Duck, You Sucker!

365 Films

Entry #154

Duck, You Sucker! (1968)

Directed by Sergio Leone

Let me just start off immediately by pointing out that Duck, You Sucker! is an AWESOME title for a movie.  It's not the only one this one has and by far the one that makes the least sense, but it's still pretty damn awesome.  In certain territories it's also known as A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon A Time In..The Revolution.  The last title makes a lot more sense considering this is the second entry in Leone's "Once Upon A Time..." trilogy, but that's neither here nor there.  I think my favorite part about the Duck, You Sucker title is, as Keith Uhlich wrote in Slant for the subsequent DVD review: "It is rumored that Leone's original title for Duck, You Sucker was Once Upon a Time…The Revolution, which it did eventually, and appropriately, go under during its French release. Frayling explains in an accompanying video interview that the English title is both a loose translation of the original Italian, Giù la Testa (literally: "Keep your head down, balls") and the result of a mistaken assumption on the part of Leone, who was convinced that "Duck, you sucker!" was a common phrase of American slang."  I don't know, that shit makes me laugh.  The film opens with what must be the only example of a an introductory shot announcing itself to us with a close up shot of piss.  Leone's capacity for stripping his environments down to their grubbiest, most base components gets a good exercise with the first section of this film.  In one of the most nauseatingly disgusting sequences ever committed to film, Rod Steiger's  Juan Miranda, a mexican outlaw gets picked up by a wagon carrying the worst examples of the white race within a 1,000 mile radius.  The group proceeds to berate Juan and his countryman (along with any other group on the planet that isn't white and christian) for being grotesque savages.  Leone visualizes their brutal words literally with a devastating montage of oral close-ups as they sloppily stuff their faces and spew racial bile at record speed.  For my money, it's one of the most memorable sequences Leone's ever committed to film, especially considering there's not a gun fight in sight.  To be fair, the scene's exclamation point does come in the form of a gunshot to the head, but it's definitely the ONLY way that sequence could have ended.  The reason I'm spending so much time waxing over this particular opening is that it sets up the overwhelming sense of cynicism that not only courses through so much of this film, but through all of Leone's work.  We are introduced to the hero of Duck, You Sucker and he is a vile, misogynistic sadist who also happens to be dedicated to his comrades and family (including the children from several different women to which he lays claim).  His eventual partner in crime is James Coburn's John Mallory, an early IRA explosives expert on the run from the British.  The point being that these two rise to the top like cream when the rest of the world is as shitty as the one run and ruled by the white institutions represented by the wagon in the form of money, violence, and religious hypocrisy.  And what Miranda and Mallory learn is that in order to destroy those institutions, they have to play by their rules and that is what sets apart Duck, You Sucker from so many other films of its type.  Leone has no romantic ideals about revolution and does not for one second see them as anything remotely glorious and cinematic as his filmmaking brethren.  For him, the founding of this country and fateful meeting between civilization and the frontier were not tidy nor orderly affairs.  Much like the trail of death left in the way of the railroad in Once Upon A Time In The West, the characters in this film are dragged kicking and screaming through the idea of progress and nobody comes out clean in the end.