Face to Face
Well, I had become a little tired of watching some of the more forgettable of the Italian westerns, so I wanted to follow up with one of the higher examples. I wanted to watch one that I have never seen before, so I cued up an excellent Italian-language print of Sergio Sollima’s Faccia a Faccia.
Sollima directed two of my favorite spaghetti westerns The Big Gundown and it’s sequel Run, Man, Run, both starring the great Cuban actor Tomas Milian. This Sollima film was made in 1967, in between those two other films, and also stars Milian.
It is a remarkable film. A schoolteacher (played by Italian western great Gian Maria Volontè) heads to Texas for health reasons, and gets caught up with an outlaw. The film contrasts the schoolteacher slowly evolving into a ruthless criminal while the outlaw sowly develops a conscience. A third major character is played by Wiliam Berger, an Austrian-born American actor in his first of many Italian roles. Berger plays a Pinkerton detective going undercover to capture Milian’s gang. (I just read that Berger was once a roommate with Keith Richards?!?! I wonder what year that was?)
This epic film made up for watching a couple of merely ok westerns.