Sergio Leone’s iconic Spaghetti Western, the culmination of his “Man With No Name” trilogy, is worth seeing in a cinema. The opening massive close up of a man’s sweating face looms large and sets a confrontational tone. This is immediately followed by one of Leone’s perfectly composed dusty vistas as a skinny dog runs across the centre of the frame, with men on horseback near-indistinguishable from the landscape, such is the sense of scale. Preceded, of course, by Ennio Morricone’s rattling, bombastic score, all primal wails and whistling, as familiar and strange as it must have been in 1967.
This is a type of film-making we just don’t see any more. Tarantino might like to think he’s conducting a revival of sorts – and certainly Kill Bill does on occasion evoke the spirit of Leone – but that film is devoid of the broad moral commentary (and, for that matter, the sheer panache) of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. These images have entered the lexicon of society, such are their force: the hand as it edges closer to a gun; the suspicious eyes flitting from side to side; the rapid cuts as the inevitable shootout nears.
