[Review] Duck, You Sucker! (1971)
The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or an embroidery; it cannot be done with elegance and courtesy. A revolution is an act of violence.
The moment this movie opened with a quote from Mao Tse-tung, I knew I was going to be disappointed, in spite of the paradox. One the one hand, how could a western about the Mexican revolution open with such a bold statement and not deliver a great story about hope and morality and failure? How could it not be full of dastardly back-stabbings and suspenseful standoffs that would leave me questioning the film’s protagonist? On the other hand, Sergio Leone’s speciality was never with nuanced morality tales, and I feared that no matter how carefully crafted it was, the film would fall flat if it didn’t have the emotional maturity to back it up.
I needn’t have worried. There is very little of note in this film, and hence, very little to be wasted by its lack of refinement. The films opens, after its epigraph, with a man urinating against a tree, just as Leone pissed away any semblance of deeper meaning to this story. It turns out that he took Tse-tung’s words entirely at face value. He didn’t want to make a film about sociopolitics, literature, or art either — he wanted to make a film about violence. The storytelling isn’t hugely worse than it is in Leone’s earliest spaghetti westerns; it’s just that a film so involved in historical tragedy needs to have a little awareness beyond the guns and the dynamite, and the complete absence thereof makes Duck, You Sucker! feel juvenile and superficial. At one point a man is seen laughing and waving cheerily only days after his family is murdered. There is one female character — she gets raped. It goes on.
Duck, You Sucker! is a structural mess, although an intriguing one. The film takes it’s time establishing a conflict between its the two protagonists, Mexican highwayman Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger) and IRA revolutionary Sean Mallory (James Coburn). Ultimately this conflict proves inconsequential to the grander scale of the story, and the two team up with the Mexican revolutionaries against the evil Colonel Reza (Antoine Saint-John). This isn’t unprecedented for a spaghetti western, and a tale of backstabbing and changing allegiances can be very effective. The trouble is that the conflict for the first 75 minutes is incredibly shallow, like a very sedated Heat, so there is no reason to invest yourself in it. It doesn’t just end inconsequentially — it starts, remains, and ends, without meaning a damn thing. I do give it credit for being humorous at times, but that’s as far as it goes. When Juan and John do eventually team up, there’s no surprise, there’s no emotion. It’s just the way the story goes, and it’s fine.
In my review of Once Upon a Time in the West I praised Leone for the brilliance of the climax, which I note he has tried to emulate again here — not in the climax (which, again, is fine) but in the use of flashbacks throughout. I think that says all that needs to be said about Duck, You Sucker! — it spends far too much time piggybacking on the ideas of earlier films, and far too little developing any of its own.
Scope and story: 0/3. This film was conceptualised and produced solely to make box office.
Performance and production: 🐎🐎/3. Coburn’s Irish accent is distressingly bad. Other than that, the performances are strong, and the film looks and sounds good. Music, while not on par with other Morricone scores, is evocative and one of the film’s few redeeming features.
(Western exclusive) ‘Wao wao wao’ factor: 🐎/3. Duck, You Sucker! has a grand total of zero standoffs. If that’s what you want from a Western, you’ll be sorely disappointed. It does, however, have a scene with a machine gun and fistfuls of dynamite. Just be warned that none of this comes close to the usual tension of Leone’s usual standoffs and gunfights.
