The Good, The Bad and the Ugly - re:View

Thanks for immediately ruining the ending you hacks!!!!

Shill your podcast, that's the spirit.

Top Hat Monkey

Exactly, R-Pupkin! Wayne's performance in Liberty Valance puts the lie to the notion that The Duke had no acting chops (aka Range). And just to add to the discussion of great traditional westerns, I'll toss in Shane, one of the finest ever made.

Top Hat Monkey

“It will suck.” No lies detected!

R_Pupkin

I've said my peace on this lol

Sarah Low

Surprised they did not invoke Yojimbo as the inspiration for fistful of dollars?

I wonder if Jay and Rich know that they watched 2 difference cuts of the movie. Jay watched the 4K disc which is the shorter U.S. theatrical release and Rich watched the one for sale on Amazon Prime streaming which is the longer Italian cut. The extra scenes only fill in a few plot points but do have an Angel Eyes scene in the middle of that long section he's otherwise missing from the movie. (The voice dubs are all off in the extra scenes due to being dubbed decades later, which is why the U.S. theatrical cut is usually preferred.)

DonMac

Fantastic re:View - the Rich & Jay format is a lot of fun. (Side note: the re-visiting little seen movies from Rich’s childhood were excellent episodes). Really great to get Jay’s reaction and commmentary on the film. It’s nice to have the new, fresh takes after a lifetime of loving this movie. Also - I think For a Few Dollars More is incredible. Absolutely brilliant. There are criticisms about it (long and with a muddled plot) but Lee Van Cleef is awesome as a pseudo-good guy (he may not be a white-hat but he’s got a moral motivation) and I love Gian Maria Volontè in that film. His Indio is the psychopath bandit that fuels nightmares! great stuff, and as usual Mr. Evans nails it: to all you GenX-ers, try something different! You won’t regret it.

R_Pupkin

Absolutely love the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It’s almost an anti-western, western. Telling the story of the frontier days lawlessness fading away in favor of “progress” and law & order. Statehood and structure - how good is John Wayne in that movie?? Literally the aging, fading embodiment of the western….but still the biggest badass in the territory. and he plays it so well. Lots of sorrow and resignation in his performance. He gets it. Doesn’t like it - but he understands it and knows he’s powerless to stop it. Brilliant acting.

R_Pupkin

Let’s not support Alex Kurtzman in any way. All it will do is encourage him. Allegedly if the new batch of shows fails to catch fire, is finally going to lose power over Star Trek. Of course that doesn’t guarantee his replacement will be any better

Jeff Kleist

Can somebody tell Mike to watch "Strange New Worlds"? It's actually star trek unlike everything since Enterprise. If he doesn't like it I will send RLM 1000$. That's how confident I am that he will like it.

Mr Moxie

If they want help picking out an old school Western to watch, just start with the ones in the Criterion Collection

DonMac

Nobody mentioned it yet, so here's a bit of trivia : Sergio Leone had someone else in mind as his Man With No Name, none other than our good pal Richard "Blooddebts" Harrison, who was very active in Italian cinema at the time. Unfortunately, he was quite fed up with westerns, and this project looked like a bomb. Leone asked him, at least, some help to pick a replacement. Out of three, Harrison picked Clint Eastwood because he's the only one who could ride. He still jokingly claims that this is greatest contribution to cinema.

Bill Wilson

Gremlins 3 is coming! It will suck https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2918116/reference/

Venusian Society

"I refuse to watch anything made by hack thief Sergio Leone." That's the spirit...

Manuel Johnen

Popping in the comments to say RLM I love you so much but as a Kurosawa mega-fan and the host of the "Mifune Mondays" stream (Jim Maxwell and I watched Hidden Fortress together and talked shop!), I refuse to watch anything made by hack thief Sergio Leone. But if you do get around to a Yojimbo re:View...

Sarah Low

Forgot Van Cleef was in that one. He was also one of Lee Marvin's goons in the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as was Strother Martin (i.e., the prison warden in Cool Hand Luke).

Darrick Taylor

"High Noon", starring (coincidentally...?) Lee Van Cleef as one of the bad guys... :D It's an alright movie, but I was slightly disappointed by it, and it doesn't hold a candle to "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"... but it finally delivered the proof, that Lloyd Bridges was NEVER young...

Manuel Johnen

Glad to hear Jay loved the film. Re: older Westerns, they weren't all silly. (Most were but then most films are. We just remember the great ones and our memory airbrushes out the rest.) John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is suitably dark and morally grey. It definitely represented a departure from his earlier work. Even then, a movie like The Searchers, which was not great, is still kind of dark. (FWIW Wayne was good in both of those too, even though he had virtually no range as an actor.) There are others, like High Noon, which hold up as well. Anyway, loved the review. Cheers!

Darrick Taylor

Hey, don't knock multilingual coproductions! Financing from multiple countries gave these movies less painfully tiny budgets and more exotic locations. Not to mention multinational actors who collectively had appeal in more markets. Speaking of Spanish locations: when the Man With No Name films were made, Spain had just recently opened up to moviemaking and tourism after spending a decade or so trying to be North Korea. This opening up led to more, uh, liberated ideas making their way into a repressive dictatorship. So these movies were practically heroic, and every movie should be shot in North Korea.

Kurt