Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		2.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

My Name Is Nobody Blu-ray Movie Review

The Man with Nobody's Name

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 29, 2013

The spaghetti western entered with a bang in 1964 when Sergio Leone brought us The Man with No Name in A Fistful of Dollars, but it exited with a fiery explosion in 1973 with My Name Is Nobody, directed by Tonino Valerii with Leone directing specific sequences and serving as uncredited producer. Because Leone also conceived the story, and because of his identification with the genre generally, My Name Is Nobody was often advertised, and is still often cited, however erroneously, as a Sergio Leone film. The mistaken impression was furthered by the presence of star Henry Fonda, firmly identified with Leone after his vivid turn in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and by Ennio Morricone's soundtrack, which cribbed and parodied themes from many of Morricone's scores for Leone.

My Name Is Nobody is itself a non-stop parody of everything that Leone created with his trilogy of films starring Eastwood and summed up in his 1968 masterpiece starring Fonda. The genre's unexpected success had spawned so many imitations that, like the Western itself, the films had become formulaic. Leone and Valerii set out to give it a Grand Exit in the form of a tale about an aging gunslinger who tries to retire but finds himself inescapably thrown into one final battle against impossible odds that serves as his own Grand Exit.

Viewers expecting the operatic intensity of Leone's own films are usually disappointed by Nobody. It's opera all right, but it's opera buffa: a comedy filled with slapstick, low humor and winks at the audience. Only Fonda's world-weary killer remains aloof from the tomfoolery. He's the one who carries with him the values of the Old West that the spaghetti Westerns elevated into a moral code—what Fonda's Jack Beauregard calls "that illusion that made my generation tick". Like the principled Pike of The Wild Bunch, Beauregard is a dying breed. It's not just an inside joke that the cemetery where he finds his dead brother also has a grave marked "Sam Peckinpah", or that the gang pursuing him calls itself "The Wild Bunch". Pike's gang never used that name, because they had principles, which is ultimately what got them into trouble. The mob chasing Beauregard is composed of unruly hooligans on whom Pike wouldn't have bothered to spit.

The film opens with a sequence clearly intended to recall Once Upon a Time in the West, as three gunslingers prepare to ambush Jack Beauregard (Fonda) while he gets a shave. Reportedly directed by Leone, the sequence features trademarks such as exaggerated sound effects and deep focus shots that establish spatial relationships between near and distant figures. But there's something immediately different, and it shows in tiny touches like the little boy who is gagged with a bar of soap and the barber who exclaims over the extra tip left by Jack to cover the damage to his shop. This isn't the grimly merciless West of Fonda's black-hearted Frank. It's something with a lighter touch (except, of course, for the three men that Jack guns down).

As Jack walks away, having dispatched his would-be assassins, the barber and his son agree that "nobody" is faster on the draw than Jack Beauregard. Enter "nobody" in the person of another man with no name, played by Terrence Hill, whose original name, Mario Girotti, betrays his Italian birth, but whose blond-haired blue-eyed wholesomeness makes him perfect casting for an all-American "gee whillikers!" kid. Because Nobody appears to be a simpleton and a buffoon, he isn't taken seriously by anyone, at least not at first. He may in fact be the fastest gun in the West, but he's a joker, not a fighter. His idea of a showdown is to walk up to a gunfighter, then draw the opponent's pistols before the other guy can react and slap him silly, while flipping the guns in and out of their holsters so fast that the gunfighter never gets a chance to draw. For Nobody, that's more satisfying than killing the man.

Jack Beauregard is weary and feels his time is over. Among other things, his eyesight is fading. He's biding his time, hoping to stay alive until he can get passage on a ship to Europe and leave his past behind. But Nobody, who has worshipped Jack since he was a kid and can recite all his gunfights from memory, can't bear the thought of his hero just slipping away. He wants Jack to go out in a blaze of glory. Echoing John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Nobody wants to "print the legend".

As it happens, Jack has an excellent opportunity for a fight. A corrupt mining operator named Sullivan (French actor Jean Martin, who has obviously been dubbed) wants Jack dead for reasons relating to a claim on an exhausted gold mine through which The Wild Bunch is "laundering" their stolen gold. The details remain fuzzy, and they're not really important. While Jack tries to avoid a confrontation with the gang, Nobody is insistent that he face them. Eventually Nobody arranges the fight, and it's everything he hoped for—although the spectacular pyrotechnics depend on strategically placed dynamite which is there for no obvious purpose except to enliven the battle. But never mind. Before we reach that point, however, plenty of hijinks have ensued, most of them involving Nobody's uncanny coordination, which resembles that of a circus clown. An elaborate challenge of drinking and shooting in a bar and a lengthy debate with Jack Beauregard over a pool table, using guns, balls and cue sticks, are high points.

The film concludes with an extended voiceover by Jack that may or may not be from the grave. It's an elegy for gunslingers, the Old West and the Leone Western all wrapped into one. Fonda's delivery is both simple and magical as he bids farewell to an era. The film was his last Western.

My Name Is Nobody Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Note: My Name Is Nobody exists in various cuts. The version on this Blu-ray runs precisely 1:56:27, which is, at most, a few seconds off the official length of 117 minutes (and that is undoubtedly a rounded figure).

Image Entertainment previously released My Name Is Nobody on DVD in 2005. This 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is obviously a new transfer with excellent detail, solid blacks, brilliantly saturated colors and contrast levels that are well-balanced between the bright outdoors scenes of the arid desert locales and the shadow detail of the dusty interiors. The major issue, however, is the source material, which is battered and scratched, with numerous instances of vertical and horizontal lines, streaks, splotches and speckles. Someone else might wish to opine on whether the source was an original camera negative, an interpositive or a print, but I find all such speculation moot, given the capabilities of sophisticated digital tools to modify colors, densities and textures from a variety of sources. What is certain, however, is that without better source material, or an extensive and costly restoration, My Name Is Nobody will never reach the level of video quality we have seen from other films of this vintage.

Image remains addicted to BD-25s, but the Blu-ray's average bitrate of 22.07 Mbps is sufficient to avoid any artifacts, given the black letterbox bars and the number of scenes involving simple conversation.

The screen captures included with this review have been chosen from undamaged frames and do not reflect the extent of the source damage. If the entire film looked like the captures, the video score would be much higher.

My Name Is Nobody Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original mono soundtrack is presented as lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono, with identical left and right speakers. The track is free of noise, hiss, pops or clicks, but like many spaghetti Westerns, it has the kind of fidelity one associates with AM radio. The limited dynamic range is well suited to reproducing dialogue (often obviously dubbed) and the exaggerated sound effects that were a Leone signature, as well as the deceptively minimalist scores that Ennio Morricone created for the original "Dollars" trilogy and both echoes and parodies here. Long before Francis Ford Coppola used Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now, Morricone incorporated it into the score of My Name Is Nobody. Alert ears will also pick out elements of a theme that Morricone would later incorporate into The Untouchables, as well as fragments from Once Upon a Time in the West . Like the film itself, the score is a pastiche of other movies. This is probably as good as it ever sounded (except perhaps on original master recordings).

My Name Is Nobody Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No extras are included. Image's 2005 DVD was also featureless.

My Name Is Nobody Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

My Name Is Nobody must be approached with appropriate expectations. If one is expecting something in the mode of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, disappointment is guaranteed. The film creates its own strange mood, and despite the apparent frivolity of Nobody's antics, it has a thoughtful undercurrent and an elegiac tone. As for the video quality, Blu-ray versions have been released in Italy, Spain, Germany and France. I have not seen any of them and cannot compare video quality, but it is entirely possible that one or more were derived from superior source material. For anyone with region-free capabilities, investigation may be warranted before investing in this Image release. The film itself is highly recommended for those who know what they're getting.