It’s Friday, which can mean only one thing, it’s nearly Saturday, ok two things, it means it’s time for my choice in this weeks Classic Film Friday.
As a lone stranger rolls in to a town filled with hate. We have the start of a collection of probably the best westerns ever from director Sergio Leone.
A Fistful Of Dollars or Yojimbo
Even though A Fistful Of Dollars is a remake of Japanese director Akia Kurosawa’s amazing Yojimbo and changing the place to the wild west and the Samurai swords for guns, the film really broke new ground on its original release and even on today’s standards it still stands as a classic western.
Not only was the film a box office hit, but it also launched the movie careers of both Italian director Sergio Leone and an almost unknown young American actor named Clint Eastwood.
Since seeing A Fistful Of Dollars as a child I became a fan of the Sergio Leone westerns and still today, for me anyway, other westerns pale in comparison to the epics that followed with Eastwood and Leone.
With its well placed violence, realism and its strange tongue-in-cheek humour, the movie is still enjoyable to watch and with the advent on DVD, digital remastering and Dolby Digital 5.1, which gives the brilliant Ennio Morricone soundtrack a fresher more powerful sound, the film is even better to watch.
They Just Don’t Make Them Like They Used To!
It’s a real shame that we don’t get westerns as good as this and the films that followed, but I suppose that’s because there will never be another Sergio Leone.
But there are a few of the Sergio Leone westerns that followed this that are really worth seeing, which are:
- For A Few Dollars More
- The Good The The Bad And The Ugly
- Once Upon The Time In The West
- A Fistful Of Dynamite
A Night In With Sergio Leone
So even yif you don’t like a lot of the westerns that you may have seen in the past, if you’ve never seen a Sergio Leone western then you are missing out, so check them out and have night in with the master of the spaghetti westerns 😉
Karen Woodham is the founder and owner of the Blazing Minds. She is also a Cinema reviewer and works with RealD 3D reviewing the latest 3D releases and IMAX, she has also had several articles published in various publications including the first edition of SFW Magazine. In 2015 she became an Award Winning Blogger and also has her website listed as one of the UK’s Top 10 Film Blogs.
