When you talk about great westerns, a large part of the conversation has to wrap around Sergio Leone's contribution to the genre. His most well known pictures are the Man with no Name series, starring Clint Eastwood, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Where those films set the precedent for westerns to come, this movie, in its own right, shows that the art of filmmaking is beyond just sets and dialog. With two anti-heroes and a villain, this movie grabs you by the collar and never lets go.The railroad is coming to the West and some men will do just about anything to anyone so that they will be the ones on top. The brightest star in this cast is Henry Fonda playing the villain, a ruthless psychopath who is willing to kill small children, and with Jason Robards and Charles Bronson playing the two anti-heroes the chemistry is totally explosive. The movie was completely shot in America, Utah and Arizona, on the local Indian Reservations, so the scenery is as breathtaking as it can be. The gunfights are classic Leone as well as the costumes for each character; you almost forget that your watching a fictional story and not something based on real life. Like in all of Leone's films the music is a major component in the movie and the tempo of the film keeps pace with it, which is no small feat.
The shear brilliance of having Fonda play the blackest character of his career, and pull it off as if it was second nature, totally goes to Leone, for convincing him to do the part. Not that I'm a big Western genre fan, but I do have some favorites, and even though it took me years to finally see a complete version of this film, it ranks right at the top of my list. If you like Westerns, and have never seen this film before, you should find it and watch it, this film just reinforces the idea that Sergio Leone was one of the greatest film makers of our time.
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