Sergio Leone
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo.

"Mwaaah - Waa - Waa - Naa" That's how the last chapter of Sergio Leone's "Dollar Trilogy" begins. Beyond launching Clint Eastwood's career and the Spaghetti Western genre, it has the great merit of gifting the world of cinema with three of its greatest masterpieces. If in "A Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More" the film was "confined" to a more limited area and purpose (The first is set in a remote town dominated by two gangs ruthlessly competing for the territory and end up killing each other, while in the second, the "base" of the film is the story of a heist that comes off well but "ends badly"), here Leone says goodbye to a confined story and settings and crafts a small-scale epic, also adding one more "antagonist," because while there were always two in the previous films, here we find three.

The film opens by introducing the three figures: first the Ugly, then, in a very cynical way, the Bad (a brilliantly shot scene with fantastic timing and Oscar-worthy frames), and the "introverted" Good. From these first three scenes, Leone wants us to understand that this time he wants to go deeper, to show us how much he has learned and how skillfully he can handle a film of this magnitude. I certainly don't want to analyze scene-by-scene, but just consider the shootout in the bombed city ("I’m going to shoot them and come back!"), fantastically executed, or the one in the prison camp with Wallace torturing Tuco with Ennio Morricone's sweet symphony in the background or shortly after, the clash between two factions fighting over a bridge, which in the grand scheme of that war has no significance ("A fly shit") but yet ends up costing thousands of lives (Leone thus inserts a kind of critique of war in general); the scene is majestically shot, with a thousand extras, Leone manages to immerse us in a real military clash (Let's remember that the film is from '67, no computers, nothing fake, all real) illustrating it in an utterly ruthless and fatalistic way, just like the captain himself (played by a great Aldo Giuffrè), culminating with the majestic explosion of the bridge putting an end to this futile battle ensuring that "The soldiers go slaughter each other somewhere else."

The finale begins. The Good finds a dying survivor, and as he is about to give him his last cigar, Tuco starts to flee, Blondi hits him just in time with a cannon, knocking him against a tombstone, and thus enters the story. The camera rises simultaneously with the beginning of "Ecstasy of Gold" showing us the cemetery in all its splendor; a disbelieving Tuco starts running, while a dog (unleashed by surprise by Leone himself, causing Wallach a completely spontaneous reaction) runs alongside him, and thus begins the grand finale sequence. The music grows along with the images, taking on an almost celestial tone, with camera movements absolutely innovative for the time (and still beautiful today) and then stopping abruptly with the discovery of the fateful grave, with a lightning-fast close-up on Wallach; as Tuco begins to dig, the fateful shadow of the Blond appears, throwing him a shovel ("You'll dig faster with this!") just before Sentenza throws him an even bigger one ("You'll dig even faster with this!"), needless to say, the atmosphere in these scenes is one of absolute perfection, and cynicism is in the air yet somewhat surreal; proven that there is only a skeleton in the grave (Wallach's cross sign is fantastic) Eastwood "writes" the name of the real grave on a stone, placing it at the center of the open space in the cemetery, thus beginning the immortal final showdown, the first great example of (and very likely the most beautiful) Mexican standoff of all time, with breathtaking close-ups accompanied by Morricone's fantastic Spanish-influenced music, up to Eastwood’s gunshot that ends Sentenza’s life for good; note the rivalry/friendship between Tuco and Blondi that in some way "always balance things out", in fact after throwing Sentenza's hat and revolver into his respective grave with gunshots (a fantastic cynical comment to it all), after having Wallach pick up the $200,000, he orders him to put his neck in the noose, as a sort of balancing of accounts. (Simply fantastic scene, from a close-up of Wallach disbelieving for all that money, an upward camera move and the appearance of the noose with Tuco's head inside).

Needless to say how it ends, Blondi from afar breaks the noose causing Tuco to fall (After some absolutely eerie moments, with Wallach hanged at the brink of death making us almost feel like we ourselves have the noose tightening more and more around our necks!) onto a sack of dollars (always note Blondi's hierarchy, leaving half the money to Tuco, splitting the loot in half) and here reappear the writings: The Ugly on the sack of dollars, morally defeated but with half the booty on his side, The Bad is dead and (not) buried ignobly, and the Good, solitary as ever, departs for another place, who knows where and why. Wallach stands up, hands tied, running toward Eastwood and yelling: "Hey Blondie, you know whose son you are?! You're the son of a great whor..."AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. And the film ends, steeped in epic and myth.

An absolute masterpiece of cinema, a film not simply categorizable as "Spaghetti Western" but to be cataloged as THE FILM, a masterpiece that all filmmakers sooner or later must confront. In my opinion, alongside "Once Upon a Time in America" and "Once Upon a Time in the West", Leone's peak, the sum of all his experience and genius. A cult, a must for all those who know what a film is and what cinema is all about. Immortal.