I am under Spaghetti Western overdose. I finally finished the “Man with No Name” trilogy. Clint Eastwood with lots of Ennio Morricone music and sounds. It’s a western, and they do dumb things like they only do them in westerns.
For instance, would anybody in his right mind walk down an open street facing a gunfighter at the other end, slowly, looking down into the face of the opponent, and not watching for ambushes from a hundred places on both sides of the street. No matter how good you are with your gun, no matter how fast you can draw, no matter that you can cut off a rope with a bullet to save a guy from hanging, you don’t live very long if you walk down the street in broad daylight so anybody can just wipe you out.
Never in the real world would somebody do a thing like that. I went paintballing once, and you just stick your head out over a wall and sure enough somebody plants a bullet on your visor. You stand up and you are bombarded with pellets from all directions. Hit hurts with paintballs. If they were actual bullets, you’d be dead. You’d never walk down the street unscathed.
But the man with no name and the other gunfighters can do it. All the time. Over and over again.
I won’t even talk about the story line in this movie. It really does not matter. It’s all about photography, music and the mystique of the gunfighter. However, I was impressed with the protrayal of the Civil War, the senseless slaughter of Americans against Americans, not only in the East where we usually think of the Civil War taking place, but here in the western sage. There are scenes and images of war in this film that take the glory all away and leave us with scum, blood, guts and hopelessness
Rating: *
Are you kidding me? I love it when people relate movies to reality. “You would never do this…”. Nobody, with the exception of you, watches these movies with a realistic approach. These movies are great in the fact that they are fiction. Clint is suppose to be the “bad ass”; the only guy that walks down the street unscathed. Keep analyzing movies, eventually you will get better at it. Or better yet, stop analyzing movies and just enjoy them. Everything doesn’t have to be a learning experience.
“It’s all about photography, music and the mystique of the gunfighter.” That’s the beauty of the movie. Take it for what it’s worth. Sergio Leone captured the spirit of the western.
Great comment. There is a fine line between watching a movie and just letting go — you are definitely right — and watching a movie and never really getting into it. This was one of those for me. I never got out of the space of “I am sitting here watching a movie, I am sitting here watching a movie…”
So when that happens, I have time to think and come up with “nobody would do this…” thoughts.
I do think that Leone’s masterpiece is “Once Upon a Time” where he combines all the elements of the gunfighter mystique and the movie industry at the time and makes the best western of all time. It’s been years that I saw it, but it’s time again…
All around – I really appreciate your comments and the time you spent making them.