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The Price of Power
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27-11-2013, 07:42 PM
If you're a fan of Spaghetti Westerns, you may have heard of this 1969 film which sets the JFK assassination in the old West (the assassination still takes place in Dallas, but the President is Garfield). An innocent black man is blamed for the shooting. The sequence starts at 45:30.
28-11-2013, 12:47 AM
I don't know how many fans of the genre we have here, but most of the Italian directors who made these films (like Sergio Leone) were leftists and radicals, and they deliberately subverted the American Western to make statements about capitalism, racism and imperialism.
28-11-2013, 01:03 AM
Wonder how Clint Eastwood feels about that?
I'll watch this movie on the weekend as that is the time to watch westerns. With bbq ribs. And beer.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her. “I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
28-11-2013, 04:42 AM
Quote:That's the first thing that I thought also. Watched the Aussie (western) "The Proposition" recently.I liked it alot.The actors were dirty/funky,lots of flies buzzing around,just like it's supposed to be.:  :
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
28-11-2013, 05:24 AM
I am a fan of subtitles....my Italian is pretty rusty.
28-11-2013, 06:33 AM
Keith Millea Wrote:Oh, I haven't heard of that one. I've book marked it for the week end too. The only Australian western I remember is Priscilla Queen of the Desert and that doesn't have a lot of horses in it. I'm sure there are others but can't recall. They will come to me later.Quote:That's the first thing that I thought also.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her. “I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
28-11-2013, 07:42 AM
Tracy Riddle Wrote:I don't know how many fans of the genre we have here, but most of the Italian directors who made these films (like Sergio Leone) were leftists and radicals, and they deliberately subverted the American Western to make statements about capitalism, racism and imperialism. Which is why the headlines saying "President Plans World Wide Peace Drive" and "FDR To Go To Warm Springs" is a little too close to home in 1965 in '36 Hours'. It may be coincidence but it sounds like left-leaning Hollywood movie makers expressing thinly veiled hints about JFK.
28-11-2013, 05:38 PM
A.J. Blocker Wrote:I am a fan of subtitles....my Italian is pretty rusty. Yeah,my hearing loss has forced me to use subtitles all the time.So,this hearing loss has had the wonderful effect of turning me on to the great foreign films out there.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
27-12-2013, 03:26 PM
(This post was last modified: 27-12-2013, 05:22 PM by Tracy Riddle.)
I got the chance to see The Price of Power with English overdubbing (bought a boxed set of public domain Spaghetti Westerns - 44 films for $12) and it was quite good.
The film was released in Italy in 1969 and the writer (Massimo Patrizi) obviously was pretty familiar with the Kennedy assassination. It doesn't look like it was released at all in the US until many years later. It's about 15 years after the Civil War, and a very Kennedy-like man (and Civil War vet) is President (played by Van Johnson - the President is never actually named as far as I can recall). He wants to heal the Union, end the de facto slavery of sharecropping and segregation, tax the rich and help working people. He plans a trip to Texas to campaign for his programs. At one point he says, "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not." There is a lot of opposition to the President in Dallas, which is run by businessmen and land-owners. The Vice President is a Texan controlled by these Dallas businessmen because of his corrupt past. The sheriff of Dallas is involved with a couple of the top businessmen in a plot to kill the President as he rides through town in a carriage with his Jackie-look-a-like wife. A black man is the Oswald character who is framed and later killed for allegedly shooting the President from an upper story window behind him, while the viewer watches two men firing from the front (from a wooden "overpass" as witnesses call it). The President dies, the First Lady goes back to Washington with the body, and his top aide gets involved in a complicated cover-up. He seems to be on both sides at once, mostly trying to protect the new President from being controlled by the Dallas businessmen, and to keep a new Civil War from starting. Finally evidence comes out that two doctors examined the President's body (the first one said he was shot from the front, the second lied and said the shot came from the rear). Witnesses recall seeing the shooters on the "overpass." The cover-up falls apart and there's lot of gun fighting and all the plotters get killed. There was a saloon that was supposed to be like the Carousel Club, and a stripper is a character in the film, but I'm not sure if the owner was one of the plotters. There were a lot of characters in the film; it was hard to keep some of them straight. Edit: I forgot to mention there's also a "Wanted for Treason" poster with the President's face that gets circulated around the town. |
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