Wayde,
You can email me privately regarding footnotes on your reviews. My email is:
Newavedist@aol.com
If you check out my other posts, you can get my background or log onto
www.imdb.com which lists
the features I directed and
www.mcfarlandpub.com for my movie books. I'm also a film collector so
I've gone through numerous prints of these titles and thus know what they did regarding distribution
of them. "OUTW" was interesting in that no two prints seemed to be the same. Each copy I inspected
had different scenes removed. They did make
a new 35mm low fade scope print (not Technicolor) for The Film Forum back in the eighties which looked
pretty good so I guess that was another pass of the US negative I forgot to mention. The image was mint without wear.
While Leone might have been influenced by the Italian neo-realist movement, I would not classify him
as part of it. His background was working on sword and sandal epics and he even made one called
"Colossus of Rhodes" which is not bad as these things go but doesn't contain any of his style.
I believe most of "OUTW" was shot in Spain like all of his productions using American and Italian
actors for the leads and Spanish extras for the bit parts. He did do some sequences in Monument Valley
as a homage to Ford. Leone went out of his way to find the ugliest and rattiest looking people for his movies which was another departure from Hollywood
Westerns where everyone seemed too 'clean' for the era. Before the 20th Century, hygene
was pretty awful with most people washing irregulary and the majority of the population filthy, wearing the same worn clothes all the time. Leone depicted this in his films compared to so many US films where
cowboys were clean shaven and appeared to be wearing new outfits from Western Costume.
On the other hand, the locations he used didn't look like the American West nor did the ethnic extras which was part of their surrealism. All of the ingrediants from the foreign looking locations and extras, bad dubbing, exagerrated sound effects and electronic guitar made them seem other worldly which is what I find so fascinating.
In terms of Eastwood, he wanted to branch out on his own and not get typecast as the man
with no name so he turned down Leone's offer to make another picture. It was a smart move on his part. Following "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", he tried some unusal roles in "The Beguiled", "Play Misty for Me", "Dirty Harry" and "Every Which Way But Loose". Now he's one of our top directors at age 76. Not bad for a guy who started as a supporting character in a TV B Western ("Rawhide"). In fact
appearing in cheap foreign films was usually a sign that an actor's Hollywood career was over (i.e. Edmund Purdom). Eastwood was one the rare lucky ones who became a star from these productions and was able to manage his career for decades to come. Others like Steve Reeves just fizzled out
and retired.
Beginning in 1965/1966, Hollywood movies started using blood squibs for bullet impacts.
Squibs are condoms filled with kyro syrup and food coloring that are wired to explode
blowing a small hole in the costume and squirting out the stage blood. (I've used them
in some of my pictures). You need a licensed pyrotechnican to rig them so the actor doesn't get hurt.
"Major Dundee" and "The Sand Pebbles" were among the first titles to feature them but
irregularly. Sometimes there was a squib and other times there wasn't which was disorienting. "Bonnie and Clyde"
was the first movie to use them consistently for every bullet hit with the climax in slow motion.
Pekinpah used this technique throughout "The Wild Bunch". Curiously, Leone did not utilize
them and although his films were very violent and sadistic, they aren't that bloody. People still fell after
getting shot, often within the same frame as the person firing, but without any bullet
impact. Quite a difference between "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "The Wild Bunch"
released the same year. I guess that's another element that makes Leone Westerns seem strange today.