The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Courtesy of MGM-UA Home Entertainment.
The first of Sergio Leone's Westerns was A Fistful of Dollars (1964), followed by For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966). These three films, which were phenomenally successful in Europe, were released in America, where they were box office smashes from 1967 onwards. Interiors were usually filmed in Rome, locations near Madrid, or in Almeria, southern Spain. The films came to be known as the “Dollars” Trilogy, although they were not originally planned as a trilogy. With each film, and with steeply rising budgets, Leone's cinematic style - his carnival sense of humor, indirect way of telling stories, and above all his variations on the traditional Hollywood approach to film language - became more and more sophisticated. He called this “cinema cinema” - meaning films which are partly about other films. Leone turned the Western into a new kind of fairy tale: ironic, realistic on the surface but mythic at the core, a blend of grungy close-ups and over-the-top spectacle. Other distinctive features included the interplay of music and image - which at times resembled today's rock videos - the exaggerated production design and the casting of Hollywood actors in the lead roles who took “cinematic memories” over to Italy with them. Many critics wrote that the resulting films “lacked the true spirit of the Western,” which was precisely their purpose.
banner: Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), 1966. Italian, 78 x 55 in., 1969. The Frayling Archive. SL107
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