DUCK, YOU SUCKER at Film Forum in New York City

“Rapturous and more than slightly insane... “Sucker” also features one of the most glorious and unforgettable scores by Leone’s composer, Ennio Morricone. Overwhelming ... you’ll savor pieces of “Duck, You Sucker” in your head much later: the mark of a work by a true voluptuary, the overspill in whose craft comes as much from enthusiasm as arrogance.”
– Elvis Mitchell, New York Times [ click here to read the entire review ]

“A cornucopia of broad comedy, violent mayhem, naive politics and dizzy melodrama - not to mention something of a masterpiece!”
– New York Magazine [ click here to read the complete review ]

“(A) fascinating Sergio Leone spectacle! James Coburn displays masterly ease in the role of a fugitive I.R.A. dynamiter who blows things up for Pancho Villa’s revolution. Between patches of pulp-Shavian debate, the rest of the movie has the lyric recklessness about violent men and their haunted pasts.”
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker [ click here to read the complete review ]

“Sergio Leone’s Great Testosterone Epics! Coburn, of course, was one of the screen’s greatest he-men, and he’s perfectly suited to a Leone film. Twenty minutes of restored footage makes this the best version of the film to appear in the U.S. (The film) abounds in the qualities that made Leone one of the most vital filmmakers of the 20th century.”
– Andrew Johnston, Time Out NY

(1972) During the Mexican Revolution, an armed stagecoach packed with fatcats condescends to give big-familied peon Rod Steiger a ride — big mistake! — while self-exiled Irish rebel James Coburn uses the latest in modern technology to wipe out an entire armored column. They grudgingly team up, but Steiger’s ideology consists of lusting for that Mesa Verde bank, while Coburn confesses, “I believe only in dynamite.” In the wake of the revolutions of 1968, this was Leone’s most overtly political film: “And what happens to the poor people? They’re dead! That’s your revolution.” But as the betrayals and their mortal consequences proliferate, a humanity and sense of friendship unique to Leone emerge, even as a repeated flashback finally reveals the source of Coburn’s disillusionment, culminating in the anguished final line. Perhaps the least-known of the Leone classics, but packed with tour de force sequences: the reduction of the stagecoach passengers to close-ups of chattering mouths; the massacre in the rain with the tormented informer looking on; the wordless, relentless procession through the bank, each vault revealing more... prisoners. Leone’s original title, Once Upon a Time... The Revolution, was thought too incendiary in the antiestablishment climate of the early 70s, so the director came up with what he thought was a common American expression: Sucker was later issued under an alternate title, A Fistful of Dynamite. This new version, based on a recent Italian restoration, includes some 20 minutes of footage not in the original U.S. release, making it the most complete English version ever of Leone’s final vision of the West.

AN MGM DISTRIBUTION RELEASE

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ENNIO MORRICONE Film Music Volume 1 $11.92 tax included [$11.00 plus tax]	ENNIO MORRICONE Film Music Volume 2 $11.92 tax included [$11.00 plus tax]
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