Face to Face

Brad Fletcher is a professor of history in the east. His lungs are bad and the doctors tell him to go west. On the road he meets the leader of a gang. Solomon Bennett is wounded and running; he takes Fletcher hostage. The professor is frightened at first. Then he stays with the gang and starts observing. At the next robbery he offers an idea and the idea works. Then another. The group starts listening to him. Bennett grows uneasy. The two change places: the outlaw tires and wants out, the professor does not stop. Sergio Sollima directs. Gian Maria Volonté plays Fletcher and Tomas Milian plays Bennett; William Berger is in the cast. It is an Italian and Spanish co-production, made in 1967. The film belongs to the political vein of the western; the director made several in the kind and all of them are about power. The music is by Ennio Morricone. The matter it treats is violence being learned; the film shows cruelty not as a nature but as a road. The narrative deliberately sets the two men against each other and they exchange places entirely by the end. The character Volonté plays is at the centre and the change is given step by step. There is a third man too; an agent who has got inside the gang, and his position shifts as well. The narrative does not give its final confrontation as a classic duel. Its limit is pace; the narrative is slow, there is much talk and little action. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian westerns and political narrative. Who it is not for: it is slow, argumentative, and the ending cold.