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“Don’t Turn The Other Cheek”: Eli Wallach & Franco Nero buddy up in this 1971 action-comedy spaghetti western In keeping with the politically tumultuous nature of the late ‘60s, the Spaghetti Western went through a transition that represented the feelings of the time. No longer were the goals of the person (“the lone gunman who rides into town and cleans up” made popular by Leone’s Dollars trilogy in 1964 and was afterwards aped by every Italian genre filmmaker) important. Instead, the circumstances of the people, the group, was seen as way more commercially viable (at least by some producers, straight shoot ‘em ups were still the general order of the day). Hence the filmmakers decided to allegorically set their politically-charged vehicles during Mexico’s early 20th century revolution. DON'T TURN THE OTHER CHEEK 7 Unlike the vicarious fantasy of the avenging angel oaters most of these, so called “Zapata westerns” prided themselves in telling no-nonsense narratives about peons taking up arms against their corrupt authorities, normally with a roughish foreign character (generally a mercenary) overseeing the proceedings, who, by movie’s ending, has either shed his cynical attitudes towards “the cause” and sided with the common people or doesn’t …and pays the price for it (see 1966’s A Bullet For The General). DO NOT TURN THE OTHER CHEEK 11 The father of the genre himself, Sergio Leone got in on this fleeting fad when he reluctantly (but that’s another narrative) helmed the sadly underrated Duck You Sucker (1971), a Zapata Western that condemns the revolution and brutal confrontation but nonetheless manages to be political with its loud apolitical stance. The most accessible of these Italo-Zapata entries are Sergio Corbucci’s (the director behind Django) The Mercenary (1968) and its lighter but however plan filled remake, Compa