There is a particular strand of spaghetti western that is less interested in the mechanics of violence than in what violence does to a man who discovers he enjoys it. Face to Face, Sergio Sollima’s violent spaghetti western and released in Italy in 1967 as Faccia a faccia — is the fullest expression of that preoccupation the genre ever produced.
The premise is deceptively simple. Professor Brad Fletcher, played by Gian Maria Volonté, travels to the American West for his health, having contracted tuberculosis. He falls in with an outlaw named Beauregard Bennett, played by Tomas Milián, and the relationship between them becomes the film’s entire subject. Fletcher, the educated man, the civilized one, is steadily revealed to be the more dangerous of the two. The closer he gets to frontier violence, the more at home he becomes — and the more he is drawn toward something ideological, something that wants to organize brutality into a doctrine.
Sollima was operating in a different register from Sergio Leone. Where Leone aestheticized the western’s violence, Sollima interrogated it. Face to Face is uncomfortable in the way good political allegory is uncomfortable — it makes the audience complicit in the intellectual seduction of the professor’s transformation.
Milián’s Beauregard is the more conventionally sympathetic figure: a frontier outlaw with a code, a man capable of loyalty and of disgust at what Fletcher becomes. The reversal of expected sympathies — the bandit as moral center, the professor as ideological monster — is what gives the Face to Face Sergio Sollima dark spaghetti western its staying power more than fifty years on.
Ennio Morricone‘s score is among his finest western work, oscillating between lyricism and menace in a way that reflects the film’s own unease. It is a film that rewards patience and repays a second viewing considerably more than most of its contemporaries.
