Any number of lazy tributes will remember Henry Fonda as the hickory-solid quintessence of sincerity because of his icon-making, thoroughly decentwork under John Ford, tight-ass Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, etc. But we shouldn’t forget that, far from polishing his bronzed screen image during the long journey to On Golden Pond, Fonda made a few pit stops in Italy and did weird, wayward work that displays admirable daring. Maybe he was just desperate to stay in movies, but his collaborations with Sergio Leone show a great sense of fun about his Hollywood persona; Fonda turned his lank, stiff-backed uprightness into something taut, hard, and masochistic for the director in Once Upon a Time in the West, and five years later they reteamed to make the utterly gonzo My Name Is Nobody. Functioning as a producer and with a story credit, Leone was backing away from the Spaghetti Western in Nobody, offering directorial duties to his onetime assistant director Tonino Valerii, who then proceeded to helm one of the most batshit crazy entries in a notoriously batshit crazy subgenre.

Terence Hill (née Mario Girotti; fresh from the first legs in the Trinity trilogy of comic Westerns) is the titular Nobody, a wandering gunslinger tagging after famous soon-to-be-retired lawman Jack Beauregard (Fonda), who’s harassed across the territories by hired killers. Nobody plays fanboy to Beauregard upon their first meeting, rattling off the memorized details of his hero’s shoot-outs, then pitching his idea for a climactic finale: Beauregard alone against the roving 150-man posse of the “Wild Bunch.” It’s a preposterous “out in a blaze of glory” scenario that Nobody orchestrates into ridiculous reality before ushering Beauregard into the annals of legend and stepping into his idol’s shoes as the movie playfully dovetails at its conclusion, dropping Nobody into the exact same ambush that introduced Beauregard.

The movie’s leads epitomize its essential cross-current dynamic: old-guard Fonda plays it straight as the wet-eyed, plain-spoken old gunfighter, while affable Hill—a sort-of directorial substitute in his meddling scene-setting—is the clownish spirit of the movie: goofy, inventive, and slightly too self-amused. It’s likely no accident that Fonda seems to be the only actor in the movie speaking with his own voice; he’s an earnest American relic at odds with the freaky Cinecittá madness all around him that’s paying him tribute and giving him a good razzing. My Name Is Nobody is a Western in the sense that Shoot the Piano Player is a gangster picture; it doesn’t jump though the set-up genre hoops, just fucks around with them and gets a laugh at the then-fresh novelty of doing its own thing. There’s no lack of self-aware nudges: Sam Peckinpah’s ascendance is referenced in the “Wild Bunch” horde, and the director’s name appears in a barren cemetery on a wooden cross. And you’ll have a tough time finding a movie past the silent era that takes so much glee in the simplest camera tricks, with Nobody’s quickdraw theatrics often veering into sped-up “Benny Hill”-style slapstick. Add to that one of Sergio Leone’s most wild, rubbery scores—including a meandering, off-tune “Ride of the Valrykies,” and a Wild West fun fair, replete with hall of mirrors, and you’ve got a sense of this dizzy, disoriented, but more-often-than-not entertaining cacophony of ideas. A scene where Fonda and Hill play pool with pistols is key—this is the Western as a cleverly orchestrated pinball game.

Image Entertainment serves up the movie on a feature-free disc, with a lightly cropped seeming but clear transfer. I have my reservations about the color fidelity—some of the greenery’s a tad too verdant for my taste—but the overall image quality puts the previous WHAM! DVD issue to shame. The lack of contextualizing liner notes seems an obvious missed opportunity, but Nobody’s jumbled formal fun, aware but unmarred by self-congratulation, shines through regardless.
—NICK PINKERTON