A Fistful of Dynamite - Duck You Sucker

Rating: 10/10 (2 December 2009)

At first blush this would seem to be another Sergio Leone "spaghetti western." One of the greatest actors of the last half of the 20th Century, Rod Steiger ("The Illustrated Man," Jud in "Oklahoma," "On the Waterfront," "The Pawnbroker," "In the Heat of the Night") is Juan Miranda, a Mexican bandit chief. But this is not the Eli Wallach one-dimensional bandit chief of Leone's famous "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." In the beginning we see Miranda as a brutish, illiterate, immoral thug. But a much more complex personality is developed in this movie, and Steiger is splendid in the role.
John H. Mallory (James Coburn) is an old Irish revolutionary bomb expert traveling in Mexico(for reasons we don't learn until the middle of the film) in the Mexican Revolution era of Zapata and Pancho Villa. John is motorcycling on a road in a barren part of Mexico when he encounters Juan and his family who try to rob him. John counters Juan's guns with his explosives starting is a comical string of Juan's attempts to capture John, who he wants to use to aid him in robbing a bank he had dreamt of robbing since he saw it as a child.
The two do become embroiled in the Mexican Revolution, to the dismay of Juan who sees the futility in revolutions because his experience is that a successful revolution just results in one set of rulers replacing the other, with the peasants suffering continuing under the new regime (after his release from prison leftist Mexican muralist David Siqueiros expressed a similar disillusionment in a mural depicting a sequence of revolutions that circled back on itself.)
I saw the English language version of the film on cable television's Independent Film Channel (IFC), which shows films uncut. It included the opening scene of Juan urinating while waiting for the stage coach.