Dir: Damiano Damiani
Star: Gian Maria Volonté, Lou Castel, Klaus Kinski, Martine Beswick
a.k.a. El Chucho Quién Sabe?

Likely regarded as one of the top tier of spaghetti Westerns – at least, outside those directed by Sergio Leone – this founded the genre of ‘Zapata Westerns’. Wikipedia defines these as featuring a variant of the hero pair with “a revolutionary Mexican bandit and a mostly money-oriented American from the United States frontier.” Certainly, this is considerably more overtly political than most others in Kinski’s filmography, being set in the Mexican Revolution. This took place in the nineteen-tens, beginning as a revolt against the established order, but ending in a messy, multi-factioned civil war, and resulting in the death of more than a million Mexicans overall.

It’s clearly well under way when we join the action, a government train coming under attack from rebel forces under El Chuncho (Volonté), seeking to “liberate” the weapons it is carrying. Their raid eventually succeeds, thanks largely to help from an American passenger, Bill Tate (Castel), who joins the rebel gang. El Chuncho is less a philosophical rebel than a mercenary one, and intends to sell the arms to the leader of the rebels, General Elias. But there’s work to be done before that, such as pursuing Chuncho’s “white whale”, a legendary golden machine gun. It’s also clear from early on that Tate, nicknamed Niño by the gang for his boyish good looks, has an agenda of his own, and also has a love-hate relationship with gang moll Adelita (Beswick).

Right from the beginning, the harsh nature of the war is made clear: the first scene shows a firing squad executing rebels. Then the train is stopped by El Chuncho placing ahead of it, a captured Mexican officer, who has been crucified on the tracks. Still alive, the only way for the train to get out of the rebels’ “kill box” is to drive over the prisoner. This sets the tone for a film which is generally brutal in tone, with Damiani pulling no punches about the selfish nature of many of those involved, on both sides. The key point on which the film hangs is El Chuncho’s decision to leave the town of San Miguel. He and his gang have already overthrown the town’s leader, Don Felipe, executing him. But he and the bulk of his gang then leave the town, taking all the weapons with them to sell to Elias – and leaving San Miguel wide open to government reprisal. When the inevitable happens, El Chuncho feels personally guilty.

Kinski’s role here is as El Chuncho’s sibling, a man of God known as El Santo. There’s almost some foreshadowing of Jesus Christus Erlöser, filmed five years later. When El Santo is asked by another priest why he is living with thieves, he spits back, “Christ died between two thieves! God is with the poor and the oppressed. If you’re a good priest, you should know that.” A subsequent rant causes Tate to ask El Chuncho, “Is he mad?”, to which the response is a shrug and “He’s my brother.” Half-brother, to be exact: “Same mother, and the father, who knows?” But Santo doesn’t realize that Chuncho is in the arms business, thinking the weapons are donated to Elias “for the triumph of the revolution.”

SPOILERS. It’s this deceit which eventually proves his downfall. When El Chuncho delivers his arms to Elias, he discovers his greed led to the defenseless inhabitants of San Miguel being slaughtered. He accepts execution as his fate, only for El Santo to pop up – apparently the sole survivor – and demands the right to carry out the punishment: “He’s my brother. My blood.” When Chucho remind his brother he had said that God is good and generous, we get one of the classic Kinski lines: “God is. But I’m not…” And neither is Tate. For having carried out what has been his mission all along – the assassination of Elias – the American then saves Chucho by shooting his brother, as the priest is about to execute him.

That alone would be a wonderfully bleak way to end a movie. But, wait! There’s more! For Chuncho tracks down Tate, who has just received his 100,000 pesos bounty from the government, with the aim of killing him. But Tate shows that he had left behind half the bounty for Chuncho, in thanks for the (unwitting) help, and the two men agree to return to America and begin a new life. But when Chuncho discovers everything had been a set-up from the train robbery in the beginning, he has a further change of mind and announces he must kill Tate. The American asks why to which El Chuncho replies, “¿Quién sabe?” [Who knows?] before gunning the assassin down. END SPOILERS.

Damn. That’s some cynical cinema. Damiani makes it clear his sympathies are with the rebels – as you’d expect, considering the film is generally considered to have been written by Franco Solinas, who was also responsible for The Battle of Algiers. Yet there’s no black and white to be found here: it’s all shades of murky grayness, such as El Chuncho’s enthusiasm for destroying the old order, even as he lacks anything at all credible with which to replace it. The original plan was to film this in Mexico, but it ended up being Spain as usual.

For Kinski, the highlight is a raid on an army outpost, where El Santo interrupts a medal ceremony: “Don’t pin medals on criminals! They’ve killed children and women. They’ve tortured people. And now your hour is come! The Lord curses you thieves and murderers! I curse all of you, d’you hear me? Assassins of Mexico, I challenge you!” before reciting the Trinitarian formula, punctuating each element by lobbing a hand-grenade at the soldiers. Again, classic Klaus. It’s a large part of the reason why the Village Voice said, “The best reason to see the movie is for Kinski, who delivers the film’s most arresting performance. Coasting on manic charm, Kinski steals every scene he’s in.” Hard to argue with that.