by Brendan Foley
Arrow Heads
Arrow Video, a subsidiary of Arrow Films, humbly describe themselves as merely a “Distributor of classic, world, cult and horror cinema on DVD & Blu-ray.” But we film geeks know them as the Britain-based bastion of the brutal and bizarre, boasting gorgeous Blu-ray releases with high quality artwork and packaging and bursting with extras (often their own productions). Their collector-friendly releases had traditionally not been available in the U.S, but now Arrow has come across the pond and this column is devoted to discussing their weird and wonderful output.
The Western means different things to different people.
Or, actually, a better way to put it would be that The West means different things to different people.
For some, the story of the American West is the story of the new world, of freedom, of frontiersmen and women pushing out into the bold unknown. There’s a romantic, aspirational quality to the stories of this West, a longing for the days of Real Men, when all you needed was a horse to ride on and a gun on your belt to make manifest your destiny.
For others, the story of the West is about endings, about the inescapability of ‘progress’ however ugly and bloody that progress may be. The West is where nature makes a final bitter stand against industry and falls, where fences kill off the rolling fields and free herds, where train tracks bind the land, and where myth and legend fade into the ember.
And, heck, for some people the story of the West involves Johnny Depp reciting poetry while shooting people. Takes all kinds.
Perhaps most fascinating of all is when outsiders get their mitts on America’s great playground of myth and start getting frisky. The dimensions of the frontier get warped, abstracted, blurring the lines between history and the collective dream-state through which ‘Cowboys and Indians’ play their games.
Take Cemetery without Crosses. This is a French/Italian-financed, Spain-shot spaghetti western written/directed and starring a Frenchman of Russian descent.
The end result is a film that depicts the West as closer to a bombed out wasteland, drained of most color and humanity as hardscrabble people chase petty conflict into cycles of vengeance and destruction.
Cemetery without Crosses revolves around a family feud (not the game show kind, the murder kind) between the Caine family and the Rogers family. As the movie opens, one of the Caine men is caught robbing from the Rogers clan, and so they chase him down back to his desolate homestead and make a show of executing him on the spot, forcing his wife Maria (Michele Mercier) to watch as her husband dies.
Not only is this simply a profoundly non-chill thing to do, but it proves very stupid as it turns out that Maria’s former lover Manuel (aforementioned writer/director Robert Hossein) is a gunslinging badass who still nurses a thing for the new widow. She begs him to help her and her husband’s lecherous brothers take revenge on the Rogers family, and Manuel agrees, setting off a series of events that climaxes in an all-out bloodbath.
Spaghetti westerns are known for their extravagance, exaggerating characters and stories to the point of operatic/cartoonish excess. Where musicals have musical numbers, spaghetti westerns have bullets. Cemetery without Crosses is a quieter affair then that, more subdued and considered in the ways it depicts the cycles of violence and grief that slowly but surely destroy both families.
If anything, Hossein’s strong-but-silent gunslinger feels almost extraneous to the narrative and unbefitting of the tone. It’s not that Hossein labors on the vanity shots or anything like that, but Manuel’s very carefully designed iconography of ass-kicking ability don’t always gel with the darker, harsher material of the film.
In its own way, Cemetery without Crosses feels like a rebuttal, or, at least, a conversation piece to Sergio Leone’s genre-defining A Fistful of Dollars. That film was also about a deadly figure wandering into a private war between two families, with elaborate tricks used to fake the different sides out and cause reprisals. But Dollars, for all its blasted locales and grim visages, had an aura of that old romantic West about it. The Man with No Name was no hero, but he had a nobility about him and by the time he really set to work eradicating the town of its inhabitants, there was no misunderstanding that this red harvest was justice well earned.
(Speaking of Leone, he was apparently quite friendly with Hossein and helped out on the set of Crosses, even going so far as to direct one scene. You will know this scene when you see it.)
Not so with Cemetery without Crosses. There’s no good family standing against a bad family, it’s just two separate barrels of snakes dumped into one fresh bucket while the audience watches who comes out which end. Everyone is motivated by one selfish urge or another, even Hossein’s avenger. And by the end of the film, both he and Maria have chosen action that is blatantly unforgivable.
At a brisk 90 minutes, Cemetery without Crosses has a no-fuss, no-muss approach. It’s a lean and pretty damn mean little machine with a bleak heart and little mercy. It’s funny that I would review this so close to Broken Lance, as both are films that use the setting of the West, a theoretical new world, to tell stories about old grudges bearing fresh wounds that leave all ravaged.
While not as expansive or iconic as the great Leone films, Cemetery without Crosses is a raw little gem of a movie, well worth tracking down.
The Package
Special Features and Extras
Remembering Sergio is a nice talk with Hossein about that entire era of filmmaking, not simply limited to Sergio Leone’s own influence on the film.
Location Report is a fascinating little making of shot on set of the film, showing that cast and crew were very aware of the strange confluence of cultures and histories that went into Cemetery without Crosses.
Archive Interview with Robert Hossein finds a clearly exhausted Hossein discussing his (at the time uncompleted) film. Older movies seem like wholly formed artifacts, and we can forget that they, like all art, are the product of artists and craftsmen working really hard to try and pull something together. Nice to be reminded sometimes.
Theatrical Trailer
Get it at Amazon:
[Blu-ray]