"My country is me and my family"

Rating: 9/10 (16 July 2007)

This was a picture Sergio Leone never intended to make  he began as producer, but to cut a long story short got roped into directing it. In spite of this, coupled with the fact that he was getting seriously fed up with the western genre, Duck You Sucker is perhaps Leone's most personal picture. He turned it from being yet another Zapata western (see Quien Sabe?, Il Mercenario and Companeros) into a statement against the genre.
The intended message of Duck You Sucker is, in short, an even-handed condemnation of the left and the right, the moral of the story being that it's best not to get involved, and that the home and the family are what matters most. A rather dubious philosophy when taken to such extremes, but a real tonic when you look at how preachy some of those Zapata westerns were. Personally though, I'm more drawn in by the delicate humanism that was maturing with Leone's work. There were occasional emotional moments in his earlier films, but now Leone is really giving them time and complexity. Take for example the scene where Juan and John discuss the realities of the revolution at the camp  you can really believe in these characters.
Like his final film, Once Upon a Time in America, this one can be seen as almost being a love story between two men. Not in a literal sense of course  it's not homo-erotic  but in the way it's structured. Juan and John are opposites thrown together by fate, are antagonistic towards each other at first, but somehow a bond develops between them and they become inseparable. There's also the back story with Sean (the other man in the Ireland flashbacks), with whom John obviously had a similar relationship.
As far as his technical style goes, this is actually one of Leone's most perfectly constructed films. The editing is all spot on, and incredibly rhythmic. Although it's a lot subtler than in the dollars westerns, watch closely and you'll see he still choreographs the opening credits in time with music. Duck You Sucker is one of the best examples of what Michael Powell calls a "composed film"  that is, one in which every aspect of the image  movement, editing and even the colours and arrangement of objects and people  responds to the music are the collage of sounds. Powell himself was one of the best directors of composed films, Robert Wise was another, and so was Leone.
A brilliant example of this compositional style, and one of my favourite moments in all cinema is when Juan realises John's potential as a dynamiter, and the Mesa Verde bank logo appears above his head, just as Morricone's music references Bach's Toccata. A lot of people really hate that bit. Yes, it's completely over-the-top, almost cartoonish, but this is really Leone saying "Hey, this is cinema, we don't need rules!" Having said that, there is one sequence along these lines which I dislike, and that is when the bourgeois travellers are demonising the peasants whilst stuffing their faces, and we see all these close-ups of their mouths and hear the same words repeated over and over. It's such an obvious, boring device, and not really very effective.
A big weakness with Duck You Sucker is that, being caught between the old and new Leone styles, sometimes it doesn't really know what sort of film it wants to be. Leone's westerns, for better or for worse, stuck to the formula of a hero and a villain pitted against each other from the start, destined to meet in a final showdown. As his films progressed he concentrated more on social drama and character development, and Duck You Sucker certainly continues this trend. However, it is still tied to the old tradition and consequently has a few token villains  but the nazi-like army officer Ruiz and the governor whose face is on all the posters while they are necessary background figures, don't really belong as characters. The drama in Duck You Sucker is fully formed  Leone had fully developed the humanistic element in his films by now  but at the expense of making the action elements feel tacked on. Also despite the picture being in part a statement against political violence, the action scenes are still done in an exciting, heroic fashion.
An awkward Leone picture to pigeon hole, but still a very enjoyable one. It's the closest he came to making a "message" film, even if it is the ultimate political anti-statement. It has its flaws, but it looks great, and has a brilliant pace to it. Both Rod Steiger and James Coburn have been criticised in the lead roles, but I think they're both perfectly cast. Considering the circumstances in which it came about, Duck You Sucker isn't half bad.