I was told a quote once by a friend, and I'm paraphrasing here, "if the Western myth- ologised the west, then the Spaghetti Western mythologised the Western".  I was never going to quote that on this blog;  it seemed too "film buff"-ish and trite, however cool and accurate a statement it is.  After I saw MASSACRE TIME,  I felt that it was a needed bone in the skeleton of this article.

MASSACRE TIME was made immediately after it's star, Franco Nero, had finished the hit DJANGO with Sergio Corbucci.  DJANGO was such an intense experience for me that I actually avoided this one; how could something be very good in the stark shadow of a legendary film like that?

I needn't have worried.  Here, director Lucio Fulci avoids the surreal apocalytic energy of DJANGO completely...this is a totally different beast.  MASSACRE TIME,  more than any other Spaghetti that I've seen, is a stunning catalogue of western archetypes.  Read differently, one could say that it's full of stereotypes, but in this case I don't believe that to be true.  Each character,  each plot stroke, is pure western...distilled into a strong whiskey that goes down smooth.

Nero plays Tom Corbett, a man far away from home.  He's given a message that he needs to return to his family...something is not right.  When he arrives,  he finds that the ancestral land has been taken by a ruthless land baron,  his mother is poor,  and his brother, Jeffrey Corbett(played excellently by George Hilton), has become a lazy, worthless drunk(in spite of the fact that he still kicks serious ass), doing side work for the town blacksmith.  The town is brutalised by the sociopathic son of the land baron, who hunts humans for sport, and kills unarmed men in the street; his depravity is further displayed in a near-blatant display of father/son incestuous lust...

...something has to be done, and the Corbett brothers are going to have to do it.
 
Ha!  We've seen this movie,  right?  Well,  in a certain way, yes,  but in many other ways,  no.  The real-time experience is far beyond the familiar sum of it's parts. Each of these characters seem like a potent concentrate of every other character like them in every western ever made,  but pounded into a hard, raspy,  grit that keeps you staring at it.  It's that larger-than-life energy that pours across the screen. Where DJANGO took the essence of the western and burned it alive, screaming, begging for eternity,  MASSACRE TIME is like an ancient slab of rock, with the history of the cowboy picture chiseled into it like jagged Hittite cuneiform.

My favourite character, other than Franco Nero's,  is the Chinese blacksmith,  played by the highly amusing Tchang Yu.  Typical for his character,  he's the town blacksmith,  the barber,  the undertaker,  and in a fun barfight scene,  the saloon piano player(a mighty fine Ragtime player he is too, apparently...long before ragtime was invented!).  He totes out the sayings of Confucius at key moments,  but then contradicts them, using the realities of the town as the counter, "Confucius say, if you want to live a long life, try to be ignorant, and know nothing...but in this town, you have to know a lot of things to live a long life".  Very amusing.  Add to that a hilariously crass love of money, and you have one of my top secondary characters in Spaghetti Westerns.

Honestly,  many people give Clint Eastwood the title "king of the Spaghetti Western",  but I think it really belongs to Franco Nero.  What Clint does to a role is amazing,  a burned-hard gunfighter that commands every scene he's in.  There's something of the outsider to him as well.  He has too much of the DNA of the American western woven into his genome to be a full denizen of this unique, almost surreal universe.  Nero is the Spaghetti Western universe incarnate;  harsh,  intense, and brutal, without those delicate subtleties that make him like us.  He isn't like us.  He's the glaring orange of the sun-tortured mesa,  the deafening crack of a rifle shot, and the static coldness of a man left to die in the mud.  I'm always possessed by his cold gravitas, and the things that he lacks as a finely-drawn human make everything he does more of a simple, hard statement. That's what the Spaghetti Western is to me;  a series of simple, barbaric, almost  mythological statements.

MASSACRE TIME is an excellent Western movie experience.

One thing that should be known about me is that I'm a fan of Mountie stuff.  Radio dramas,  lobby cards,  buttons, knick-knacks,  swag and other Mountie-related nonsense bring the smile of a well-satisfied geek (Check out my Mountie swag series HERE).  Well,  Mountie movies are very much on that list.  I own at least forty in various formats,  and I haven't seen a bad one yet!  Well, it was relatively recently made known to me that there are Euro/Spaghetti Mountie westerns,  and I LOVED the idea!  I grew up with Sword and Sandal pictures,  and in the last half-decade I've developed a taste for both Spaghetti Westerns and the Poliziotteschi cop movies,  so adding Mounties to the mix was an exciting prospect.

I now have a good pile of them!  I was able to find a source with every Euro-Mountie film that my research has been able to discover.  One of these is the Italian/Spanish production, Kitosh, The Man from the North, originally titled Frontera al Sur (Frontier of the South),  filmed in Spain in 1967.  Though it was apparently filmed in Spanish, I've only seen a dubbed version.  It's as well-dubbed as any of these films, and although this particular copy is an occasionally brutal pan-and-scan,  it's highly watchable.  Any port in a storm, wot?  I've yet to see a DVD release of it,  and many Euro-western fans don't even know it exists!

It stars George Hilton as the rakish tracker/woodsman/gunfighter David Kitosch.  This seems to be a name very much in line with traditional Spaghetti naming conventions;  the Italians in particular have a unique perspective on the American west,  and they tend to pick some really odd,  but macho-ish-ly cool names for their gunslingers.  Kitosch fits right in with some of the many odd names in the genre,  particularly the famous ones:  Manaja, Keoma,  Sabata, Sartana, and the most famous of them all, Django (the gunfighter, not the guitarist).  Names in general are certainly a big part of the magic of a western character, and the Italians know it very well;  so much so, in fact, that the baddest of the gunfighters is a man with no name!  It's an interesting and effective convention...it sets our guy apart from the crowd, and imbues him with strangeness, and it ties him to the various qualities of the cowboy hero/anti-hero archetype.

Typical of the Euro-western, Kitosch is very much in the anti-hero camp.  Between the debauching of beautiful women and running from hostile Aboriginal Canadians (traditionally referred to as "indians"), he works with the Royal Canadian Mounted police as a scout.  To let us know from the beginning what kind of guy our character is,  Kitosh, The Man from the North begins with a kiss;  Kitosch smooches the wife of White Wolf, a local native chief,  and immediately we're on the run!  In wide-eyed haste, he horses-up and makes tracks for the fort of the local Mountie contingent,  with the afore-mentioned indians on his tail.  From then on the plot goes a bit cosmic and stream-of-consciousness-ish.  Kitosch is asked to travel with the Mounties to protect a shipment of gold from a large band of outlaws,  which he declines, and then there is a carriage full of beautiful women (each of whom seem to have a different emotional issue),  who seem to have not much of a raison d'être (other than being both A) beautiful, and B) women), and,  of course, there is the mysterious Mountie Major Baker, played by Pierro Lulli, the uncrowned king of the Peplum/Sword and Sandal film.  He is Kitosh's foil throughout the story,  fighting for the upper hand over him (in fact, impersonated by Kitosch for much of the picture,  much to his chagrin).  Throw in gunfights (fights in general, actually...diverse and plentiful),  piles of gold bars,  Mountie action, a Christian indian named Joseph, and more unpredictable plot turns than three Republic serials,  and you have this film in a nutshell. 

It's all very surreal.  Surreal,  and EXTREMELY enjoyable.  It took me a few minutes to grab a hold of the flow of the thing,  but once I got the interior logic (or whatever term you would use to describe the interior flow of this swirling mass of themes and storyline),  it was quite an amazing ride.

I was excited when I heard that Hilton was in this one.  I'm a big fan of the Franco Nero Spaghetti Western masterpiece Massacre Time,  filmed the year before Kitosch (and reviewed by me HERE),  and Hilton was awesome in a supporting role as Nero's character's brother.  He has such a strange vibe;  one part chaotic clown,  a couple parts daring hero,  and a dash or two of emotionally volatile killer.  Though he often plays a role with humour,  it is very seldom (in my view) that it's ever really that funny.  He has an anti-hero's edge that cuts,  even when he's making what is obviously meant to be humorous.  His characters are the types of fellow upon which the good side is best to be,  and I suspect it may have been the same for the man himself.

Actually,  1967 was quite a year for George Hilton.  Typical of European actors of the time,  the  was in at least eight movies that year,  including the one immediately following Kitosch, the Man From the North,  Il Tempo Degli Avvoltoi ("The Time of the Vultures" in English,  released as "Last of the Bad Men"), in which he also plays a Kitosch character.  I say "a" as opposed to "the",  because I'm not certain they are, in fact, the same character,  in spite of the temporal proximity of the two films.  That's the beauty of the "Spaghetti".  The logic and reasoning issues  that so often destroy American low-budget movies don't apply;  in fact,  as Kitosch proves,  the less attached you are to the normal strictures of life,  the more ecstatic your watching experience will be.

I suggest that you get out your tin-foil Mountie hat and put Kitosch in the DVD player...it's awesome.

I have a couple related side-notes:  The copy of Kitosch, The Man Who Came From the North that I have came from Euro Trash Cinema. It's pan-and-scan,  but a good, clear copy dubbed into English.  Craig is a fast shipper, and he has a HUGE collection,  including many Spaghetti/Euro Mountie pictures, including Cormack of the Mounties (Guibbe Rosse),  Jesuit Joe,  Django Does Not Forgive (Mestizo),  Cavalry Charge (La carga de la policía montada), and Rebels of Canada (I tre del Colorado).  You can watch Last of the Bad Men on Youtube (as well as Hilton's 007 James Bond adventure, 2 Mafiosi Contro Goldfinger under the title Goldginger).  Have fun!