The Element of Time
The Element of Time
My Name is Nobody
1973 Director: Tonino Valerii
Starring: Terrence Hill, Henry Fonda
“People go around wasting days, weeks, years and, all of a sudden, there’s only 30 seconds to go” –Jack Beauregard
Tick, tick, tick, tick. . . . Somewhere out in the Old West, three men on horseback approach a barbershop. Wordlessly, they enter it, and bind and gag the barber and his young son. A ticking clock is heard. One of these men passes himself off as the barber when Jack Beauregard (Fonda) comes in for a shave. The three men signal each other through glances. After lathering Beauregard’s face, the man prepares the straight-razor—and just then, Beauregard points a gun at the man’s crotch. The ticking continues. Satisfied with his shave, the customer tips the would-be barber and checks his face in the mirror. But one of the men outside shoots towards him; Beauregard swings around and shoots the trio dead and leaves. The barber and son emerge from hiding and release each other. The boy is astonished that the customer shot the three men with what seemed to be just one shot. He then asks, “Pa, ain’t nobody faster at the draw than him?” The barber answers, “Faster than him? Nobody!”
“My Name is Nobody” often deals with speed, but also with time. We encounter these issues as a young man, who will modestly tell people he is nobody, stands in a river. “Nobody” (played by Hill) places a fly on the water and waits motionless—apparently a long time—lifting a club so he can kill the fish when it takes the bait. It works. He soon comes across three other outlaws. One of them offers him the horse he seeks if he delivers a basket to Beauregard inside the saloon nearby, which he does. Just before this, someone from the telegraph office, for the second time now, delivers a message to Beauregard that a ship to Europe will soon leave and asks for a deposit. And once again, Beauregard brushes him away; he says he still has time.
Beauregard is a famous, but aging, gunslinger who wants to end his career before it ends him. But Nobody has plans for him. He recalls prominent gunfights in which Beauregard fought against several men simultaneously, “. . . like that time in El Paso, Fifth of March 1882, Billy Mason, John Murray, Fred Carson. ’82 was one of your best years.” He continues by listing several dates, places, and the men involved; he’s a great fan of his hero’s achievements and wants to see him go out in a blaze of glory by facing the Wild Bunch—a gang of 150 outlaws—singlehanded.
Time is against Beauregard, and not just because of his age. He searches for his friend, Red, and his brother, “Nevada Kid,” but he’s too late: Red is mortally wounded and Nevada was killed. Nobody, always two steps ahead of him, leads him to Nevada’s tomb on a high plain. The ticking clock is heard again. Now, Beauregard is annoyed by this stranger and shoots his hat off twice as he walks away because he refuses to fight him. And suddenly, a vision: thundering, through a dusty canyon, an enormous faction of riders approaches as we hear Ennio Morricone’s “The Wild Horde”—a wistful, inspiring instrumental. Then Nobody repeats his want: Beauregard should face the Wild Bunch alone in a gunfight. “You’ll be written up in all the history books,” he says.
Nobody is a sharpshooter—he’s a younger version of his hero. At one point, he enters a saloon where a drinking game occurs. The men must drink then shoot the empty glass before it hits the ground. The challenge becomes tougher as the glasses are smaller the more they drink. Nobody is speed and accuracy personified. And although his skill is often on display, he has no need to “make a name” for himself; when anyone asks who he is, he answers, “nobody.” The pair soon meet again for what appears to be a showdown, but Beauregard is weary of this sort of thing. Then, once again, a rumbling, Morricone’s song, and the riders appear in the distance and enter the town. Will he face the Wild Bunch?
Sergio Leone’s movies often deal with issues of time and speed. His filmmaking can involve lengthy shots of inactivity. And time often seems to stand still in Spaghetti Westerns, a genre Leone helped create. This is evident several times in this film, such as in the scene where Beauregard’s enemies ask Nobody to deliver the basket with a bomb to him. In doing so, Nobody talks and talks, even as the hissing bomb is heard, creating anticipation and anxiety; he is wasting time and risking both of their lives! In a later scene, Nobody rushes to the train station to prevent his idol’s departure. But first, he stops at the station’s restroom and finds the engineer at a urinal. Nobody then stands at the urinal facing the one occupied by the engineer; these two (youth versus age) stare at each other at length. The engineer literally can’t “go”—a long scene of inaction.
“My Name is Nobody” signals the end of an era. And Beauregard is a symbol of the Old West. At one point he mentions that day’s exact date, June Third, 1899—the new century and all its progress is about to dawn. And he is tired of evading danger. Here, again, Leone juxtaposes youth and age in an unusual way; youth (Hill) looks back longingly to days gone by, while age (Fonda) rejects that. Whereas youth has time to theorize, age must be practical. By 1973, when “My Name is Nobody” was filmed, the Western movie genre had been around for many decades, and most of these films mythologized, advocated, and white-washed a morally questionable time period of land appropriation and colonization, genocide, and lawlessness. Most Spaghetti Westerns (low-budget Westerns created mainly in Italy and Spain, often with U.S. and European actors) were made between 1964 and 1978. By the 1980’s Westerns had lost much of their appeal with audiences. And, almost a decade before this, “My Name is Nobody” predicts this terminus.
The idea of a terminus is even present in the film’s main theme: Morricone’s “The Wild Horde.” This haunting instrumental borrows some of its phrasing from Richard Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries,” a majestic piece from his cycle of four operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). In Norse mythology, the Valkyries were female warriors who rode into battle and chose which warriors would live or die; they would then take the fallen to Valhalla, where they would feast and fight until the end of time. Morricone’s composition, therefore, becomes a swan song for Beauregard and the Wild West.
And in spite of its many references to death, age, and time, the film is a comedy. This is evident in the drinking and basket scenes. “My Name is Nobody” contains several pratfalls and visual gags, some of which can be coarse, but some of its humor is subtle, particularly as it recalls earlier Westerns. The movie is loosely based on Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the Wild Country” (1962), a film about the passing of the Old West at the turn of the century. At one point, Nobody points out a grave to Beauregard, stating, “Sam Peckinpah, that’s a beautiful name in Navajo,” an obvious dig at the director. The film also makes reference to one of Leone’s first Spaghetti Westerns, “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964, starring Clint Eastwood, to whom Terence Hill bears a slight resemblance). In that film, Eastwood plays a nameless individual; indeed, its Italian title was originally “Il magnifico straniero” (“The Magnificent Stranger”). So Hill’s Nobody is an allusion to Eastwood’s role as the nameless gunslinger. Moreover, Hill’s character, Nobody, and the film’s title, are a play on words—a running existentialist joke. And perhaps an unintentional jest occurs when Beauregard comes across his dying friend, Red, and asks, “where’s Nevada?” It’s all I could do to stop myself from replying, “just east of California.” Get over it.