≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a rather interesting film on Turner Classic Movies, a Western from 1978 called China 9, Liberty 37, a co-production between Spain’s Asta Productions and Italy’s Compagnia Europea Cinematografica, which makes this both a “spaghetti Western” and a “paella Western.” It was directed by Monte Hellman, an enigmatic filmmaker who lived until 2021, when he died at the age of 91, but he was absent from film work for long periods of time. He was a protegé of Roger Corman – who had Hellman shoot the long takes of Monterey sonsets he used to fill out The Terror, a 1963 film Corman concicted out of whole cloth when he realized that because he had finished their previous film, The Raven, two days ahead of schedule his stars, Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, still owed him two days’ worth of work. Hellman’s career didn’t soar to the heights of Corman’s most famous protege of the period, Francis Ford Coppola, and the only film of his I’d previously seen was one I hated, Two-Lane Blacktop from 1971, which co-starred singers James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson as road bums traveling with a woman played by Laurie Bird, whom Hellman married in 1974 and divorced in 1975. (I remember her as utterly untalented and it’s no surprise Hellman and Bird were personally involved.)
When Hellman was offered the chance to direct China 9, Liberty 37 – the title is a crossroads in the middle of the Old West and it’s actually shown on a crossroads sign in the opening credits (back when films still had opening credits) – he hadn’t made a Western in a dozen years and hadn’t made a film at all in four years, so he jumped at the chance. China 9, Liberty 37 was based on a script by Jerry Harvey and Nicholas Venturelli, based on a story by Emilio de Concini with him and Don Vicente Escriva (since the last name is Spanish for “writer,” I thought this might be a pseudonym, but no-o-o-o-o, “Escriva” was his birth last name) credited with “collaboration” and Alberto Liberati with “dialogue.” The opening scene shows Clayton (Fabio Testi, easily the sexiest and most drop-dead gorgeous male in the cast) about to be hanged when an agent for the Great Southern Railway grants him a pardon and offers him $1,500 – $500 in advance and the rest when the job is done – to kill Matthew (Warren Oates, a ling-time favorite actor of Hellman’s). Clayton protests that killing Matthew isn’t worth the risk to his own life, but the money acts as sweetener and he agrees to the deal – only when Clayton arrives at Matthew’s property it turns out Matthew knows precisely why Clayton is there and ends up holding a gun on him.
Clayton also comes upon Matthew’s wife Catherine (Jenny Agutter, a British actress whose most famous credit is as Michael York’s leading lady in the 1976 science-fiction film Logan’s Run, though she’s not only still alive, she’s still active) while she’s skinny-dipping – skinny-dipping scenes are a favorite of Hellman’s – and the two of them end up having sex, first ini the water, then on land. Alas, Matthew catches them and threatens to kill Clayton for having cuckolded him – and just then Matthew’s relatives come over for a visit, during which they have a camp-fire singalong on “Red River Valley” and other songs of similar vintage. (Did Hellman include “Red River Valley” as a back-handed homage to John Ford, who used the song instrumentally in a lot of his Westerns even though, to the best of my knowledge, he didn’t actually show anybody singing it?) Later, after Hattmew has responhded to his wife’s extra-relational activity by beating the shit out of her and she’s stabbed him and left him for dead, though unbeknownst to her he recovers – Clayton and Catherine flee Matthew – their plan is to go to Liberty (ya remember Liberty? The town that’s only 37 miles away?) where Catherine can take a stagecoach and get herself out of the West altogether, only along the way they run into a little person and offer him a ride back to his circus, where he’s part of a whole show of acrobatic freaks. The movie comes to a dead stop so we can watch a lot of little people on trapezes.
Later on Clayton and Catherine go to a local inn, where the proprietress has worked out an elaborate scheme for separating them from their money – first she tells them the rate for the room, then the bath, then dinner, then breakfast, and so on – and Clayton and Catherine have a great soft-core porn scene together during which we hear a song on the soundtrack identified on the film’s imdb.com page only as “China 9 Love Ballad” and sung by a woman whose voice I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I didn’t recognize. It’s the great Ronee Blakely, who did a magnificent acting job as the tortured country singer “Barbara Jean” (i.e., Loretta Lynn) in Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville – a performance that should have made her a star, only for some reason just as this film was being released she accepted an offer from Bob Dylan to go on tour as one of his backup singers, and her career never recovered its momentum. Alas, while at the inn Clayton and Catherine are caught by a raiding party led by Matthew’s brothers Duke (Carlos Bravo) and Johnny (Gianrico Tordinelli, a hunky blond who’s Fabio Testi’s principal rival in the male pulchritude department). Duke tries to ambush Clayton in bed, but after futilely trying to talk Duke out of it, telling him he has a wife and child and he shouldn’t get himself killed fighting Matthew’s battles, Duke attacks him and Clayton shoots him dead.
Johnny rapes Catherine, and when Matthew catches them, at first he seems to approve – “That’s what you do with whores,” he snarls – but later on he beats up Johnny and says, “She’s still my wife.” There’s also a scene at a saloon in which Clayton gets an offer to become the Buffalo Bill-style hero of a series of fanciful “Western” novels by an author who’s played by director Sam Peckinpah, whose appearance remained obscure even though it was ballyhooed as “Introducing Sam Peckinpah” (which it was, at least as an actor – the only previous appearance by Peckinpah on screen is a walk-on as a meter-reader in Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Instead Clayton beats a hasty retreat to the nearest whorehouse, though as the film ends he has one last confrontation with Matthew and I was really hoping he’d kill Matthew, collect the $1,500 the railroad had offered him to kill Matthew (ya remember the railroad?), and Catherine would run off with him – but instead Clayton is the one who does the proverbial ride into the sunset alone and Catherine stays with her abusive S.O.B. of a husband – not my idea of a happy ending.
China 9, Liberty 37 was hailed at the time of its release as one of a cycle of “revisionist Westerns,” which basically upped the violence quotient of traditional Westerns and also were a lot more frank sexually – though one could make a case for John Ford’s little-regarded 1926 masterpiece Three Bad Men as the first “revisionist Western,” the first to present genuinely multidimensional characters instead of stick-figure heroes and villains. Three Bad Men was the ancestor of all the “psychological Westerns” like High Noon that became all the rage in the early 1950’s, and China 9, Liberty 37 is very much a film of its time, scored with soft-rock ballads by Pino Donaggio and John Rubenstein in which the dominant instrument is solo acoustic guitar. It’s an intriguing curio that makes me want to see some of Hellman’s other films – maybe at this stage in my life I’d actually like Two-Lane Blacktop!
