Year Of The Western! #24 Duck, You Sucker! (1971)

I was trying hard to find a poster that felt more in line for this film. Normally I have looked for some interesting overseas posters for the other films I have watched for this list because I really enjoy some of the way those films have been presented in those markets. Plus the art tends to be more visually interesting than those of their US counterparts. This poster is trying to sell this film as something it is not and I feel like that might be the reason why this film is not in the same conversation as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West with Leone's best films. 

Film #24 Duck, You Sucker! (1971)

Here is the imdb.com cast listing. Here is the wikipedia page about the production. 

This film starts off with Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger) robbing a stagecoach full of wealthy people. His whole family helps in the robbery. After sending the coach passengers away (naked, in a wagon rolling down hill), they see some large explosions nearby and a single man on a motorcycle passes by them. Juan shoots out the rear tire and brings the cycle to a stop. The man, John (James Coburn) that gets off of the motorcycle, calmly walks over to the coach that Juan had recently appropriated and throws an explosive in it and tells Juan, 'Duck, you sucker,' and blows a hole in the roof of it. 

Turns out that John is a former member of the Irish Republican Army and is an explosives expert. Juan sees this as a sign from God that they should team up and rob a bank located in Mesa Verde. John does not want to join Juan and help him. Juan shoots through the gas tank of John's motorcycle and leaves him no immediate choice but to join Juan.

On the way to Mesa Verde, John uses a distraction of a passing train to get away from Juan. Undeterred from his goal to now rob the bank, Juan and his family continue on. Once they arrive in the city, they learn that it is under military control and that it is covered in troops. Juan finds John in a local restaurant across from the bank and confronts him. John said he has been waiting for him and wants to introduce him to some people. Turns out that there are a number of people trying to start a revolution in Mesa Verde and they are planning a coordinated attack of a few specific locations. 

The Mesa Verde bank is one of them. Juan, having no interest in a revolution but having a lot of interest in money, agrees to strike the bank with John.

Once the plan is in place, Jaun and his family go in to rob the bank. Every vault they open is full of townspeople that were being held captive by the military and mayor of the town (John knew this but didn't tell Juan). As they exit the bank with over a hundred freed people, Juan is now considered a hero of the revolution. A revolution he never intended to join but now has to play along as his family is with him and he is looking for the right time to escape.

John has his own reasons for going alongside the revolution. There is a series of flashbacks to his time in Ireland when it shows him with a woman he loves and his best friend. Its implied that the friend got him involved in the Irish Republican Army and that would lead to a deadly day when the friend was captured by the government and forced to point out other rebels. John kills the guards and then after a moment of hesitation, he shoots his friend. It appears that John will always be at odds with 'the uniforms' no matter what uniform they are wearing. 

So the remaining film is John and Juan's relationship and their own relationship with the revolution that is happening around them. 

Here is a great scene where Juan tells John what he thinks of revolutions. 

  

Steiger's boiled over frustration at explaining that revolutions rely on the poor and uneducated is very honest. His Juan at the start of the film isn't a good man, but he is never played as stupid. He is short sighted and thinks about himself and his family but he is constantly aware of his place in the world. He doesn't want to fight a war that will never be about bettering him or his people. Coburn's introspective pause and then throwing his book about Patriotism in the mud is earned. A man who had believed in a revolution once is starting to see that it doesn't amount to much. When John says later that he believes only in the power of dynamite, you believe him. 

The scene below is where John draws a line in the sand and is going to take the fight to the uniforms. He tells the rest of the people with them they can hide in the caves but he is done running and hiding. Juan thinks he is bluffing, winking when he tells his family he will miss them because he thought he and John would bolt and get away from the fight. Juan realizes shortly after that John means business and is making it a point to keep the troops from crossing the bridge. 

Leone knows how to make explosions look beautiful and epic. 

So we have the bulk of the images from the poster above: Juan firing the machine gun, a fairly accurate representation of the action at the bridge, and we saw John earlier in the film in the jacket full of dynamite riding his motorcycle (the fuses weren't all lit while he was wearing the jacket... that seems really unsafe no matter how good with explosives you are). The poster's tag line is "Rod Steiger and James Coburn will blow you apart." Followed by "By the master of adventure Sergio Leone." The poster promises a rip-roaring adventure with two loose cannons. It looks like a action-adventure thrill ride. 

It isn't. The first half leans a little into comedy (Juan forcing John to join him, Juan accidently becoming a leader in the revolution), but after the explosion of the bridge, the film pivots into a drama that just happens to have a massive train loaded with dynamite running full steam into another train later on.

Spoiler alert here: Juan's family was in the caves while he and John were taking out the bridge. The opposing troops found the caves and killed everyone in them. All six of Juan's kids were killed. Upon seeing this, he loses the smile that has been mainly on his face for the whole film, and picks up a machine gun to face the army. As he walks off, the film stays with Coburn as he stares at all the dead bodies and the camera travels over the massacre like a ghost, its attention being drawn to many different faces as it glides over. Meanwhile, you hear the sound of gunfire and violence as Juan is taken captive off camera. Coburn slowly turns his back and walks further into the cave, to another exit. 

To ruin the rest of the film and the further motivation for why John did what he did in Ireland would be wrong. The ending is spectacular and hits hard. And that is not just a joke about the trains hitting each other, but that has to be seen to be believed. It is not something you will see a film studio even attempt to do today. 

Steiger as Juan was an interesting choice. Per the trivia, this role was suppose to go to Eli Wallach, Tuco from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but Rod Steiger owed the production studio another film and they wouldn't fund it unless he was involved. Also, Steiger was playing Juan completely straight and serious initially and this frustrated Leone. Whatever happy medium they eventually came to really did give the character some depth. Had Juan been too serious, the impact of losing his family would not have been the same. He, much like Tuco, was always trying to see his situation in the best light even if it wasn't 100% accurate. I liked his performance, especially each time during the bank robbery, the doors would open and show more people and no money, and he would get more and more defeated. 

James Coburn as John was great. His performance was a little surly at times and he was easy to piss off but he would always get the job done. Juan calls him Firecracker and it fits. His John doesn't belong in the west. He would prefer explosives and a motorcycle to handguns and horses. Per the trivia, Clint Eastwood was offered this role and he turned it down (for Hang Em' High, see my thoughts on that film in that particular post) and I am glad he did. Coburn brought just something different to this role. I really enjoyed it.

This film exists on the same far edge of the western like the Wild Bunch did. While the Wild Bunch was more about finding your place in a world that is moving forward, Duck, You Sucker! is more about wondering if you even want a place in that world. Juan wanted money so that he and his family could live well. John wanted to escape a political atmosphere that cost him dearly and just go get drunk and blow stuff up. John says early in the film, "Where there's revolution there's confusion, and when there's confusion, a man who knows what he wants stands a good chance of getting it." I don't know if either believe that at the end. 

You get the feeling that Leone was done with westerns and really wanted to do something different. While he deconstructed them with Once Upon a Time in the West, he blew it up (phrasing intended) with Duck, You Sucker! I can respect that. He wrote the book on epic westerns, so why not write another about moments that shape a country and the men that exist in it? 

The poster for the film shows a movie that never truly was and after having seen Duck, You Sucker! I am glad for the movie it actually is. It is a great way to part ways with Leone on this list. 

Western Checklist (nowhere near official or scientific):

• Weird gang member names? Actually, not really. Everyone had a pretty regular name. 
• Beautiful landscapes? Yeah, even the explosions looked beautiful. 
• Any terrified horses? Maybe. I do know that James Coburn snaps the neck of a rooster (off camera). 
• How many Ernest Borgnines? There wasn't anyone that stood out to me. 
• Does it have a theme song with the name of the film in the title? No, but the score is by Morricone and it has some amazing parts in it. Check it out below. It's as wide in scope as Once Upon a Time in the West. 

Rating:

I am going to give this film 5 out of 5 tin stars. There is just something about the detail that Leone puts into his films that really makes them work for me. Great performances from Steiger and Coburn take this film and make it outstanding. Highly recommended.