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THE GRAND DUEL (Il Grande Duello), Synergy Entertainment, 1972.
Dir. Giancarlo Santi. Perf. Lee Van Cleef, Horst Frank, Alberto Dentice (as Peter O’Brien).
Review by Dominic
Van Cleef stars here as Clayton, an enigmatic sheriff who offers protection to rough-and-tumble dude Philipp Wermeer (Dentice), who is wanted for the murder of town kingpin Eli Saxon (Frank). The two subsequently travel to Jefferson in order to confront Saxon’s sons, a bunch of high-powered crooks, and uncover the truth about “The Patriarch”’s murder.
The Grand Duel is Giancarlo Santi’s only Western as director, although he worked as First Assistant Director to Sergio Leone on both The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and his own film contains plenty of dramatic close-ups reminiscent of Leone’s work. It is also much heavier on the action sequences—although several of these are exaggerated and ridiculous, clashing with the moody poise of Van Cleef’s presence. The contrast of exploitation grit and musical elegance exhibited here may strike some as awkward, particularly before we’ve been sufficiently swept up by the narrative itself. Fortunately the score (courtesy of Luis Enriquez Bacalov) is such a distracting gem that sub-par picture quality and the occasional unsteady camera pass with considerably less intrusion than they may have.
The villainous Saxon sons don’t appear until nearly halfway through the film. The most striking of these is clearly Adam Saxon (Klaus Grünberg), a pock-marked anemic fop whose decadent appearance not only contrasts with that of the rugged Philipp, but signifies his wasteful indifference to human life when he smokes an old-timer upon his debut. Adam is certainly the film’s most unsettling character: the unnatural combination of his pretentious image and hyper-masculine surname alerts us to the fact that this guy is no ordinary bad egg, and we wait patiently for the full extent of his effete sadism to be exposed. Although its sexual politics might sit uncomfortably with modern audiences, this development is communicated with genuine chill and renders Adam one of the more memorable villains in the history of the Spaghetti Western.
Several of The Grand Duel’s earlier sequences feel unfortunately cluttered, the result of a paucity of contextualizing landscape shots and a number of over-hasty transitions from close-up to close-up. However, this is largely made up for in its latter half, where the film is fluently (even poignantly) shot and a number of smoky flashback sequences lend to it a surprisingly hypnotic aura. Overall, The Grand Duel remains an enjoyable and energetic (if little watched) film. Van Cleef’s trademark combination of edginess and austerity serves the concluding showdown wonderfully as Santi’s editing pace sidles up to Bacalov’s score to end this one with an eloquent bang.
9/10
