As the 1950s came to a close, the American Western became more and more sophisticated. Directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Sam Peckinpah made some of their best films around this time. Movies like The Searchers, Rio Bravo, and Ride the High Country were beautifully photographed and acted. But at the same time, bloated productions like Cinerama’s How the West Was Won and the abundance of Western material on television signaled that the genre’s dominance as a part of American culture was coming to a close.

So why not leave it to two Italians to revitalize it?  MGM and 20th Century Fox have just released a high-definition transfer of three of the most delirious and delicious western pictures ever to hit the screen, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.  Together, they’re known as the “Man With No Name” or the “Dollars” trilogy.  These three films are now available in one Blu-ray set, and also on standard definition DVD. With the enhanced high-definition picture and sound Blu-ray offers, they’ve never looked or sounded better.

Three men tie these pictures together: Clint Eastwood, whose whole persona can be traced back to these movies; Ennio Morricone, the composer whose music revolutionized the way we listen to movies; and Sergio Leone, whose mad vision broke the form of the western, pushing it almost to the point of parody.

For Leone, everything was a big deal.  Character and plot details are revealed purposefully, often with a big payoff later in the film.  In A Fistful of Dollars, when Gian Maria Volonté tells Eastwood that you must always aim for the heart to kill a man, and then demonstrates his sharpshooting on a suit of armor, you can bet that’ll come back later on.  The violence in these movies is more intense than what had been shown in earlier Westerns, and pre-dates the brutal Sam Peckinpah film The Wild Bunch by half a decade.  Even the people in Leone films are bigger than life.  His trademark close-up shots fill the frame with characters’ heads, or sometimes even just their eyes, lending a heightened sense of awareness.  We may not be seeing the scene from their point of view, but we know what they’re looking at, and what they’re thinking.  Leone’s shots of people are less about action and more like portraits.

If there was any one crazier than the Italian Leone when it came to interpreting stories of the American west, then it would be his longtime musical collaborator—and former schoolmate—Ennio Morricone.  Morricone came to film music with a diverse background, working in popular music arranging, as well as the avant garde.  So Morricone brought to the movies a gift for melody, and a wild streak. Prior to Leone, western movie scores were big orchestral affairs, meant to sound as wide as the prairie. Morricone – partly due to budget restrictions—went in the opposite direction, bringing electric guitar, a Mexican bugle, and most distinctively, whistling.

And that distinctive cry from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly?  According to University of Southern California professor Jon Burlinghame, whose enlightening commentary on Morricone is a highlight of these Blu-ray discs, Morricone took a cue from nature, and used the cry of the wolf to help construct his theme.

For the grand finale of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Morricone prepared one of the longest cues in the movie.  As Tuco, played by Eli Wallach, stumbles upon a massive graveyard where somewhere, a treasure is hidden, a rolling piano figure builds slowly on the soundtrack.  An English horn takes the theme, and finally an orchestra and wordless soprano add to the intensity.  That cue, which Leone reported played on the set while shooting the scene, and to which he edited the sequence, is called “The Ecstasy of Gold.”

You can really hear – and see – the progression that both Morricone and Leone made while watching A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good the Bad and the Ugly back-to-back.  Musical and cinematic ideas that were experiments in the first film of this trilogy were perfected by The Good the Bad and the Ugly, which is a true masterpiece, even if it wasn’t recognized as such back in the 1960s. Although the Western Cimarron had won a Best Picture Oscar in 1931, Westerns had been continually looked down upon as popular entertainment—not art.  It would take until 1990 for Westerns to be recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences once again, when Dances With Wolves took home the top prize.  Two years after that, Clint Eastwood, the man who got his big break in these three Westerns, would be honored with two Oscars for directing and producing his own revisionist Western, Unforgiven.

Blu-ray allows for more than just incredible video and audio quality, even though those are the main draws to this three-disc set.  Commentary tracks, interviews, and supplemental material included in the set help establish the case for the “Man With No Name” trilogy to be elevated beyond entertainment to art.  Don’t call ‘em spaghetti westerns.  They’re more than that.  Maybe… a three-course Italian feast.

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