A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe

Major Cabot meets Joe Thanks at gunpoint

Supposedly the last western Sergio Leone worked on, 1975’s A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (aka Un genio, due compari, un pollo) has a ramshackle spaghetti western charm and an opening section which strongly recalls the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West – it’s operatic, dramatic, largely silent and at the end of it there’s a plot reversal designed to shock and delight. It’s this section that was supposedly directed by Leone himself. With spanking wide vistas of Monument Valley and close-ups so vivid you can see sweat droplets forming, that must almost certainly be true. Damiano Damiani did the rest of it, poor guy, and the story here … Read more

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Original art for the poster of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 January Lee Van Cleef born, 1925 On this day in 1925, Clarence Leroy Van Cleef Jr was born, in New Jersey, USA. Best known for his portrayal of baddies, Van Cleef served on submarine chasers in the Second World War before becoming a time and motion man after the war ended. Not looking enough like a traditional penpusher to satisfy his colleagues, Lee was persuaded by them, and his friends, to give the stage and film world the benefit of his hawk nose and eyes, each of which was a different colour, thanks to the heterochromia iridium mutation. Van Cleef’s … Read more

Once Upon a Time in the West

Henry Fonda is the baddie in Once Upon A Time In The West

By 1967, after countless Italian sword and sandal epics and three astonishingly successful spaghetti  Westerns (A Fistful Of Dollars, A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly), director Sergio Leone was tired of men in period costume and was eager to try his hand at something more contemporary. It wasn’t to be. Paramount studios prevailed upon Leone to make one more western for them. In return they promised to fund his four-hour, four-decade overview of organised crime, Once Upon a Time in America. Leone’s fourth Western could easily have turned out to be a 90-minute contractual obligation, with Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and whoever was available squinting hard into the … Read more