SANDY KNOLL: The Price of Power

by Alex Cox

In the years after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, a number of movies were made that dealt with the event-and a possible conspiracy behind it-in fictional terms. Among them were Executive Action (73), Winter Kills (79), The Parallax View (74), and, most famously, JFK (91).

One of the earliest, and certainly the strangest, of these cinematic efforts to unravel the mystery was The Price of Power, a spaghetti western made in Spain and Italy in 1969. The director was Tonino Valerii, who had been Sergio Leone's assistant on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. Made only a year after the latter, The Price of Power featured the same railroad-based locations, desert ranch house, and western town: Flagstaff in Leone's movie became Dallas in 1880.

In Valerii's film, President Garfield (Van Johnson) visits Dallas, where renegade ex-Confederates are plotting to murder him. Their first attempt is foiled by the improbably named Bill Willer (Giuliano Gemma). But the President embarks on an ill-advised horse-drawn "motorcade" through the city and is shot by snipers, and Willer's friend Jack is arrested and accused of the crime. When Jack-the Lee Harvey Oswald character-is murdered during a transfer between jails, Willer decides to find out who the guilty parties are. He uncovers a conspiracy run by Texan businessmen, corrupt law enforcement, the Vice President, and a racist renegade called Wallace.

The film painstakingly recreates the events in Dealey Plaza in the guise of a revenge Western. The necessary conceits of the spaghetti western (almost universal racism, total corruption of the police, distrust of authority figures) are also those of the conspiracy film. As usual with Valerii, the script is workmanlike and the direction plods a bit. But the concept is fascinating, and the photography and production design are excellent (Carlo Leva, the designer, was an assistant to Carlo Simi, the genius who built the original sets for Leone in Almeria, Spain).

Gemma, clad in pristine beige buckskin throughout, is appropriately muscular and ever-youthful (he was better in Italian westerns where he displayed more cynicism, like A Pistol for Ringo, and Arizona Colt). The villains, inevitably, fall out. I first saw the film in Paris, where it was called Dallas, and at the time I thought the presence of a racist killer named "Wallace" was simply a predictable reference to George Wallace, sworn enemy of desegregation, and later the victim of an assassination attempt himself.

But a few years ago, documents started appearing that linked Lyndon Johnson-Kennedy's VP-with a hired Texan killer. Certain witnesses (including LBJ's former mistress) claimed that LBJ had used this man's services to dispose of troublesome reporters and political rivals. The hitman's name was "Mac" Wallace. And, a couple of years back, a documentary shown on PBS-which infuriated Jack Valenti and was quickly suppressed-suggested that "Mac" Wallace's fingerprints had been found in the Texas School Book Depository, and that he may have been set to work by Johnson to kill the commander-in-chief. Had Valerii and his scriptwriter, Massimo Patrizi, heard about "Mac" Wallace back in 1969? And, if they had, who told 'em?

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© 2006 by Alex Cox