My Name is Nobody is one of the most beautiful westerns ever made (review)

The cult film with Henry Fonda and Terence Hill returns this Tuesday on C8.

My name is Nobodyof Tonino Valerii, follows Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda), legend of the West, wishing to end his career as a gunslinger and considering embarking for Europe. But a young admirer, calling himself Nobody (Terence Hill), doesn’t see it that way. He wants to bring Beauregard into history by leading him to fight the Wild Horde.

While the prestigious Sergio Leone is credited with the screenplay, the western master actually had the original idea for the story, but it was written by Fulvio Morsella, Leone’s brother-in-law, and Ernesto Gastaldi. In 2016, on the death of the director Tonino Valeriiwe paid tribute to the latter while recalling to what extent My name is Nobody changed the history of the western. A classic not to be missed, this Tuesday evening on C8.

“My Name is Nobody, therefore, is one of the most beautiful westerns ever made. We know that Leone has long claimed authorship of the film (for which he had the idea and which he had produced), but today Today, no one doubts it anymore: this swan song, this joyful, sad and loving homage to the western is indeed the work of Valerii (Leone would have only directed the urinal scene). Nobody is the story of a strange friendship, that between an old worn-out Western hero and a young lone wolf. Jack de Beauregard and Nobody. Henry Fonda and Terence Hill. Unlike the mainstream of the genre, the film is a variation that is not schoolboy and grimacing, but admiring and theoretical on the western. First imagined as Leone’s response to the farcical successes of Terence Hill which, according to him, perverted spaghetti, Valerii’s film very quickly transforms into a melancholy reflection on filiation, old age and the end of an era. And behind the popular success, hides an ironic and moving postscript to the genre, a farewell to the western in general, thanks to the magnificent presence of Fonda, and a wonderful compilation myths of the West and those of old Europe (we can see the film as a rereading of the Odyssey).”

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