Every gun makes its own tune.

Libby and I finally finished the Man With No Name Trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns by Sergio Leone last night. They're all quite good.

Some highlights:

1) Fistful of Dollars seemed the most human to me. I rooted for the Man with No Name most strongly in this movie. The whole concept seemed Dantean - playing evil men against each other is just what they deserve. I suppose it's not surprising to find ideas from Dante in a Western if the movie's Italian, though, eh?

2) The gun battle at the end of A Few Dollars More is amazing. More amazing than the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's iconic fight. The way Leone played with music was beautiful, and how it was intrinsic to the actual scene made it that much more powerful. Oh man, when Eastwood opens up the watch!

3) The last act of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly makes the whole epic worth-while. It's slow up to that point, but the movie from the point where they get caught by the Union until the last scene is a great poetic meditation on human life.

I especially liked the scene where Tuco is standing on a cross, with his neck through a noose, gazing at money he thinks he'll never gain. While this affords the Man with No Name time to escape, it's also intensely purgatorial. This movie is really image driven, somewhat like Dante, but without the medieval structure.

Also, does anyone know if this was intended as a kind of prequel? What does it represent when Eastwood picks up the Poncho he wears throughout the other movies? Is it like a vestment?

It's curious to watch the most American of genres through the eyes of a foreigner. While American Westerns offer a stylized image of our own past, Sergio Leone offers a stylized image of that very image, and this new image is as revealing as the initial. Everything looks, on the one hand, so stark and austere. The sets are sparsely populated, the cities small, everything made of wood, dwarfed by the landscape always threatening to swallow it up. On the other hand, everybody's filthy dirty - inside and out.

Finally, Clint Eastwood played one cool character. I'm working on my sneering squint as I write this.

P.S. Funniest dialogue in the movies?

Tuco: "See you soon, id... id... ids... "
Eastwood: "'Idiots'. It's for you."