ONE AFTER ANOTHER (1968)

“Pay in Advance: Richard Harrison as Stan Harris, the Clean-Cut, Cruel-Hearted Anti-Hero of One After Another (1968)”

One After Another (1968)

Directed by Nick Nostro (billed as Nick Howard)

also known as: Uno dopo l’altro (Italy); Day After Tomorrow (USA); Von Django - mit den besten Empfehlungen (Germany)

There’s something awfully poignant in reading genre film magazine interviews conducted with one-time 20th Century Fox and American-International Pictures contract player Richard Harrison. Usually, he laments that his most significant contribution to the industry had nothing to do with any of his film or television appearances.

As it happened, when a legendary western title came his way, Harrison instead recommended a young actor from Rawhide to a relatively unproven director whose last credit was a sword-and-sandal picture. Very soon after, the actor - Clint Eastwood - was catapulted high in the consciousness of film culture, and a career was built. (Still going!) Maybe it’s grandiose to connote the two, but that legendary image of the squinty-eyed, silent gunfighter in loose-fitting poncho stood as magnificently tall in the minds as much as the ancient bronze statue of sun-god Helios, The Colossus of Rhodes, once physically did. There was just not as much luck for that sword-and-sandal picture gifted with the same name, as directed by Sergio Leone.

Of course, Harrison is modest in his estimations. But it does allow for the misconception that his many screen performances merely served as minor divertissements, under-written bastardized parts that dwarfed in comparison to the role he was up for and chose not to take. The one that almost saw him operating on the ground floor level of the spaghetti western, and expediently moving from Gunfight at Red Sands (1963) - featuring the first western score of rightfully soon-to-be-lionized composer Ennio Morricone - to the heights of The Man With No Name and A Fistful of Dollars. (Instead, during 1964, Harrison appears in the sub-genre of diminishing returns - the peplum - with Messalina vs . the Son of Hercules, directed by Umberto Lenzi.)

Although never destined to be a household name like Eastwood, Richard Harrison surfed through the turbulent sixties and into the downbeat seventies from low-budget minor-league genre piece to the next, whether peplum, spy or western. Film producer Italo Zingarelli “discovered” him for the market. And in short order (only taking into consideration the westerns of the nineteen-sixties), Harrison would feature in Gunfight at Red Sands in 1963 with One Hundred Thousand Dollars for Ringo (Alberto De Martino, 1965) and Rojo (Leopoldo Savona, 1966) to follow. In the same year as One After Another, there was the stylish Vengeance (Antonio Margheriti, 1968) and Between God, the Devil and a Winchester (Marino Girolami, 1968). Always convincing, even though he rarely dubbed his parts, Harrison consistently provides a likeable presence - the Dave Clark Five to Clint Eastwood’s The Beatles.

In a diverse array of rascally anti-heroes, he’s never been more unusual than as the milquetoast-named Stan Ross in Nick Nostro’s colorful 1968 work, One After Another. More verbose than The Man with No Name, Stan Ross is a portrait of simmering, methodical evil, duplicitously pitting warring factions - a la Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars - against one another. (Some may say it’s another in the line of shameless rip-offs, but I like to think of it as “continuing a tradition”).

Ross comes to town under the pretense of grief for Bob Ross, his brother/partner. Bob was shot to death during an orchestrated hold-up at the local bank, and - we believe - Stan’s turned up to not-so-subtly inquire about the death. But there’s a reason Stan Ross looks like a politician or well-groomed banker. He’s an unabashed capitalist who doesn’t get close to anybody, uncoiling a barbarous nature when separated from the prospect of money. Bob Ross was a pawn - someone Stan was counting on to steal for him, with all of the first reel’s purported sadness directed at his untimely demise strictly a song & dance act. 

One After Another’s finest scene is a richly kinetic, well-choreographed barroom dust-up. It also happens early on, roughly twelve minutes in. A bespectacled Richard Harrison enters a saloon for a tumbler of whiskey but instead receives an insult from the bartender (Roberto Messina), referencing strange new customers and their need to Pay in Advance. He pretends to be unperturbed, and puts down his money - but it agitates Ross. Unable to process the slight, Ross erupts and slams down hard on the bartender’s hands, gaining the attention of some rough card-playing types. The alpha of the bunch (Glenn, played by Paolo Gozlino, our main villain’s Right Hand Man) moves over for a confrontation. Glenn belts Stan. Stan grabs a bottle and sends him careening elsewhere - just as the bartender throws a towel around Stan’s neck to strangle him. Glenn reconvenes in the meantime and steadies himself for more fighting. Stan Ross flinches, grabs another bottle, but now notices his glasses are damaged. He opens a leather compartment contained in his overcoat - a la Colonel Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More (1965) - and reveals several replacement pairs. Stan and Glenn duke it out some more before Stan shoots at the hands of the far-off henchmen… 

And this would continue unabated if not for the arrival of the well-heeled Colonel Jefferson (José Bódalo), accompanied by Sabine (Pamela Tudor), the pretty blonde proprietor who will become Ross’s de-facto love interest. It’s an inauspicious meeting: Harris insults the quality of Sabine’s whiskey - “It stinks.” 

For someone just rolling into town, ostensibly grieving over the death of a family member, he’s not making a lot of friends. But his intentions, if you lend your trust to Nick Nostro, are to be understood much later on: He’s there to poke around and gain information about that Deal Gone Wrong. In One After Another, for Nostro - and his four other screenwriters - inherent motivation is to be revealed after the fact, logic apparent after charting the trajectory of events. 

So: It seems the devious Colonel Jefferson struck an agreement with Esperato (José Manuel Martín) and his fellow Mexican bandits but then screwed them over. There was an organized robbery at the bank, but Jefferson infiltrated and, in a cloak & dagger operation, hired his men to be there first. Stan’s supposed brother/partner, Bob Ross, was an unnecessary casualty. The cowardly ex-officer Jefferson intends to “spread the seed of poison” and allow for corruption to overtake the town - put the blame on Esperato and his men. But he wasn’t counting on this Stan Ross customer to show up, so the discussion at the bar is to bring him over to his side of the table: Jefferson talks Ross into hunting down Esperato and company. Still, Ross will instead switch allegiances several times over. And when Jefferson has no more use for him and leaves him for dead, Ross will turn bloodthirsty avenger in an almost giallo set-up - “Kill them - one after the other." He also plays mind games not unlike The Man with No Name, like ordering coffins from the local undertaker, ear-marked for those he intends to kill. In the end, Stan is double-crossed and tamed - by Sabine (Pamela Tudor). She will force him to be with her or else go home without his hard-gained riches. 

Richard Harrison - with a dubbed voice that’s not his - looms large over a minor work in the genre. We don’t know the true extent of how evil he is until the final moments - by then it’s too late, Sabine’s taken over the reins of the relationship. Given what we have seen, Stan Ross will maneuver his way out, on alert for an opportune moment when guards are down. To paraphrase an old Walter Hill quote in Film Comment, character for Stan Ross, as portrayed by Richard Harrison, is whether or not he’s the one holding the gun. 

A filmmaker with an unobtrusive style who prematurely retired (to take care of his mother), Nick Nostro cut his teeth as an Assistant Editor, Assistant Director, and Script Supervisor. Nicknamed “The Professor," his obituary makes it seem as if he was aware his work wasn’t destined to be the subject of intellectual discourse: “I was neither Fellini nor De Sica,” he once said. After concluding his film career, he entered politics (the Forza Italia in Gioia Tauro) and died in 2014. His only other spaghetti western title is Dollar of Fire, released in 1965. I haven’t seen it. 

Richard Harrison, on the other hand, would have a busy seventies, sticking to Europe where he could so easily get work. Budgets and schedules would see further reductions, but no matter, he would still be delivering in the same sort of energetic if sometimes-mindless westerns as he did in the previous decade. He would even begin to direct, starting - uncredited - with Acquasanta Joe in 1971. Coincidentally, this is the same year Clint Eastwood went behind the camera, on Play Misty for Me. Critically, they were not received equally.