The spaghetti Western isn’t my favorite genre, but I get the appeal. They are tough, cool, and atmospheric. The score is excellent. It’s a cast full of badasses. The stories are simple and brutal. I can see how these became so beloved. Personally, they all feel like the same movie to me in the way that any genre you aren’t invested in can. Like, all the Star Wars movies feel distinct to me because I love them and am invested in them. To someone who is indifferent to Star Wars, the films can feel pretty uniform. I just saw For a Few Dollars More the other day and I’m already struggling to remember what I saw in that as opposed to Once Upon a Time in the West or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
Lee Van Cleef is a nice foil for Clint Eastwood. It’s funny how they both look about a decade older than they were at the time. I guess props to the makeup team for getting them to look so sun-worn. It was fun seeing Klaus Kinski pop up as one of the gang of robbers. I kept expecting him to become more prominent as the movie continued before I finally realized that he was a nobody at the time this was made.
While I’ve come to like the Western genre more over the years, the spaghetti Western still eludes my interest. I’ll certainly see more of them. Sergio Leone really is a master at making this. It’s fun tracking how these films were a sort of bridge from the classic American Western to the neo-Western. They are as fun as the classics and as brutal as later films.
Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend
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