The Specialists (film)

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The Specialists
French film poster
Directed bySergio Corbucci
Screenplay by
  • Sergio Corbucci
  • Sabatino Ciuffini[1]
Story bySergio Corbucci
Sabatino Ciuffini
Uncredited:
Lee Van Cleef[2]
Starring
CinematographyDario Di Palma[3]
Edited byElsa Armanni[3]
Music byAngelo Francesco Lavagnino[3]
Color processTechnicolor
Production
companies
  • Adelphia Compagnia Cinematografica
  • Les Films Marceau
  • Neue Emelka[3]
Distributed by
Release dates
  • 26 November 1969 (1969-11-26) (Italy)
  • 10 April 1970 (1970-04-10) (Germany)
  • 22 April 1970 (1970-04-22) (France)
Running time
104 minutes
Countries
  • Italy
  • France
  • West Germany[1]
LanguagesFrench
Italian
Box office
  • £309.9 million (Italy)
  • 1,252,173 admissions (France)

The Specialists (

international co-production between Italy, France and West Germany.[4] Retrospective critics and scholars of Corbucci's Westerns have deemed The Specialists to be the final film in the director's "Mud and Blood" trilogy, which also includes Django (1966) and The Great Silence (1968).[5]

Plot

A single stranger named Hud comes to Blackstone, a town where his brother has been hanged after being falsely accused of robbing a bank. After tangling with the local sheriff and a nearby Mexican bandit turn revolutionary, Hud finds out one of the town's most dignified citizens swapped the real money out with counterfeit bills. After several gunfights and backing down a group of young toughs, Hud rides off after saving a local girl and burning the stolen money.

Cast

Production

Edmond Tenoudji asked Corbucci to write and direct a film for singer Johnny Hallyday;[2] the resulting film uses only a small amount of material from the Corbucci/Van Cleef drafts, such as the hero wearing a bulletproof chainmail vest.[6]

The film credits the screenplay to Corbucci and Sabatino Ciuffini, with whom the director would later work with on

Sonny & Jed (1972), What Am I Doing in the Middle of a Revolution? (1972), Di che segno sei? (1975), Odds and Evens (1978) and Super Fuzz (1980).[7] To accommodate the primary cast members and ensure the film's marketability in France, most of the dialogue was performed in French; Hallyday also recalled that much of the film was improvised, with scenes being written as they were shot.[6]

heatwave that had struck Rome, at one point Mario Adorf nearly suffocated under his heavy costume.[6]

Themes

Like most of Corbucci's Westerns, The Specialists features prominent

anti-authoritarian themes and messages; in the documentary Sergio Corbucci: L'uomo che ride, the director stated that it "was a film about how the wealthy are oppressors".[8] Unusually, the film also presents an anti-hippie stance in the portrayal of several of its antagonists; in a 1971 interview with the French magazine Image et Son, Corbucci stated:[4]

The idea was to show that I was against the hippies. Listen, at this time the Manson business hadn't happened... but there are too many real problems in the world for me to accept the disinterested passivity of these people. Yesterday, Jimi Hendrix died shooting up in London. I am against drugs and hippies. I wanted to denounce them in The Specialists... I'm really violently against their attitude, and I hate Easy Rider.

Release

The Specialists premiered in Italy on November 26, 1969,[9] where it grossed 309,936,000 Italian lira, making it the 17th highest-grossing Spaghetti Western of that year[10] and making only marginally more money than Corbucci's earlier The Great Silence.[11] It was released in West Germany on 10 April 1970 as Fahrt zur Hölle, ihr Halunken ("Go to Hell, you scoundrels") and in France as Le Spécialiste (highlighting Hallyday's appeal over Gastone Moschin and Adorf in the Italian version's plural title) on 22 April 1970.[1][12] The film was Corbucci's most successful Western in the French market, garnering 1,252,173 cinema admissions and becoming the 30th most popular film released there in 1970.[9] Most of the differences between the Italian and French versions of the film concern the climax: while dying, El Diablo orders his biographer Chico to falsify the outcome of his duel with Hud in the former version and tells him to write the truth in the latter, and the Italian prints feature a montage of close-ups of the townspeople's reaction to Hud burning the stolen money; these are missing from the French prints.[13]

In the UK, the film was released in June 1973 by Golden Era Film Distributors in an English-dubbed version titled Drop Them or I'll Shoot. This version, given an

X-rating by the BBFC, ran 92 minutes compared to the 104 minute runtime of uncut European prints and deleted several scenes, such as the entire pre-credits sequence.[14]

The Specialists was screened as part of the Cinéma de la Plage program during the

L'Immagine Ritrovata, Bologna.[15]

Home media

The 4K restoration of The Specialists was released on

Cinémathèque Française director of programming Jean-François Rauger, and a 32-page booklet containing a reprinting of the Pilote comic Le Guitariste ("The Guitarist"), a parody of the film created by Pascal Guichard and Jean–Claude Morchoisne.[16]

In 2020, the restoration saw two further releases: the first, released on January 7, was distributed by Kino Lorber Studio Classics on DVD and Blu-ray for the US market, featuring English subtitles for the Italian track, an audio commentary by filmmaker Alex Cox, and the Italian trailer.[17] The second, released on May 18, was handled in the UK by Eureka Entertainment for Blu-ray. Aside from the French and Italian tracks (for which English subtitles are provided for each), the disc also presents what is known to exist of the film's English dub track, which was found to have suffered irreparable damage and large segments missing (which play in subtitled French on the disc). The disc's special features include the French and Italian trailers, Cox's commentary, an interview with Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western author Austin Fisher about the film and its historical context, the complete script of the English dub (presented as both a slideshow and a PDF file on the disc), and a booklet containing essays about the film and French-produced Westerns by Once Upon a Time in the Italian West author Howard Hughes.[18]

Reception

From contemporary reviews,

Monthly Film Bulletin.[19] Rayns described the film as Corbucci "dourly going through the motions of the Continental revenge Western."[19] Rayns commented that Corbucci's film did have "a splendid finale-after the excellently shot and edited massacre of El Diablo's gang" while concluding that otherwise, all "the film offers are the stereotyped bickering cowards, the stoic Sheriff, the secretly scheming villainess and the cheroot-chewing avenger: all precisedly stage-managed by Corbucci, but without much enthusiasm and to little point."[19]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Fahrt zur Hölle, ihr Halunken". Filmportal.de. Retrieved September 19, 2018.
  2. ^ a b Cox, Alex (2020). Commentary by Alex Cox (Blu-ray). Eureka Entertainment. Event occurs at 0:25:55. EKA70382.
  3. ^ a b c d e "Gli specialisti (1969)" (in Italian). Archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it. Retrieved September 19, 2018.
  4. ^ a b Cox, p. 267–268
  5. ^ Hughes, Howard (2020). Western Excess: Sergio Corbucci and The Specialists (booklet). Eureka Entertainment. p. 8. EKA70382.
  6. ^ a b c d Giusti, p. 497–499
  7. ^ Hughes, Howard (2020). Western Excess: Sergio Corbucci and The Specialists (booklet). Eureka Entertainment. p. 11. EKA70382.
  8. ^ a b Hughes, Howard (2020). Western Excess: Sergio Corbucci and The Specialists (booklet). Eureka Entertainment. p. 12. EKA70382.
  9. ^ a b Hughes, Howard (2020). Western Excess: Sergio Corbucci and The Specialists (booklet). Eureka Entertainment. p. 14. EKA70382.
  10. ^ Fisher, Austin (2020). Austin Fisher on The Specialists (Blu-ray). Eureka Entertainment. EKA70382.
  11. ^ "Spaghetti Western Box-Office Stats". Austin Fisher. 9 April 2020. Retrieved June 13, 2020.
  12. ^ "Gli Specialisti". Bifi.fr (in French). Retrieved September 19, 2018.
  13. ^ Cox, Alex (2020). Commentary by Alex Cox (Blu-ray). Eureka Entertainment. Event occurs at 1:31:14. EKA70382.
  14. ^ Hughes, Howard (2020). Western Excess: Sergio Corbucci and The Specialists (booklet). Eureka Entertainment. p. 15. EKA70382.
  15. ^ "Canes Classics 2018". Cannes Film Festival. 23 April 2018. Retrieved June 13, 2020.
  16. ^ "Test Blu-ray : Le spécialiste". critique-film. 7 June 2018. Retrieved June 14, 2020.
  17. ^ "The Specialists (Blu-ray)". DVD Talk. Retrieved June 14, 2020.
  18. ^ "The Specialists [Gli Specialisti] (Blu-ray)". Eureka Entertainment. Retrieved June 14, 2020.
  19. ^
    Monthly Film Bulletin. Vol. 40, no. 477. British Film Institute
    . p. 214.

Sources

External links
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