FOR FRIDAY: LEONE ON THE JOB

On the day that starts the weekend before Thanksgiving, all is well, relatively speaking-- there is work to be done and the spirit in which to do it. With that in mind, a couple of items relating to the work of one of the masters, a man who made comparatively few films, but made up for his lack of proliferation with the sheer density of cinema contained within each of the features he finished.

First, take a look at this erudite, almost mathematical breakdown of the gloriously magnified graveyard showdown that caps The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), a smartly composed 14-minute video essay by Max Tohline.



Tohline is a Missouri-based film scholar and lecturer who has clearly spent a lot of time looking closely at what Leone has done to heighten the ending of this masterpiece with as much sheer cinematic bravado and intelligence as he could muster. Many thanks to long-time SLIFR  reader Gonzalo Jimenez for tipping me to Tohline's fine piece.

And then there's Scott Rollins' nifty collection of photos chronicling the director at work on the sets of Once Upon a Time in the  West (1969; top), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (above) and many others. The entirety of his gallery, Sergio Leone: Sul set, is part of his project The Scott Rollins Film and TV Trivia Blog, which features information and photo-intensive posts on actors and filmmakers from throughout pop culture. Many thanks to him for collecting these shots, two of which grace this page today. Now, for me, back to work.

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