The late 1960s witnessed a spate of Italian Westerns wearing their Leftist politics emblazoned on their sleeves, fashioning didactic stories about mercenary soldiers and Mexican peasants into crudely direct anti-Imperialist and implicitly anti-American screeds. Leone offered his own take on the politicization of the spaghetti Western in Duck, You Sucker! whose Italian title Giù la Testa! is better translated as “Keep your head down!”, that is, don’t be easily swayed or swept away by the events around you. While cynically mocking the propagandistic tendencies of the Italian popular cinema, Leone offered a boldly ambiguous statement about revolution and social responsibility that counted Pier Paolo Pasolini among its admirers. Curiously neglected, even to this day, by fans and critics alike, Duck, You Sucker! is a key transitional work that reveals Leone working towards the more complex and ambiguous characters of his late films, embodied here in the friendship between Rod Steiger’s Mexican peasant bandit and James Coburn’s dashing Irish revolutionary.nd space for thorough examination. – HG

Followed by a one-hour program of the early television work by Clint Eastwood that first attracted Leone to his most famous star.