Sergio Leone!

I once saw a very very early matinee of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (with ice cream and everything) and I have rarely ever been so truly truly happy.

Cheyenne: You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother. She was the biggest whore in Alameda and the finest woman that ever lived.

anyway i t hink the dollartrilogy is flwaless but loene lost mometnum after that.

Leone is too much; there are times when I'm very impatient with his whole shtick. I also love the ringing telephone sequence in "Once Upon a Time in America," but what a fucked-up movie experience that is.

Yeah, Leone and Peckinpah own the western genre. I might sneak The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid on the boat as well...

What I didn't know was that Leone was actually depicting a very real part of the Civil War that took place in New Mexico. I always assumed that he was creating a surreal version of the war. Perhaps the scope of what occurred was implicitly larger in Leone's fiction, but it's based in truth.

I need Ford, Hawks, Mann and Boetticher along with Leone, tho. "Johnny Guitar" too.

It really does. The more I watch it, the more I am convinced that is my favorite movie.

OTM, but I'd add Leone > EVERYONE ELSE.

Wallach is perfect in the role, but he actually sucks in most other films (ie Magnificent 7, Godfather III).

I guess if your nation was formerly the seat of empires and now changes governments annually, you'd dote on the past too. (plus Visconti was an aristo)

*actually 6 hours, i think

then i took a class about spaghetti westerns and italian horror in college. it didnt help that the class was four hours on thursday nights but most of the westerns would put me to sleep [morricone's music was a sweet lullaby somehow]. dario argento's horror movies were just so much more exciting to watch in class. it also ruined westerns to have to write lengthy papers breaking down their cultural significance while italian horror was much more sexual in nature...

still like leone but only when i have a whole afternoon free and plenty of popcorn.

what about those:

sabata
the great silence
man of the east
keoma
gunlaw
my name is nobody

all brilliant. the last one doesnt really count though because leone co-directed it (and because its a piss-take of "for a few dollars more")

http://www.lfb.it/fff/fumetto/aut/a/imm/aragones01x.jpg

also, i consider that film to have a stronger, more haunting feel to it, due mainly to the score and aspects like that hazey telephoto shot of a distant man walking towards the camera, his visage blurred by desert heat

say, does anybody know what kind of revolver makes that characteristic spaghettie western retort? that "Pyewwww!" sound? or is it just a recording of a richochet of a rifle-fired bullet?

The box is out this Tuesday!

jesus christ... Duck You Sucker kicks ass.

I just rented Colossus of Rhodes. It's Leone's first directorial feature and it's a epic set in ancient Greece.

Box made it seem awesome. I really should have translated that "cult" actually can mean "a very homo-erotic gladiator film". The acting and fight scenes are lousy too. Bummer.

didnt he just co-direct that?

It feels like he co-directed it with no one. I think the term "half-directed" is spot on. But no, Imdb just credits Leone. Disappointed because I really wanted this to be like another Jason and the Argonauts or Satyricon. Not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OspdJIxTYi4

(I'm so so sorry)

just finished a fistful of dollars. so amoral! love it

I love pretty much everything this guy did or touched except "Once Upon a Time in America," which I find a strange drag.

it was significantly cut and re-edited on release -- esp.the us version, which didn't have leone's approval -- and i'm not sure anyone has ever yet seen the original intended version: tho whether the full-length version would have been less draggy is obv a bit of a question

it sets itself lots of tricky technical conundrums -- multiple flashback structure involving multiple child actors playing characters when young , plus characters playing themselves when old slathered in latex, and hinges on a not-very-amazing reveal, if i recall correctly

also it turns urban new york in the 30s into somewhere as spaciously unpeopled as some of his westerns, though this is kind of amazing in its strangeness

i don't think de niro is that great in it, which is a problem: he'd entered his slump period round now, i guess

oth it has that terrific infolded multiple flashback montage with the ringing phone, which is one of my favourite coups de cinema (some of it set in the most spacious opium dens outside qing dynasty beijing)

den not dens

what was going on w/ this dude between 1971 and 1984?? anyone read a biography or somethin'?

p.s. i love how everybody in duck you sucker says "duck you sucker" like leone imagined it to be some kind of common american slang phrase.

anyone read a biography or somethin'?

Yeah this:

http://cache0.bookdepository.co.uk/assets/images/book/medium/9780/5711/9780571164387.jpg

... not that interesting tbh 'cos he wasn't that interesting. I think between 1971 and 1984, he was trying to make "Once Upon a Time In America", buying rights, raising money, arguing over money, writing scripts, rejecting scripts, hiring writers, fighting with writers, firing writers, filming far too much then being unable to decide what to leave in and what to leave out - pretty much what he did on all his films!

Prefer this Frayling bk to his actual biog -

http://www.boomerangbooks.com.au/bookImages/LARGE/439/9780500287439.jpg

but Frayling's commentary tracks for the Leone movies, especially the blu-ray only TGTBATU commentary, are some of the very best ever recorded - guy has done his research, is an excellent public speaker, has interesting things to say about the content.

Local indie cinema running a morricone season, man with no name trilogy, ouatitw, the mission. result.

http://diodatilodge.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/ad1.jpg

http://www.lushquotes.com/pics/sergio-aragones/The-Western,-when-I-do-one,-will-be-one-long,-continuous-story..jpg

The Dollars trilogy Blu-ray boxset keeps calling to me from the shelves in HMV

it is the greatest

Those movies are poetry. Esp. if you throw "Once Upon a Time in the West" in.

Once upon a time in the west tho. Its somehow more, isnt it? Elegaic as opposed to pulpy maybe?

RIP screenwriting man

“But to the general public Mr. Vincenzoni was most associated with For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, two hugely successful Italian-made westerns directed by Sergio Leone that are now recognized as classics. ‘I have written movies that won prizes at Cannes and Venice,’ he told Christopher Frayling, a cultural historian and Leone biographer. ‘These were screenplays for which we suffered on paper for months. Do you know how long it took me to write For a Few Dollars More? Nine days.’”

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-luciano-vincenzoni-1926-2013http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-luciano-vincenzoni-1926-2013

Yesterday Criterion shared this photo of Bresson and Leone taken in Venice in '72

http://scontent-a-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/1374936_10153346893555565_1024260217_n.jpg

amazing pic! cld def fit on the 'people who you wldn't expect to be photogged together' thread.

i like the way bresson is always such a dandy!

for all the talk about everything else associated with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, it's hardly ever noted how Eastwood gives such a good performance, and he's so understated throughout that it's hard to miss next to Wallach and Van Cleef and the more colorful supporting turns. And he's very good with the low-key comedy -- in particular his delivery of this line kills me every single time:

Tuco: Even when Judas hanged himself there was a storm.

Blondie: That *could* be cannon fire.

Was surprised to be quite moved by Fistful Of Dynamite/Duck You Sucker. Wonderful film.

The music helps.

I'm told that many versions of it were butchered and the big relationship reveal at the end was cut, which is a big change. Apparently the current UK release is our first fully uncut one.

I don't know, I've seen various different cuts of this film over the years but, curiously, the longer cuts I've seen are more confusing and make less sense than the shorter ones.

I really liked the ending, which features Coburn's best smile in the film. Definitely makes the film better.

A Fistful of Dollars was pretty good!

Rewatched Once Upon a Time in the West and think it's my favorite now. I could watch Fonda and Bronson stare at each other all day. Which I guess is what I did.

Does bug me how Bronson doesn't even feign blowing while playing the harmonica. Seems intentional tho?

Harmonica : The reward for this man is 5000 dollars, is that right?

Cheyenne : Judas was content for 4970 dollars less.

Harmonica : There were no dollars in them days.

Cheyenne : But sons of bitches... yeah.

OUATITW German title: Play Me The Song Of Death

I recently rewatched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for the umpteenth time, only this time I looked up some of the making-of. Apparently Wallach's classic scene at the gun shop was mostly improvised! I also saw this incredible fan video comparing filming locations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjDBUL_zhqs

I hate knowing that almost nothing was actually filmed in the West, though the locales are pretty good facsimile obv. Likewise kinda bugs me when Ford would literally plant a few saguaro in Monument Valley shots when they don't grow there naturally. That's movies for ya tho eh.

lol that's kind of awesome that you didn't know his movies were made in Italy and Spain!

no I knew that. and I saw that video a couple weeks ago, it's p cool.

on one of the dvd commentaries they mention how you can tell they're not US horses based on their gait

for me it's the flora that makes it obvious it's not in the Americas

It's actually one of my favorite facets of those films. there's nothing like the over familiar monument valley to take you out of them. they're all vaguely familiar but not specific.

I can see that. And mon valley def overused to point where it just looks like a generic set.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a fantastic film

Too bad the sequel with Eli Wallach's character Tuco in the lead role never happened. That's one of my all time favorite movie characters.

The Rod Steiger character in "Fistful of Duck You Sucker" pretty much is Tuco.

Wallach's Tuco was a great character. I liked the unfamiliar landscapes. Eastwood has always been confident but I like that he seemed so comfortable in this role. The music was as iconic as I expected

I need to watch the 1st 2 in the trilogy again but I think my favorite is Few Dollars More. Love how they flesh out the villian's character, and they actor does a great job. And I prefer Van Cleef as a vengeful hero to a sadistic baddie. His unique face gets mentioned a lot as his appeal but man that voice is incredible too.

Watching "My Name is Nobody". Majority of it shot in US but I bet none of the landscapes look familiar even to those who've seen a lot of westerns.

(Not directed by Leone. Based on an "idea" of his, w a Morricone score)

Sergio that's not Sergio. This movie is a trip and the theme song is an all time WTF?.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j46FDG8UeXw

The Fall should have covered 'Captain Apache', that would have been excellent.

Never heard of that one! There's some channels over here that show spaghetti westerns all the time, though usually really early in the morning, and they're generally pretty bad but there's the occasional good one.

From the wiki for "Captain Apache":

The vocals of the opening and credits song were performed by Van Cleef.

!!!

My fave campy Ennio deep cut is this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewtB8GPqWLw

It's from a movie called "Duello new Texas," or "Dual at Red Sands." apparently the first western with a Morricone score.

Ugh, autocorrect. The movie was called "Duello nel Texas," aka "Gunfight at Red Sands."

Was just looking around on wiki and realized how few non-Leone spaghetti westerns I've actually seen. I've seen, say, A Bullet for the General, and My Name is Nobody, but do any/many more of them approach the mastery and majesty of Leone?

Rick Dalton's spaghettis are supposed to be great.

I've seen dozens of spaghetti westerns so I'll try to answer. The first four Leones are undeniable and there's a reason they each topped the Italian box office in their respective years. I'd maintain there are a good handful (a fistful?) of non-Leones that are great in their own way and not too imitative of him - depending on taste, perhaps a bit more than a handful.

My non-Leone POX would look something like this (in chronological order):

A Pistol for Ringo
The Return of Ringo
Django
The Ugly Ones (aka The Bounty Killer)
A Bullet for the General
The Big Gundown
The Great Silence
Cemetery Without Crosses
Tepepa
The Price of Power

I've seen a lot of them but they were usually released under a dozen different titles so it's difficult to distinguish them. One of the best is the one with Jean-Louis Trintingnant that's set in winter, The Big Silence, I think? Also the first (or second?) Django with Franco Nero.. there's dozens of films with Django in the title though. A particularly memorable one, I think called Requiescant, has Pasolini on it, playing a priest

... The Great Silence (xp)

Saw quite an entertaining one the other day with Klaus Kinski as the unluckiest gambler in the west - possibly one of the Sartana (sp?) films.

Requiescant is great, good call

Thanks! How far do a lot of these veer from style into exploitation film grit and grime, sex and violence qua sex and violence? I'd like to avoid that, if possible.

The ones I mentioned all have more going on than gross-out/shock elements. Most have some sort of political angle. Fwiw spaghettis tend to downplay sex (as opposed to sexual assault, which may be what you mean)

My Name is Nobody score sounds like a Morricone compilation that couldn't get the rights to the actual original compositions

xpost Yeah, sexual assault (or its threat) is pretty prevalent even in stuff like "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "For a Few Dollars More," but I never got the feeling they were playing for shock, just legit gross man menace. A la Mann's "Man of the West," which goes pretty far down that road for 1958 - Jack Lord's character is like a spaghetti western villain prototype - but which is just too old fashioned to make the impact that the sweaty, dirty spaghetti stuff does, imo. The women in these movies are often so sad, tired and tragic, stuck in this macho world that doesn't value them as much more than servants or playthings.

The most objectionable spaghetti I've seen in terms of ugliness and base pandering is Blindman (1971)

Violence and misogyny are pretty much a constant.

For sure (see also: most movies with guns). But Leone offers a real sense of poetry and vision that helps escape the gravitational pull of that particular gutter. A lot of action movies, esp. low budget action movies of that era, struggle to pull that off.

The rape of the rich white woman at the beginning of duck you sucker is treated so casually

(I quite liked the film by the end - some amazing scenes - but it was a drag in places and rod steiger is fucking terrible as the annoying caricature mexican)

His accent is abysmal and you need a tolerance for his customary scenery chewing, which I've got tbh.

He’s so one-note and shouty, I just wanted him to fuck off. Didn’t have this reaction to wallach

finally watched For a Few Dollars More, liked it but not nearly as much as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Eastwood was very charismatic in the Dollars trilogy

and the ponchos he wore

Same poncho in all three. I think his entire outfit is identical.

is it the same poncho? he wore it so well

It was pointed out to me somewhere that The Good, Bad, & Ugly is actually the film where he gets the poncho, despite being the third in a "trilogy."

I like the vest or undercoat he wore with wool lining in For a Few Dollars More

El Indio as Volonté portrayed him was a great character

Volonté was a marxist who basically despised the movies. There's an anecdote of him turning to another lefty crew member and going "we're Italian communists making these capitalist movies in fascist Spain, does this make any sense to you?".

Great portrayal tho yeah.

"For a Few Dollars More" is fantastic.

Lee Van Cleef is great in it too.

I like the vest or undercoat he wore with wool lining in For a Few Dollars More

He wears that vest in all three as well. His hat, poncho, vest, shirt, and as far as I can tell his jeans are the exact same items throughout the "trilogy."

interesting

Just watched the Eastwood trilogy over the last several days, for the first time in like twenty years. All much better than I remembered, but TGTBATU was just utter wowsville. I see on Letterboxd that it is both the most popular and the highest rated film of '66. Pretty sure I've never seen a film claim both top spots for any other year. Rare that a movie that's actually The Best is also just so broadly enjoyable.

lol, okay, I only had to look as far as '72 and '74 for other examples. But it's still rare!

Yeah, I love how the dollars trilogy just goes bigger and better with every installment.

It's just astounding and entertaining in equal measure. Love it to death. And I love those little doodles Sergio Leone did in the margins of Mad, too.

In more seriousness, I never pass up an opportunity to post this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjDBUL_zhqs

OK, "Good Bad Ugly," per my previous posts I love this movie and always have. But I just started the Red Letter Media review on it (which is neither here nor there*), and within seconds they point out that Eli Wallach is, problematically, playing Tuco in brown face. Which I guess he is, but weirdly all the times I've seen this it never once occurred to me. Sure, he's playing a Mexican character, but I'd always thought that one big trademark of all the spaghetti westerns is that the lead/American actors (and really everyone else) *all* have tons of make-up slathered on, which just adds to the sweaty, dirty, gross, sun-burned desert vibe. That is, I never thought Eli Wallach's character as particularly darker skinned than Clint Eastwood's or Lee Van Cleef's, let alone most of the rest of the largely Italian casts.

Like, here's Henry Fonda in "Once Up a Time ..."
https://filmforum.org/do-not-enter-or-modify-or-erase/client-uploads/_1000w/west-slide.jpg

Anyway. Now I am irreversibly aware.

*though worthwhile because one of the guys had never seen it before, despite always wanting to get around to it, and immediately realized it was one of the greatest movies ever made.

That was kind of Wallach's thing. See Also: The Magnificent Seven.

Spaghetti westerns are chock full of Italian actors playing Mexicans/Native Americans. In For a Few Dollars More it was Gian Maria Volonté playing "El Indio."

..and Volonté was surely browned up to play El Indio - compare his complexion there to his complexion in Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion. He was a Northern Italian who grew up in Turin.

Charles Bronson in "Once Upon a Time in the West", Rod Steiger in "Giu la Testa" etc.

Oh, I knew they were often playing Mexicans or Native Americans. But I was always struck by how everyone in these movies seemed to have the same skin-tone (like Fonda above), no matter who they were playing. Like, Bronson in "West," is his character's ethnicity even stated?

It's not stated but you see him as a child in flashbacks - when you eventually find out where the harmonica playing comes from, for instance - and he doesn't look Lithuanian!

You're right though, even Fonda, of all people, is brown as a berry in that film!

https://hotcorn-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/06/27123618/The-Good-The-Bad-And-The-Ugly-Clint-Eastwood.jpg

Lee Van Cleef is Dutch:

Here's Jason Robards as Manuel "Cheyenne" Gutiérrez:

http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cheyenne_Robards.jpg

And then Claudia Cardinale (who is Italian) playing the presumably Scottish or something "Jill McBain":

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DTraHI1YJbs/WtsauCwD4rI/AAAAAAAACdI/m5c7Dg-PPVky-aoWAOuIbO2SKSrgWb6aQCLcBGAs/s1600/once-upon-a-time-in-the-west-1968-008-claudia-cardinale-close-up-angry-look.jpg

I always thought the name Jill McBain was hilarious for someone with the look of Claudia Cardinale. Italians playing Confederate soldiers makes me snicker as well.

Franco Nero was believable but some of the other guys…

She's called McBain because she took her husband's name tho! Frank Wolff, of German descent.

He's supposed to be Irish, so of course he has bright red hair.

(xp) I notice Frank Wolff committed suicide in 1971, while another actor in the film, Al Mulock, committed suicide by jumping out of window, in costume, during the shooting. Leone is supposed to have said, on hearing the news, "Get the costume, we need the costume".

show must go on!

It's like something from Fassbinder's "Beware of a Holy Whore".

Good observation

watched A Fistful of Dollars for the first time in eons the other night. it's far more violent than i initially remembered, definitely goes far beyond any other western of its era. it's not shocking to anyone who's seen westerns from The Wild Bunch and after, but for 1964 it pushes some limits. i read a lot of contemporaneous reviews which consider it pretty bad but no, it's amazing. just the beautiful stark look of the town and the colors of the fire and blood, the dirt and sweat covering everyone at all time. and it's kind of remarkable how Eastwood immediately settled into the role without any growing pains, and how that role really informed the rest of his acting career so much. the absolute expert delivery of his lines when he confronts the men from the Baxter clan, asking them to apologize to his mule (after asking the undertaker to prepare three coffins), his almost tongue-in-cheek amorality masking his ability to do the right thing at the right moment in his own particular manner (i.e. getting Marisol and her family out of town after rescuing her from the Rojos), etc. overall it's a film that feels very contemporary and pitiless in a way that isn't intentionally feel-bad, but simply a brutal tale told well.

I just watched it recently too and agree with the above. I think I'd seen it before but honestly I don't remember. If so, it was years and years ago. I've seen reviews call it the punk-rock western and that seems appropriate. I think Quentin Tarantino stole almost all of his ideas from this movie. And of course the soundtrack is all-time.