Reply #29: "The Wild Bunch" and the Italian film "Il Sorpasso" [View All]

The bad guys who are the film's good guys decide to face the Mexican warlord and rescue their friend, knowing they will die. They machine gun (gattling gun?) the entire encampment and each and every one of them die. It uses a hellish Hollywood finish of blood and violence but with no traditional Hollywood message. There is no moral center in the film. The heroes are flawed bad men. They are old and ugly and over-the-hill. Yet, we feel a certain joy at the end as they go out in a blaze of violence and a sadness or emptiness when others arrive to find them.

Il Sorpasso is a fantastic Italian film of the early 60's. I saw it with subtitles on TV when I lived in Oakland many years ago and I actually went out and bought the video: Vittorio Gassman (a great Italian actor) and the French actor Jean Louis Trintignant, directed by Dino Risi. It's about a shy law student (Trintignant) who is studying for a college exam when this loud-mouthed Italian guy (Gassman) who is basically good but overly self-assured and bombastic asks to use his telephone. He ends up inviting the shy law student in his sports car driving cross country through Italy, trying to get the shy guy to open up (and also getting the law student to finance their adventures with his money). At the end, just as the shy college student starts acting more cool and looks forward to going back to his dorm to ask that girl next door out on a date, the loud-mouthed guy tries to pass a car at high speed and drives off a cliff into the Mediterranean. The loud-mouthed self-assured guy of course manages to save himself. The shy guy gets crushed on the rocks below. Although I don't like Hollywood remakes, I'm surprised that a film this good was never Americanized and updated into an American film, as Hollywood seems to be short on ideas of late.