Duck, You Sucker (1971)

Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker arrives near the end of the Zapata Western cycle, a 1971 epic in which a Mexican bandit and an Irish explosives expert stumble into a revolution neither of them wanted. It is a handsomely mounted picture, all dust and dynamite, carrying the director's signature fatigue about violence as a human enterprise. What interests us here is how little of the modern social consciousness apparatus it brings along. This is a film from 1971, and it behaves like one.

On representation, the film offers a curious inversion. Juan, the Mexican peasant, is played by Rod Steiger of New Jersey, and the Irishman by James Coburn of Nebraska, surrounded by a largely European supporting cast. That is not deliberate inclusion but its opposite, a familiar mid-century habit of casting whoever the studio could afford. There is no LGBTQ content of any kind, no body-positivity messaging, no neurodivergent characters, and no environmental concern, which for a film about land and dispossession is a small irony. The treatment of women is where the picture becomes genuinely difficult to defend. It opens with Juan raping a coach passenger, and women thereafter function as victims or as ghosts in flashbacks. No feminist framework is available here, and none is attempted.

The film's political energies are real but class-based. Peasants are crushed by landowners and federales, a tyrannical governor hoards a fortune, and wealthy passengers are robbed with some relish. Leone, however, is a deconstructor, not a pamphleteer. He insisted the revolution was a symbol, and the thesis he advances, that revolution means confusion, arrives through character and betrayal instead of sermon. We are left with a picture that carries an ethnic-oppression dimension and a class-struggle pulse, and almost nothing else from the contemporary moral toolkit. We classify it accordingly, with the grim satisfaction of a sommelier identifying an old vintage that has not traveled well.