GO FOR BROKE (1968)

"A Wise Man Doesn't Holster His Gun… Until He Takes a Look Around: Umberto Lenzi, John Ireland and Mark Damon Go For Broke (1968)”

Go for Broke (1968) 

Directed by Umberto Lenzi

also known as: 

Tutto per Tutto (Italy); All Out (USA); Copper Face (USA)

"We all run a risk in the world… what matters is what's in it for me."

In an opening of rushed exposition but reduced dynamism, a smirking Mark Damon sits stranded with a deck of cards as he waits for any random passerby to help export him to the next town. A black-clad rider (John Ireland) approaches and cautiously agrees to the deed under the assumption that the man's horse became lame, and he's shot him. But this is the nefarious, cut-throat world of an Italian western and trust shouldn't be so readily consigned - as Damon sidles up behind Ireland, he steals his gun and horse within the same loose medium shot. He leaves Ireland to stare off into the far distance at his receding figure, plaintively crying out: "Adios, friend." With all of that, Lenzi has introduced us to the two central players. They will spend the rest of the 83-minutes in a game of making up and breaking off and saving each other's hides in a friendship conditional on how mutually beneficial it is at any given moment. 

Lenzi goes for an off-kilter sense of humor, quick-witted and particularly perverse at times, one in line with a man who would go on to make several cannibalistic life-is-cheap exploitation pictures (Eaten Alive, Cannibal Ferox). Witness one of the two Mexican outlaws slyly referencing his potential hanging — "The air is very hard on my throat!" — in his refusal to venture into a town where his image is emblazoned on a Wanted poster. Or, Damon/Ireland firing at bad guys from a hilltop: "How's your shot at this distance?", says Ireland. Damon ruthlessly shoots an almost imperceptible dot on the horizon, then offers: "What distance?". In the increasingly violent climate of the west and the rugged land of Lenzi, base inhumanity is the price of staying alive. One needs to retain a certain macabre lightheartedness for sanity's sake. 

The bright red-yellow Spaghetti Western main titles fitted to Marcello Giombini's rousing score are familiarly distorted and manipulated and broken-up a la the Leone-Eastwood trilogy, but also crossed with the pop-art style of the '60s Batman TV series. There's also a trace of the Saul Bass-designed Anatomy of a Murder's jagged stick figure repurposed as a gunned-down sombrero-fitted corpse, as well as the overbearing presence of oval-shaped owl eyes. We won't learn the significance of the latter until the film starts up again, and Damon and Ireland make nice: Ireland's nickname is The Owl. And he sure knows a lot about Johnny Sweet, the Ace (Damon), including his age of 25. Why this older man knows so much about a young outlaw is never really divulged, but there's a hard-edged, tough-love father/son rapport at play. Ireland conveniently and continuously rescues his "son" until the last act, when they reverse roles and revoke his Guardian Angel status. Maybe it's as simple as seeing something of himself in the younger man. Regardless, Lenzi - and prolific western screenwriter Eduardo Manzanos - just don't have it in their playbook to pontificate on details. They move it along for the next action set-piece. 

Mark Damon is in a drinking establishment playing poker with some crooked townsfolk. You've seen this type of scene play out before: a conniving blonde brothel worker - Belle Smith (Lisa Halvorson) - is slipping an extra ace to her preferred clientele. Two aces and three kings to Damon's three aces and two tens, but before Damon can call foul, the town's higher-ups pull a gun and ask him to leave town. Fuming, Johnny Sweet instead confronts Belle in her cozy room, and there are some questionable, politically incorrect rough words and a slap to the face. But the two fall into bed together anyway. It's a moment better suited to the then-booming Bondian-Spy sub-genre to which Lenzi was no stranger (1966's The Spy Who Loved Flowers). Belle Smith is a ruse, though, as she'll only subsequently turn up as savior during a crucial moment for Johnny, leaving the requisite black-widow, femme-fatale role to Maria (Mónica Randall), a character soon introduced. 

While Lenzi only provides the most basic motivation for why Johnny Sweet and The Owl catch up time and again to reunite, it's the predictable promise of gold bullion that most resolutely bonds them together. Following a confrontation tied to the fixed card game, Johnny meets José (Eduardo Fajardo) and Paco (Armando Calvo), a pair of grimy and grim Mexican bandits, who enlist Johnny, and then The Owl, into a money-making scheme. It's Maria (Randall) who overhears their plan during an idle moment in a barroom, and who then consults with her gluttonous villain/boyfriend Carranza (Fernando Sancho). She infiltrates to help the quartet find the "halfbreed whose name means face of Copper" (José Torres), the man who knows of the gold's whereabouts. Treacherous assignations soon proliferate between Johnny, The Owl, and the Mexican bandits, but the big reveal is Maria's betrayal to former husband Copper Face. Was it out of selfishness, or merely a necessity to take up with Carranza to spare hers - and Copper Face's - lives? 

After the gold is discovered in a mine, everyone must spend a night of the avaricious soul, Maria even fending off a potential rape as the rest take turns standing guard before splitting the loot in the morning. Like a harbinger of doom, an ominous rattlesnake crosses the group, signifying an end to any previous standing gesture of solidarity. 

A few words about John Ireland and his character, The Owl. The Owl has ulterior motives: namely returning the stolen El Paso gold to the bank's vaults for reward money and to free his wrongly imprisoned brother. Because all roads lead to Leone in the Spaghetti Western, he must have the personal significance of a sacred object to provide some alleviating solace. In a direct nod/steal from Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) in For a Few Dollars More (1965), the mercurial Owl longs for an ornate pocket watch now in the hands of Carranza. It comes off as absurdly unimaginative, with a handful of isolated moments for Lenzi to attempt to sell an idea shoehorned in to spark remembrances of an earlier picture in the Spaghetti Western cycle. Thanks to his reliable presence and hitting-his-mark practicality, Ireland brings with him a certain glamour of Classic Hollywood. Plus, there are the notorious personae from past performances that bring welcome baggage: Billy Clanton from John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and Bob Ford in Samuel Fuller's I Shot Jesse James (1949). He was already a familiar face of the Italian exploitation circuit, as this is a re-team with Lenzi from Pistol for a Hundred Coffins (1968), a prior release also shot in Spain/Italy and produced/distributed by Alberto Grimaldi's Produzioni Europee Associati. 

Go for Broke doesn't rate high enough for Alex Cox to include it in his 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director's Take on the Spaghetti Western, but there is one interesting footnote relayed in his book. Mark Damon, already the star of 1966's Johnny Yuma, claims it was he alongside legendary spaghetti western director Sergio Corbucci to have created the storyline for the infamously violent Django (1966). The matinee idol looks of a Damon in place of Franco Nero may be hard to imagine. Still, there are shades here, especially when the impetuous Johnny Sweet gets down-and-dirty in a brutal end fist-fight with the corpulent Carranza. (In between Damon's galvanic wallops: "You know what they say about you, don't you? You're a bad loser. And you know what, they were right.") 

In the finale, Lenzi fucks around with the requisite momentum-building quickdraw. He provides the usual flickering series of resonating images - shimmering gold, a reward sign, an image of The Owl - to place you in the blindingly vengeful mindset that burns inside Johnny Sweet towards the once and future father figure. But Lenzi ends with good-natured jocularity and a literal coffee break in the middle of the knockdown brawl, like something out of The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952). Then, a truce and a promise to meet up in Vera Cruz for a job down the line, Johnny Sweet and The Owl's bizarre friendship re-ignited one last time before the propulsive musical strings greet the closing credits.