Once Upon a Time in the Italian West

"Talk not of the town, boys, give me the broad prairie,
Where man, like the wind, roams impulsive and free...
Then enter, boys; cheerily, boys, enter and rest;
You know how we live, boys, and die in the West!
Oho, boys! - oho, boys! - oho!"
- "Life in the West" by 19th century songwriter-poet George Pope Morris

Today's topic is kind of a tricky one. We're going to discuss, if only briefly, suicide and actors in spaghetti westerns (or, Italian westerns - i.e., westerns shot in Europe, usually produced and directed by Italian filmmakers).

Of course, there is nothing new about actors and suicide. Ever since fledgling actress Peg Entwistle pitched to her death off the "H" of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign in 1932, performers who strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage have "shuffled off this mortal coil."

When Clara Blandick, forever endeared as Dorothy's distressful Aunt Em in "The Wizard of Oz," was going blind and suffering from severe arthritis at age 85, she put on an elegant nightgown, styled her hair, swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills, and lay down on a couch, draping her shoulders with a gold blanket and tying a plastic bag over her head. She left a note that began, "I am now about to make the great adventure."

George Sanders, the quintessence of British sophistication, who went from winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his urbane performance as an insufferably acerbic theater critic in 1950's "All About Eve" to playing a comic stooge for Inspector Clouseau's slapstick billiards antics in 1964's "A Shot in the Dark" to dressing in drag as an aging transvestite in director John Huston's 1970 spy thriller "The Kremlin Letter," recognized the onset of dementia and was aware of increasing physical infirmities. The 65-year-old actor ingested the contents of five bottles of the brand name barbiturate Nembutal in 1972. "Dear World," he wrote, "I am leaving because I am bored...I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool."

And so it goes. "All the world's a stage," Shakespeare's Jaques in "As You Like It" noted, "And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances." And here we emphasize exits, from Elizabeth Hartman in 1987, to Inger Stevens in 1970, Hervé Villechaize in 1993, Brian Keith in 1997, Richard Farnsworth in 2000, Spalding Gray in 2004, and Robin Williams in 2014.

But the focus in the Moviehouse is the instance of suicide among thespians from the corrida of Italian westerns. Admittedly, the scope on this approach is limited, if not morbid, but the stories behind the tragedies are interesting and worth retelling.

Take, for example, the tale of Al Mulock, a Toronto-born actor. His is the first face seen in director Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" as it looms ominously into view in startling closeup in front of a craggy landscape in the western frontier (well, actually Andalusia, Spain). He portrays the lead gunman in a trio of bounty hunters unfortunate enough to encounter the bandit Tuco Ramirez (Eli Wallach), the titular "Ugly."

Mulock, who was born Alfred Mulock Rogers (the great-grandson of Sir William Mulock, an illustrious and influential Canadian businessman, educator, and politician), attended Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in New York City. Partnering with an English actor, Mulock started The London School, which taught Method acting to British actors.

Mulock was consistently employed in British TV and cinema in the 1950s and early '60s, typically as a bad guy. In a pair of back-to-back "Tarzan" pictures starring musclebound Gordon Scott, Mulock played disparate robbers. In 1960's "Tarzan the Magnificent," Mulock shared his screen villainy with Jock Mahoney and John Carradine.

Al Mulock plays John Carradine's son in "Tarzan the Magnificent."

Produced the previous year, 1959's "Tarzan's Greatest Adventure," featuring Gordon Scott as a surprisingly articulate and Jane-less apeman, has long been revered as the best "Tarzan" picture ever made, directed by John Guillermin. Al Mulock held his own in a tiffany thieves' den that featured Anthony Quayle and Sean Connery.

Sean Connery, Al Mulock, Anthony Quayle, and Sara Shane
sweat it out in "Tarzan's Greatest Adventure."

In an inspired South African twist on "High Noon" titled "The Hellions" (1961), costarring Jamie Uys, the future filmmaker behind the surprise 1980 comedy hit picture "The Gods Must Be Crazy," Al Mulock played one of a murderous brood of patriarch Lionel Jeffries.

Lionel Jeffries (center) leads his reprobate offspring - Al Mulock,
Marty Wilde (father of "Kids in America" pop singer Kim Wilde),
Colin Blakely, and James Booth - into the South African Transvaal
settlement in "The Hellions."

In 1966's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," Al Mulock's character returns as a one-armed gunslinger who faces down Tuco in a bathtub, only to waste too much time gabbing.

"When you have to shoot, shoot - don't talk."

Two years later, in the protracted prologue to Sergio Leone's 1968 magnum opus, "Once Upon a Time in the West," Al Mulock again appeared as one of a threesome of duster-clad gunmen, along with Hollywood western old-timers Jack Elam and Woody Strode, this time awaiting the arrival of the harmonica-playing drifter played by Charles Bronson.

As ludicrous as it sounds, director Sergio Leone initially entertained
the notion of having Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach,
the stars of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," appear in cameo roles
as the three unlucky gunfighters who greet Charles Bronson.

One day, off the set at a hotel in Guadix, in the province of Granada, Spain, Mickey Knox, an American screenwriter who collaborated with Sergio Leone as a dialogue director to coach non-English speaking actors to perform convincingly in English, and a production manager saw a body drop past their window. It was Al Mulock, still wearing his western costume.

The actor had yet to complete his scenes, so as he was being loaded into the ambulance, a frantic Sergio Leone shouted, "Get the costume! We need the costume!" Mulock had surprisingly survived the fall, but he fatally suffered a punctured lung from a broken rib during the bumpy ride to the distant hospital. And that's why, at the close of the opening scene in "Once Upon a Time in the West," his character is only seen in long shots, presumably by a stand-in wearing Mulock's retrieved wardrobe.

Al Mulock wears his "Once Upon a Time in the West"
getup for the last time on screen.

Mickey Knox later surmised that Al Mulock was a drug addict and couldn't find a fix in Guadix. Knox recounted, "Desperate, he went up to the roof and took a dive."

Luigi Pistilli was revered as an actor on the Italian stage, respected as one of the country's finest interpreters of Bertolt Brecht's plays, such as "The Threepenny Opera" and "Saint Joan of the Stockyards," when he had his first credited screen role as Groggy, the cunning second-in-command of an outlaw band led by El Indio in "For a Few Dollars More," the second of Clint Eastwood's so-called "Man with No Name" trilogy directed by Sergio Leone.

Luigi Pistilli appears in closeup in one of Sergio Leone's
marvelously photographed sequences in "For a Few Dollars More."

Pistilli became a familiar face in the genre of Italian mystery-horror known as "giallo" films ("giallo" meaning "yellow," stemming from pulp fiction mystery paperbacks popular in post-fascist Italy that were published with yellow paperback covers), including "The Case of the Scorpion's Tail," "The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire,"  and "Twitch of the Death Nerve," directed by the godfather of giallo cinema, Mario Bava.

Luigi Pistilli meets a gruesome end in the 1972 giallo thriller
"Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key."

Apart from Sergio Leone, Luigi Pistilli performed in the spaghetti westerns "Death Rides a Horse" and "The Great Silence." He appeared with Carroll Baker in "The Sweet Body of Deborah,"with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk in "Machine Gun McCain,"and with Charles Bronson and James Mason in "Cold Sweat."

Luigi Pistilli robs his own bank in 1967's "Death Rides a Horse,"
one of the first spaghetti westerns Lee Van Cleef made after "For
a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" that
cast him as the lead good guy.

One of Pistilli's most memorable screen roles was a brief appearance as Father Ramirez, the brooding older brother of Eli Wallach's Tuco in Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (pictured below).

Tuco: "You think you're better than I am. Where we came from, if
one did not want to die in poverty, one became a priest or a bandit.
You chose your way, I chose mine. Mine was harder...You became a
priest because you were too much of a coward to do what I do."

Luigi Pistilli committed suicide on April 21, 1996, in his home in Milan, prior to appearing in the final performance of "Before Dawn," British dramatist Terence Ratigan's burlesque of the opera "Tosca." The play had been panned by both critics and audiences, which might have contributed to his state of mind. He was 66. In his note, the actor expressed his despair over making public statements concerning the termination of a four-year relationship with Milva, a redheaded singer-actress (born Maria Ilva Biocalti).

Milva was dubbed "La Rossa" by the Italian press for her red hair.

In his suicide note, Pistilli apologized to Milva for his spiteful comments that had been published. He was buried in the small village of Cori, in the Lazlo region of central Italy, beside the resting plots of his parents and a son, Daniele, who had committed suicide in 1989 at the age of 24.

A German youth born Karl Hyrenbach made his screen debut in an uncredited role as the ill-fated husband of Lee Van Cleef's Col. Mortimer's sister in Sergio Leone's "For a Few Dollars More" (1965). In a flashback scene, the crazed outlaw El Indio (played by acclaimed Italian actor Gian Maria Volontè) breaks in on newlyweds Karl and actress Rosemary Dexter, shoots hubby and starts to ravish the bride before she takes her own life.

In an all too brief acting career over nine years, the blond-haired Hyrenbach, who adopted the show business name Peter Lee Lawrence, became a wildly popular star of Italian horse operas, spaghetti westerns with titles like "Fury of Johnny Kidd," "I'll Kill Him and Return Alone" (as Billy the Kid), "Pistol for a Hundred Coffins," "Four Gunmen of the Holy Trinity," and "Raise Your Hands, Dead Man, You're Under Arrest."

In 1972, Lawrence began suffering from debilitating headaches. Fits of depression and mood swings became common deterrents. He underwent surgery at a Madrid hospital, where the biopsy revealed that he had glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive brain cancers. He moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where he underwent chemo and radium treatment. He was later admitted to a clinic in Rome with severe stomach pains. He died there April 20, 1974, age 30.

Rumors persisted that Lawrence committed suicide because he was convinced a brain tumor was killing him and that life was not worth enduring such pain. Italian actress Erika Blanc (Enrica Bianchi Colombatto), who costarred with Lawrence in a handful of pictures, denied that he killed himself, insisting he died of the brain tumor.

Claudio Camaso was the younger brother of actor Gian Maria Volontè, who cemented his place in the iconography of spaghetti westerns with his portrayals of Ramón Rojo in "A Fistful of Dollars" and El Indio in "For a Few Dollars More" (pictured below).

Camaso, who would sometimes be billed as Claudio Volontè, appeared in 18 movies and three Italian TV series from 1964 to 1976. Among his spaghetti westerns were "10,000 Dollars for a Massacre," "John the Bastard," and "Vengeance Is Mine."

On the evening of July 26,1977, Claudio Camaso mortally stabbed Vincenzo Mazza, a motion picture electrician, during an argument in a square in Rome known as Campo de' Fiori. The actor fled, but ten days later, he surrendered to the police. During his detention, awaiting trial, he hanged himself in his cell in Regina Coeli, a convent-turned-prison in Rome, early morning on September 16. He was 44.

French actress Claudine Auger (best known as Bond Girl "Domino"
in "Thunderball"), Luigi Pistilli, and Claudio Camaso (credited as
Claudio Volontè) are shown in a scene in "Twitch of the Death Nerve."

If the name Frank Wolff is mentioned, a natural response might be, "Who?" But one picture of him from his most unforgettable - albeit brief - role from "Once Upon a Time in the West" will have one going, "Oh yeah, that guy!"

He portrayed Brett McBain, the homesteader who, along with his redheaded offspring, is massacred by badass gunfighter Frank (Henry Fonda, inspiredly cast against type) and his henchmen in the movie's opening scene. Throughout the 1960s, Wolff became a familiar presence in spaghetti westerns and Italian giallo thrillers.

And yet, Frank Wolff was as American as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. He was born Walter Frank Hermann Wolff in San Francisco, the son of a Bay Area physician. He attended UCLA, where he studied acting and stagecraft. He wrote and directed plays there and befriended future director Monte Hellman (best known for the 1971 road movie "Two-Lane Blacktop").

Wolff was cast in Monte Hellman's first film, "Beast from Haunted Cave," a low-budget 1959 monster movie produced by independent filmmaker Roger Corman. The picture also featured Michael Forest and Richard Sinatra (the son of Frank's cousin). Wolff (pictured above) befriended Forest (familiar to fans of the original "Star Trek" series as Apollo in the episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?"), and the two later became roommates.

  

Apollo (Michael Forest) attempts to seduce mortal Lieutenant
Palamas (Leslie Parrish) on a second season episode of "Star Trek."

Frank Wolff had small roles in two other films from 1959, both directed by Roger Corman himself, namely "The Wasp Woman" and "I Mobster." In 1960, Wolff, Forest, and Richard Sinatra costarred in Corman's bargain-basement World War II action picture "Ski Troop Attack."

Frank Wolff plays Sgt. Potter in "Ski Troop Attack," which was shot
back-to-back with "Beast from Haunted Cave" in Deadwood, S.D.

Between 1957 and 1961, Frank Wolff appeared in a number of episodes of various TV series, including "Rawhide," with Clint Eastwood, and a memorable "The Twilight Zone" story titled "A Passage for Trumpet," featuring a poignant performance by Jack Klugman as a suicidal jazz trumpet player who gets a second chance from an ethereal horn player named Gabriel.

Frank Wolff portrays Baron, a sympathetic club
owner in "A Passage for Trumpet," with Jack Klugman.

In 1961, Wolff went to Greece to costar in "Atlas," filmmaker Roger Corman's attempt to cash in on the sword-and-sandal genre spawned by Steve Reeves' "Hercules" movies. Wolff's friend, Michael Forest, was cast as the muscular titular hero, while Wolff himself chewed up the scenery as the duplicitous King Proximates (pictured below).

On Corman's advice, Frank Wolff remained in Europe, where he became an in-demand, scene-stealing character actor in numerous motion pictures, most of them Italian productions. Early in his European sojourn, he returned to Greece for a second-billed role in his most esteemed film, the 1963 Best Picture Oscar nominated "America America," which writer-director Elia Kazan shot on-location in Athens and Istanbul.

Frank Wolff plays American expatriate Vartan Damadian
in Elia Kazan's tribute to his uncle, "America America."

In 1968's "The Great Silence," Frank Wolff brought some much needed comic relief to an otherwise bleak, nihilistic Italian western, featuring French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant as a mute gunman, the titular sympathetic hero who only ends up getting summarily dispatched by sadistic bounty killer Klaus Kinski. In a cast that included the aforementioned Luigi Pistilli, Wolff (pictured below) portrayed an unctuous sheriff who plays up to Kinski's cold-blooded character of "Loco," only to meet his demise on a frozen lake as Loco delightedly shoots and cracks the ice at the sheriff's feet.

Suffering from depression, Frank Wolff committed suicide in his room at the Rome Hilton on December 12, 1971, age 43. His body was found in the bathtub by the chambermaid. Supposedly, he killed himself after his wife discovered his affairs with other women. Police reported that he slashed his throat, but rumors persisted that he had cut himself a lot lower because of his guilt.

For one of his final roles, as a police commissioner in the 1972 crime programmer "Caliber 9," Wolff had his dialogue redubbed by his friend and roommate, Michael Forest.

Commissioner Frank Wolff confronts ex-con Gastone Moschin in
"Caliber 9." Moschin is most familiar to American audiences as
the ingratiatingly parasitic Don Fanucci in "The Godfather Part II."

Frank Wolff's final film role, as an idiotic caveman in the ludicrous prehistoric sex comedy "When Women Lost Their Tails," was released posthumously in 1972. The silly drive-in feature was a sequel to a 1970 "commedia all'italiana" ("comedy in the Italian way") called "When Women Had Tails," both directed by a master of comedy Italian-style, Pasquale Festa Campanile, whose name translates into English as "bell tower party."

Both "Tails" pictures featured the bountiful auburn-haired Austrian beauty Senta Berger (best known for her role as the widow of an executed rebel doctor in Sam Peckinpah's "Major Dundee") as the titular cavewoman.

Senta Berger later launched a career as singer of "chansons,"
French lyric songs.

In the company of Italian comic character actors, Frank Wolff (second from left), essayed the his final role as the caveman Grr in "When Women Lost Their Tails."

Just because we didn't want to finish on an image of Frank Wolff in "When Women Lost Their Tails"...

Since 2003, Senta Berger has been president of
the German Film Academy.