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Showing posts with the label Man With No Name

A Fistful of Clint: "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" (1966)

  The sun sets upon this short series of reviews as we join The Man With No Name for one final adventure... The country is torn in half by the American Civil War.  Brother fight and kill each other on the battlefield as the fate of a nation rides in the balance... But three gunslingers are involved in a battle of a different sort: survival against the desert and each other as they hunt for treasure... and the final few dollars they may ever see... Sergio Leone's " The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly " is the final movie in the " Dollars Trilogy "- and is by the far the most ambitious of the lot.  While " A Fistful of Dollars ", and " For a Few Dollars More " used a fairly small cast, and few locations to tell their stories, this movie ups the number of performers, locations and includes a much more elaborate set piece by dropping the characters between the Union and the Confederacy armies, and by having them on a quest across the land. Leone did ...

A Fistful of Clint: "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964)

  It was high noon, and the tumbleweed were tumbling by when I first saw him... The Man With No Name... his steely glare burning into me brighter than the white hot sun reflecting off the scorched, arid dirt... Nah... not really.  I was a teenager in an air conditioned basement... A drifter follows the tumbleweed into a small one road town.  At one end was the Baxter family, and at the other end, the Rojo family.  Both families were fighting for control, with the average citizen suffering in between. Seeing an opportunity to make money, the drifter proceeds to play a deadly game of tug of war with the two families... " A Fistful of Dollars ", directed by Sergio Leone, is a masterpiece of the Spaghetti Western genre.  Compared to most of the North American Westerns filmed at the time, it stripped away the idealistic sheen off of the genre.  It was gritting, sweaty, dirty, with very complex and morally ambiguous characters.  It dropped the "white hat/bla...