:57:05
and became the armourer and
stunt director of Leone's films.
:57:08
Quite a lot of characters
in this film represent the assembling
:57:12
of a kind of repertory company for Leone.
:57:15
Mario Brega as the overweight baddie,
:57:19
Benito Steffanelli as the stunt man,
Morricone with the music.
:57:24
This is the establishment of a home team
:57:27
that Leone would work with in the future,
over and over and over again.
:57:31
Various Spanish actors
pop up in the background.
:57:34
Aldo Sambrell,
who is in this film as a baddie,
:57:37
plays a baddie in
nearly all Leone's Westerns.
:57:41
So he's assembling a crew that he will
work with in future, Spanish and Italian.
:57:46
And in this case, American as well,
:57:48
because a member of the Baxter clan,
the gunman who wears the green shirt,
:57:53
was played by Bill Thomkins,
who was in fact Eastwood's stunt double
:57:57
that he brought over
from the United States.
:57:59
So Bill Thomkins appears
as one of the Baxter gunmen.
:58:03
And on some prints of the film, he was
actually billed as "Western consultant",
:58:08
so Bill Thomkins not only
did stunts for Eastwood
:58:13
and appeared as one of the gunmen,
but was Western consultant.
:58:17
One can only wonder
what sort of consultancy,
:58:20
because it is so different
to the traditional Hollywood Western.
:58:25
Here's a dried-up riverbed in Almería.
:58:28
Almería's full of dried-up riverbeds called
ramblas, which were rivers but dried up.
:58:34
So you get canyon walls, and these wide,
:58:37
almost street-like
spaces in between them.
:58:42
These ramblas were incredibly useful
:58:44
for shooting sequences
of horses going at full tilt.
:58:48
You could keep the outside world out
and let 'em rip, like a racecourse.
:58:52
The ramblas of Almería
appear in this movie,
:58:55
as indeed they do
in all Leone's Westerns.