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    FILM & VIDEO

    Duck, You Sucker!

    Duck, You Sucker!

    Presented by Harvard Film Archive at Harvard Film Archive

    November 13, 2011

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    Directed by Sergio Leone. With Rod Steiger, James Coburn, Romolo Valli
    Italy/US 1971, 35mm, color, 157 min. In English
    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.

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


    • At-a-
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      • Venue Info

        Harvard Film Archive

        Harvard Film Archive Cinematheque
        24 Quincy Street
        Cambridge, MA 02138

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      • Admission Info

        Tickets:

        $9 - Regular Admission
        $7 - Non-Harvard Students, Harvard Faculty and Staff, and Senior Citizens
        Regular HFA screenings are free for all Harvard students with a valid photo ID.

        Info Phone: 617.495.4700 or 496.3211

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      • Dates & Times

        Dates:
        November 13, 2011

        Times:

        7pm

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