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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Companeros, September 21, 2004
COMPANEROS succeeds because of its excesses. Everyone but a handful of peasant students led by an ineffectual pacifist professor (Fernando Rey) is greedy and corrupt. The nominal bad guys don't simply kill the nominal good guys. Rather, in a manner that would do a James Bond film proud, they devise elaborate tortures that, as a rule, provide more opportunities for ingenious escapes than lingering deaths. If you're not convinced yet, one of the bad guys has an old-fashioned telephone mouthpiece grafted over his right ear.
Franco Nero stars as a Swedish (!?) gun trader in turn of the century, revolution torn Mexico. Tomas Milian co-stars as an accidental revolutionary and the two are thrown together when an impenetrable safe, presumably filled with great riches, is discovered. Nero and Milian travel to Fort Yuma to kidnap the imprisoned Professor Xanthos (Rey), the students' hero and possessor of the combination that will open the safe. Along the way, besides developing into a buddy film with the grungy Milian and the fastidious Nero, our heroes must conquer various groups of federales, a fort full of American soldiers and, most dangerous of all, Jack Palance's group of freelancing mercenaries.
Palance's character is one of the strangest... he's a pot-smoking wooden handed goon whose only friend is his pet falcon Marcia, who gnawed off his right hand to free him from a crucifixion death. If you find that more disturbing than absurdly humorous, COMPANEROS isn't for you, because that's pretty much of a piece with the spirit of this movie.
COMPANEROS is fast moving and quite violent, but I found its exuberant, excessive and exaggerated violence as much fun as an old Warner Brothers cartoon or a James Bond movie.
The disk also comes with 17-minutes worth of interviews with stars Nero and Milian and composer Ennio Morricone, who tells us that he conceived the choral themes for this movie as a "Gregorian chant with a reggae beat." Makes sense to me.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A classic example of Italian Western, May 29, 2001
Wonderfully extravagant political western with a lovely Morricone score. The characters, as one might expect, are overdone and hammed up, but this is one of the pleasures of Italian westerns of the time. Like Leone, Corbucci's view of the west is highly stylized, violent and compulsively entertaining. Depending on your preferences this could well be a crude film with bad acting but if you are tuned to the right frequency the film delivers: it is a classic of this particular sub-genre, made with passion and high voltage energy, and in my opinion it also is Corbucci's finest entry along Il Grande Silenzio. It's not up to Leone's standards, but then again, what could be? Worth the admission, but you do need to enjoy this brand of extravagance.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Swedish Bullets and Cuban Berets, September 25, 2002
Although "The Great Silence" may well be Corbucci's best spaghetti western, "Companeros" is surely his most enjoyable-- and probably the closest he ever comes to vivid characterization in his films. Franco Nero's Yodlaf Peterson (aka "The Swede") is an amusing riff on the Gringo figure with "much money but not much heart" (to borrow a line from "A Bullet for the General"). And Nero clearly enjoys playing off Tomas Milian's sometimes buffoonish yet always committed "El Vasco" (meaning "beret," which Milian wears throughout the entire film, Che Guevera style, only taking it off during his marriage ceremony to Iris Berben)--the two generate a chemistry that seldom occurs in spaghetti westerns, especially the highly political ones. ("A Bullet for the General" explores the growing alienation between the Gringo and the revolutionary, for instance; "Faccia a Faccia" documents the growing horror of the bandit for the Western intellectual; and "The Big Gundown" shows grudging respect between the American sheriff and the Mexican outlaw against the forces of capital--but no real friendship.) Significantly, the film ends with the true *beginning* of friendship-- "Companeros" turns from an ironic statement by "Il Penguino" (the Swede) to one of political commitment and personal investment. Against the amoral greed of prior Gringo characters (starting with Eastwood's "Man with No Name"), Yodlaf learns by the end of the film that there is something more important than the self. By naming himself a "companeros," he effectually rejects the greed and apoliticism typical to the role. Ennio Moriconne's music is outstanding, and, as he says in an interview in the disk's "extras," he intentionally worked to create a unique "style" for Corbucci's film, one far different from the haunting score he had just provided for Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West." Unfortunately, Corbucci's camerawork is generally undistinguished, perhaps because he was no longer working with his longtime collaborator Enzo Barboni, who had gone on to make his own films. Alejandro Ulloa's photography is far less accomplished and stylish (perhaps a reason why he worked almost entirely in low-budget, exploitative films). Overall, a highly enjoyable movie, although the pacing (as is often the case with Corbucci's works) is at times lumbering. One particularly interesting feature of Anchor Bay's print is its inclusion of the expository "backstory" of how Milian's character receives his nickname at the film's opening (the US version cuts right from the opening gunfight back in time to Yodlaf's arrival, several weeks earlier, in San Bernadino). It's a wonderful five minute sequence, reminiscent of his "Tepepa" role-- and a shame that American viewers have been unable to appreciate it for thirty years.
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