Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale star in Sergio Leone’s loving tribute to the myth of the American West, which features Henry Fonda in a rare role as a cold-blooded villain.
Tag: Ennio Morricone
Dario Argento’s ‘Cat O’Nine Tails’ on Amazon Prime and Criterion Channel
The Cat O’Nine Tails (Italy, 1971), Dario Argento’s second feature, follows up his directorial debut The Bird With the Crystal Plumage in genre, style and “animal” theme (stretched into a trilogy with Four Flies on Gray Velvet). In Bird, Argento explores, pushes at, and plays with the mechanics of suspense and murder mystery spectacle in […]
John Cassavetes is ‘Machine Gun McCain’ on Amazon Prime Video
John Cassavetes was doing his Orson Welles thing—by that I mean acting in whatever movie paid well so he could finance his own, personal productions—when he took the lead in Machine Gun McCain (Italy, 1968), an Italian mob picture/heist movie hybrid shot in large part on location in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. […]
‘Let the Corpses Tan’ on Amazon Prime Video and Kanopy
The Belgian filmmaking team of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are carving a distinctive and specialized career melding stylized art movies with flamboyant genre pictures drawn from expressive techniques of Italian exploitation movies. With Let the Corpses Tan (Belgium/France, 2018), their third feature, they turn an adaptation of a cult pulp novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette […]
Spaghetti Blu-ray: A pair of ‘Ringo’s and ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’
A Pistol for Ringo/The Return of Ringo: Two Films by Dessario Tessari (Arrow, Blu-ray) A Fistful of Dynamite (Kino Lorber, Blu-ray) Duccio Tessari is not one of the directors known for spaghetti westerns. In fact, he only directed two in his long and successful career, both with Giuliano Gemma (billed as Montgomery Wood) playing against […]
Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ on Netflix and Showtime
The Hateful Eight, the eighth feature by Quentin Tarantino, is something strange and audacious even for a filmmaker whose films are rarely short of either. It’s a vivid widescreen western epic that runs nearly three hours yet plays like a chamber piece, largely contained within the intimate quarters of a stagecoach stopover during a blizzard […]
Sergio Corbucci’s ‘Compañeros’ on Amazon Prime
Compañeros (1970) is an ironic title, but then as a spaghetti western—a genre steeped in mercenaries and con men and double crosses—it would have to be. Swedish gun runner Yodlaf (Franco Nero), in Mexico in the heat of the revolution to sell his weapons to the highest bidder, and hot-headed Mexican peasant turned revolutionary officer […]