Duck, You Sucker (1971)
★★★½ — Duck, You Sucker (1971)
There's a moment in Duck, You Sucker! where a Mexican bandit and an Irish revolutionary are sitting in the ruins of everything they thought they were fighting for, and you realise Leone has quietly broken your heart without you noticing. That's the trick he pulls here, and it's devastating when it lands.
This one goes by a few names. A Fistful of Dynamite is the other main one, and both titles tell you something true about it. It's loud, it's messy, it's sprawling, and it's vintage Leone all the way through. Set during the Mexican Revolution, it follows Juan Miranda, a bandit played by Rod Steiger with wild, sweaty energy, a man who has no interest in politics, ideology or causes of any kind. He wants money. He wants survival. He wants his family safe. Into his world rides John Mallory, James Coburn all Irish charm and quiet menace, an explosives expert with an IRA past he can't outrun. Together they pull off a bank job that accidentally becomes a revolutionary act, and from there the film pulls them both, willing or not, into something much bigger and much darker than either man bargained for.
I've written about Leone before, and I'll keep writing about him because the myth-making, the moral ambiguity, the sheer visual nerve of his work never gets old. This film has all of it. The grand close-ups of sweat-slicked faces. The wide desert vistas that make men look small and fragile against the landscape. The slow-burn tension that turns a conversation into a confrontation and a confrontation into an aria. The train heist sequence is extraordinary, and the massacre at Mesa Verde is one of the most quietly brutal things Leone ever put on screen. The film's central argument, that revolutions consume the people who make them, that legend is a cage men get trapped in rather than a gift, is handled with genuine weight. This isn't a film that romanticises rebellion. It's one that mourns it.
The friendship between Juan and John is where the film earns its keep. It crackles with irony and a genuine, earned melancholy. These are two men performing versions of themselves, the rogue, the revolutionary, while something more complicated grows underneath. The final act reframes everything that came before it, and if you let it, it hits hard.
But I have to be honest: it's too long. Several scenes drag well past their natural end point. Standoffs, conversations, entire sequences outstay their welcome in ways that dilute rather than deepen. Compare it to Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), where every silence felt loaded, every pause felt like a held breath. Here, the pacing stumbles under its own ambition. Leone is reaching for an epic and sometimes grabs one, but he's also in love with his own rhythms in a way that occasionally tips from hypnotic into sluggish.
And then there's the Morricone score, which I find genuinely odd. Morricone is always welcome, and there are passages here that soar. But the main theme, jaunty and almost whimsical, keeps clashing with the film's darker turns. It lacks the haunting gravitas of his work on Once Upon a Time in the West, that bone-deep ache that made that film feel like a funeral for an era. Here it sometimes edges towards parody at the exact moments it should be breaking your heart. It's a rare misfire from one of the great composer-director partnerships in film history, and it costs the film something.
What it doesn't cost is its place in Leone's late-period run. This is a flawed epic, no question, undone in patches by its own grandeur and an uncertain tonal hand. But Steiger is magnificent, Coburn is effortlessly cool, and the film's ambition, its genuine desire to say something about revolution, sacrifice and the unwilling making of myths, puts it well above most of what was being made around it. For fans of Leone, it's essential. Just go in knowing it's not his finest and you'll find plenty to love.
Four stars.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1971 | Watched: 2025-10-12
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in America (1984) · A Fistful of Dollars (1964) · For a Few Dollars More (1965) · Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)
