First of three masterpieces by the great
Italian director Sergio Leone and the last of a trilogy of westerns
which he made with Clint Eastwood, this marked a significant
step-forward on the two previous films on which they had collaborated,
("A Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More"). The 'Once upon a
time ...' movies would see Leone's films take on a much darker turn but
although there is quite a lot of violence and death on display here,
this is an almost jovial epic, (the humour comes from Leone's subversion
of traditional western clichés). Almost every sequence feels, and
looks, like a classic, (the climatic gunfight has the choreographed
precision of a ballet), Tonino Delli Colli's widescreen cinematography
is magnificent, and although dubbed, (very effectively), the English
translation of the Italian script is first-class.
The plot is simplicity itself as Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef search for some buried gold but the plot is only the thread of a much richer tapestry centred around events in the American Civil War. Stylistically and thematically this film would later influence Eastwood as a director. At a time when, in America, the western seemed long past it's sell-by date, in Europe Leone's homages single-handedly revitalised the genre paving the way for a whole new breed of post-modernist classics.
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