Sergio Leone!

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!