sergio leone anthology

During their hey-day in the 60’s, spaghetti westerns got no respect. And that might still be the case today if it weren’t for one director: Sergio Leone. The most obvious reason for the success of his “Man With No Name” trilogy is the presence of Clint Eastwood. But it was Leone’s work behind the camera that made Eastwood a star...not the other way around. The stylized violence and copious close-ups of squinting eyes established the formula quite well in Fistful of Dollars, but it’s also Leone’s weakest entry. For A Few Dollars More is a much more enjoyable film, adding Lee Van Cleef as a worthy adversary for Eastwood’s wandering anti-hero. And with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Leone stretched the genre to fit more grandiose ideas than anyone ever thought possible. Ego may have been the motivating factor (Leone always saw himself as a David Lean-type director whose skills went unrecognized), but the result is irrefutably one of the best westerns ever made. The final film in the set, Duck You Sucker (aka A Fistful of Dynamite), turns overtly political and, despite some strokes of genius, fails to keep up the momentum of the previous films. But it’s a worthwhile effort to see a patchwork masterpiece made by a true autuer working within a genre without autuers. Each film in the set features a 2-disc presentation with excellent commentary tracks, retrospective featurettes, interviews with Eastwood and a copious amount of advertising materials.