Gian Maria Volonte stars as the history professor whose timidity and physical ill-health turns, through his encounter with Tomas Milian's outlaw, into a fantasy of redemptive masculine violence and power that becomes ever more sadistic and irrational as he assumes a greater leadership position amongst a community of outsiders. If the 'Zapata westerns' tended to enact fantasies of Third Worldism through a sometimes confused melange of Fanonism, Guevarism and the (inverted) tropes of the Hollywood western, Sollima's film seems to suggest a class critique of that very framing: Volonte as the bourgeois intellectual whose eventual avocation of a fantasized violence become real merely replicates the violence of the class whose trappings he ostensibly rejects. That's to say: Fascism.
Review of Face to Face
