Very fine spaghetti western with much variety. There are sweeping landscapes and massed shoot outs but also more intimate wrangles, moments of humour and tight hand to hand fighting. Big and somewhat sprawling though the plot may be there is always time given to sly asides and intimate exchanges. There are times to cheer and times to smile as this well made movie unfolds with much style. Central performances of Franco Nero, Jack Palance and Tony Musante are all first rate and all help to fully engage the viewer. And, having said all that, even if all the above had been less than it is, then surely the Morricone score would carry it anyway. As with the rest of the film, this is a very varied score, soaring one minute, clattering at another and then spine tinglingly effective at others. Very watchable.

"Django" director Sergio Corbucci's Spaghetti western "The Mercenary" about an itinerant Polish pistolero Sergei Kowalski (Franco Nero of "Camelot") in Mexico at the turn of the century who takes a poor ignorant peasant (Tomas Musante of "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage") under his gun arm and elevates him to the status of hero of the Mexican revolution beat Sergio Leone's "Duck, You Sucker" by three years. In "Duck, You Sucker," an Irish revolutionary (James Coburn) took a penniless peasant (Rod Steiger) and elevated him to the status of Pancho Villa during the Mexican revolution. Indeed, the basic plots of "The Mercenary" and "Duck, You Sucker" resemble each other closely, except the characters and the endings differ drastically. The peasant here in "The Mercenary" is Paco Roman, a young, wifeless, childless, blue-collar laborer toiling in the mines of a wealthy aristocrat with a taste for opera. In "Duck, You Sucker," the peasant was much older, with a brood of trigger-happy sons, and a passion for thievery. In retrospect, the similarity between "The Mercenary" and "Duck, You Sucker" shouldn't seem too surprisingly when you consider that the same scenarist, Luciano Vincenzoni—who penned "Death Rides A Horse," "For A Few Dollars More," and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"—wrote both "The Mercenary" and "Duck, You Sucker." "The Mercenary" was Corbucci's first Mexican revolutionary western that he would follow up with "Companeros" starring Franco Nero as a Swedish arms dealer, Tomas Milian as the Mexican peasant, and Jack Palance as the villain."The Mercenary" opens in an arena with clowns simulating a bullfight. The main clown is really Paco; he is on the run from wealthy mine owner Alfonso García (Eduardo Fajardo of "Bad Man's River") and a deadly but dandified gambler Curly (Jack Palance) who is in league with Garcia. The Polish gunman Kowalski (Nero) sits in the stands and watches Paco until the time for the sundown comes. At that point, Corbucci and his multitude of writers—among them Franco Solinas of "A Bullet for the General" and Vincenzoni—flash back to the first meeting between our heroes who later become fast friends. Two Mexican mine owner pay Kowalski to get their silver. Curly follows them after he sees them talking to Kowalski. Curly is deeply interested in them because he had to have one of his henchmen, Studs (Franco Ressel of "Sabata"), killed for trying to kill Kowalski. You see, Kowalski caught Studs gambling with loaded dice and made him swallow the dice with a glass of milk.Anyway, Curly kills the two Mexicans and rides out to get the silver and Kowalski. Meanwhile, at the mine, Paco and his fellow miners—exploited at poverty wages—dine on execrable food and Paco discovers a lizard in his food. Everybody has a good laugh about the 'meat' in the grub. Later, in Garcia's office, the mine owner comes face-to-face with Paco holding a pig on a platter with a pistol sticking out of its mouth. Paco hand feeds Garcia the lizard and the two are enemies for life. When Kowalski shows up to pick up the money, he finds himself surrounded by Paco and his men. They are going to kill the Polish gunman until the Mexican army, with a vengeful Garcia in the ranks, intervenes with an artillery barrage. Vincenzoni wrote a similar scene in Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" as Tuco was about to hang Blonde from a hotel rafter. In the middle of all the shooting, the wealthy Paco explains that the silver can never be gotten to but he has fistfuls of paper money. He pays Kowalski to teach him how to operate a machine gun and the two become revolutionaries.Kowalski takes his hard earned money and leaves Paco, only to be trapped in the desert by Curly and his gunmen. This time Paco intervenes in the showdown between Kowalski and Curly and kills all of Curly's men and forces Curly to walk away without a stitch of clothing on in humiliation. Now, Curly has it in for Paco as well as the Polish soldier-of-fortune. Essentially, Kowalski teaches Paco how to run a revolution until an interfering woman Columba (Giovanna Ralli of "Cannon for Cordoba") joins them and turns Paco against his pal. As they make more money, Kowalski's demands become outrageous. He prefers to be paid in coin and he forces Paco's army to stop in the middle of the desert so that he can improvise a shower to cool himself off. No sooner have Paco and Columba wed and left Kowalski tied up in a stable than Garcia and Curly arrive, again with the Mexican army and a bi-plane that drops bombs.Spaghetti director Sergio Corbucci wrote and directed twice as many westerns as Sergio Leone. Corbucci lacked Leone's flamboyant style and his lucky break in establishing the Italian western. Nevertheless, he was his equal when it came to staging gunfights and helming snappy action stories. Franco Nero became his Clint Eastwood and Corbucci gained fame as Burt Reynolds called him 'the other Sergio' for his diverse oaters. Corbucci bucked the 'southwest' look of Spaghetti westerns with his oddball oater "The Great Silence" and his muddy western "Django" where the hero dragged around a coffin with a machine gun stashed in it. Corbucci maintains a furious pace throughout "The Mercenary," even though it starts up with a flashback and sacrifices some suspense—because you know the principals cannot die until the flashback ends. Predictably, the body count is as high as the film's cynicism. At one point, Curly jams a hand grenade into a revolutionary soldier's mouth and blows him up. However, Corbucci shows uncharacteristic flair when he stages a killing and a torture scene and declines to show the violence in each scene. In one scene, a thug batters the truth out of an unwilling victim while we watch Curly ride around in a circle. This kind of subtlety is very unusual for a Spaghetti western.

... just another GOOD, BAD, UGLY clone, in fact (which seemingly nobody notices ...). But let's start where things start: 1966 was an important year, simply because one of the best movies ever made saw the light of day then: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is a rare piece of motion art, where really everybody involved gave his absolutely best and also succeeded in doing so. There has so much praise been said regarding this movie, that I actually don't have to add any more lines, except maybe this one: Clint Eastwood is maybe the most important director today and was certainly one of the most important and influential actors in the 60ies and 70ies and although he has made more great movies in recent movie history than anybody else, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (GBU) still shines as the absolutely and by far best picture he was ever involved in. Quentin Tarantino calls GBU rightly the best picture ever made and IMDb-voters have voted it # 2 of the all-time-best-list (it should be # 1, but I'm sure that will happen some day, smile).When GBU hit the screens in 1966 it was a major success in Europe, but had a somewhat slow start in the USA, but word-of-mouth got around and finally made this a HUGE hit worldwide.In Europe the narrative potential of GBU was immediately recognized and multiple clones were made in the years to come, IL MERCINARIO being one of the earlier ones.But ... well ... Sergio CORBUCCI is not Sergio Leone (despite their sharing their first name), Franco NERO is not Clint Eastwood, Tony MUSANTE is not Eli Wallach and well, Jack PALANCE is probably as good as Lee van Cleef, but his hairdo in this movie having him play a gay (?) gunfighter makes the role of the "BAD" he has to take in IL MERCINARIO somewhat ridiculous (and still this movie isn't a comedy ...). And yes, Ennio Morricone is of course Ennio Morrcione, turning in another major achievement, not as good as in GBU but also not very far from that.But Corbucci not only copied the three lead roles from GBU, there are in fact many more similarities, from the storyline of hunting stolen (!) gold up to even a scene in which Franco Nero takes bath in the desert, simply lifted and slightly changed from the GBU-scene in which Eli Wallach does the same in front of the short-from-dying Clint Eastwood. Not to mention the shoot-out scene between Nero, Palance and Musante in the bull-fighting arena with camera-shots to their hands in the very same way as on the cemetery in GBU ... anyone who's willing to watch IL MERCINARIO with GBU in mind will find more similarities. IL MERCINARIO is certainly an above-average Italo-western (which doesn't mean that much, considering the low average Italo-westerns have "achieved"), but it's still just a GBU-clone.But as said above, simply copying main elements of another movie does not necessarily lead to the same outcome although Corbucci still did it much better than many other minor directors. This also shows, how much of the enormous grandeur of GBU is owed to Sergio Leone's fantastic direction, his eye for detail and feeling for timing.This is what IL MERCINARIO is lacking most in my humble opinion: appropriate timing. Actually the screen is practically permanently crowded with too many people and there's action going on for most of the time, where in fact less would have been more. The cool scenes in between and any better-than-average characterization of the leading men is completely missing as is the dialogue seldomly on the point.A few months after seeing the GBU one will still remember many scenes, a few days after watching IL MERCINARIO one will most likely only remember the gun pointing out of the pig's head and hardly any more.

The Mercenary is one of my favorite movies to watch. As is the case with the Leone westerns, I just can't get enough of this film. This is Sergio Corbucci's most meaningful and well-crafted cinematic work. It comes very close to being as good as any of the movies in the Dollars trilogy, and is definitely a strong contender for the title of "best non-Leone spaghetti western."Franco Nero gives what is perhaps his best performance out of all of the films I have seen him in. It definitely helps that his voice is not dubbed by someone else in this movie. His acting in the role of Sergei "the polack" Kowalski is at least as good if not better than any of Clint Eastwood's performances. There's plenty of Franco Nero style machine gunning action in this movie too. Tony Musante is fantastic as Paco Roman. He's kind of like a less cartoonish version of Tomas Milian, which is perfect for the character of Paco. Giovanna Ralli is wonderful in the role of Columba. Her role in this movie as the strong, cunning female revolutionary is much more significant than women were usually given in westerns. She plays it perfectly, and she really deserves equal billing with Nero and Musante. Jack Palance is entertaining and gloriously over-the top, as always. Eduardo Fajardo puts in a fine performance too, as usual.The music is one of Ennio Morricone's most memorable scores. The title theme is a rousing, festive Mexican sounding instrumental. During the film, there's some great use of organ music, and best of all there's that haunting whistling pattern that will forever stick in your mind, followed by the solemn trumpet melody and building crescendo. It works so well with the action on screen, especially during the showdown in the bullfighting arena, which is one of the greatest scenes in film history. Corbucci and Morricone could definitely create art on screen. It's no coincidence that the greatest spaghetti westerns are the ones with the greatest music scores.This is a very well developed story with intelligence, emotion, a roller coaster ride of action, and even a little bit of comedy. It is also very tight. There are no plot holes here. It's just a damn good flick. I could watch it a million times. Do not miss this one!!