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You are joking about Howard Hughes, the multi-milionair? This one is a british film critic. And the book is quite recommendable, despite a few errors. He describes 20 SWs very closely. He has also made a smaller version with more films, but less information, as Pocket Essential.
The best english book, together with Fraylingās. -
Not changing the whole film into an american one, only Neroās character.
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Eufemio is just a spanish name, but not as common as Paco (or Pedro or Juan). I think Hughes was only misinformed.
Just to add more confusion to this topic, I checked my Dizionario Del Western AllāItaliana to see what the italians say and found Musanteās character listed as Eugenio/Paco Roman. It doesnāt get any easier does it!
There was, however, no mention of any other name for Neroās chacter other than Serghei Kowalski, il Polacko. Palance is listed as Ricciolo which, as previously pointed out, means Curly. So that seems straightforward.
But then, for a laugh, I couldnāt help checking what Weisser might say and he lists Palanceās character as Captain Elam! Ridiculous, I thought but then found the 1st volume of the Glittering Images Western AllāItaliana also refer to Palance as Elam in the english language text but Ricciolo in the italian!
Now Iām really confused!!!
Typical Weisser bullshit.
Letās call him Paco. Forever
I have an Italian print of IL MERCENARIOā¦I will have to watch it, once again; but, I donāt recall Musanteās character being called āEufemioā in it. He was Paco, as I remember it.
Incidentally, the name Eufemio isā¦or wasā¦a very common Mexican name. It was the name of Emiliano Zapataās brother (who was portrayed by Anthony Quinn in the movie VIVA ZAPATA).
The most curious change of names for the characters in IL MERCENARIO I have ever come across are in the promotional materials (pressbooks and magazine articles) that came out in America before the film was released!
Absolutely no explanation for thisā¦but, according to the original pressbook Neroās character was supposedly called Bill (??).
The other names were just as ridiculous. Never have found out why these names were listedā¦as they are obviously not the names that appeared in the film when it was finally released in the USA.
I just watched it and found it a little weak. Although there is a very good Nero, excellent little details and score, I donāt have to talk about, there is something missing. Although a hate comparisons, I have to compare to companeros. Milian is better, much better. And I had more fun, companeros was faster. Il mercenario is a great flick, but definitely not one of the big westerns. Maybe I am a little disappointed because I was waiting for such a long time to watch il mercenario. And maybe I like companeros more because it was one of my first westernā¦? But I would for sure by a DVD 
Watch it again! 8)
Definately, see it again.
i would make my top 10 without a doubt 
Did you see a nice widescreen print or a shoddy fullscreen one.
I saw a widescreen print, but not the best quality. Maybe you are rightā¦ should watch it again.
I have to agree with Lode. Iāve watched this film 3 or 4 times maybe but I just canāt get into it. Itās very well made film with good music, actors etc. but for some reason I donāt enjoy it as much as I enjoy other Corbucci films. Itās one of the truly great films of the genre but itās not one of my personal favorites.
Yes, it is not my fav Corbucci western and like most things down to personal preference I guess.
Revolution elements in westerns are not really my thing and Nero plays a character who is a bit to arrogant for my liking at times.
I think that the acting is much better than in Companeros.
Nero is great as Kowalski, his acting is basically the same in both films, but it seems to be a more routine performance in Companeros.
Palance and Milian on the other hand are clearly over the top in Companeros, but where Palance has nevertheless his moments Milian kills the role with his overacting, like he did in all films around this time. Thatās why Musante is much better.
And Palance gives in The Mercenary one of his greatest villains, also one of the greatest in SWs. On par with van Cleef in GBU.
Itās interesting how different people react to the same film. IMO it is Companeros who is strolling around, while The Mercenary is an extremely fast film, quite contrary to a Leone. If Leone had worked with the Mercenary screenplay the film would have been twice as long.
I have to agree, that Palance is much better in Mercenario than in Companeros. But I disagree to that Milian fact. It is just his way of acting in these kinda roles PLUS I really love Milian as a spaghetti actor. So the power of those two facts will never be beaten by Musante Nevertheless Musante is great and it is a pity that he never came up to play in westerns again. When it comes to the point of Nero I have to quote ENNIOO, because I think he is right: āā¦Nero plays a character who is a bit to arrogant for my liking at times.ā This was exactly what I was thinking while watching it. I just like him better as Yodlaf, although he is great in both flicks. But these are just feelings. The overall acting seems to be better in Mercenario, but the fun is on companeros side. Nevertheless Mercenario is a hell of a western - but I thought it would do betterā¦
I enjoy both movies, but I always looked at Companeros as the more entertaining of the two, but not necessarily the better one. Mercenary is really good, even with the multiple endings. Does anyone else agree the movie should have ended in the bull ring instead of continuing on? The touch with blood dripping from Palanceās flower is perfect. 
Donāt get me wrong though, I love both movies.
1968 ā Aka: A Professional Gun, orig. Title: Il Mercenario (I), Salario para Matar (E) ā Dir: Sergio Corbucci ā Cast: Franco Nero, Tony Musante, Giovanna Ralli, Jack Palance, Eduardo Fajardo, Franco Ressel, Franco Giacobini ā Music: Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai
Corbucciās early spaghetti westerns had been fairly one-dimensional action movies, saved by his sense of style and flair for action scenes, but hampered by limited production values. The success of Django (1966) finally gave him bigger budgets and the opportunity to realize his sometimes very ambitious plans. For The Mercenary he apparently had fairly large means at his disposal, as well as a near perfect cast and crew. Despite a very difficult genesis, it became one of his most accomplished movies, visually stunning, ferociously violent and totally wonderful.
A Polish mercenary (Nero) arrives in Mexico and is hired by the Garcia brothers to transport their silver safely across the border. But a group of revolutionary bandits have taken over the mine and are now waiting for Colonel Garcia to attack with his Federales. Their leader Paco Roman (Musante) is a simple man who doesnāt have a clue how a revolution has to be undertaken or even what the concept really means, so he hires European mercenary Nero to instruct him in the art of warfare. Nero not only wants to be paid for the job, but also requires to be treated like a king. For this he is hold in contempt by peasant girl Columba (Ralli) who was freed by Paco Roman and subsequently joined his gang. On their trail is a second mercenary (Palance), who was humiliated by Paco and is now out to take revenge. When Curly is about to kill Paco, the latter is saved by Nero who intends to hand him over to the authorities, but thereās still that gorgeous peasant girl ā¦
Influenced by Marxist ideas, like most Southern European intellectuals in the sixties, the Mexican revolution was the ideal background for Corbucciās political westerns. There is little doubt that he wished to equate the Mexican situation to the situation back home, where a right-wing, fervent pro-American government tried to suppress any kind of revolutionary initiative. For The Mercenary, he got hold of a story by Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio. The original script had been influenced by āThe Exeption and the Ruleā (Die Ausnahme und die Regel), one of Bertold Brechtās famous so-called LehrstĆ¼cke (Teaching plays). Brechtās play is about a rich merchant who must cross the desert to close an oil deal. During the trip the class differences between him and his working-class porter become clear. Eventually the merchant accidently kills the porter when both are lost in the desert and he feels threatened by him. In court the merchant is acquitted, even though it has become clear that the porter didnāt threaten the merchant, but wanted to give him his last water instead. Solinas and Arlorioās script was intended as a kind of three act drama, about an American mercenary and a third world revolutionary, set shortly after the turn of the century. In the first act those representatives of two different worlds would meet and decide to cooperate. In the second act they would slowly become aware that the cultural gap between them was too large, and the final act would describe their inevitable downfall and violent death. Director would be Gillo Pontecorvo, with whom Solinas had already made the award-winning The Battle of Algiers (1963).There were rumours about casting Peter OāToole or Burt Lancaster as the mercenary, while Sidney Poitier was asked for the part of the revolutionary. But the affair never came off the ground. Consequently the script was rewritten by at least four different people (among them Luciano Vincenzioni and Sergio Corbucci), and finally disowned by Solinas and Arlorio, who re-used several ideas for another movie with director Pontecorvo set in Haiti, without Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster and Peter OāToole, but starring Marlon Brando: Queimada (Burn!/1969). Some elements of the original story, also seem to turn up in a lesser known Lancaster (!) movie from ā68, Sydney Pollackās dissapointng - if occasionally funny - The Scalphunters. In this movie the mercenary has become a trapper and the revolutionary an escaped slave (played by Ossie Davis, apparently Poitier wasnāt available) but the only neat idea of the entire movie is the decision to make the slave the more literate of the two.
Meanwhile Corbucci had met with all kinds of problems preparing his movie. His first decision was to relocate the story to Mexico and cast his favourite actor, Franco Nero, as the Mexican. James Coburn was nearly contracted for the part of the mercenary, but turned the offer down when preparations for filming were already well on their way. Nero then became the mercenary, the American became a European, and Corbucci considered both Jack Palance and Eli Wallach as the Mexican revolutionary. Palance would eventually turn up in the movie, but in a different quality, and when Wallach said no, Corbucci asked Tony Musante, whom he had seen in a thriller and who had a good face for a peon. Musante immediately signed the contract and took the plane to Rome, preparing himself for la dolce vita, only to end up in the burning heat of the Almeria desert.
Itās a bit of a surprise that after all those reworkings and rewritings, some of the ideas of the original story (or even Brechtās play) still shine through in Corbucciās movie. The decadence of the turn of the century and the differences in the background of the protagonists are wonderfully illustrated by the presence of all kinds of regalia of modern life, such as machine guns, cars and planes, and Musanteās often bewildered reaction to it. We see Musanteās character, Paco Roman, evolving from a simple peon to a ruthless gang leader who is developing a revolutionary ardour by the aid of the peasant girl who has started to love him. There is one, very touching scene where Musante, confronted with a map of Mexico, confesses that he never realised how great his country was. What definitely has been changed, is the original bleak ending: Musante and Nero finally become friends, but the gap between them turns out to be too wide when Nero proposes a partnership (since thereās always a revolutionary war somewhere) and Musante decides to stay in Mexico, to continue the revolution. But still he needs the Europeanās professional skills: after they have said goodbye, Nero shoots mine owner Garcia and his federales, who were waiting on a distant mountain range for Musante. What is also new in the final script, is the introduction of the second mercenary, the sadistic Ricciolo (Curly in the English language version), who constantly crosses himself and is sexually aroused in the prospect of killing Paco Roman. It has been suggested that the collective reworking the original story, got the idea of the second mercenary when they read about Lumumba and his suppressed revolution in Belgian Congo, and the role European mercenaries had played in the process. Anyway, this second mercenary adds a new dimension to the story and was probably exactly what the film needed.
Like all Corbucciās films, Il Mercenario has some flaws, most of them due to what has been called by Phil Hardy āhis lack of discipline and need to fit in jokesā. The running gag here is Nero lighting a match on all kinds of surfaces, even a hanging manās boots and a womanās cleavage . Although funny, such antics can work against the movie, or at least against certain scenes. Like The Good the Bad and the Ugly (clearly an influence), The Mercenary is at first sight a rather relaxed, almost cheerful movie, set against a bleak and ugly background; but the story is punctuated regularly by strong images of physical or mental cruelty, such as the suggested castration of a traitor of the revolution or two hanging men, whom we had met before in the quality of bullies. Of course, the lighting of the match underlines Neroās ācoolnessā here, but it seems a bit over the top. When Paco Roman finally has his Columba in a romantic hold, she starts complaining about his sabre, no not that sabre, a real sabre. Furthermore Nero shoots a plane out of the sky and brings down a horse by using his rifle as a blunt instrument. Like Fellini, Corbucci often is tempted to put so many extravagant scenes in his movies that they tend to overgrow, so to speak, the larger picture. But I guess that is the price you pay for the kind of brilliance that was Corbucciās (and that was quite different from Leoneās severe perfectionism). Moreover, despite all possible shortcomings, the film works, and works very well, thanks to some fine performances and a multi-layered script. The casting of Musante has been critisized - many critics would have preferred Tomas Milian in his part - but his rather restrained performance provides some counterweight for Neroās laconic acting style. Nero probably gives his best performance ever as the selfish and conceited, but imperturbable and resourceful mercenary. Kudus go to Giovanna Ralli as the lascivious and lusty Columba. Of the various strong women in Corbucciās movies, she probably is the most impressive one. She flirts with Nero when she wants to have Musante, exposes Nero as a āthief of the revolutionā (and sees to it that Musante confiscates his wealth!), but realizes in time that the revolutionary army canāt do without him when the Federales appear to posses a plane: she knows only the Polak can deal with it.
Instead of the more common flashback structure, Corbucci and his co-writers use a loop structure here, a literary technique rarely used in action movies. For this reason the script was probably called overwrought by some critics. In a loop structure the moment of highest entanglement, the scene in which the various story-lines come together, is immediately shown at the beginning of the movie; subsequently the script makes a large detour until this moment of upper entanglement is reached again and is about to be unravelled. This moment, the loop, is indeed the Arena scene, in which Paco Roman and Ricciolo meet for a shootout, supervised by Sergei, while Columba and Garcia, the other people involved, are biding their time in the background. Actually, the script is quite intricate and intelligently put together; it takes multiple viewings to trace all those vicissitudes and internal references, and every time youāll discover new ones ā¦
The Mercenary was Corbucciās biggest success in the US and popular among most European audiences, but wasnāt well-received at home. It still would prove to be very influential within the spaghetti western industry. Most European mercenaries populating future Zapata westerns, would be modelled after the ultra-cool and ultra-chic Sergei Kowalski, who seemed to be perfectly at home in Mexico as well as on the catwalks of Paris or Milan. Kowalski also may have influenced those well-dressed heroes like Sartana and Sabata, who werenāt mercenaries fighting in a revolution, but who used their sophisticated weaponry in a similar tongue-in-cheek way as the Polak (but of course Colonel Mortimer was a major influence there too). Morriconeās score is often called one of his very best, and deservedly so. Itās alternately rousing and touching, with different themes to reflect the different moods of the filmās contents. The Arena is certainly one of his most memorable separate tracks. Alejandro Ulloaās cinematography is magnificent too.
Reviewed DVD: There still seems to be no official English friendly release available, except for the Japanese R2 disc, much too expensive and probably even out of print. Therefore I watched (once again) my Italian Colt Collection DVD. Itās a fine disc, although colours could have been a little more vibrant. But thereās only Italian audio (DD 5.1 & 2.0 stereo). However, there are Italian subtitles HOH which may facilitate the task a little.
This review is for Stanton
Nice to see you mention Bruno Nicolai in the heading :).
You continue to outdo yourself Scherp. Excellent review.
Scherp, where do you get all these informations about Corbucci and his films?
Hereās the link for further reading:
http://www.spaghetti-western.net/forum/index.php/topic,174.0.html
And the database entry:
I used several sources:
- Il Dizionario del Western allāItaliana (Giusti): origins of the story, history of casting, history of reception in Italy
- Wikepedia: Brecht, Exception and the Rule
- Wikepedia: The Mercenary, S. Corbucci
- Se sei vivo Spara (Casadio): comments on the film and the actors
- Gente di Respetto, forum - thread Il Mercenario
- Spaghetti Westerns (Frayling), description + comments on the movie, chapter about Zapata westerns
- The essential Spaghetti westerns (Hughes)
- SWDB Altervista (Italian) - Il Mercenario, S. Corbucci
- I read all the comments here on the excisting Mercenary thread
- Several Italian reviews of the movie (Internet)
Most conclusions I drew myself ā¦
(By the way: it is hard work, finding info on Corbucci and his movies; thereās still a lot to do in this respect. Even on the Net you find preciously little on the man. I try to do him justice. Please donāt hesitate to give your comments if there any data you doubt or donāt agree with)
Excellent work, scherp my friend!!
BRAVO!
THE MERCENARY is likely my most favorite Corbucci film.
[quote=āscherpschutter, post:78, topic:177ā]I used several sources:
- Il Dizionario del Western allāItaliana (Giusti): origins of the story, history of casting, history of reception in Italy
- Wikepedia: Brecht, Exception and the Rule
- Wikepedia: The Mercenary, S. Corbucci
- Se sei vivo Spara (Casadio): comments on the film and the actors
- Gente di Respetto, forum - thread Il Mercenario
- Spaghetti Westerns (Frayling), description + comments on the movie, chapter about Zapata westerns
- The essential Spaghetti westerns (Hughes)
- SWDB Altervista (Italian) - Il Mercenario, S. Corbucci
- I read all the comments here on the excisting Mercenary thread
- Several Italian reviews of the movie (Internet)
Most conclusions I drew myself ā¦
(By the way: it is hard work, finding info on Corbucci and his movies; thereās still a lot to do in this respect. Even on the Net you find preciously little on the man. I try to do him justice. Please donāt hesitate to give your comments if there any data you doubt or donāt agree with)[/quote]
This book by Giusti seems to contain many of the informations Iām always interested in. sob
In which Wikipedia did you find something interesting?
Oh, and I have linked your review to the german Wikipedia.