A Bullet for a General (aka Quien Sabe? and El Chuncho, Quien Sabe?)
1966, Italian, a Spaghetti Western
Dir. Diamiano Damiani
Era of the film: Mexican Revolution, 1910 – 1920
Plot ending alert: When you reach the paragraph beginning “in the end” stop reading if you haven’t see the film and don’t want to know how it ends. Go to the TubiTV.com site and watch the film for free, then come back here for more about it.
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While the famous Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns were subtle in their exploration of politics, there were quite a few films in the popular Spaghetti Western subgenre that were more far more overt in their exploration of political themes, especially related to leftist ideals. The heyday of Spaghetti Westerns was the 1960s, a time of a lot of political turmoil and upheaval. A Bullet for a General is a political film, but works well as an action and adventure film as well. It is credited with being the first (of a number) of Spaghetti Westerns to deal with the Mexican Revolution. They are known as the “Zapata Westerns.”
At the opening of the film, a young blond-haired American man named Bill Tate (called “El Nino” a lot in the film, or “the young one” or, literally, “the child”) is riding on a train full of guns belonging to the Mexican army. Mexican bandits have chained a living man, an officer of the Mexican army, on the tracks to make the train stop. After a skirmish between bandits and soldiers on the train, the officer on the tracks and an officer on the train decide that the train should proceed and run over the officer so the bandits can’t get the guns and further fighting will end.
But Tate, well dressed in business suit and very cool-headed, makes his way to the front of the train to the locomotive, shoots the train’s engineer (the train’s driver), and stops the train. He then puts on handcuffs and tells the bandits that he is a wanted man and is being taken to jail in El Paso and that is why he stopped the train. He says he wants to join the bandits.
After getting the guns from the train, the bandit’s leader, El Chuncho, takes a vote among the gang and they decide to let Tate join them. The gang’s plan is to sell the guns to the revolutionary army and make some money, and, secondarily, to help the revolution succeed.
The meaning of “Chuncho” is hard to determine and appears to depend on the context in which it’s used and the region of the world in which it’s used. It can mean, variously, an “owl,” (a nocturnal predator), or, “the unfriendly” (informal usage, Peru)… or, possibly, a “bad person,” as in “one who brings bad luck”… or, “a tribal person who has not been civilized” (usage in the Amazon), or “a relative to this town.” Perhaps it means, in this film, “the rebel” or “the outsider” or “the uncivilized.”
The original title of the film was El Chuncho, Quien Sabe? (On some posters for the film, the title is just Quien Sabe?) This could mean, The Rebel, Who Knows? Or, The Bad Guy, I Wonder? Or The Bandit, Who Can Tell?
The original title reflects the fact that there is some ambiguity as to El Chuncho’s integrity as a person. He once fought with the revolutionary army. For some reason he left them and became a bandit. Is El Chuncho a truly bad guy, which in the context of this film would mean someone purely out for money, or is he a good guy who wants to help people, especially the downtrodden and oppressed people of Mexico? Is he a rebel as in “a revolutionary” or is he a rebel without a cause — just one more self-centered bandit who lives for money and kicks? We have some idea as the film progresses, but get a definitive answer in the final few minutes of the film.
The actor playing El Chuncho, Gian Maria Volante, will look familiar to anyone who has seen the early quintessential Spaghetti westerns that were hits in America and launched the entire Spaghetti Western subgenre. Those low-budget, Italian-made Westerns were directed by Sergio Leone and starred Clint Eastwood. Volante played Ramon Rojo in A Fistful of Dollars and then, very memorably, a drug-addicted bank robber who has bad memories of his own past brutal behavior — thus the use of a drug to help soften his pain — in For a Few Dollars More.
As in For a Few Dollars More, Volante gives a compelling, dynamic performance. You like him. You like El Chuncho. In real life Volante had a spirited, fiery personality and he held strong leftist ideas and feelings. In the course of his career he won major prizes, such as a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in 1991 at the Venice Film Festival, but his roles in the two Spaghetti Westerns were what made him most famous in America.
Throughout Bullet for a General, the American, Tate, has the opposite type of personality from El Chuncho’s. He is not extroverted and sociable, and says very little unless it is about moving along and selling the guns. It’s also clear that he expects to meet the rebel general in person when they sell the guns. We know Tate’s up to something. So do some of the bandits. But El Chuncho likes him and helps him.
Tate was played by an interesting Swedish actor called Lou Castel, who was born in Bogota, Columbia in 1943 and named Ulv Quarzell. His father was a Swedish diplomat working in Columbia. His parents separated and his mother, a militant leftist, returned to Europe, eventually living in Rome and working in the film industry. Castel moved there and began his acting career there. By 1990 he was living in France. He has done a variety of types of film ranging from art films to exploitation fare, and worked with Wim Wenders and Claude Chabrol, but he always chooses films that have a leftist slant.
One other notable character and actor in the film is El Santo played by Klaus Kinski. Kinski was known for his over-the-top performances in a number of Spaghetti Westerns and other kinds of films, and seems somewhat subdued here, though there is a cool scene half an hour into the film of him appearing on a high rooftop of a church in a brown monk’s robe and yelling as a soldier is given a medal in an open area below, “Why do you give them medals? They kill women and children. And terrorize the people. For the last time they have preyed upon the people. Let’s exterminate all of them.” The office giving the medal says, “He’s crazy.” Then Santo yells, “In the name of the Father!” and tosses a hand grenade at the soldiers. “Of the Son!” Another grenade. “And the Holy Ghost.” A grenade. “Amen.” Another grenade. Then a bunch of rebels open fire from the roof, killing the soldiers.
In the end, the bandit gang has been wiped out or dispersed (one gang member rides off on her own toward the end) and only El Chuncho and Tate are left alive. Tate achieves his mission, one we suspected all along — he has killed the revolutionary general. We learn that his motive was very simple: gold. He was a hitman and offered his services to the Mexican government and was hired by them.
(Below: English actress Martine Beswick playing one of El Chuncho’s gang. She eventually leaves the gang after a young man in the gang who she loves dies in a gun battle.)
Yet he does have some ethical and emotional integrity. He intended to give El Chuncho half the money from his hit on the general, performed for the Mexican government. Early in the film a Mexican says that Americans have ice in place of a heart. Tate seems to be that kind of person. But he isn’t entirely. He appreciated the help El Chuncho gave him and he cares about him.
El Chuncho finds Tate at a hotel in a border town, one Tate told him to go to if they were separated. Though El Chuncho initially tries to kill Tate for killing the general, he is placated when Tate lets him know that he had left him a lot of gold in a safe at the hotel with a note indicating that it was for El Chuncho.
So, briefly, El Chuncho seems to be accepting the idea of being a rich man. He asks if he will even be considered a rich man in America. Tate says he will be. Tate takes him out to get a haircut and buy a suit. They go out for dinner in an elegant place. El Chuncho gets laid after telling a well-dressed woman that he is a big-shot businessman on his way to America. He seems to be embracing a new lifestyle.
But he sees Tate acting arrogant and cold. And he realizes that the strange life of being a rich man, being a person who can use his money to stand apart from everyday fellow human beings, isn’t what he wants. In the final minutes of the film, he embraces the idea of revolution once again. He shoots an incredulous Tate who keeps asking “Why” as he is being shot.
El Chuncho wants to overthrow the landowners and big shots who more or less enslave the rest of the population and live in luxury while others starve and suffer. In the end, El Chuncho is on the run again, but with a clear idea of what he hopes to accomplish. He runs away yelling that the peasants should buy dynamite with the gold that fell out of Tate’s bag.
Scholars who study Spaghetti Westerns (SW) say the this film initiated a new kind of SW that dealt with political themes. They are called Zapata Westerns and used the Mexican Revolution as a metaphor for leftist revolutions in general. Sergio Corbucci, who made a wide range of films from comedies to westerns, made several notable Zapata SWs. These include The Mercenary (1968) and Companeros (1970). These films feature someone who is hoping to profit from the revolution (gun-runner, etc.) and that person’s encounters with idealistic revolutionaries.
In contrast to the more purely leftist Zapatas, Sergio Leone made a bitter study of revolution in Duck, You Sucker (1971) (also known as A Fistful of Dynamite.) By the early 1970s, some of the idealistic hopes of rebels in the Sixties had been crushed. Things were not looking so good for leftist idealists in Europe or America. Soon, especially in America, a long era of right-wing domination of politics would begin, and with it a steadily widening of the gap between the very rich and the rest of the people, who got less and less.
Note on how to see this film —
It’s free on TUBITV.com, which does run a few ads with their films, but not many.
Note on the version of the film shown —
The version shown on TUBITV.com is the full-length cut of the film, coming in at almost 2 hours (1 hour, 54 minutes), not the 77-minute truncated cut that was done for some markets and was disjointed and hard to follow.
I will say that there was a little issue for me of Second-Act Blues — which I’m using here to mean that the during the second act the story gets a little bogged down in various subplots and loses some of it’s momentum. But it wasn’t serious. The story mostly moved along quite well.
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