:23:00
was a way of clearing their minds
of what went on at home.
:23:03
They were disappointed with the '50s,
hated television Westerns.
:23:07
Too overlit, too anodyne, too clean.
Everyone's teeth sparkled too much.
:23:12
So let's rough up
the Western, make it grungy.
:23:14
You have a revisionist
grunge in the foreground,
:23:17
with the stubble, and the cheroot,
and everyone looking a bit dirty,
:23:21
with a kind of epic pretension in the
background. That's what Leone was after.
:23:34
Now, this location was south of Madrid,
:23:38
but not as far south as Almería.
:23:41
Aldea del Fresno, "the valley
of the ash trees", by the river Alberche.
:23:46
It's a favourite Leone moment. They ride
together, the camera goes up on a crane,
:23:51
and you can see beyond
it a whole crowd of people.
:23:54
One of those visual surprises that you get,
:23:56
trompe I'oeil effects
that you get in his films.
:23:59
One of Leone's favourite painters was
Magritte, who specialised in juxtaposition.
:24:05
In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
there's a famous one.
:24:08
They look through the bushes
and there's the trenches
:24:11
with literally thousands of troops.
:24:14
This is the first of those moments, at
the Río Bravo canyon, called Río Bravo
:24:18
because it's the Mexican side and the
Rio Grande was known as the Río Bravo.
:24:23
This is the first of the major sequences
in the film that was not in Yojimbo.
:24:29
There's no reference to this
in Yojimbo at all. This was added.
:24:33
The consignment of gold,
the massacre of the troops,
:24:36
the introduction
of the baddie Ramón Rojo,
:24:39
Gian Maria Volonté,
an Italian theatre actor.
:24:42
All this was added by the scriptwriters
:24:45
to fill out the story of Yojimbo,
and make it even more mean.
:24:49
The massacre doesn't happen in Yojimbo.
:24:52
This ups the ante in terms
of the body count in the movie,
:24:55
and makes the violence
that much more larger than life.