The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 20-26
China 9, Liberty 37 (1978)
Directed by Monte Hellman
Fabio Testi was the Italian Disney Prince we never got. Tall, svelte and ruggedly handsome, he was almost too well-built for his own body. He was six feet tall but looked eight or nine. In what turned out to be his final Western, the enigmatic China 9, Liberty 37, Hellman gives his audience ample opportunity to drink in Testi’s mustang-like features. Hellman’s laid-back existential style is crisper than usual in this tale of a bounty hunter who falls for his target’s wife—the better to capture the snappy chemistry between Testi and a magnificently bearded Warren Oates (leporine Jenny Agutter is the third wheel here, despite her place in both men’s beds). If Hellman’s earlier The Shooting is a riff on Camus’ Sisyphus myth, China 9 is Dostoyevsky’s The Double rewritten as a Spaghetti Western. Hunter and hunted have much in common, including lust for the same demure woman and an association with the bureaucratic railroad company that sent the former to kill the latter. Oates allows Testi to stay on his farm and slowly watches this gorgeous slab of Italian clay morph into his own image—all the better to annihilate his worst self and achieve Nirvana. If Testi were any less a perfect specimen (“I can see you don’t believe in rust,” muses Oates) then destroying him wouldn’t have the same symbolic pleasure for his doppelgänger. And if the title tells us we’re not far from the spiritual ecstasy found in eastern philosophy, real freedom from the self is still far away. Scout Tafoya (April 21, 7:30pm at the Spectacle’s “A Fistful of Testis”)