An absolute Western masterpiece is available to stream on Amazon Prime. Clint Eastwood plays the role that launched his Hollywood career. A duel from the film has become legendary.
Clint Eastwood has played countless roles in his eight-decade career. But one role defined him like no other: The Man With No Name, the symbol of the Western antihero, who defined an entire genre thanks to Sergio Leone’s Dollar trilogy. The best part of the series, Once Upon a Time in the West, is available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Clint Eastwood’s Western masterpiece ends with a magnificent scene.
The term “Dollar Trilogy” is misleading: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and TwoGlorious Outlaws are only loosely connected. In the third and final part, Eastwood’s hero, nicknamed Blondie, Eli Wallach’s bandit Tuco and the cold-blooded killer Sentenza (Lee Van Cleef) are looking for a pot of gold. And they’re doing it while the American Civil War is raging around them.
Watch the movie trailer here:
When Leone’s film was released in 1966, the reviews were mixed: many critics considered the genre of the so-called “spaghetti western” to be low-quality junk. But the third dollar film became a box office hit, even more so than its predecessors. Critics rightly re-evaluated the film in retrospect. Today, it is not only considered one of the best Westerns, but also one of the best films ever.
Two gloriously bad guys streaming on Amazon Prime
There are many reasons for this: thanks to the film, various technical ideas are now considered part of the genre’s standard repertoire. Leone, cameraman Tonino Delli Colli and composer Ennio Morricone transformed a sleazy genre into a solemn opera about bloodshed. But unlike Once Upon a Time in the West, Two glorreiche Halunken never forgets its popcorn origins: there are no lengths, no artificial pauses, no melodramatic dwelling on the dreams of its characters. This film is a spectacle from start to finish that never gets boring.
This is due in no small part to the various dueling scenes, at least one of which Western fans must know: the three-way duel in the finale, also known as a “Mexican standoff” in English, has made film history. Rarely has a scene of the genre been copied as often as the final gunfight between Blondie, Tuco and Sentenza in the middle of a cemetery.
Watch the ten-minute scene in English here:
If you now feel like watching one of the great masterpieces of the Western genre in full, you can stream “Two gloriously bad guys” on Amazon Prime.
