10,000 WAYS TO DIE

Once upon a time Alex Cox was rather famous - his Repo Man and Sid & Nancy were sporadically thrilling punk-flavoured parables, his deliberately anachronistic western Walker split the critics and appears to have made him pretty much unemployable in America - with a persona as engaging as his witty, sometimes shapeless films. His documentaries (on the likes of Kurosawa and the Emmanuelle movies) have always been fun, as were his left-field introductions to cultish films for BBC2's early '90s Moviedrome strand, and with 10,000 Ways to Die he proves just as engaging on paper.

Spaghetti westerns have always been one of his big loves - Cox made his own in 1987, the fairly shambolic Straight to Hell - and 10,000 Ways to Die is a fascinating, very individual look at the genre, from 1963's Red Pastures ('half-hearted and half-assed') to assorted late '70s efforts like My Name is Nobody and the brilliantly titled A Genius, Two Partners, and a Dupe. The glory years, of course, were the late '60s, in particular '68-'69, which gave us the slow, self-important, magnificent likes of Cemetery Without Crosses and, of course, Sergio Leone's brilliant Once Upon a Time in the West.

Though Leone looms large, his great rival Sergio Corbucci is perhaps the real hero here: he made some crap, but his lean, operatic Django is an 'impressionistic, cruel, anti-clerical, pop-cultural stew' while the little-seen, snow-bound The Big Silence is a film 'to which the word 'genius' can be applied'. Cox loves the likes of Klaus Kinski, has little time for Clint Eastwood, feels 'stars' shouldn't helm their own films (they're too 'intrinsically shallow, isolated and self-pitying'), and can't help getting in his digs at Thatcher, US foreign policy or the folk who finance movies and insist on 'sympathetic' characters.

10,000 Ways to Die is a complete top-to-toe rewrite of an unpublished, more academic book Cox worked on in the '70s, and is perhaps most fascinating - though it's diverting throughout, despite the repetitive nature of much of its subject matter - when he brings a director's insight to exactly how these films must have been made.

Cox (X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker), maverick director of such films as Sid and Nancy and Repo Man, covers over 50 spaghetti Westerns in chronological order, providing extensive plot summaries and commentaries.

He pays particular attention to godfathers of the genre Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, who revitalized the form with stylized languid silences and a highly developed visual sense, as well as Americans Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef, who gave the steely-eyed, menacing face to some of the best Westerns.

Enlivened with humor, vivid descriptions, and an infectious enthusiasm, this book is an informative take on an offbeat, short-lived genre.

With its explorations of recurrent themes (some might say obsessions) found in the films and the enriching director-author anecdotes and insights to the craft and improvisation on the set, this book is likely to remain a standard reference for film buffs.