Top Western Movies, Part 4

“The Man With No Name” Trilogy:  A Fistful of Dollars / For a Few Dollars More / The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

A Fistful of Dollars (1964) / Director: Sergio Leone / Stars: Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volonté, Marianne Koch, Wolfgang Lukschy
A wandering gunfighter (Clint Eastwood) comes to town riven by greed, pride, and revenge, and decides to profit by playing off the warring families, the Baxters and the Rojos, against each other.

For a Few Dollars More (1965) / Director: Sergio Leone / Stars: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonté, Mario Brega
Two bounty hunters with different intentions team up to track down an outlaw.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) / / Director: Sergio Leone / Stars: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Aldo Giuffrè
There’s a fortune in gold buried in a remote cemetery, and two bounty hunters make an uneasy alliance in a race against a third to get there first. Clint Eastwood is the titular Good, Lee Van Cleef is the Bad, and Eli Wallach is the Ugly. But they’re alike in their selfish devotion to finding the loot. No one is named Pretty is this sordid, unheroic world of caprice and violence. Ennio Morricone’s famously evocative score is a character unto itself.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller  (1971) / Director: Robert Altman / Stars: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane
John McCabe (Warren Beatty) is a flush gambler who teams up with a prostitute (Julie Christie) to build a casino-brothel in the community of Presbyterian Church. Success brings the attention of a mining company, which decides to take over. Featuring Altman’s improvisational style and songs by Leonard Cohen.



 

Will Penny (1968) / Director: Tom Gries / Stars: Charlton Heston, Joan Hackett, Donald Pleasence, Lee Majors, Bruce Dern
Will Penny was Charlton Heston’s favorite film role. Penny, a lifelong loner, takes on a deranged clan called the Quints (led by Donald Pleasance) as he takes in a beautiful woman and her son, realizing what’s been missing from his life (“too soon old and too late smart,” he aptly says). Not that it matters ultimately; no progress or happiness lasts in a world where archetypes revert to type.