CS Weekly Archive > DVD > 06/08/07

The Good, the Great, and the
Extraordinary…Plus the Poignant

by jason davis

Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari)
Screenplay by Victor Andrés Catena & Jaime Comas & Sergio Leone (latter directed)
Story by A. Bonzzoni & Victor Andrés Catena & Sergio Leone

For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più)
Screenplay by Sergio Leone and Luciano Vincenzoni (former directed)
Scenario by Fulvio Morsella and Sergio Leone

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo) Screenplay by Age & Scarpelli & Luciano Vincenzoni & Sergio Leone (latter directed)
Story by Luciano Vincenzoni & Sergio Leone

Duck, You Sucker (aka A Fistful of Dynamite/Giù latesta) Screenplay by Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati and Sergio Leone (latter directed)
Story by Sergio Leoni and Sergio Donati

Fistful of Dollars

For a Few Dollars More

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Duck, You Sucker

Inspired by Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars chronicles a hired gun's (Clint Eastwood) attempt to play competing crime lords against each other in a ravaged Mexican town. For a Few Dollars More finds bounty hunter named Monco (Eastwood) going head to head with a Civil War veteran (Lee van Cleef) for the bounty on a psychotic murderer (Gian Maria Volontè) while The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly sees a trio of similarly colorful Western scoundrels (Eastwood, Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach) racing to recover hidden Confederate gold as the Civil War winds down. The anthology's final entry, Duck, You Sucker finds ex-IRA bomber John Mallory (James Coburn) luring bandit Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger) into the Mexican Revolution where both men learn to appreciate the difference between an ideological battle and the carnage of the actual fight. The four films included in the set (with the notable exceptions of Paramount's Once Upon a Time in the West and Warner's Once Upon a Time in America on either side of Duck, You Sucker) present nearly comprehensive account of Leone's storytelling development from a simple genre filmmaker to a weaver of rich philosophical tales.

Discarding the black and white hats of the classic Western, Leone and his writing collaborators embrace ambiguity and moral relativity in their early Spaghetti Westerns. The so-called "Dollars Trilogy" (the first three films in the set, which the marketing folks at United Artists unified with the spurious notion that Eastwood plays the same "man with no name" in each—in actuality, the characters are discreet individuals named as Joe, Monco, and Blondie, respectively) present their protagonist in an anti-heroic light. The Eastwood characters register as "good" only because the characters around them are worse. Having established the gray area where the stories reside in Fistful, each succeeding film adds to Leone's dramatic toolbox—emotional depth and humor in For a Few Dollars More and sense of scale and social conscience in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The storytelling reaches maturity in Duck, You Sucker where the characters' tortured backstories and the carnage they witness during the Mexican Revolution paints a portrait of suffering and friendship in the face of a world gone wrong. Here, the consequences of the violence take the spotlight, upstaging the entertaining gunplay of the earlier films and delving into the depths of the human condition with compassion, circumspection, and character. Juan and John's friendship is reminiscent of that between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which was released two years earlier, in 1969), and the film is overcast with the same sense of melancholy that would pave the way for Leone's 1984 epic swansong, Once Upon a Time in America.

Fistful of Dollars
- Commentary by Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling
- A New Kind of Hero featurette
- A Few Weeks in Spain: Eastwood on the making of the film
- Tre Voci: Three friends remember Leone
- Not Ready for Primetime: Filmmaker Monte Hellman discusses the TV broadcast
- Network prologue with Harry Dean Stanton
- Location Comparison Then to Now
- 10 radio spots
- Double-bill trailer

For a Few Dollars More
- Commentary by Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling
- A New Standard featurette
- Back for More: Eastwood on the making of the film
- Tre Voci: Three friends remember Leone
- Original American release version comparison
- Location Comparison Then to Now
- 12 radio spots
- Original theatrical trailer

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
- Commentary by film critic Richard Schickel
- Deleted scenes
- Leone's West making-of documentary
- The Leone Style: Documentary on Leone
- The Man Who Lost the Civil War documentary
- Reconstruction featurette
- Il Maestro: Ennio Morricone featurette
- Poster gallery

Duck, You Sucker
- Commentary by Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling
- The Myth of Revolution: Frayling on Leone's politics
- Sergio Donati remembers Duck, You Sucker
- Once Upon a Time in Italy: Leone exhibit featurette
- Sorting Out the Versions featurette
- Restoration Italian Style
- Location Comparison Then to Now
- Six radio spots
- Original theatrical trailer

Leone biographer Christopher Frayling and Time Magazine critic Richard Schickel offer informative commentaries that trace the development of Leone's cinema, with the latter offering significant insights into the stories' development. A network prologue from the Fistful's first TV airing legitimizes Eastwood's gunman (much like George Lucas' attempt to backpedal the amoral Han Solo in the special edition of Star Wars) and several featurettes highlight the diverse international edits of Leone's films illustrating the storytelling impact of diverse cuts.

Though slightly hobbled by the absence of two key films in Leone's oeuvre (the two Once Upon a Time pictures licensed by other distributors), MGM's anthology presents an excellent exploration of the filmmaker's evolution as a storyteller, with a simple exercise in revisionist genre like Fistful of Dollars eventually leading to a rich philosophical epic like Duck, You Sucker and a non-stop barrage of entertainment in between.

The Sergio Leone Anthology
MGM Home Video
Rated R; 511 min.
$89.98

Buy it now

Jason Davis is the DVD Manager for CS Weekly , a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

The Sergio Leone Anthology courtesy MGM Home Video

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