Almeria; The Good, The Bad, and the Absurd

Again, due to an unexpectedly short bicycle ride and another fortuitous wind, I find myself with extra time on my hands after showering, doing some laundry, and taking a swim in the hotel's pool. Therefore, in my never ending attempt to keep this blog up to date and providing you, dear reader, with the details of my peregrinations, I am now talking about things which happened more than two weeks ago. So far, I have made pilgrimages to Velasquez birthplace, Columbus' tomb, Pizarro's birthplace, and several other sites I have yet to write about. This trip is all about pilgrimage, but not just to Santiago de Compostela, though that is the general direction I'm heading. - J.

Today I'm going to talk about my pilgrimage to the filming site of The Greatest Movie Ever Made (tm) according to Quentin Tarantino, who we should take seriously, at least with regards to the sincerity of this belief, since almost all of his films are very similar in pacing, cinematography, music and flow as the film of which I'm about to write. "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", (Italian: Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo) is a 1966 Italian epic Spaghetti western film directed by Sergio Leone, starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in the title roles. The very familiar soundtrack theme has now become the subject of millions of cell phone ring tones. It is the third film in the "Dollars Trilogy" following A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965).

The making of the movie is as bizarre as its location, a tiny town called Tabernas in the middle of Europe's only desert, a tiny pocket where so many movies have been filmed which require desert scenes that almost all the rock formations are now, at least on a subconscious level, quite familiar to almost everyone; I had a weird feeling of déjà vu when looking over the landscape.

Fans of the movie will wonder how an Italian film, filmed in Spain, with Spanish actors playing American confederate soldiers, Moroccans playing Mexicans, and the American lead characters all communicated. This is almost a hilarious story onto itself. Sergio Leone spoke some English, badly, but enough to communicate with Van Cleef and Eastwood, and Eli Wallach spoke some French, which Leone spoke very well, and that is how they communicated. All of the dialogue was overdubbed in the studio afterwards, which is why only Van Cleef, Eastwood, and Wallach move their lips in synch with the audio, and everyone else has very badly out of synch speech, since they were speaking in Italian. Various reasons have been cited for this: Leone often liked to play Morricone's music over a scene and possibly shout things at the actors to get them in the mood. Leone cared more for visuals than dialogue (his English was limited, at best). Given the technical limitations of the time, it would have been difficult to record the sound cleanly in most of the extremely wide shots Leone frequently used. Also, it was standard practice in Italian films at this time to shoot silently and post-dub. Whatever the actual reason, all dialogue in the film was recorded in post-production.

Most of the Western scenes were shot in Almería in the south. The production required elaborate sets, including a town under cannon fire, an extensive prison camp and an American Civil War battlefield; and for the climax, several hundred Spanish soldiers were employed to build a cemetery with several thousand grave stones to resemble an ancient Roman circus. The Spanish government under Franco approved production and provided the army with technical assistance; the film's cast includes 1,500 local militia members as extras. Ennio Morricone composed the score. Leone was instrumental in asking Morricone to compose a track for the final stand-off scene in the cemetery, asking him to compose what felt like "the corpses were laughing from inside their tombs", and asked the cinematographer Colli to creating a hypnotic whirling effect interspersed with dramatic extreme close ups, to give the audience the impression of a visual ballet.

Eastwood was not initially pleased with the script and was concerned he might be upstaged by Wallach, and said to Leone, "In the first film I was alone. In the second, we were two. Here we are three. If it goes on this way, in the next one I will be starring with the American cavalry". Eastwood played hard-to-get in accepting the role (inflating his earnings up to $250,000, another Ferrari and 10% of the profits in the United States when eventually released there.)

Wallach and Eastwood flew to Madrid together and between shooting scenes, Eastwood would relax and practice his golf swing. Wallach was almost poisoned during filming when he accidentally drank from a bottle of acid that a film technician had set next to his soda bottle. Wallach mentioned this in his autobiography and complained that while Leone was a brilliant director, he was very lax about ensuring the safety of his actors during dangerous scenes. For instance, in one scene, where he was to be hanged after a pistol was fired, the horse underneath him was supposed to bolt. While the rope around Wallach's neck was severed, the horse was frightened a little too well. It galloped for about a mile with Wallach still mounted and his hands bound behind his back. The third time Wallach's life was threatened was during the scene where he and Mario Brega—who are chained together—jump out of a moving train. The jumping part went as planned, but Wallach's life was endangered when his character attempts to sever the chain binding him to the (now dead) henchman. Tuco places the body on the railroad tracks, waiting for the train to roll over the chain and sever it. Wallach, and presumably the entire film crew, were not aware of the heavy iron steps that jutted one foot out of every box car. If Wallach had stood up from his prone position at the wrong time, one of the jutting steps could have decapitated him. The bridge in the film was reconstructed twice by sappers of the Spanish army after being rigged for on-camera explosive demolition. The first time, an Italian camera operator signaled that he was ready to shoot, which was misconstrued by an army captain as the similar sounding Spanish word meaning "start". Luckily, nobody was injured in the erroneous mistiming. The army rebuilt the bridge while other shots were filmed. As the bridge was not a prop but a rather heavy and sturdy structure, powerful explosives were actually required to destroy it.

The city which was built for this movie still exists and has been recycled several times in other Spanish and American movies, and it is to here that I have made my pilgrimage through Hyperreality . The place is now referred to by locals as "Western Leone" and is two kilometers out of Tabernas, the closest town. "For a Few Euros More", an old hunchback who speaks with a heavy drawl will be glad to show you the place. At first I thought he might be an actor putting me on, but no, he really does suffer from this crippling affliction, poor fellow... As might be expected, the humidity here is none existent, and one of the first things I did before setting out into the desert was purchase several large bottles of water, as just sitting in the shade is dehydrating.

Wooden structures here likely will last forever if they have some paint on them since rot is not an option. Louis pointed out the various buildings and described them in terms of where they were used in the film. Inside the saloon, some men dressed up like cowboys were sitting around the table playing cards. As I was the only one around, they paid no attention to my wandering about, but I noticed shortly after my arrival the sound of a small generator started up, and then the sound system started playing the familiar Ennio Morricone theme from the movie: all for my benefit I'm sure, and the only electricity in the whole place. Everything was very crudely put together, as is normal in movie construction, so many of these buildings have in fact been slowly improved to add to their permanence. In the height of the tourist season, when dozens of people might actually show up, they stage scenes from the film, including shoot-outs, complete with horses and gunslingers coming out of the saloon firing cap guns in the air. There is something mildly depressing in the fact that there is so little happening in Tabernas that they have to survive off the ruins of movie props built nearly half a century ago. It's all rather pathetic and desperate, right down to the white- washed reinforced concrete Indian teepees on the hill.

One really wonders at the Post Modernist mindset required of the Spanish people whose job it is to re-enact 19th century Wild-West American gun-slingers as portrayed by an Italian director in the psychedelic 60's filming in Southern Spain, all for the benefit of English and German tourists. Still, as an exercise in absurdity, it is a fascinating place to visit, more for the people than the place. Tabernas itself is a tidy little town of a few hundred people like so many thousands of other little towns of a few hundred people throughout Spain. There is absolutely nothing at all to recommend it and nothing even remotely different about it except for the local tavern, which doubles as a temple of worship for fans of the sacred Leone trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns. In this bar, the walls are covered with fading posters, most of them signed, and lots of faded sepia-toned photographs of locals helping out with the production of the movies. The woman who runs the place, infact, informed me that her father was one of the extras and personal horse assistant to Mr. Eastwood, and she even showed me a signed photograph of them together. Leone himself would occassionally come in for a quick bite and a beer between shots.

I asked if there was any hotel in town, and the owner said there wasn't, but she did rent out rooms upstairs for 15 euros a night with a shared bath down the hall, but I was the only guest, so I had it to myself. I said "yes" right away. Where else can one sleep in a Temple to the Blessed Trinity for 15 euros a night?