A REASON TO LIVE, A REASON TO DIE (IT/SP/FR/GER, 1972)

Massacre at Fort Holman (UK, US); Una Ragione per vivere e una per morire

D: Tonino Valerii. P: Arthur Steloff. W: Rafael Azcona, Ernesto Gastaldi, Toino Valerii. Ph: Alejandro Ulloa. M: Riz Ortolani. St: James Coburn (Colonel Pembroke), Bud Spencer (Eli Sampson), Telly Savalas (Major Ward), Georges Geret (Sergeant Spike), Reinhard Kolldehoff (Sergeant Brent)

It would be simplistic to describe Tonino Valerii as a protégé of Sergio Leone. But it is true that in his early directed works, Valerii – an assistant on the first two ‘Dollars’ movies – hewed closely to Leone’s style and favoured themes. This was especially apparent in his debut, A Taste for Killing – the story of a cynical bounty hunter with a grudge against the main villain, riffing on For a Few Dollars More – and his final western, the comedic-nostalgic My Name is Nobody, produced (with some scenes directed) by Leone himself. A Reason to Live…, while indebted most heavily to The Dirty Dozen, harks back additionally to the treasure hunt/Civil War tableau of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

If only the writing and direction came anywhere close to that film’s level, or matched the liveliness of its better derivatives, the likes of Any Gun Can Play or Red Blood, Yellow Gold. While the characters played by Coburn and Spencer have some spark, the remainder are makeweights, with Dirty Dozen co-star Savalas wasted in a peripheral role, and the plot is something of a trudge.[i] Coburn plays a discredited Union officer, considered a traitor for surrendering the strategic Fort Holman to Savalas’s Confederate major. By way of expiation, he forms a scratch squad of condemned prisoners to retake the structure. To keep them on side he speaks of a stash of gold, but this is all but forgotten by the time they assault the fort and his principal motive is revealed – to avenge the death of his son, who was ransomed by Ward and then executed regardless.

Coburn, back on Spanish soil a year after A Fistful of Dynamite, retraces his steps in another sense. Like Sean Mallory, Pembroke is a fighting man with a tragic past, but where Mallory was fully realised on the page, on this occasion Coburn feeds on scraps. The actor’s class counts for much, but it is Spencer’s character who traces the more satisfying arc. Beginning as a typical Euro-western chancer, he stands by Pembroke when the rest of the men would lynch him, evoking the spectre of Cut-Throats Nine. He’s resourceful, preventing his colleagues’ capture in an enemy-held town by running in to announce the end of the war – an act that provokes a spontaneous celebration among the locals. And he demonstrates a gift for dissembling by impersonating a Confederate officer to gain access to the fort. At the very least, the film provides potent evidence of Spencer’s grubby charm and instinctive comic timing.

A Reason to Live… is disappointing not because it is imitative; that would rule out at least two thirds of Euro-westerns. It is because the story lacks vitality – unusually for its writers, Ernesto Gastaldi, who penned Valerii’s most accomplished films, Day of Anger and The Price of Power, and the Spaniard Rafael Azcona, subsequently much lauded in his homeland – and lopes along at a sluggish pace. Valerii composes his images attractively but is too slavish to the script, drawing out the major incidents – an encounter with murderous homesteaders, the sojourn in the town, Eli’s reconnaissance – and sapping them of energy. (An elongated urination gag anticipates a low point in My Name is Nobody.) The men under Pembroke’s fragile command include such stalwarts as Benito Stefanelli and the bug-eyed Adolfo Lastretti, but they are an undistinguished bunch; they are not furnished with the foibles and fortes of their counterparts in the similarly plotted Kill Them All and Come Back Alone and The Five Man Army – all derived ultimately from The Professionals and The Magnificent Seven.

The adobe and stone fortress, erected atop an Almería hillside for the 1970 western El Condor, is an imposing structure, and takes centre stage in the final third. Valerii shoots this like a war film, belatedly delivering a solid action set piece, with much use of explosives. The production design is strong, although unconvincing as a Civil War backdrop, and Ortolani’s score is one of the best he composed for a western. By turns sombre and heroic, it confers grandeur on Ulloa’s handsome vistas and underscores the pathos of the final images – high-angles shots of smoking ruins and a carpet of corpses, over which Pembroke and Eli declaim their disillusionment.
Kevin Grant

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[i] The full version of A Reason to Live… runs close to two hours, but it has been released in considerably shorter versions, running between 80 and 95 minutes. The cuts hinder the early scenes between Spencer and Coburn, which are some of the best, but they do speed up the characters’ journey to Fort Holman