:53:03
but the real baddies
tend to threaten children,
:53:06
or in the case of For A Few Dollars More
actually shoot a child.
:53:11
That's the signal
that this guy is really bad.
:53:13
So he's upped the ante
on the morality stakes,
:53:16
and this is the moment where
Marisol, Mary, the Virgin Mary,
:53:21
looks at the stranger.
:53:23
She wants to be protected.
:53:26
The setup of them is like a painting of the
Holy Family, in the middle of the street,
:53:31
which was quite deliberate, just as the
Last Supper will come a little bit later on.
:53:42
You could argue that most Hollywood
Westerns were, in fact, Protestant,
:53:47
and Socially Darwinist
in their attitude towards the West.
:53:52
That you do get references to the
Holy Family, particularly in Shane,
:53:56
a model of Fistful of Dollars.
:53:58
Marian and little Joey
in their log cabin in the wilderness,
:54:03
and there's Shane the redeemer
coming in and saving the Holy Family.
:54:07
But the profusion of iconography,
:54:10
and the setting in the southwest,
and the Italianising of the Western
:54:14
creates a Roman Catholic atmosphere,
rather than the Protestant Western.
:54:19
Just as the locale shifts from
the middle West, or Wyoming,
:54:23
or the setting of the Johnson County War,
which was where Shane was set,
:54:28
further southwest into
a Latin, Italian, Hispanic setting.
:54:33
Lots of things flow from that,
including Roman-Catholic iconography,
:54:37
which is part of Leone's project.
:54:40
It's not a religious Western.
He's mocking much of the iconography.
:54:44
He's saying, "We can recognise this
as something we can identify with. "
:54:56
So we're not judging Ramón,
we're saying he's smart. Smart wins.