Among the best-known Westerns of all time, the final film of Leone’s Dollars trilogy is a thrilling epic that dramatically expands the historical sweep and ambition of his earlier films, once again casting Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name, who this time sports a strange halo of sorts as a crypto-religious figure, an angel of redemptive death. In its very title The Good, the Bad and the Ugly openly declares Leone’s interest in creatively using recognizable film archetypes to fashion a new critical iconography that playfully confuses visual tropes of cinema, religion, history and popular culture with a wit and sophistication similar to emergent Pop Art. Set during the Civil War, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly uses its improbable story of hidden gold to again pit Eastwood against Lee Van Cleef, now a sinister mercenary, with Eli Wallach completing the unholy trilogy as the lusty, oafish stumbling bandit – a striking, twitching emblem of human weakness and greed. A massively influential film, Leone’s epic is a bravura example of both his baroque visual style, revealed as much in the incredible sets as Tonino Delli Colli’s extraordinary widescreen cinematography, as well as his savage gallows humor – with both intertwining in an astonishing cemetery shootout that remains one of the iconic moments of postwar Italian cinema. – HG