A Fistful of Dung

Rating: 2/10 (16 August 2019)

I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of Rod Steiger in the first place - he's basically a male Meryl Streep (a stupid, inconsistent, different bad accent in every movie) and lots of hammy over-acting. But here he's just doing a Tuco impression (Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly). Give me the original, please. Coburn's stupid fake Irish accent is nearly as grating.
The graphic violence? Well, that's the director's trademark. You don't go into a Leone film expecting tearful embraces, poetry readings and discussions about feelings.
This is such low-grade, recycled garbage the stench of it retroactively rubs off on the rest of Sergio Leone's work. In fact, now that I've seen the full, un-cut versions of Duck, You Sucker (aka A Fistful of Dynamite) and Once Upon A Time in America, I can confidently say that, by and large, Leone was a bona fide hack.
He ripped off Kurosawa's Yojimbo with A Fistful of Dollars, an obscene, nearly shapeless, gratuitously violent bloodbath with so few redeeming qualities it would never be shown on TV if it didn't star Clint Eastwood.
Having stumbled into a Euro hit he kept Eastwood on board and made For a Few Dollars More (surely the most on-the-nose movie title in cinema history). This second instalment in the so-called Dollars Trilogy explored a relationship between Eastwood's Monco and Lee Van Cleef's Col. Mortimer, part humor, part mutual admiration, part rivalry, with liberal doses of sly comedy worked in to good effect.
Now Leone had a bankroll, so he embarked on the ambitious The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. He shot what must have been a million miles of film, got an all-time brilliant score out of Ennio Morricone, an all-time impressive performance out of the estimable Eli Wallach, and managed, in its original incarnation, to create a rambling, shambling, violent, black comedy, buddy film that would be a late-night staple of generations.
The movies all got released in America and now Leone was as hot as anybody on this side of the Atlantic. So he made Once Upon A Time in The West with Bronson, Robards and Fonda. For all the talk of that film's epic status, it's a solid film whose ambition is just beyond its grasp, with the same trademark continuity problems and sloppy editing that were prevalent in Leone's earlier work.
And then this workmanlike, repetitive, dull pile of garbage with a musical score that could just as easily been by Burt Bacharach. It's not hard to believe it would be over a decade before somebody gave Leone the money to film the even-more-execrable Once Upon A Time in America.
By my count that makes one great movie (Good,Bad,Ugly) and two above-average ones (Few Dollars More, Once Upon...West) and three terrible movies (Fistful of Dollars, Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon...America). Your mileage may vary.