Ringo del Nebraska
D: Antonio Román,
Mario Bava (uncredited). P: Fulvio Lucisano. W: Jesús Navarro, Antonio Román. Ph:
Guglielmo Mancori. M: St: Ken Clark (Ringo, aka Nebraska), Yvonne Bastien
(Kay), Piero Lulli (Bill Carter), Renato Rossini (Lou Felton), Alfonso Rojas
(Marty Hillman)
A film of contested
parentage, Savage Gringo remains of
interest chiefly because of revered film-maker Mario Bava’s role in nurturing
it to the screen, if not in its actual conception. According to Lucisano,
co-writer of Bava’s Planet of the
Vampires, Bava replaced the veteran Román as director at an early stage – an
assertion intended, perhaps, to burnish a modest film with added lustre. Other
participants, notably actor Renato Rossini, insist Bava was in charge of the
second unit only, and that Román merits sole credit. (One Bava whose role in
the production is acknowledged on screen is Mario’s son Lamberto, credited as
assistant director.)
Certainly, there is
none of the playful morbidity or visual élan associated with Bava, and in that
respect the film feels like the work of a hired gun rather than a master of his
craft. A competently assembled accumulation of material gleaned from Shane, given a suitably sweltering
complexion by Mancori, it affects, in places, the insouciant tone struck by a
number of Italian westerns inspired by A
Pistol for Ringo and personified by its star, Giuliano Gemma. Efforts in
this direction founder, however, on the stolidity of Clark’s performance. (The
beefy American starred in Bava’s first western venture, The Road to Fort Alamo, a more pedestrian affair, albeit more
patently Bavaesque visually, with its colour gels and shadowy caves.)
Clark plays the
titular drifter and crack shot, who befriends embattled rancher Marty Hillman,
catches the eye of his dissatisfied common-law wife, Kay, and takes up the
fight against local bully Bill Carter once Marty is fatally wounded in an
ambush. Beyond territorial rivalry and a longing for the sultry Kay, Carter and
Marty have history: both worked for Kay’s late father, a notorious bandit, and
Marty has hidden 50,000 stolen dollars somewhere on his property. These
revelations add a dash of colour to an otherwise anodyne plot.
Diverging from Shane, Ringo’s
motivation is nothing so banal as benevolence or as mundane as romance, despite
Marty’s profession of trust and Kay’s ardent pleading. Rather, he stays around
because, “I want to see how the story ends” – idle curiosity with just a hint
of the amused detachment so typical of the Euro-western’s mercurial antiheroes,
who existed merely to pit wits and weapons against sundry malefactors. (And
usually, although not here, to profit from proceedings.) So much is below the
surface, at any rate; it would have taken an actor with a lighter touch than Clark,
and a director with a firmer interest in the genre, to tap the character’s true
potential.
Notwithstanding
Clark’s sluggishness, Savage Gringo
has much to offer fans of the genre, offsetting its stolid lead and prosaic
script with a smattering of compensatory quirkiness. Tim Lucas is probably
correct in surmising it was Bava’s hand on the tiller at these points, having fun
with the formula. The whistling guitarist shot off his horse as the credits
roll is both a nod towards For a Few
Dollars More and a subversion of what had rapidly become a cliché. Like his
namesake in A Pistol for Ringo the
title character drinks milk, but calls for the hard stuff after his first
bruising encounter with Carter in the saloon. (Bava may have borrowed the idea
of a milk-drinking protagonist from Sergio Corbucci’s Minnesota Clay, on which he worked uncredited in 1964. The ultimate
source of this wheeze is probably 1939’s Destry
Rides Again.)
As Clark’s sparring
partner, Piero Lulli is the dark heart and black soul of the piece. Bava cast
him as a no-nonsense police inspector in Kill,
Baby, Kill the same year; he did a fine job, but outright villainy was Lulli’s
forte. He drips malice, whether urging the boozy sheriff (Livio Lorenzon,
typically vivid) to remember his place when he dares to lock up members of
Lulli’s gang, or urging himself on Bastien’s long-suffering heroine. Bastien
herself, the wife of Román, gives Kay plenty of fire, but her performance lacks
subtlety. As a woman who has spent too long fighting off the attentions of two
men she despises, only to be rejected by the one she comes to love, she plays
all her scenes in a high emotional register that becomes abrasive and offputting.
Part of the problem is
the absence of chemistry between Bastien and Clark, a likeable enough actor but
one with limited emotional range. In a way, however, that is fitting. Having
seen off Carter and his men and turned over the money to the law, Ringo ignores
Kay and simply rides on, leaving the impression of a man who has gone through
the motions, unmoved, unfazed by death and devastation. In that sense, at
least, he is a true Euro-western protagonist. Kevin Grant
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