By Chris Byrd | Catholic News Service
NEW YORK (CNS) — The spaghetti western was a popular genre in the 1960s and ’70s. Closely associated with Italian director Sergio Leone and often flavored by composer Ennio Morricone’s distinctive and memorable scores, some of these movies helped to establish Clint Eastwood’s fabled onscreen persona, that of a squinty-eyed, raspy-voiced antihero.
“That Dirty Black Bag,” an updated take on the style created by Leone’s compatriot Mauro Aragoni, lacks the panache of its forerunners. It’s also intensely gruesome.
The first of the series’ eight one-hour episodes, which Aragoni co-directed with Brian O’Malley and co-wrote with Silvia Ebreul, Marcello Izzo and Fabio Paladini, is available on AMC+. Additional installments will be released consecutive Thursdays, concluding April 28.
Viewers don’t have to wait long to discover what they’re in for since the show’s opening sequence is visually stunning yet grotesque. Set in a Catholic chapel, the first scene introduces us to Quinn (uncredited), an outlaw wanted for rape and murder, and then to the slumped bodies of the parishioners he’s apparently just massacred.
Things become even more graphic shortly afterward when Quinn is himself gunned down by bounty hunter Red Bill (Douglas Booth) who proceeds to sever Quinn’s head with an axe and stuff it into the titular sack. “A head weighs less than a body,” Red Bill reasons.
As the story unfolds from there, primarily in a drought-plagued town called Greenvale, we witness the efforts of African American entrepreneur Mr. Thompson (Paterson Joseph) to drive Steve (Christian Cooke), a peaceable farmer, off his homestead. Thompson wants the land for his gold mining enterprise.
Steve turns to Sheriff Arthur McCoy (Dominic Cooper) to intervene in the dispute. But the lawman is preoccupied with trying to catch Quinn, unaware of the grisly fate the killer has already met.
At the outset, much of the program’s abundant violence, which eventually includes Red Bill’s torture at the hands of a crazed goat farmer named Butler (Aidan Gillen), is presented obliquely. Yet, as the plot progresses, the depiction of mayhem and its aftereffects becomes more straightforward.
The fact that a brothel is Greenvale’s principal business establishment, moreover, suggests the extent of the series’ sexual content. So, too, does Steve’s complicated relationship with his Christian faith, a form of devotion that doesn’t deter him from carrying on an adulterous affair.
Add to all that frequently crude dialogue and it becomes clear that this homage cannot be endorsed for TV fans of any age.
Byrd is a guest reviewer for Catholic News Service.