The Good, the Bad and the Ugly<\/span><\/a>\u201d, a morally ambivalent figure torn between love for his family and his disdain for the rich, the latter epitomized by a coachload of the upper crust and pious travelers who fall foul of Juan and his gang. <\/p>\n\n\n\nAfter a lengthy prologue in which the coach is held up and then stolen by the peasant gang, John Mallory arrives on a motorbike, his presence announced via a series of explosions that precede his appearance through a cloud of dust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From then on Juan and John are intertwined throughout the rest of the film, each one taking turns to put one over on the other. Juan shoots the tire on John\u2019s bike. John then warns Juan to \u2018duck you sucker\u2019 before blowing up the coach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
John jumps on a passing train to escape being pulled into Juan\u2019s plans to rob the National Bank of Mesa Verde. Juan then tricks John into blowing up a church that kills the man who hired him to work at his silver mine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The non-stop one-upmanship between the two of them is played out against the background of what appears to be a Mexico in a perpetual state of revolution, with each side turning out to be just as bad as the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The main villain of the piece is Colonel Gunther Reza, a psychopathic Army commander played by Antoine Saint-John, who spends most of the film trying to outdo Clint Eastwood\u2019s combined body count from all three of Sergio Leone\u2019s Dollar trilogy films and succeeds by a factor of about ten to one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eventually, Juan is forced to face up to the reality of a conflict that takes his family from him, though not before he finally gets to rob the Mesa Verde bank. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Naturally, things don\u2019t go as planned, John tricking Juan and his gang into releasing hundreds of political prisoners held in the vaults, as opposed to the copious amounts of gold and silver the bandidos were hoping to liberate instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the set pieces of the film, reminiscent of the exploding bridge scene in \u201cThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly\u201d, takes place between Reza and his men and the remnants of the peasant revolutionary forces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
John and Juan defeat Reza and the Federales by firing on them and forcing the soldiers to take cover beneath a stone bridge which John has wired with explosives, blowing most of the enemy to kingdom come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The film ends in another spectacular confrontation featuring a train crash between the opposing sides in which John dies at the hands of Reza, Juan machine-gunning his nemesis to death and then watching helplessly as John uniquely organizes his own funeral by blowing himself up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDuck, You Sucker!\u201d finds Leone in seriously political mode, the opening credits quoting Mao Tse Tung\u2019s message that \u2018the revolution is an act of violence\u201d, a message that the director reinforces whenever he can throughout the film. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The occasional light and humorous moments that Leone would insert on occasion to lighten the mood in his Dollar Trilogy are few and far between here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One that does stick in the mind, however, is when Steiger flexes his hands to indicate stress, a gesture he apparently picked up after watching Leone offset. The film is also noteworthy in that most of the non-American actors deliver their dialogue in English which in turn means that the audience is less distracted than usual when watching a movie in which everyone apart from the main characters is obviously dubbed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After a slow start, there\u2019s plenty of action to help move the story along and of course, it is blessed with yet another wonderful score by the maestro himself, Ennio Morricone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Steiger is impressive in a role originally slated for Eli Wallach, stealing the film in the process. James Coburn, on the other hand, is weighed down by having to play an Irishman, his accent on a par with his attempt to sound like an Australian in \u201cThe Great Escape\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not the most popular Leone Western at the box-office, \u201cDuck, You Sucker!\u201d is still worth viewing if you\u2019ve yet to see it. If you can get hold of the restored version, which was released on DVD a few years back under the title \u201cA Fistful of Dynamite\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>My Name is Nobody (1973)<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nDirection of \u201cMy Name is Nobody\u201d is attributed to Tonino Valerii with Leone receiving a credit for the story based upon his idea. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leone, however, supposedly contributed a number of scenes by forming a second unit when it became clear the film was running over schedule. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is some confusion as to which sequences Leone directed himself but there seems to be a consensus it was mainly the scenes shot in Europe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bulk of principal photography took place in America which explains why the film features a number of Stateside actors including Henry Fonda, this time playing a \u2018good guy\u2019 as gunfighter Jack Beauregard, Geoffrey Lewis as the leader of the Wild Bunch and cameos from Leo Gordon, R.G. Armstrong and Stephen Kanaly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The film itself is classified as a comedy Western, mainly due to the presence of Italian actor Mario Girotti aka Terence Hill, famous in his home country for a series of comedies he appeared in with Carlo Pedersoli aka Bud Spencer including \u201cMy Name is Trinity\u201d, \u201cTwo Missionaries\u201d and \u201cWatch Out, We\u2019re Mad!\u201d Whilst not setting the box office alight in America, \u201cMy Name is Nobody\u201d did great business in Europe where the Hill \/ Spencer films enjoyed huge popularity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even though not strictly a Sergio Leone film, there are a number of sequences that call to mind his directorial style, in particular, the almost dialogue-free scene at the beginning in which Beauregard guns down three killers who have cornered him in a barbershop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The film also features yet another hugely enjoyable score courtesy of the maestro Ennio Morricone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leone would only get around to making one more movie, the gangster epic \u201cOnce Upon A Time in America\u201d, released in 1984, before dying of a heart attack at the age of sixty in 1989. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was a hugely influential figure for a number of directors, in particular, Quentin Tarantino, whose most recent offering is entitled \u201cOnce Upon A Time in Hollywood\u201d. It\u2019s therefore fitting to leave the last word on Leone to Tarantino himself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is what he had to say about \u201cOnce Upon A Time in the West\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI would go even as far as to say that [Leone] is the greatest combination of a complete film stylist, where he creates his own world, and storyteller. Those two are almost never married. To be as great a stylist as he is and create this operatic world, and to do this inside a genre, and to pay attention to the rules of the genre, while breaking the rules all the time \u2014 he is delivering you a wonderful Western\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sergio Leone only directed eight films in his short but impressive career. His first two movies were examples of the popular sword and sandal Italian movies of the late 1950s \/ early 1960s, Leone credited as an assistant director on … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6438"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6438"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6451,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6438\/revisions\/6451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}