I flew the Atlantic because I wanted to. If that be what they call ‘a woman’s reason,’ make the most of it
March 21, 2013 § Leave a comment
I learned today that Damiano Damiani passed away a few weeks back, aged 90, and thought it was worth pausing to mark the fact.
Damiani enjoyed a suitably epic career in Italian film and TV, working in some capacity in the industry from 1948 through to 2002, but to be honest most English-speaking film nerds probably remember him for one thing alone: 1966’s ‘Que Sabe?’ aka ‘A Bullet For The General’, an extraordinary piece of work that I think stands as one of the best post-1960 westerns made on either side of the Atlantic.
All of the Three Sergios went on to make movies with suspiciously similar plot-lines to Damiani’s film (Leone’s ‘Duck You Sucker’ / ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’, Corbucci’s ‘Companeros’, Sollima’s ‘Face To Face’), but, as immensely enjoyable as all those pictures are, for my money the sheer artistry and narrative intelligence of ‘Que Sabe?’ trumps them all. Without wishing to go overboard in my gushing, it is perhaps the best Spaghetti Western ever made, and it’s widely available on DVD too, so ferchrisake – if you like a good western, you know what to do. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Natasha Gudermane
my nerves are bad to-night 
Leave a Reply