grand duel

Clint Eastwood’s squint in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy established him as superstar. But Lee Van Cleef, a prolific character actor who spent most of the ‘50s and ‘60s appearing on one TV show after another (seriously, his IMDB resume looks like a substitute teacher’s schedule), enjoyed a career resurgence just by association. After playing opposite the Man With No Name in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Van Cleef became a hot commodity among European producers who wanted a bit of that Leone mojo…but on a budget they could afford.

The Grand Duel (1972) doesn’t offer the actor much of a stretch performance-wise – his character’s clothes, dialogue and demeanor are much the same as Angel Eyes from Good, Bad & Ugly – but a nifty role reversal casts him as sage gunslinger helping an outlaw framed for murder to clear his family name. The script (by mystery specialist Ernesto Gastaldi) lifts more than a few elements from Once Upon a Time in the West including a showy dialogue-free opening sequence and a recurring flashback. But despite its Frankenstein-esque construction, the film manages to get a leg up on most other Spaghetti westerns of the era.

And a lot of that is due to Van Cleef, whose hawk-like features and funereal garb give him the appearance of a particularly wise old vulture just waiting to peck your eyes out. The film always allows him straddle the line between black and white in a way that’s even more convincing than Clint. And director Giancarlo Santi makes sure there and plenty of dramatic close-ups and familiar showdowns (along with some less familiar aerial acrobatics!).

So why has The Grand Duel languished in relative obscurity? Well, besides an alternate title mucking things up (aka The Big Showdown) the film’s tone is inconsistent: light and jokey one minute, dead serious the next. Gastaldi’s script also tosses us right into the middle of a long-standing family feud and takes its sweet time explaining who’s who. Withholding that sort of information in a mystery is essential. In a Western it’s just plain frustrating.

But The Grand Duel deserves much more appreciation. And thanks to Blue Underground, it’ll finally get it. Although this is just a standard-def release, the transfer actually looks remarkably better than the blu-ray version released a few months ago by another company. On top of that, it includes an audio commentary from Spaghetti western specialists C. Courtney Joyner and Henry Parke and a collection of similar titles available on home video.