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killdjango76 — The Bad - Sentenza
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Published: 2013-02-20 16:47:19 +0000 UTC; Views: 590; Favourites: 8; Downloads: 0
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Continuing in reverse order: Lee Van Cleef as "Angel Eyes"/Sentenza whose icy cool badness is, to me, the only thing Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Il buono, Il brutto, Il cattivo, 1966) needed more of.Related content
Comments: 12
I do agree Angel Eyes should have had a bit more screen time. He was still chilling, as only as Lee Van Cleef could portray. A legendary film.
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LVC always made a great bad guy...but he also made a great good guy. Colonel Mortimer from Dollars More is a fantastic contrasting character to Angel Eyes. Or Ryan (Death Rides a Horse) or Frank Talby (Day of Anger) who were both sort of...both...good and bad! Cheers.
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Oh, indeed! My best friend's favorite film is For A Few Dollars More. The music was superb and utterly magnificent. Gian Maria Volonté, Van Cleef, and Clint Eastwood were perfect and shone in their acting range.
Van Cleef's Ryan was sad, especially at the end when he walked away as Bill demanded he turn around and defend himself. Lee Van Cleef's face made me cry, I won't lie. It was pretty bleak, and the introduction was just shocking.
Day Of Anger was the first non-Leone western I watched. Gemma and Van Cleef's relationship was really well done, so well done.
Have you seen The Big Gundown? Magnificent film. Arguably Lee Van Cleef's best role. Tomas Milian as Cuchillo, the little rascal. In fact, Gundown, along with The Great Silence are so perfect, so flawless, so beyond, I can't rank them at all.
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I've seen both The Big Gundown and The Great Silence. Both favorites of mine. I've seen all of Leone's western work, all of Sollima's, and all but two of Corbucci's westerns (his first and one of the later comedy westerns). In fact, I've probably seen between 150-200 Euro-westerns...it would really take me a long time to rank them all!
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I want to watch Faccia a faccia. Morricone's score is really bizarre, discordant. The Great Silence is beyond depressing, and I've probably seen what amounts to only 15 or 20 minutes out of small video fragments including the ending, which is brutal, shocking. Woah, that's really awesome!
What's your favorite Leone western?
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Faccia is my personal favorite of Sollima's trio, though Big Gundown would probably be considered the best. Run Man Run is a fun watch, but a bit of a letdown after those two. Morricone's score for Faccia is jarring, but fits the film really well. (I would say all the screaming in the Navajo Joe soundtrack is Morricone's most abrasive western score).
The Great Silence is definitely one of the darkest and most depressing spaghettis (The Forgotten Pistolero and Cemetery Without Crosses also spring to mind), but Corbucci's use of the snowy setting is amazing. Trintignant is great as Silence, and Kinski is at his madman best. Also good support by Frank Wolff.
As for Leone, I would say Once Upon a Time in the West is his best overall. For A Few Dollars More is my favorite of the Dollars movies. Fistful is great fun, but too close to Yojimbo, and though I dearly love Good/Bad, it's wonderfully operatic but light nearly everywhere else. Tuco is the only one of the trio that's really developed as a character. Once Upon at Time, to me, is the best of both: a more intricate plot and characterizations like For a Few, but with all the big scope and grandeur of Good/Bad. (And just to cover them all, Duck, You Sucker is great fun but a bit of a let down after Once Upon a Time and Good/Bad and just can't hold up over the long runtime.)
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Gundown was seriously amazing. Yeah, Run, Man, Run seems more light than the other two.
In my opinion, it's the darkest Western ever due to what Corbucci conveys and shows, as well as being THE anti-western. Again, this is above everything by Corbucci, by Leone, by anyone, really. It's just that magnificent.
There's much, much more to Blondie and Angel Eyes than what we're seeing. I have a close, intimate relationship with this work of cinematic art. I notice things, deeper things. There's so much to this, so epic, personal, grand, that I just can't express my full love for this.
I agree that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is Leone's best achievement. Once Upon A Time, to be blunt, suffered from much too many problems for me to consider liking it, and I have a list of those things if you need it. Everything is drawn out to a ridiculous extreme where any form of suspense is ruined. Even Morricone's score gets gratting after a while, with the same theme played over, and over, to which it all sounds so similar that I couldn't pick out a different tune than the theme and guitar, and the way that Harmonica tune is played so often, makes me want to break the TV screen.
Frank was not developed sufficiently to be considered a great villain. Shooting a 10 year old doesn't make you an automatic figure of pure evil. Fonda's performance actually made it worse, I hate to admit. The way he delivers his lines, I seriously laughed at one point with Morton when he was supposed to be threatening.
The story suffers from way too many sub plots to make whatever it's trying to be a seriously confusing mess. The revenge thing feels too tacked on as a saving point and, if you cut it down, you pretty much have Indio and Mortimer, and I seriously hate that.
I can accept Frank and Harmonica circling each other for 15 minutes, but when you put a flashback in between this, it becomes utterly ludicrous. And it made me laugh because of how exaggerated it is, Fonda's scrunched up face when circling Bronson, and when that chord strikes when he puts the harmonica in the kid's mouth.
The character I wanted to like was Cheyenne, whom Jason Robards plays so cornball hammy and so out of place, I thought he'd save the film. Unfortunately, most of his scenes are shared with Claudia Cardinale.
Ah, Jill. Dear god, Jill. Her acting abilities here range from that of a cardboard cut out, her face so frozen in the same state, as if trying to remember if she left the hot plate running on her trailer, irritatingly to the point where I realized she was dubbed by the person who dubbed Susan Scott as The Widow in Gundown. This was not necessarily a good thing, as it reminded me I could be watching that instead. That love scene was so bizarre, and it isn't because she's in bed with a "killer", it is because of how random and so out of place it is, which seemingly has absolutely no effect on anything after.
Charles Bronson was wooden, and again, the revenge plot, felt too forced and literally came up at the last second, without any build up or suspense or reveal and grand operatic atmosphere as in For A Few, and that dreaded harmonica tune becomes rage inducing. The only good thing was when Jill shot at it, reliving us of it's horror.
None of these characters had any charisma with each other, which made their motives detached and overall uninteresting as if this film can't decide what it wants to be. It literally feels unfinished that I honestly thought the 3 hour version was the cut version and not the compete and entire film.
Overall, had the actors were much better directed, put more effort, the characters better written and executed, the story less confusing and muddled, and much other needed things, I'd rate it in my top 20.
The Good, Bad, and Ugly was perfect on every level, with Gundown and Silence being literally untouchable by anything due to how grand and marvelous the plot is, the development, the acting, camera work. In Silence, the camera was just so perfect and awe inspiring, terrifying.
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All I can say is that there's some things I can agree with in your analysis and some I can't, but, by and large, I understand where you're coming from. I will, however, say that like many large, long and ponderous movies (like a Lawrence of Arabia), Once Upon a Time benefits greatly from being seen on the big screen with an audience, which I've had the benefit of experiencing. I've seen it and Good/Bad several dozen times since I was a kid and in both cases, I get great enjoyment out of them and always find something new in them.
And while I'll absolutely agree that Silence is a masterpiece, it is in many way too unrelentingly bleak to be my "favorite," so to speak. For Corbucci, I'd say that The Mercenary is the easiest to just pop on and enjoy.
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You know what I want? For these films to be released again, in their original form, in theaters. That will never happen, but I can dream.
I tend to stress my points to a bit extremes, I apologize. I don't mean to be so extreme.
That's what I loved about this, and that's why it's such a marvelous but brutal. It turns the Western, Italian and American, on it's head. It burns down the cliches and covers them with boundless snow, ice, and mud. It just arrived today, and I finished watching it. It is very disturbing, creepy, surreal, Gothic to a literature sense.
I didn't put this in and played it, oh no. I actually feared what it would do, that I began to sweat. All the way to the end, I felt sickened, disturbed, I felt as if I had lost as they did. It was just too real for it's own good. It's the most gruesome and bleak thing ever. The eerie imagery of the outlaws carrying scythes, eating horses. The fact they aren't explicitly gone into makes it surreal. Where do they stay? What do they eat? Do they eat each other, or do they sit so still they freeze to death?
It's just the sheer ambiguity of everything. They all have faces, a history, all connected somehow. And Morricone's soundtrack is pure poetry. It seems to take place in it's own word than in the dying Old West.
It's a deep film, highly complex and one that you should go into in carefully and with an open mind to truly appreciate it.
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Owing to this conversation, I took a few days to do a rendering of Silence that you might enjoy. (It can be found here: killdjango76.deviantart.com/ar… ) I might do Kinski as well at some later date.
Cheers.
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Greetings! Just letting you know that the new version is up here: killdjango76.deviantart.com/ar…
Cheers.
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