Movie Review: Ride Lonesome (1959)

A routine but robust western, Ride Lonesome is a modest package delivered with minimal fuss. 

In rugged desert terrain, veteran bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Randolph Scott) arrests fugitive Billy John (James Best), but not before Billy sends his men to fetch help from his brother Frank (Lee Van Cleef). Ben has a multi-day journey to escort Billy to Santa Cruz, and at a rest stop operated by Carrie Lane (Karen Steele) and her husband, Ben and Billy encounter outlaw Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts) and his sidekick Whit (James Coburn, in his screen debut).

Ben and Sam create an uneasy temporary alliance with a common objective of delivering Billy to justice, Sam intent on securing an amnesty in the process. Once Mr. Lane is confirmed as dead the group continues the trip to Santa Cruz, and have to fight off an attack by tribal warriors intent on kidnapping Carrie. Frank and his men are soon in pursuit, and with Ben choosing the long and slow trails, Sam starts to suspect that Ben's real target is Frank, with Billy being used as a lure.

The sixth of seven westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott (who co-produced the films with Harry Joe Brown, hence the "Ranown Cycle" label applied to the series), Ride Lonesome is written by their frequent collaborator Burt Kennedy. Clocking in at an efficient 73 minutes, the film is a compact effort, never threatening to rise much above budget and talent limitations, but also easily maintaining a basic level of engagement and competency.

Majestic CinemaScope photography and sometimes clumsy editing summarize the film's ambitions and constraints. On close examination the plot makes little sense, and the portrayal of the Mescalero natives is particularly obtuse: their attack consists of riding in circles to offer themselves as best possible targets, and this after their Chief offers a horse as a trade for Carrie. But the film does work its way to a stirring climax, Brigade's real intentions revealed in a final confrontation with Frank. The jagged bond between Brigade and Boon is another steady source of spiky macho posturing with multiple possible outcomes.

The elemental dialogue matches the stiff performances. Kennedy's script stays in clipped economy class, and Scott, showing all of his 61 years, appears particularly uninterested in expressing any emotion other than cold and stoic. Pernell Roberts breathes more life into the Sam Boone role, while Lee Van Cleef is largely wasted: the seemingly critical character of Frank appears in all of two scenes. Karen Steele brings plenty of incongruous glamour to the desert, Boetticher not restraining any of the salivatory ogling by the sweaty men in her company.

Ending with an unforgettably fearsome image of a fiery cleansing, Ride Lonesome also rides straight and true, but along a narrow trail.



All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Bravados (1958)

A routine western exploring a quest for revenge blinded by rage, The Bravados mixes beautiful scenery and dogged convictions in a bowl of genre cliches.

Jim Douglas (Gregory Peck) rides into the small border town of Rio Arriba to witness the hanging of four men (played by Stephen Boyd, Lee Van Cleef, Henry Silva and Albert Salmi) who have been convicted of a violent bank robbery. Douglas has been tracking the criminals for six months, believing they raped and killed his wife. In town he rekindles a relationship with his ex-lover Josefa Velarde (Joan Collins), and meets banker Gus, his daughter Emma and local Sheriff Sanchez.

On the evening before the hanging most of the townfolk congregate at a church service, and the four criminals make their escape, taking Emma with them as a hostage. A posse is organized and Jim emerges as a leader in tracking the bandits. As he corners each of the criminals individually they all plead ignorance about his wife's murder, but he anyway doles out his version of frontier justice.

With most of the action consisting of Douglas and the posse hunting down the escapees, the filming locations in Mexico infuse The Bravados with a cinematic majesty. The CinemaScope production features stunning landscapes, director Henry King and cinematographer Leon Shamroy capturing imposing vistas of waterfalls, gorges, cliffs, trails and impressive plains.

The alluring imagery and visual splendour compensate for an ordinary story and stiff performances. The stock stranger-seeking-justice narrative remains exceptionally shallow, the Philip Yordan script deploying awkward silence instead of providing context. Gregory Peck aims for stoic but is surprisingly awkward in the central role, and the supporting characters on the good side of the law are featureless.

But with the help of good casting, the four criminals add zesty colour. Boyd, Van Cleef, Salmi and especially Henry Silva provide a welcome edge and emerge as the more interesting group compared to the bland justice-seekers.

The story serves as an obtuse beware-of-assumptions critique of McCarthyism, with religion playing an intentionally exaggerated role as an alternative moral compass. The dusty small town of Rio Arriba boasts an ostentatious church more appropriate for a city ten times the size, complete with a heavenly all-boys choir. The divine gloss reorients Jim's perspective, from an initial reluctance to enter the church doors to a final moment of reckoning when the church is the only place he can turn to.

With a decent twist in the tail, The Bravados follows a crooked but still largely familiar trail.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Kansas City Confidential (1952)

A crime and revenge film noir, Kansas City Confidential features an intelligent plot rich with crooked characters, layers of suspicion, and delicious double crossing.

In Kansas City, the distinguished Tim Foster (Preston Foster), initially known only as Mr. Big, plots a masterful bank robbery of $1.2 million. He recruits three hoodlums to pull it off: Pete Harris (Jack Elam), Tony Romano (Lee Van Cleef) and Boyd Kane (Neville Brand). They all wear masks and never see each other, with Foster arranging for the men to first disappear then regroup to divide the loot once the heat dies down.

The innocent fall guy is flower delivery van driver Joe Rolfe (John Payne), who is arrested, questioned and roughed up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Joe is a decorated war hero with a minor criminal record. Now his life is ruined, and he sets out to find the men responsible. He tracks down Harris in Tijuana, Mexico, then heads to the gang's rendevouz at the resort of Barados. Romano and Kane are already waiting, while Foster is pretending to be a fisherman and readying a further twist to his crime. But the surprise arrival of his daughter Helen (Coleen Gray) disrupts all the plans.

Filled with uncompromising violence, threats, and mean men guarding against other, Kansas City Confidential delves into the world of small-time hoods manipulated by one mastermind, and one war hero out for revenge. Director Phil Karlson translates a gem of a script by Rowland Brown and Harold Greene to the screen and the 99 minutes are unrelenting: with every man for himself, mistrust becomes the primary currency energizing the action.

Despite the title, the majority of the film takes place in Mexico, with the final third confined to the small (fictional) resort of Barados. Here Karlson eventually loses some grit. Joe infiltrates the gang while romancing Helen, and repetitiveness creeps in through multiple similar interactions with hoods Romano and Kane.

But the story's threads are woven together with a base level of rationality. Joe's army background, two combat medals and stint in prison provide the steel and courage to now face down evil men. And the script saves another surprise related to Foster, arming him with both motive and opportunity to recruit desperate men and pull-off a daring heist.

The noir style is relatively subtle, with a more straightforward thrust for revenge dominating. Karlson mixes day and night shots with ease, and keeps light levels more neutral. Instead the emphasis is on close-ups, and the actors oblige with some stellar work. Jack Elam and Lee Van Cleef as Harris and Romano bring an admirable dedication to shiftiness, with Neville Brand's Kane adding a layer of gum-chewing smarminess. John Payne as the lead protagonist finds the right balance between toughness and empathy.

Oozing with greed, scheming and deception, Kansas City Confidential is a crafty caper.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: China Gate (1957)

A war drama set in Indochina during the dying days of French involvement, China Gate offers a few good concepts but suffers from clunky execution.

The setting is Indochina in 1954, with the French Foreign Legion in a desperate struggle to resist the buoyant Soviet-backed communist forces of Ho Chi Minh. The village of Sun Toy is near the front lines, still held by the French with the help of American air drops, but almost fully destroyed by enemy bombardments. A Eurasian woman known as Lucky Legs (Angie Dickinson) runs what's left of the local bar. She also knows the terrain thanks to regular booze smuggling runs to Major Cham (Lee Van Cleef), the local leader of the opposing North Vietnamese forces.

The Legion recruit Lucky to join a special forces mission to locate and destroy an enemy munitions depot. She agrees, but is unhappy that her American ex-husband Sergeant Brock (Gene Barry) is also part of the mission. The racist Brock abandoned Lucky when their baby was born with Asian features. Goldie (Nat King Cole) is another American member of the Legion who joins the squad. The assignment is filled with danger and skirmishes with enemy soldiers, and also affords plenty of time for Lucky and Brock to confront their past.

Directed and written by Samuel Fuller, China Gate is a limited-budget, studio-bound affair, exploring the Vietnam conflict prior to the still-to-come wide scale American involvement. The acting from a decidedly B-grade cast is stiff, the sound stage settings are plastic, the supposed jungle ambience is laughable, and the frontline infiltration tactics are unconvincing and border on ridiculous. On several occasions the Legion squadron encounters a single and isolated enemy guard, and it's never explained why they don't snipe him out instead of trying to tiptoe around him, often causing noisy carnage.

Fuller's real focus is on politics and racism. The film is filled with anti-communist rants, while the singular character arc features Brock's journey, starting from a despicable racist who abandoned his own child and finding his way to a caring husband and father. Neither Gene Barry's acting nor Fuller's writing are up to the task, and the emotional dialogue exchanges between Brock and Lucky, often incongruously set near dead bodies and in front of other soldiers, simply don't work.

Goldie's involvement as a brave black soldier is an interesting counterpoint to Brock's racism, and Nat King Cole gets to warble the title song -- twice.

Angie Dickinson often comes to the rescue of China Gate, and her performance and character are about the only thing worth watching. As a single mother very much alone in a crumbling man's world, she stands out for having a higher motive and a mission within a mission to improve her young son's future prospects.

Potentially intriguing but ultimately disappointing, China Gate is lost at the front lines where promising ideas crash against low budgets and talent limitations.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Escape From New York (1981)

An action thriller set in a depressed near-future, Escape From New York carries A-movie ambitions with a B-movie ethos. The story of a lone hero attempting to rescue the President from the wasteland of a Manhattan turned into a prison is delivered on a bare-bones budget but with plenty of flair.

It's 1997, and after a crime rate explosion, all of Manhattan Island is turned into a maximum security prison, protected by a 50 foot perimeter wall and mines. Convicts are deposited into Manhattan and never allowed out, with security controlled from a police headquarters on Liberty Island under the leadership of Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef). Air Force One with the President (Donald Pleasence) on board is hijacked by anti-government revolutionaries and intentionally crashed into Manhattan, but the President survives by sheltering in an evacuation pod. He is captured and held hostage by unknown prisoners.

Hauk recruits newly convicted Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an ex-Special Forces war hero who has turned to a life of crime, to mount a one-man rescue mission and retrieve a crucial cassette recording carried by the President within 24 hours. Snake lands a glider on top of the World Trade Center, and soon has to fend off crazy killers marauding the streets. He encounters Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) and his girlfriend Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau), leading him to the self-proclaimed Duke (Isaac Hayes), who commands the largest gang of criminals and is likely holding the President.

Fresh off his unexpected success with Halloween, director John Carpenter was provided enough clout to helm an impressive group of stars in an ambitious story requiring relatively elaborate sets. The clever premise is brought to life through the imaginative use of early simulated computer effects, Carpenter stretching his budget as far as it would go to bring to life a bleak vision of the future. The film clocks in at under 100 minutes and is ultimately a straightforward and fairly routine chase-and-rescue film, but also brimming with panache and attitude.

Thematically, Escape From New York logically extrapolates from all the downbeat 1970s crime-drenched New York-based dramas. Death Wish had the city in the grips of an out-of-control crime wave, while The Warriors saw the gangs effectively taking full control of the streets. Carpenter carries the trend to its conclusion, and now Manhattan is turned into a prison, abandoned to the low lifes who chased away civilization.

While the idea is rich, the execution is constrained by the budget. Once Snake makes it into the city, the action sequences are restricted to basic arm-waving clashes with zombie-like randoms, and then its quickly onto encounters with Cabbie, Brain, and then a standard confrontation with Duke's entourage. A no-rules two-man brawl in the boxing ring with Snake forced to take on the local brute with bats-as-weapons smacks of irrelevant padding. Overall, the city-as-a-prison environment appears limited to a few blocks, a couple of sets, a few overturned cars, and a rather limited population density.

Carpenter does a fine job with nighttime filming, and plays with backlighting, shadows and silhouettes to good effect. But by far the best thing about Escape From New York is the character of Snake Plissken. Kurt Russell oozes pissed-off cool, his long hair and eye patch creating a seminal image. At every turn he is confronted with an "I heard you were dead" greeting, which does not appear to surprise him. Dismissively swatting off attackers with either fists or assorted weapons, he is only strained by the impossible time limit imposed on his mission by Hauk.

The secondary cast brings together a clutch of respected veterans comfortable in schlocky surroundings. Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, and Donald Pleasence add plenty of esteemed heft, and spout their lines with conviction but without enjoying much character evolution.

Escape From New York is a joyride through the urban jungle of a dismal future. The overarching idea may be more interesting than the details, but the taxi trip is lively all the same.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

The Movies Of Lee Van Cleef

All Lee Van Cleef movies reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

High Noon (1952)

Kansas City Confidential (1952)

The Big Combo (1955)

China Gate (1957)

Gunfight At The O.K. Corral (1957)

The Young Lions (1958)

The Bravados (1958)

Ride Lonesome (1959)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

How The West Was Won (1962, uncredited)

For A Few Dollars More (1965)

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1966)

Commandos (1968)

Captain Apache (1971)

The Grand Duel (1972)

Escape From New York (1981)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Captain Apache (1971)

A muddled Spaghetti Western, Captain Apache gallops headlong into a botched collection of nondescript characters killing each other at drudgingly predictable intervals. Lee Van Cleef's substantial presence and some wry notes of humour are not nearly enough to rescue the film.

A half-breed member of the US Cavalry known only as Captain Apache (Van Cleef) is investigating a murder when he learns of a mysterious plan known only as April Morning. With everyone in town seemingly hiding something but no one willing to talk, Captain Apache's snooping eventually leads to Griffin (Stuart Whitman) a rich industrialist, who enjoys the company of Maude (Carroll Baker), a higher-class prostitute of sorts.

A sub-plot involving gun smuggling may or may not have something to do with April Morning, and as Captain Apache treks back and forth across the Mexican border to investigate, he runs afoul of a witch with hallucinatory potions. As the calendar ticks towards April, Griffin, Captain Apache, Maude, various gunmen and shady senior cavalry officers converge on a train as the heinous plan starts to unfold.

Director Alexander Singer, who spent most of his career in television land, fills Captain Apache with characters who make brief appearances, their role in the overall plot never fully understood, and within a few scenes they end up as so much gun fodder. From a chicken-chomping general in charge of a barracks, to a priest with something to hide, to twin blond and mustachioed gunfighters, disparate people come, spout a few lines, and are shot dead. The Philip Yordan and Milton Sperling script sacrifices all search for depth in the rush for the next undefined body to hit the floor, riddled with bullets.

A sturdy Lee Van Cleef, looking strange without his moustache, tries to hold the film together, and his half-breed law man offers some originality. He gets to wear a cool jacket and in one scene stands almost naked, stomach sucked way in, to prove his redskin credentials.

But even he is defeated by a story that offers him nothing except a search for the mysterious April Morning from the first scene to the last. Basic plot-advancement devices such as gradually revealing tantalizing additional clues to maintain interest are foreign here, Yordan and Sperling confining their hero to asking the same question and getting the same non-answer for the best part of 85 minutes.

Stuart Whitman gives Griffin some personality as the main antagonist, but Carroll Baker's role is poorly defined, Maude hastily sketched-in to inject some frivolous female participation.

Jarringly edited and photographed with no style, Captain Apache can at least boast Van Cleef singing, or at least warbling, the title song over the opening credits. It's a tune so ridiculously bad it's really good, which is more than can be said for the rest of the film.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Grand Duel (1972)

A lyrical Spaghetti Western with clever stylistic shadings and a strong central performance, The Grand Duel (also known as Storm Rider) entices with an unusually adroit plot and an impressive set of memorable characters.

Discredited Sheriff Clayton (Lee Van Cleef) catches up with escaped convict Philipp Wermeer (Alberto Dentice, billed as Peter O'Brien) just as a group of bounty hunters are closing in. Clayton helps the nimble Wermeer escape, much to the disgust of the lead bounty hunter Hole (Antonio Casale, credited as Antony Vernon). Clayton believes that Wermeer, who has been convicted of killing the wealthy "Patriarch" Samuel Saxon, is a victim of a miscarriage of justice. Clayton knows the identity of the real killer and wants to help clear Wermeer's name.

The two form an uneasy alliance and make their way to Saxon City, now run by David (Horst Frank), Eli (Marc Mazza) and Adam (Klaus Grünberg) Saxon, the sons of the dead Patriarch. David is the ambitious power behind the scenes, Eli the token Sheriff doing the dirty work, and Adam the rather unbalanced, effeminate yet blood-thirsty youngest son, about to be married to Elisabeth (Dominique Darel). The Saxons are ready to seize the rights to a large silver deposit discovered by Wermeer's dead father, but the unexpected arrival of Clayton and Wermeer disrupts their plans.

Director Giancarlo Santi was Sergio Leone's Assistant (or Second Unit) Director on both The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966) and Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), and clearly he was paying good attention. The Grand Duel is rich with Leone-inspired camera angles, ostentatious prolongations, sharp dialogue, sly humour, and plenty of bullet-rich action, style as important as substance, a lot achieved by saying little.

Lee Van Cleef is dominant as Clayton, dressed all in black, having lost his Sheriff's star for reasons that will become clear late in the film, but all the more free in the meantime to pursue justice without it. Alberto Dentice provides the dynamic athleticism to contrast with Van Cleef's economy of motion, and the two create a duo brimming with trouble towards each other and more violently towards the assembled bounty hunters and the Saxons.

The Grand Duel benefits from a large supporting cast of well-defined characters, with each of the Saxon sons efficiently provided with a distinct personality. David is laying plans for the political capital that can be purchased with wealth, while Eli leads the on-the-ground rule-by-gun. Adam occupies an exclusive class of derangement, a dainty murderer inhaling the aroma of his silk scarf while getting high by brutally gunning down innocents. Jess Hahn adds gruff colour as the wagon driver trudging his way across the west, his path ever conflicting with Clayton and Wermeer.

Argentinian-Italian composer Luis Bacalov provides an exalted orchestral musical score to accompany the unfolding drama. Pinned by a hypnotic and melancholy harmonica melody, it is one of the more inspirational non-Morricone Spaghetti Western themes.

There may be slight deficiencies in originality and slickness of execution, but otherwise The Grand Duel is a hearty Spaghetti Western dish.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Commandos (1968)

An Italian World War Two action drama, Commandos struggles against an atrocious script filled with tin-eared dialogue, but does enjoy some brisk scenes of combat and a few memorable character definition moments.

Sergeant Sullivan (Lee Van Cleef) is in charge of an American commando unit, tasked with parachuting into North Africa to seize and hold a strategic water supply site at a desert oasis. Sullivan and his men are to eliminate the Italian squad defending the well, and fool the nearby German units until the full American invasion force arrives to relieve the pressure.

Sullivan immediately clashes with Captain Valli (Jack Kelly), an inexperienced officer assigned to lead the operation. Sullivan had previously narrowly survived a mission on Bataan, a harrowing experience that haunts him in flashback, and he blames that fiasco on incompetent leadership. The North Africa mission initially unfolds relatively smoothly, except that Valli refuses to kill all the Italian defenders, taking some as prisoners instead. The ruse to convince the Germans that all is well at the oasis hits some rough spots when a German engineering unit makes an unexpected appearance at the well, and the mission ultimately begins to unravel when the Italian prisoners take the initiative.

With Americans pretending to be Italians holding actual Italians as prisoners and then pretending to be allies of the Germans while everyone speaks in English, Commandos quite quickly gets stuck knee deep in the desert sands, trying but failing to draw out the distinction between enemies. Other than the overstressed personality of Sergeant Sullivan, everyone else here is predominantly bland and interchangeable.

An army of writers (including Menahem Golan) get all their pencils crossed trying to conjure up meaningful dialogue, but all they are able to produce are tired, sometimes cringe-inducing exchanges. The outcome is wooden actors spouting stock lines scraped from the bottom of countless combat boots. In amongst the dross, Van Cleef does get to hiss, through clenched teeth, his version of what it takes to knife a man to death, his beady eyes shooting daggers at the overmatched Jack Kelly. Watching Van Cleef emotionally dominate Kelly is an unfair fight, like a spider devouring a small insect hopelessly captured in its web.

Leave it to an Italian production to find an excuse to insert a luscious whore into the barren desert, Marilu Tolo getting the dubious privilege of portraying a live-in hooker who still gets paid, despite having apparently no option to say no and nowhere obvious to spend her hard-earned cash. She somehow just disappears partway through the movie. 

Commandos does come to life when the shooting starts, the bazookas swing into action, and the bodies start to dramatically fall. Although director Armando Crispino never quite seems to get the pacing and editing right, the cuts jarring as the scenes switch from the shooter to the shot, there are enough flying bullets, rumbling tanks, and grim faced men exchanging chaotic fire to inject a reasonably satisfying boost of action. Otherwise, the tension is confined to plenty of skulking around in the murky dark, not helped by a buzzy monotonal soundtrack (with the tone often inexplicably jumping with the edits) that serves only to annoy.

Commandos does find a unique and memorable ending, a quiet anti-war moment forcing reflection on the wastes of war. The desert is where bad dialogue goes to die, but the sands of time reassert their message.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1966)

"You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig." Blondie (Clint Eastwood), talking to Tuco (Eli Wallach).

After the success of A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More, Sergio Leone finally gets his hands on the budget of his dreams, and assembles the first western opera to conclude the Dollars trilogy.

Driven by an Ennio Morricone music score featuring the two-note coyote yell that has since become legend, and with every scene a lesson in framing, actor dynamics, and fluid camera motion, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is an all-time classic.

It's a sprawling epic about three men chasing after buried gold coins in the midst of the American Civil War. Tuco (Wallach, as the Ugly) is a common bandit with a bounty on his head; Blondie (Eastwood, as the Good, although the term is only relative) is a bounty hunter; and Angeleyes (Lee Van Cleef, as the Bad) is a brutal henchman who is single-mindedly pursuing the buried loot. The three men wage a triangular battle against an unforgiving desert landscape littered with desperate, colourful and disposable secondary characters fully aware they are bit players in a masterpiece of storytelling.

Tuco and Blondie start out as partners but their relationship quickly deteriorates. They are soon engaged in a deadly personal feud when they stumble onto the clues needed to locate the treasure. Angeleyes is mercilessly abusing or mowing down anyone who gets in his way. The three men, after taking turns to brutalize each other, need to make their way to the cemetery where the gold awaits, while guarding against each other in a deadly game of shifting alliances, with the added inconvenience of avoiding the brutality of the Civil War raging around them.

Leone could now afford a third American actor, and Eli Wallach gives the performance of his life as Tuco. While Eastwood and Van Cleef nail their stoic and tough personas, Wallach takes over the heart of the film as the scrambly, shifty bandit scratching out a form of survival. He is also afforded the only back-story in the movie in a sequence where he meets his brother. Tuco's subsequent description of his relationship with his sibling as he rides away with Blondie is the trilogy's most human moment.

The film has two enormous, drawn-out showcase scenes, and both come in the final hour of this 160 minute epic. In the first, Tuco and Blondie stumble upon a stand-off at a bridge between the Union and Confederate armies, and need to resolve the meat-grinding battle hindering their progress . The second showcase occupies the final 30 minutes, and takes place at the cemetery. Here Leone conjures up one of the best scenes in the history of movie-making. As Ennio Morricone unspools the magnificent The Ecstasy of Gold theme, Leone's cameras alternate their focus between Tuco sprinting through the cemetery and the whirling multitudes of headstones. The end-result is spine-tingling, hypnotizing and brilliant, all at once.

Leone follows this with the classic triangular showdown between the three men in the middle of the cemetery, unimaginably stretched in time and filled with trademark tight close-ups. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is a breath-taking conclusion to a magnificent trilogy, and also one of the best films ever made.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: For A Few Dollars More (1965)

The middle chapter of Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, For A Few Dollars More is probably the least celebrated installment, but also ironically the most complete film among the three.

While A Fistful Of Dollars is magnificent in its sparseness and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is magnificently overblown, For A Few Dollars More sets about delivering the most solid character-driven narrative, perfectly meshing Leone's style with another brilliant Morricone score and a fleshed-out story now clearly backed by a bigger budget.

There are more locales, more extras, more scenes, more characters and more background than the first installment, without yet veering into all-out opera territory.

After the remarkable and unexpected success of A Fistful Of Dollars in Europe, Leone rapidly pulled For A Few Dollars More together. He convinced Clint Eastwood to sign-up for the sequel and reprise his role as the Man With No Name, even though the first film had not even been released in the US. With more budget at his disposal, Leone was also able to afford another American actor, and Lee Van Cleef got the role of Colonel Mortimer.

The plot sees Eastwood and Van Cleef as two bounty hunters who eventually team up to take down the gang of the vicious bandit El Indio (another perfect Gian Maria Volonte villain). There are bank robberies, gun-fights, exotic guns, and a terrific hat-shooting duel. The memorable secondary characters include Klaus Kinski as a massively haunch-backed member of El Indio's gang. The film reaches a climax with a final showdown that is almost triangular, sowing the seed for the magnificent finale that Leone conjured up for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The final math puzzle resolved by The Man With No Name is a terrific cherry on top of the icing on the cake, perfectly capturing the spirit of the trilogy.

For A Few Dollars More makes use of flashbacks and a simple but haunting tune (in this case played by a pocket watch), both tools that Leone would develop to chilling perfection in Once Upon A Time in the West.

For A Few Dollars More is the meat in the sandwich of the Dollars trilogy, not the most visible part of the meal, but certainly an essential component of the experience.






All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.