Product Description
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Disc 1: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY Collector's Edition Disc
2: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY Bonus Disc Disc 3: A FISTFUL OF
DOLLARS Collector's Edition Disc 4: A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS Bonus
Disc Disc 5: FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE Collector's Edition Disc 6:
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE Bonus Disc Disc 7: DUCK, YOU SUCKER (A
FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE) Collector's Edition Disc 8: DUCK, YOU SUCKER
(A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE) Bonus Disc
.com
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From the innovative "James Bond Western" style of A Fistful of
Dollars (1964) to the complete restoration of Duck You Sucker
(1971), The Sergio Leone Anthology pays lavish tribute to one of
the greatest of all Italian directors. A lifelong film buff
deeply influenced by the movies he enjoyed as an uneducated youth
in southern Italy, Leone (1929-1989) had officially directed only
one previous film (1961's The Colossus of Rhodes) when he
recruited a relatively unknown American TV star named Clint
Eastwood (on a modest salary of $15,000) and made cinema history
with A Fistful of Dollars, not the first Western made by an
Italian but certainly the first truly Italian entry in the
"Spaghetti Western" genre that Leone virtually invented. Each of
the four films included in this eight-disc set are influential
milestones in that once-maligned, now-celebrated genre, and while
Leone's classic Westerns were largely dismissed by critics
throughout the 1960s and '70s, they now stand as the masterworks
of a visionary artist who was posthumously elevated into the
pantheon of world-class filmmakers. To acknowledge Leone's
historic impact on the genre, the Leone Anthology includes MGM's
previous two-disc extended-cut collector's edition of The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and applies the same deluxe
to A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More (1965),
and, for the first time on DVD, the fully restored
English-language version of the original 157-minute Italian cut
of Duck You Sucker (previously known by its alternate U.S. title
A Fistful of Dynamite), which was never shown in American
theaters.
A Fistful of Dollars is best known in America for spawning the
"Man With No Name" marketing campaign that made Eastwood a star,
although Eastwood's character is clearly named "Joe" in this
cleverly adapted low-budget remake of Akira Kurosawa's samurai
classic Yojimbo, in which Eastwood's lone drifter vies for
strategic advantage in a corrupt Mexican town divided by a bitter
family feud. The operatic qualities that grew increasingly lavish
in Leone's later films are evident here on a smaller scale, along
with the modern, innovative score of Ennio Morricone, whose
legendary collaborations with Leone (on all four of these films)
were vital to the director's deliberate defiance of Hollywood's
Western traditions. Fistful was an instant success in Italy and
its immediate sequel, For a Few Dollars More, is often cited as
the definitive Spaghetti Western, with a bigger budget ($600,000)
and a charismatic costar with Eastwood (Lee Van Cleef) in an
uneasy alliance between slingers that introduced a hint of
humanity to Leone's increasingly de-mythologized vision of the
West. While teaming Eastwood, Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in a
ruthless Civil War-era quest for buried Confederate gold, The
Good, The Bad, and The Ugly completed Leone's "Dollars" trilogy
(filmed primarily on locations in Spain) on a truly epic scale,
introducing the darker cynicism, grander ambition, and artistic
maturity that defined Leone's later films.
Leone vowed to quit making Westerns after his 1968 masterpiece
Once Upon a Time in the West (a Para release not included in
this set), but circumstances led him to seize the directorial
reins of Duck You Sucker, a dynamic yet deeply disillusioned
study of revolution that can now take its rightful place among
Leone's greatest films. Like several of Leone's films, Duck You
Sucker suffered a long history of cuts, re-cuts, and censorship,
and the fully restored 157-minute version (unseen since the
film's 1971 Italian premiere) more effectively explores the
complex friendship between an Irish rebel explosives expert
(James Coburn) and a brutish Mexican bandit (Rod Steiger) who
becomes a reluctant revolutionary in 1913 Mexico. With explosive
action sequences that remain among the most impressive ever
filmed, Duck You Sucker now gives richer meaning to the film's
original Italian title Giù la testa ("Keep Your Head Down"),
asserting Leone's theme that family is far more important than
the devastating violence of revolution. In the Leone Anthology (a
variation on previous DVD sets released in England, Germany, and
Japan), Duck You Sucker is the long-awaited crown jewel in a
box-set of cinematic treasures. And while Leone purists will
endlessly debate over the image quality (generally quite
impressive) and 5.1-channel soundtrack mixes included here,
there's no denying that The Sergio Leone Anthology is the
definitive Leone tribute for a technically demanding 21st-century
audience, and that's cause for enthusiastic celebration. --Jeff
Shannon
On the DVDs
Listed is the eight-disc set (also including cast lists, scene
selections, brief synopses, and behind-the-scenes details), the
bonus features found in The Sergio Leone Anthology provide a
comprehensive study of Leone's career, themes that dominated his
work, and the historical contexts that inform Leone's classic
"Spaghetti Westerns." With an even balance of lively authority
and erudite scholarship, accled Leone biographer and British
film historian Sir Christopher Frayling provides informative
commentary on A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and
Duck You Sucker, while Time magazine critic Richard Schickel's
equally astute commentary remains on MGM's previous two-disc
release of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (Many of these
features were prepared for the U.K. version of The Leone
Anthology, including interviews conducted in 2003 and 2005.) In
addition to a wide variety of vintage American radio promotional
spots for these films, the meticulously researched and
delightfully fascinating "location comparisons" show "then and
now" scenes from all four films, with original film clips
perfectly matched to location photos taken in 2004 by devoted
Leone fans Donald S. Bruce and Marla J. Johnson.
Extras on A Fistful of Dollars begin with "A New Kind of Hero"
(22:53), Frayling's behind-the-scenes analysis of the film's
innovative anti-hero played by Clint Eastwood, whom Leone hired
(when first choices Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Lee Marvin, and
Charles Bronson proved too expensive) after seeing Eastwood in a
1961 episode of Rawhide. In the interview featurette "A Few Weeks
in Spain" (8:33), Eastwood recalls the experience of making the
film on location, and "Tre Voci" (or "Three Voices") is an
11-minute combination of retrospective interviews with producer
Alberto Grimaldi, screenwriter Sergio Donati, and Mickey Knox, an
American actor living in Rome who provided many of the
post-synchronized voices for the English-language versions of
Leone's films. In "Not Ready for Prime Time" (6:20), maverick
American director Monte Hellman describes the circumstances that
led to his direction of an explanatory Fistful of Dollars
prologue for the film's American network TV premiere on August
29, 1977. Featuring Harry Dean Stanton, and filmed as an attempt
to "legitimize" the Man With No Name's seemingly immoral
behavior, the rarely-seen prologue (7:44) is introduced by
obsessive Leone fan Howard Fridkin, who saved his Betamax
from the one-time-only 1977 broadcast.
Frayling examines For a Few Dollars More in "A New Standard"
(20:15), a "making of" featurette with emphasis on the film's
male/male dynamic (described by Frayling as Leone's "invention of
the brother he never had"). In "Back for More" (7:08), Eastwood
recalls how he'd be to watch Leone to inform his own
directorial ambitions. "Tre Voci" (11:05) continues the
retrospective interviews with Grimaldi, Donati, and Knox, and
"The Original American Release Version" (5:19) examines three
edits (including removal of the name "Manco" so Eastwood's
character could remain "nameless" in the film's American
marketing) that were made for the film's U.S. release.
Extras on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are highlighted by
"Leone's West" (19:53) and "The Leone Style" (23:47), a pair of
excellent documentaries exploring the film itself and the
evolution of Leone's visual style as his budgets and production
values grew to epic proportions. Featuring interviews with Clint
Eastwood, critic and Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel, and
others, these are must-see features packed with entertaining
observations and anecdotes. Lending historical context to Leone's
film, "The Man Who Lost the Civil War" is a 14-minute excerpt
from a documentary about ill-ed Confederate general Henry
Hopkins Sibley's botched campaign to expand Confederate dominance
in the West. The "Reconstruction" featurette (11:07) is a
detailed study of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's painstaking
restoration to Leone's intended 179-minute extended cut,
featuring an interview John Kirk, the MGM director of technical
operations who supervised the film's meticulous reconstruction.
The essential contribution of composer Ennio Morricone is
celebrated in the "Il Maestro" featurette (7:47) and film music
historian Jon Burlingame provides an excellent audio-only survey
(12:29) of Morricone's most popular soundtrack. Deleted scenes
include the extended "Tuco torture" sequence (in which the brutal
beating of Eli Wallach's character is masterfully cross-cut with
the melancholy performance of a prison-camp orchestra); the
brilliant "Socorro sequence" that was drastically edited in
previous cuts; and a French trailer revealing s and alternate
angles not seen in the film's various theatrical releases. The
gallery includes eight s from the film's
international marketing campaigns.
For Duck You Sucker, Frayling's film-by-film analysis continues
in "The Myth of Revolution" (22:10), a behind-the-scenes study of
Leone's deepening artistic maturity, as manifested in the film's
cynical view of political revolution. "Donati Remembers" (7:20)
is a continuation of the retrospective interview with
screenwriter Sergio Donati (who by the early '70s was urging
Leone to return to smaller-scale filmmaking), and "Once Upon a
Time in Italy" (6:00) explores the ambitious effort that went
into creating the definitive traveling exhibit of material
(props, s, costumes, etc.) from Leone's archives and
beyond, first shown at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage,
in Los Angeles, California, in July 2005. In "Sorting Out the
Versions" (11:37), film historian Glenn Erickson narrates a
visual survey of the various cuts and changes made to Duck You
Sucker during its tortured history of global distribution, and in
"Restoration Italian Style" (6:07), MGM director of technical
operations John Kirk outlines the painstaking effort to restore
Duck You Sucker to its original Italian premiere length of 157
minutes, resulting in the first-ever English language version
based on the film's Italian-language restoration of 1996. The
disc concludes with the enjoyable "Location Comparisons" (9:32),
six rare radio spots from the film's original U.S. release in
1972, and (as with all other films in this set) the original
theatrical trailer. --Jeff Shannon