Sergio Leone!

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?

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.