RATTLER KID (1967)

“Bandits and Thieves”

Rattler Kid (1967)

Directed by León Klimovsky

also known as: Un hombre vino a matar (Spain); L’uomo venuto per uccidere (Italy); Django – unersättlich wie der Satan (Germany)

It’s 1998 and supporting player/stuntman Remo Capitani, once widely credited as Ray O’Connor to be more palatable in US markets, sits in front of a wooden fence in Rome, dressed in a garish pink and green button-up shirt. Now somewhere in the vicinity of 70-years-old, Capitani’s been called on to reminisce about his spaghetti western days in an Italian documentary for RAI television. In his few minutes of screen-time, he candidly divulges his complicated feelings about having almost always played Mexican “bandits and thieves.” He feels conflicted about having never played Yankees and instead had to contend with the guffawing, criminalistic villainous parts observed in 1,001 low-budget westerns. Adding a schizophrenic dimension to his sense of national identity, and positively affecting his approach to performance, the Rome-born Capitani aligned himself instead with the suffocating oppression facing Mexicans within the United States. All of this serves to add unnecessary but compelling weight to - as written - usually shallow, reductive caricatures in - as distributed - quick genre efforts.

It’s a telling moment (one of many) in the forgotten documentary entitled L’America a Roma. The 75-minute doc foregoes the more accessible route of recycling tired anecdotes about Clint Eastwood or the Three Sergios - Leone-Corbucci-Sollima. Instead, filmmaker Gianfranco Pannone presents the bittersweet remembrances of forgotten stuntmen and performers, the Italian locals who shared a fickle season of popularity peppered with the usual trappings of success: fast cars, attractive women, easy money. 

In the closing credits, Pannone has their Americanized pseudonyms fading up in brackets underneath their real names, their real identities having been briefly put aside for assimilation purposes: Capitani (O’Connor), Paolo Magalotti (Paul Carter), Giovanni Cianfriglia (Ken Wood), Luigi Martuarno (Jin Martin), Mauro Mammatrizio (Victor Man), and Franco Daddi (Frank Daddy). Some now work as valets (Magalotti), others work as well-regarded chauffeurs, but almost none still work in the film industry. These were men employed during an economic boom in Italy - Pannone’s math figures 27 westerns in 1964, 40 in 1966, and 77 in the peak year of 1968. But then it slowed down to a trickle, with the slate reduced and other gigs needing to be found: perhaps stand-in work or the occasional coveted nothing part, like “Italian Cab Driver” in Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976). The sun-baked faces and built-up burly physiques didn’t need to perform horse falls, and death falls, punch-ups, or other forms of big-screen barbarism any longer. 

I’ve purposefully neglected to mention the man who takes the lead in L’America a Roma - Guglielmo Spoletini, aka William Bogart. It’s he who tracks down the other men so we can see what the subsequent years have done to their self-images. Residing in Bellegra, Rome, Spoletini is a blustering larger-than-life figure enjoying the spotlight once more and attempting to prolong it. Towards the end (and this may be but spurious artistic license, I’m not certain), Spoletini tries to get another film off of the ground despite the jesting chastisement of his former cohorts and the few film producers he still knows. Spoletini, never more than fifth on the call sheet in his heyday, is seen standing tall in the half-crumbled ruins of once illustrious film studios Elios and De Paolis Studios in Lazio, Italy. Typical macro close-ups of eyes are interspersed. There’s no other gunfighter needed for a quickdraw, as he’s dueling it out with the bygone era’s effects on his ego. (There’s a throwaway line from one of the Studio officiates, as he and Spoletini walk through the rubble and Spoletini comments on how much has been removed. The man shrugs, “We’re clearing out the past.”)

In an encapsulation of how the Italian western was considered a lesser artistic enterprise, we see Spoletini in an anteroom of his home cluttered with stills, movie posters, and other memorabilia advertising his name. Spoletini instead bypasses it all to show off a simple photograph that was taken alongside Federico Fellini, the opportunity of which came about when Spoletini was a stand-in for Ettore Manni on 1980’s La città delle donne (City of Women). (“Have you seen the best yet? This is it, guys - Federico!”) 

But maybe the most moving moment is Spoletini showing to friends and family on an outdoor picnic set-up León Klimovsky’s tepid 1967 film, Rattler Kid. Spoletini - billed as Bogart - plays a typical Mexican outlaw out to double-cross hero, The Rattler Kid (Richard Wyler). 

Spoletini receives a videocassette from his son in the United States. The movie unspools on a small 27-inch television with occasional interest from the awkward congregation, but we see Spoletini last. Embarrassed, proud, maybe some resentment, but strong emotion as he’s aware a camera is capturing his resting face soaking up the distinct rhythms of a western he made thirty-one years earlier.  

Rattler Kid is a Spanish-Italian co-production from León Klimovsky, a director more known for his work (9 pictures) with notable horror icon Paul Naschy. Richard Wyler, the UK-born lead actor, resembles Richard Dawson in his Hogan’s Heroes days, or maybe Joey Bishop with a brush-cut. He presents an air of unearned bullshit swagger. Wyler had an interesting start to his career, almost co-writing a musical version of Sunset Blvd to star Gloria Swanson (she put an end to it, quite suddenly, after having second thoughts). Eventually, his path would take him to Italy for the exploitation market. 

Wyler is Anthony Garnett, a Yankee soldier who fought at Gettysburg but is now wrongfully sentenced to hanging for the murder of his superior officer during the robbery of the unit’s stolen payroll. Instead of being resigned to death, Garnett is freed with the help of a Priest and rides off to meet his fate as the outlaw nicknamed Rattler Kid. We trace the lineage of his outlaw status with Wanted posters raising the stakes from a paltry $500 to an eventual $10,000. 

Garnett, now Rattler Kid, tries to clear his name, but embraces the role of a desperado, murdering Silent Wolf and another man in Fort Jackson. Guglielmo Spoletini is a bad-news Mexican cousin of Garnett’s who will enlist him to help in a robbery, but the introduction of Garnett’s former school teacher (Jesús Puente) causes complications. As does Sheriff Bill Manners (Brad Harris), a solidly built man whom Spoletini and his gang figured would be a “fat old whiskey-smelling cuss with a rusty Winchester.” Conny Caracciolo and Hatchet for the Honeymoon actor Femi Benussi also figure in, both in nothing parts. 

It’s an incoherent slog, set in New Mexico, the action set-piece being a brutal agave cactus leave tussle - as no guns or knives are to be found out in the middle of a desert, Spoletini and Garnett whip each other senseless. It’s a scene excised in versions seen in the U.S. and Spain but retained in Germany. But, mostly, it’s Wyler acting tough with forgettable lines such as “you should never bite off more than you can chew, my friend.” 

But back in ’98 on a summer night in Italy, for forgotten co-star Spoletini and a gaggle of family/friends, the past was revisited for a proud night at the movies, barely serviceable entertainment now seen through the engaging eyes of one of its dreamers and practitioners, a now-retired journeyman stuntman/actor.