:09:25
The coffin maker, Piripero, is played
by an Austrian actor called Joseph Egger,
:09:30
who was 75 years old at
the time he made this film,
:09:34
and went on to appear as the old prophet
in For A Few Dollars More, his last movie.
:09:40
He was a music-hall star,
a sort of stand-up comedian,
:09:43
who was very popular
with West German audiences.
:09:45
So Spanish bartender, American
stranger, Austrian coffin maker outside.
:09:52
And the three choruses in this movie,
:09:54
the three characters who introduce us
to the theatre of San Miguel,
:09:58
this flyblown village
just across the Mexican border,
:10:01
are the bell-ringer,
the coffin maker, and the bartender,
:10:05
which are exact equivalents of the same
characters in Kurosawa's film Yojimbo,
:10:09
where there's a cooper
and a coffin maker and a watchman,
:10:13
who serve a very similar function.
:10:20
In Kurosawa, it's the fire tower
in the 19th-century Japanese village
:10:24
where the yojimbo sits
and watches the mayhem that he causes,
:10:28
looking down upon
the two factions as they fight.
:10:31
Here, it's the balcony of the saloon,
:10:33
which was specially designed as
a frontage by Carlo Simi, the designer.
:10:38
Carlo Simi had walked into Sergio Leone's
office in Rome, just before filming started,
:10:44
had looked at the existing designs
for the film Fistful of Dollars,
:10:47
which was called The Magnificent
Stranger, its working title,
:10:51
and thought they looked terrible.
:10:53
He got the drawings,
made them larger than life,
:10:57
with huge Mexican interiors and beams
:10:59
and a rather over-the-top form
of Wild West, or Wild Southwest, design.