The first words I learned in Italian were gamba di legno, or wooden leg, for which Benito Mussolini and Walt Disney are to blame: After the war, my mother, who was fluent in Italian, had been involved with a charity that provided artificial limbs for Italian amputees. And for decades thereafter, during the family’s annual holiday, which would start in Santa Margherita Ligure, go on to Parma and Florence, and end in Rome, one or two recipients would show up at each stop to express their gratitude, making the vacation assume the character of a royal progress.
But for a while, I was operating under the erroneous impression that Italian men were born with a wooden leg. Gambadilegno also happened to be the name of Peg Leg Pete in Topolino, the Mickey Mouse comics. So my Italian can be said to rest on a wooden leg, but we all have to start somewhere.
In the early sixties, few Italians spoke English. As I entered my teens, I realized that if I wanted to make myself understood, I had better learn some Italian, and fast. Here the movies came to the rescue: All foreign films in Italy were dubbed—they still are—because Italian actors made good money doing voiceovers and had strong unions to back their demands. During the hot afternoon hours when the grownups would rest, I was given 200 lire to buy a movie ticket and would sit in the dark cool marble theater getting my Italian lessons while puffing on a forbidden Nazionali, the world’s most godawful cigarette.
Westerns were my favorites though it took a while to get used to hearing John Wayne sobering up Dean Martin in Italian in Rio Bravo. But what really blew my mind was the emergence in the sixties of what were then contemptuously referred to as spaghetti westerns, the Sergio Leone epics, in which American actors like Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, Charles Bronson, and Henry Fonda could launch or rekindle careers: Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars). Per qualque dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More). Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). And C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West).
This was something very different from Shane, with the saintly Alan Ladd in his newly cleaned and pressed buckskin suit. In these movies, everyone, including the heroes, was of dubious moral character. And in casting the smaller parts, Leone chose the kinds of unusual faces one finds among the crowds in altarpieces, contributing to the strong Catholic feel of his work. The emphasis was on sweat and dirt, on suffering and pain. Lots of pain.
And what villains! Jack Elam with his lazy eye waiting at the train station with two fellow gunslingers for Charles Bronson in the opening sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West. But most memorably, Henry Fonda cast against type as the arch-villain Frank, who, after his gang has massacred a family, shoots the surviving boy himself for the pleasure of it. Fonda’s ice blue eyes were the stuff of nightmares.
The soundtracks were revolutionary, too, unlike those used in Hollywood westerns where some wholesome teenage heartthrob like Ricky Nelson was lassoed in to sell the product. Those savage ayi-ayi-yah cries in Ennio Morricone’s theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly made my hair stand on end when I first heard them. Or the sound tapestry at the start of Once Upon a Time in the West, the squeaky windmill, the dripping water, and that buzzing fly. Even the bullets had a different sound.
Thanks to my private tutors Clint, Lee, Eli, Charles, and Henry, I acquired a colorful, if somewhat specialized vocabulary: To this day, I can name-call with the best of them: bugiardo (liar), vigliacco (yellowbelly), iena (hyena), ladro di cavalli (horse thief), baro (cardsharp), ubriaco (drunkard), all of which come in handy when holding a losing hand in a card game.
Of course my grammar stunk, and the elaborate vocabulary of the higher diplomacy eluded me. But here one recalls Tuco’s (Eli Wallach) advice in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. A gunman out for revenge finds him sitting in his bathtub and goes into a long spiel about how much he has looked forward to this occasion—upon which Tuco’s peacemaker explodes from beneath the suds and blows the fool away. “Quando si spara, si spara. Non si parla“—or, in the American version: “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” In some situations, too much talk can prove downright unhealthy.
