Offscreen Notes
Il Mio Nome È Nessuno
Frequent Offscreen contributor Roberto Curti has added another intriguing book to his lengthening bibliography, with an excellent critical survey of the works of Tonino Valerii, entitled Il Mio Nome È Nessuno: Lo Spaghetti Western Secondo Tonino Valerii (My Name is Nobody: The Spaghetti Western According to Tonino Valerii. The book’s title would suggest that Curti deals only with Valerii’s five (out of his fourteen feature films) westerns: Per il gusto di uccidere/For the Taste of Killing, 1966, I Giorni dell’ira/Blood and Grit, 1967, Il Prezzo del potere/The Price of Power, 1969, Una Ragione per vicere e una per morire/A Reason to Live and a Reason to Die, 1972 and his most well known work, Il Mio Nome è Nessuno/My Name is Nobody. However, Curti spends an equal amount of time on Valerii’s other varied works, including his single giallo, Mio caro assassino/My Dear Killer, 1972, his dark romance La ragazza di nome Giulio/A Girl Called Jules, 1970,, and his crime films Vai Gorilla, 1976, The Sicilian Connection, 1987, and Sahara Cross, 1977, the latter, as Curti discusses on pages 74 to 78, being one of the first Italian films to extensively use the Steadicam. Curti feels that Valerii is underestimated as a director and argues convincingly for a re-evaluation of Valerii’s position within the landscape of popular Italian cinema. To this end, one of the goals of Curti’s book is to rescue Valerii from under the shadow of Sergio Leone, who produced his most popular film, My Name is Nobody. Curti writes:
“I temi preferiti da Valerii non sono pero l’epopea della Frontiera, il mito del progresso o la necessità di “stampare la leggenda”: al centro dell’attenzione c’è l’uomo, non l’icona leoniana dello “straniero senza nome”. Gli antieroi western del regista –con l’importante, significativa eccezione di Nessuno– sono outsiders tormentati e irrequieti, più vicini ai personaggii interpretrati da James Stewart nei western di Anthony Mann, segnati da conflitti interiori non meno laceranti di quelli a fuoco che punteggiano il loro cammino” (p. 15).
“Valerii’s preferred themes are not the Epic West, the myth of progress, or the classic ‘printing of the legend.’ At its center is man, but not Leone’s mythic ‘Man with no Name.’ His western antiheroes –with the significant exception of Nobody– are outsiders, tormented and restless, more in common with the characters played by James Stewart in the westerns of Anthony Mann, marked by interior conflicts which are no less lacerating than the fires that dot their path.”
