1959 - THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII,

Muscle man Steve Reeves, is a Roman soldier returning to his old hometown of Pompeii after duty in Palestine.  He runs into a lot of political intrigue with some evil Pompeiians who are framing the Christians for murder and looting sprees.  Reeves gets to the bottom of things and figures out who is framing the Christians.

However the Christians are rounded up and sent to the arena to get eaten by the lions.  Just when things couldn't get worse Mt. Vesuvius erupts which resolves the whole mess by destroying everything in sight.

What we have here is kind of a cut rate version of I Claudius with some destruction stuff thrown in for good measure.  The volcano stuff at the end of the film isn't too bad the rest of the film is only so so.  This film is basically for people who enjoy these cheesy Italian "sword and sandal" epics/

100 minutes.

1968 - ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, the classic Western film

Haven't seen this one in a very long time.  My latest viewing of Once Upon a Time in the West reminds me that this is a great film and also a really long film.

Critics talk about how Sergio Leone is the master of wide screen composition and the close up, can't argue with that.  Leone also has a sense of humor, casting Henry Fonda as a real bad guy and loading the film up with cameos from American western actors like Jack Elam, Keenan Wynn, Lionel Standler and Woody Strode.  Strode said in an interview that Leone was the only director who gave him a lot of closeups in a film. 

Ennio Morricone wrote a fairly sparse score which consisted of about 3-4 themes which are repeated throughout the film it's very effective.  The principal leads with exception of Claudia Cardinale were American they were all very good, particularly Charles Bronson as a kind of crazed revenge seeking gunman.

Lots of good stuff in this film however the chief complaint would be the length of this film.  The film could probably have done with a few less expansive crane shots.

 166 minutes, written by Sergio Donati and Sergio Leone.

1964 - A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, still holds up pretty well.

Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood try to kick start the western genre back to life and started the spaghetti western craze instead.

For a fairly low budget production, A Fistful of Dollars looks pretty good.  The film was shot in Spain which is where most of these Italian westerns seemed to end up being filmed.  The Spanish locations always seemed to give these films a sense of dislocation, they never looked exactly like the American West. 

Anyone doing a film blog will tell you that A Fistful of Dollars is based on Kurosawa's Yojimbo and there are a lot of almost identical scenes in the Leone film.  However the presence of Clint Eastwood and the western setting probably made the wandering samurai/gunfighter story more accessible to American audiences than Kurosawa's film could ever hope to achieve.

This was the first of the misleading "man with no name " trilogy.  The films actually aren't really interconnected and the Eastwood character does have a name in each of the films. 

 In 1964, mainstream film critics and conventional western movie lovers had no idea of what to make of this mutated version of an American western with a TV actor in the lead.  The film had a nasty and violent streak in it that audiences weren't used to.  Of course today, Eastwood's anti hero and the brutal violence seem almost quaint. 

 To wrap it up with a piece of useless trivia, Eastwood's character is called "Joe" throughout the film.

100 minutes, great ready, screenplay by Sergio Leone, Víctor Andrés Catena, Jaume Comas, Fernando Di Leo, Duccio Tessari and Tonino Valerii.