Leone's most moving love story.(possible spoiler in last paragraph)

Rating: 9/10 (30 June 2000)

Leone's most audacious exercise in parody is also his most sincere. Never has his treatment of subject matter been so apparently flippant - two larger than larger than life heroes, one sounding like a rump-scratching Hispanic Clouseau, the other offering a splendid take-off on Welles' more hesitant blarney; ludicrous extensions of narratively marginal scenes; jokey effects undermining solemnity (especially when Sean becomes Juan's ministering angel, a day-glo celestial banner above his head); Morricone's most daringly inappropriate score, jaunty 'Sean Sean!' theme, plenty of silly, bathetic, intrusive noises, a gloriously disrespectful impromptu variation on EineKleineNachtMusik in the middle of a heist.
As ever with Leone, though, the key to his film's soul is Morricone's music, and amidst the sarcastic invention and absurd kitsch, there beats a reluctantly sentimental heart. Leone's films are full of tension, contradiction and disruption, and A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE is no exception - characters who are plausible and motivated in one scene, may be allegorical, abstract or merely the butt of a visual joke in the next. But here he has created two of his most believable and likeable characters. This is some coup in that one is a murderer-rapist and the other is an IRA terrorist, but their burgeoning friendship and sublimated romance provides an oasis of humanity in a desert of chaos, murder, war, fascism, betrayal, rupture, dislocation.
Leone's films have been called camp, and this is a flamboyantly gay film, from the fetishisation of uniform and costume (Coburn, possibly the only actor in the history of cinema completely at ease in his masculinity, is as beautiful as ever here, long, loose and lovely in white and boots, a bondage merchant in a sweaty oater, an outrageous moustache amplifying those incomparable horse-teeth when he breaks into the Coburn smile). And while these values, in league with Leone's mocking filming, undermine the very macho generics, the insufferable authenticity of 'war' and 'revolutionary' films, the sombre love story anchors the film's humanity.
The only heterosexual sex in the film is an offscreen rape, and initially Juan's earthy, diffuse fertility is contrasted with the abstract, literally destructive, steely sterility of Sean - this is visualised in the treatments of their respective pasts - Juan's is embodied in his very visual offspring; Sean's consists of heightened, dubious flashbacks. These, bathed in lush soft-focus, seem to indicate a MICHAEL COLLINS-like disrupted love story with a lovely Irish redhead, but the blatant homoeroticism of these scenes subverts their narrative of betrayal, conflating the individual and the wider political as Leone does so brilliantly often in DYNAMITE. The development of Juan and Sean (ironical doppelgangers?)'s friendship is marked by a lot of phallic gunplay.
DYNAMITE is Leone's most persistantly undervalued film, and it is true that in comparison to his previous film, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, it is a failure, with a less compelling narrative; less controlled style; less fully worked out mythic structure; less sense of space and place; but WEST is the greatest Western ever made, and DYNAMITE is full of brilliant things too. It is often accused of being a sprawling, unfocused mess, but look at Leone's formal genius in the opening scenes. Our first shot is of Juan, a comical figure in his shifty dishevellement, walking barefoot in the parched landscape, evidently animal, comically subservient to the driver with his hidden sandwich against his sweat-drenched belly. In the next sequence, however, this prejudice against Juan belongs to the grotesque reactionaries, and we find ourselves horrified at our dangerous superficiality. This may not be one of Leone's most subtle scenes, but it is overwhelmingly, savagely powerful, the vicious contempt of these forces of order distorted into a dizzying montage of chewing, phlegmy mouths, spouting poisonous hate, ignorance, suppressed sexual-desire, and crumbs until they become the indistinguishable bestial mass they condemn.
But just as we side with the patronised peasant, he becomes the ruthless leader of a straggling group of bandits (including his trigger-happy pre-pubescent sons), unafraid to casually murder and rape. DYNAMITE is full of patternings like this, savaging our expectations and assumptions. These scenes also begin the analysis of the conflict between the individual and the mass/community that is one of the film's main themes, the ethics of revolution, their potential similarity to to capitalist, murderous anarchy, and the rights or duties of the individual to abstain or take part. The film's trajectory is ironic - Juan moves from an opportunistic chicken thief who dreams of nothing but robbing banks to unwitting hero of the revolution, but at the wrenching expense of his family and best friend.
If DYNAMITE deals specifically with the Mexican Revolution, it compresses all the violent struggles of the last vile century. Some of the nocturnal battle scenes recall World War I trench warfare, while the uniforms of the fascists, the street executions, the collaborators, the Holocaust-like slaughter of Juan's family, the move from the bright outdoors to murky interiors, all recall the Second World War. Sean himself is escaping revolution and imperial tyranny, while the invocation of America as a promised land can only sound hollow at the height of the Vietnam War, and especially in the Latin American context. While Leone's left-wing sympathies are never in doubt, he was criticised at the time for the vagueness of his approach, but time has borne out his scepticism, his despairing hope, his refusal of propaganda, his anger.
DYNAMITE wouldn't be a Leone film if it wasn't also a commentary on film-making, and it is his most significantly self-reflexive movie, with repeated shots of men looking, especially through widescreen gaps. Juan himself looks uncommonly like Leone, while Coburn's cigar-chomping calm as he ruminates over his next composition, makes him an obvious director figure. In one brilliant, hilarious, scary shot, anticipating the Saatchis by a quarter of a century, has Juan gazing through the ripped eyes of the dictator's poster image. Many US directors are invoked and examined, from Hawks, where the redemption of the transgressor is pointlessly, egotistically nihilistic, to Peckinpah, then the major innovator in Westerns (and whose THE WILD BUNCH was set around the same period as DYNAMITE), whose montage shooting of violence is alluded to in the early carriage hijack scene.
This is a film packed with with memorable sequences, some exhilirating, some harrowing - the blowing up of the bridge, the train collision, the nightime rainswept executions. It is clear to see Leone's influence on the movie brats, from the tank shaped like Darth Vader's head, to the filming of action . But there are two scenes that stand out for me, ranking with the best of Leone: the first is Sean watching the Doctor betray revolutionaries; he flashbacks to his own betrayal by his best friend - his circular retaliation immediately cuts to the fascist's executing, disturbingly linking revolutionary and reactionary, past and present, myth and reality (in the betrayal scene, Sean views everything in a mirror, his masculine wholeness shattered).
Secondly, in the middle of a raging, very physical and real battle, Sean is shot; Juan's horror is expressed in a complete suspension of time and place, as oppressive quiet and darkness shrouds his helplessness. It is a beautiful moment in a wonderful film.