Playing Guns

By Jay Cock

DUCK, YOU SUCKER

Directed by SERGIO LEONE Screenplay by LUCIANO VINCENZONI, SERGIO DONATI and SERGIO LEONE

The best thing about Sergio Leone's movies is their charming and infectious childishness. So gaudy that they seem to have been splashed across the screen with finger paints, so wildly illogical and improbably elaborate that the props might have been pulled from a giant toy box and the plots from comic books, films like the early Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns or Once Upon a Time in the West exert a weird fascination. It is almost as if Leone not only remembers the fantasies of countless Saturday matinees from his childhood but continually relives them.

Duck, You Sucker is even more frivolous than the usual Leone. The action, of which there is the customary abundance, takes place in Mexico during the waning days of the revolution. Rod Steiger swaggers through various robberies as a goodhearted, simple-minded bandido whose fondest dream is to knock over the bank in Mesa Verde. He gets his chance when he meets with James Coburn, who plays a fugitive I.R.A. revolutionary. How Coburn got from the Emerald Isle to Mexico, or why he is a fugitive, is left totally unexplained in the best Leone tradition. Coburn does put in his first appearance riding a motorcycle, a means of transportation suitable for getting over arroyos if not the Atlantic.

Steiger is too busy marveling at Coburn's practical skill with a stick of dynamite to bother his head about such questions. He tries to press Coburn into his big bank scheme, but, instead, Coburn slyly drafts Steiger into the revolution--the Mexican, that is, not the Irish. So many ambushes and detonations ensue that the viewer runs the risk of succumbing to a case of vicarious shell shock.

The patent absurdity of all this is appealing not in a campy sense but a theatrical one. Leone has a highly individualistic visual style that is sometimes irritating but can be effective in a rather operatic way. He favors huge, porous closeups and compositions with profiles looming large in one corner or another of the wide-screen frame. The music is another Leone trademark. In the Eastwood epics, it will be remembered, a jew's-harp twanged madly every time an eyebrow was arched. Here Leone recruits some hapless vocalist to make melodramatic noises that seem to be an imitation of a bullfrog with bronchitis.

The result of all this is diverting but far from consistent, even in its craziness. There are frequent longueur, and too many conversations about the meaning of revolution that are stupid even by Leone standards. Unfortunately, no one is likely to ever get as much fun out of his movies as Leone himself.

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