Yeah, it takes you out of the film and they’re completely unnecessary scenes.
But the Blu-Ray looks fantastic, I admit. Everybody is even more hideous and crusty!
Broadly, I kinda agree. It was supposedly Leone’s favorite ( Henry Fonda was his favorite actor ), but all due props to Unforgiven, I think TGTGATU is probably the best western ever done. One of the most epic finales in film, period.
However, as I have gone on about before with spittle-flecked lips, OUATITW’s opening is equally a work of art. I love how Leone lavishes film time on his generic red-shirt thugs.
Very annoying :mad:. I wasn’t even aware that those scenes existed, but I can see no reason to have a “Greedo shot first” modification to a classic film like that. Sergio Leone is 25 years dead now, I wonder how he would have reacted? As prone to bloat as he was ( and he sometimes was ), I assume that stuff was cut for a reason, not just to meet a length requirement.
Well, apparently not - it would appear those were intended by Leone all along: wiki.
I guess I’ll have to watch that restored cut some day and see what I think. But Leone was prone to bloat ;).
Oh, agreed. That’s fantastic.
My husband and I were just talking about how movies like OUATITW and TGTBATU (wow, those are awkward acronyms) and even the Coen brothers’ True Grit have one of those hero cycle-style liminal experience in them - a signal that you’ve crossed a border and left behind the normal. I think it’s very much about entering a “mythic space” that contains these godlike people.
In OUATITW the woman gets off a train and into a wagon and they go into this insane bar/restaurant/laundry/stable where she witnesses a crazy encounter with Harmonica and tons of people almost get shot and it’s such a nonissue that the bartender takes his story right back up again after they leave.
In TGTBATU Tuco and Blondie are having a real-world style disagreement (they had a bargain, Blondie was an asshole, Tuco is getting revenge, but it’s all a real world make sense sort of thing) when all of a sudden in the middle of the desert an ambulance full of dead men borne by horses running at top speed practically runs them over, inexplicably, and suddenly their story changes.
In True Grit, another movie about “there were giants in those days” in some respects, once Mattie and Rooster cross the river they come across a hanged man and a trader who offers to buy him off them. Hey, you’ve entered the underworld now!