paris; drive-in theatres being loathe to mix popcorn with politics, you may never see it in America.

You may have gathered from the synopsis that Duck, You Sucker is not rigorously didactic about revolution in a manner that Godard might approve of. It doesn’t matter though, because, while the film spins a walloping, old-fashioned adventure yarn, that’s not really what it’s about. The central concern of Duck, You Sucker is something much more abstract and, ultimately, much more meaningful: Sergio Leone’s romantic, pleasingly childlike fascination with the old West and the ways he chooses to express it. As in so many modern works of art, style herein overwhelms, indeed becomes, content. And Leone’s style, which conveys his revolutionary thoughts more forcefully than any of his plot convolutions, comes very close to the sublime.

Want some examples? Well, there’s an execution scene in which several of the rebel soldiers are being led in front of a firing squad in the middle of an occupied town. Leone starts with a long shot of the firing squad, held still and motionless so that it freezes in the mind like a tableau. Then he starts a slow circular pan, moving past buildings, a street and coming to rest on a close-up of a poster of the political leader directly responsible for the imminent execution. Great, a 180 degree pan that links the victims with their oppresser, that’s beautiful. Only there’s more. For just as Leone stops his camera on the close-up, a finger pokes through the wall and slashes a long, horizontal streak in the poster. The camera moves in and Rod Steiger’s eyes fill the screen; he’s behind the wall the poster is mounted on, watching his comrades prepare to die. From victims, to oppresser to liberator, all in one single, mesmerizingly graceful camera movement.

Here’s one more, and then I promise to shut up. During another execution scene (execution scenes in Duck, You Sucker occur as frequently as masturbation scenes in Portnoy’s Complaint), James Coburn is standing in the rain, incognito, watching his friends face a firing squad. He looks over to a truck and sees the man who sold the rebels out: a doctor who was obstensibly on their side but cracked under pressure. Coburn’s face hardens and Leone cuts to a flashback. Throughout the film there have been a series of first lyrical and then increasingly more ominous flashbacks, all set in Ireland, in which Coburn and his closest friend have shared a girl and grown more heavily involved in the Red and Tan Rebellion. After all the build-up, this one is the payoff: Coburn is drinking in a pub when his friend enters, accompanied by the police. As the friend, having obviously given into the enemy’s torture, begins to point out rebels for the police to cart away, Coburn turns his back on him and stares into a mirror which allows him to view the betrayal. He pulls out a gun, and waits to be fingered. Leone creates terrific tension by cutting between the friend and the reflection of Coburn in the mirror, and then, just as the friend is about to do something . . . Coburn turns and fires. Only Leone cuts back to the present and the gunfire becomes the gunfire which is slaughtering Coburn’s Mexican comrades. Past , and present, time, memory and violence all packed into one scene and coming together in one beautifully timed cut. That’s some fucking way to make a movie.

I could go on, but what can I add? Only that Duck, You Sucker is after Modern Times and The Godfather, the best film I’ve seen this year, thus far, and that Sergio Leone is an artist whose films you should make a point of seeing. If you favoi subtlety, dry wit, and nuances, stick with Sunday, Bloody Sunday; but if you respond to romantic epic visions, crammed with sentiment, and righteous anger, and topped off with camerawork that leaves you clutching your seat for fear you’ll fall out, then rush to Duck, You Sucker. It’s like Puccinni out of Zane Grey, and it’s dynamite.

John Kane

CONQUEST OF PLANET OF THE APES

Twentieth Century Fox

Conquest, the fourth in the Planet of the Apes series, is probably the best except for the first, and by its end the Apes have finally conquered the world which they rule in the opening two segments.

As was predicted in the last episode, Escape From... , the apes have been made servants after a plague wiped out the world’s cats and dogs, and humans, in search of hew pets, discovered the perfect servants. The plot revolves around Roddy McDowall, playing the son of the character he played in the first three episodes, and his battle to organize the apes and gorillas and chimpanzees in order to defeat the evil, 1985 (natch!) dictatorship which presently rules the Planet of Planets.

The Planet of the Apes series is probably the most charming series of trash movies made in the last couple decades, maybe because, rather than the haphazard mishmash of plot and characterization which compose other serial-type movies (Shaft, James Bond), it is a true serial in the style created by the early Perils of Pauline flicks.

Each episode is probably more like a soap opera than many can bear, but aside from the abominable Beneath the Planet of... the Apes series is probably the most successful trash cycle yet.

And anyway, uhguhggheeerrrrrugh hhhiighhhgherrghh ...

Dave Marsh