: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.
:11:04
Leone hired him,
thinking he had something.
:11:07
He was a qualified architect,
:11:09
and his contribution to Sergio Leone's
Westerns has been much underrated.
:11:13
The look of those Leone towns,
the way in which the sets are dressed.
:11:17
Carlo Simi designed
the costumes in this film as well,
:11:20
some of which were ready-mades,
some specially designed.
:11:24
The poncho, for example,
was specially designed,
:11:27
although one member of the crew
remembers, perhaps falsely,
:11:31
that they found it in a flea market
in Madrid, on the way to the shoot.
:11:35
But I doubt that that's true.
:11:46
In the shooting script,
it wasn't Baxters versus Rojos,
:11:50
in other words,
an Anglo family and a Mexican family,
:11:53
it was the Morales instead of the Baxters.
:11:56
In the original version it was
in fact two Mexican clans fighting it out.