A Bucket of Bolognese (1974)

D. Franco di Palma
Colour


We’re through the looking glass here, people. And it’s a looking glass which is cracked and dripping bright red with thick viscous blood, or – actually – is that pasta sauce? As today we’re looking at the bizarrely titled and utterly bizarre ‘A Bucket of Bolognese’, and I’m torn as to whether this is an attempt to make the weirdest Spaghetti Western of all time, or an attempt to spoof the whole genre, or simply a filmmaker taking his dream journal and making a very long and very silly movie from it.


The setting is a lost desert town which wears the name ‘Nowheresville’ on an old battered sign. It’s a small, ramshackle place, the kind you’ve seen in dozens of spaghetti westerns. Unmistakably it’s the type of town where the locals have earned deep lines on their faces, where the wind and wisdom of years has given them an interesting turn of phrase, yet where they speak English in a way which doesn’t quite match the movement of their mouths. Living in Nowhereville is stock character after stock character: there’s a corrupt sheriff; a sage and philosophical saloon owner; an earnest and good hearted whippersnapper; and a particularly lusty and buxom madam. Into town one day rides a stranger – Robert Vaughan, of all people – handsome, debonair and deadly. He clearly has the killer instinct to match his sharp get up. And he’s just in time, as the town is about to be besieged by an insane undertaker who has decided to build up his business by massacring the town folk.


(That last point is particularly interesting. Yes, for an undertaker, massacring a whole town would make him much busier in the short term – but who on Earth is going to pay him? There’s no financial gain in this. And what would the word of mouth about this undertaker be? Yes, it would undoubtedly give you more holes to dig, but this is not a sensible business building scheme.)


I’ve always admired the dream-like quality of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, the way, for example, a whole army can vanish from a destroyed bridge while Eastwood and Wallach sleep. Here that dream quality is turned up to some loud and proud, bright and brash, feverish hallucination. The undertaker is portrayed as a cackling lunatic of the kind The Grimm Brothers would have dismissed as a tad too broad. Around the town he sets up these coffin traps, where out of nowhere a full sized coffin springs up and starts spraying machine-gun fire. In town things are no better, with the lusty madam always in a state of undress and putting herself in the most ridiculous situations. You don’t expect to see a busty, sexy woman in a slip run right across the middle of a gunfight in slow motion for no real reason (well, apart from the obvious ones). Elsewhere the earnest youth is shot, but still acts as a gopher for Vaughan for the unfeasibly long amount of time it takes him to die – a good half of the movie’s length, I reckon. So what we have here is a really weird mixture and that’s before we get to the backroom of the saloon, where an incongruous party of dwarfs does nothing but play poker and eat a giant suckling pig – worrying little about the possible oncoming slaughter.


At the centre of it all, doing amazingly stoic and sterling work as the gunslinger, is Robert Vaughan. I like Robert Vaughan, I like how he uses his traditional Hollywood looks and charisma and gives them a sinister edge. It works amazingly well here, in a film where no one is sure what the gunfighter’s next move will be, that dubious morality is beautifully judged. But even more than that, by keeping a straight face and remaining calm no matter what piece of madness unfurls in front of him, he provides a centre which makes whatever the hell is happening in this movie appear almost normal.


How funny this is, I couldn’t tell you, nor whether it’s supposed to be funny. I can’t even tell you how good it is, but I know that once seen, it’s not forgotten.