Kill amigo

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Movie
German title Kill amigo
Original title Quién sabe?
Country of production Italy
original language Italian
Publishing year 1966
length 118 minutes
Age rating FSK 18
Rod
Director Damiano Damiani
script Salvatore Laurani
Franco Solinas
production Bianco Manini
music Luis Bacalov
Ennio Morricone
camera Antonio Secchi
cut Renato Cinquini
occupation

A Bullet for the General (original title: sabe Quién? Spanish for Who knows? ; English title: A Bullet for the general [ A bullet for the General ]) is a spaghetti western by Damiano Damiani in 1966 with Gian Maria Volonte in the lead role. The framework plot defines the Mexican Revolution . The rebellion is fighting the Mexican government.

action

The opaque American El Niño intentionally joins the El Chuncho gang during a railroad robbery. This gang steals weapons to sell to the revolutionaries. For El Chuncho, the focus is on enriching himself. After various slaughters, in which a valuable machine gun in particular was captured, they abandoned a revolutionary small town in order to sell the numerous booty weapons in the hard-to-find warehouse of the revolutionary leader General Elias. On the way there, El Niño falls seriously ill with malaria , El Chuncho saves him, but while searching for medication, he discovers a golden ball in El Niño's luggage, which initially does not seem important. After arriving at the camp, General Elias awakened El Chuncho's conscience by explaining to him that the whole small town had been massacred by the soldiers because he had abandoned the town. El Chuncho is insightful, remorseful, and complies with the verdict of being executed by his own brother, a fanatical revolutionary clergyman. From a distance El Niño shoots General Elias, which was his real assignment. He also shoots El Chuncho's brother down, so that the latter survives. The fact that the bullet that fatally hit the general was made of gold is known and on the one hand El Niño proves to his clients that he had successfully carried out the murder plot, on the other hand El Chuncho knows from the fact that he was abused Find General Elias. Chuncho realizes that Niño, his supposed friend, shot the revolutionary leader General Elias for a considerable sum of money on behalf of the Mexican government. Chuncho then wants to kill Niño, something that hotel staff prevents him from doing. Instead of delivering Chuncho, Niño wants to reconcile with him and has already deposited half of the bounty in the hotel safe as a sign of his reward for Chuncho. Chuncho is torn, first decides on wealth, dresses up as a rich man and wants to travel to the USA with Niño by train. But when Niño first ruthlessly pushes his way forward at the station and a little later, while getting on the train, Chuncho happily tells how he manipulated him in a tricky manner in order to be brought near the general, Chuncho suddenly pulls a revolver and apologizes to Niño what follows and shoots at him several times. Chuncho's last words to his partner, who is dying in the departing train, are: “Go back to your United States!” Chuncho chose the poverty of the revolution and his sense of justice.

Reviews

“A tough and uncompromising spaghetti western with cynical tones, who portrays the excesses of a blind, mad revolution as unvarnished as the mercilessness of a tyranny. Excitingly staged and well played. "

“The relationship between rebel, revolutionary and North American is also a model for today's revolutionary situations in Latin America. The North American, a likeness of those CIA agents so ominously active in Latin America, is finally shot by the rebel leader El Chuncho when he sees through his exploitative and racist character. "

- Friedemann Hahn : The Italo-Western, 1971

background

Damiani rejected the term "Western" for his film, as he only accepted this term for films that take place within Protestant American culture, and spoke of his film as "a political film, not a Western".

Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his first feature film, Love is Colder than Death , to the two main characters of this film, among other things.

literature

  • Howard Hughes: In This Life, One Can Die Too, Damiano Damiani's' A bullett for the general (1966) ' Chapter 8 in: Once Upon A Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers' Guide to Spaghetti Westerns . IBTauris, 2006, ISBN 978-0-85773-045-9 (English)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for Kill Amigo . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , May 2007 (PDF; test number: 38 350 DVD).
  2. The original title refers to the last scene of the film, when Nino Chuncho asks why he still wants to shoot him now, and who in his conflict just stammered “Who knows, who knows?” Before he shoots
  3. Kill Amigo. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  4. after Ulrich P. Bruckner: For a few more corpses , p. 185
  5. Fassbinder, Fischer: Fassbinder on Fassbinder , 2004, p. 25