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The Head

DVD – Region 2 Only – No English Audio or Subtitles

Delta Music & Entert. GmbH & Co. Kg

1959 / 1.33:1 / 97 min.

Starring Michel Simon, Horst Frank, Karin Kernke

Cinematography by Georg Krause

Directed by Victor Trivas

A scientist who operates out of a starkly Modernist laboratory of glass and steel, Dr. Ood comes from a long line of German crackpots with a flair for the theatrical. Rotwang, the bug-eyed inventor of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, springs to mind along with Dr. Gogol, the lovelorn psychopath of Karl Freund’s Mad Love. And not to forget the omniscient Dr. Mabuse. Each man had style to burn and was obsessed with possessing desirable – and controllable – women.

The protagonist of Victor Trivas’s The Head, Ood was the most hands-on of the bunch, satisfying his lust by transplanting the head of a beautiful but misshapen doctor’s assistant to the body of a burlesque queen. Trivas...

Arrow Video resurrects another Lee Van Cleef headliner with 1972’s The Grand Duel, the debut of Giancarlo Santi, who had previously been the assistant director on Sergio Leone’s celebrated The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Notably, the film was scripted by Ernesto Gastaldi, a noted genre writer (who also directed a handful of titles), responsible for Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim (1965) and Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (1963). Like Gastaldi’s other spaghetti western treatment featuring Van Cleef, 1967’s Day of Anger, recycled themes popularized by Leone provide the narrative backbone of a title which supplies exactly what it promises, a climactic showdown, with little to run on between its opening and closing acts.…...

Lee Van Cleef in Giancarlo Santi’s The Grand Duel (1972) will be available on Blu-ray May 7th From Arrow Video

The Grand Duel is an archetypal spaghetti western which boasts many of the genre s classic hallmarks including action-packed gunfights, wild stunts and an impressive climactic showdown…

Genre stalwart Lee Van Cleef stars as a gnarled ex-sheriff called Clayton who comes to the aid of young Philipp Wermeer (Alberto Dentice), a fugitive framed for the murder of a powerful figure called The Patriarch. Clayton helps Philipp fend off attacks from bounty hunters in a series of thrilling shootouts before the two make their way to Jefferson to confront three villains known as the Saxon brothers, and reveal who really killed The Patriarch.

A complex tale of revenge penned by prolific giallo writer Ernesto Gastaldi, The Grand Duel benefits from a beguiling central performance from Lee Van Cleef and assured helmsmanship from Giancarlo Santi.

When I first heard about this list this morning I could have sworn it was old news, but as it turns out, this list of Quentin Tarantino's top 20 spaghetti westerns is a new thing as presented to us bt Spaghetti-Western.net. What I must have been thinking of was a list of spaghetti westerns that influenced Tarantino's Django Unchained, some of which are repeated here such as Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence (read an essay I wrote on this one here) and the obvious, Django, and Giulio Petroni's Death Rides a Horse. However, this list is more than that and more than just Sergio Leone and Corbucci titles, though those two do make up eight of the twenty films on Tarantino's list. I haven't looked to see how many of the more obscure titles listed here are available on Netflix, but I have a feeling now that...