Posted on 10/12/2025 11:08:47 AM PDT by Twotone
Perhaps because it came out the year I was born, I have a hard time imagining a world without A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone and the spaghetti western. It's easy to forget how much this single film changed not just the western but the movie hero, whose credibility forever afterward came with stubble and unkempt hair, abundant sarcasm and an implacably bad attitude. It became an article of faith that the only honest way to look back at the world arrayed against the hero was through a squint.
By the time I actually understood what a western was, Leone had completed the three films in what would be called the Dollars or the Man with No Name trilogy, though he had no plan to make a series when he finished A Fistful of Dollars. In the meantime the spaghetti western genre had exploded and Leone's films would affect the style and substance of westerns forever afterward. The '60s had begun with John Ford's elegiac The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but it would end with Sam Peckinpah's brutal The Wild Bunch; something had obviously changed.
The effect of A Fistful of Dollars in North America was delayed by the fact that it wasn't released officially here until over two years after it came out in Italy, when all three of the Dollars films would come out a few months apart in 1967. A publicity campaign by United Artists landed the films in America as a single artistic statement – a fait accompli that they certainly weren't when Leone began production on his ultra low budget western in Spain in the spring of 1964.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
A true Italian meal consists of antipasto, pasta, and entree of either seafood or meat, a dessert (dolce), Wine accompanying the courses and coffee and an apperitivo afterward. Perhaps some cheese and fruit too. Obviously not everyone sits down to such a meal every day. Who could? But you pretty much always always have a pasta course.
“paella westerns” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Nor does “tapas westerns.”
You are making Pritzker hungry for that between meals snack of yours.
Excellent timing. Most don’t realize the most famous soundtrack from The Good, Bad and Ugly is titled, “ The Ecstasy of Gold”….
Unforgiven, very good. Eastwood, Hackman, Freeman
“I loved the Bud Spencer / Terrance Hill ones.”
Hill’s “beans weren’t much good anyway” scene is on of my favorites. If you look close the set decoration is really well done for such a cheap movie.
🤠
- Classical guitar arrangement
- The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
I prefer Cheese Westerns, like Horace Walpole’s ‘Rogue Cheddar’, one of the first of the Cheese Westerns to be later followed by ‘Gunfight at Gruyre Corral’, ‘Ilchester 73’, and ‘The Cheese Who Shot Liberty Valence’.
There was a Western TV series that only ran one season. Many of the scripts by Rod Serling. ‘The Loner’. Good show but an all too brief run.
😂😂😂👍
As a youngster just hitting puberty, imagine my shock over Raquel Welch in “One Hundred Rifles”. Movies seemed different from that time on.
They were filmed in Italy.
"...feel almost human now, dont'cha"
IMDB, "TG, TB, & TU", filming locations
Spain
We lost Claudia recently.
Wide Screen and director’s cut!👍
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