Two Hours of Squinting and I Loved Every Minute

Faces, Held Too Long, on Purpose

Nobody told Sergio Leone that a close-up is supposed to last two seconds. He holds them until they become uncomfortable, then holds them longer, and by the third or fourth one you understand that the discomfort is the point. This is a film that thinks a man's face, filmed wide enough to see the pores and long enough to hear him sweat, is more interesting than anything he could say. It is right.

Let me be plain about what kind of picture this is. It is disreputable. It is a spaghetti western — Italian money, Spanish locations, an American star who took the job because television was not paying, dialogue dubbed into approximate synchronisation. Serious people spent twenty years explaining that it was junk. Serious people were wrong, and they were wrong in the way that is most instructive: they mistook a lack of manners for a lack of intelligence.

Because look at what Leone is actually doing. He shoots at two distances and almost nothing in between: the enormous face and the enormous landscape. A man is either a pair of eyes filling the frame or an ant crossing a valley. There is no comfortable middle ground where ordinary drama happens, and that is why the film feels like a myth rather than a story. Tonino Delli Colli's photography makes the desert look like a moral condition. When somebody walks into shot from a mile away, you wait, and the waiting is the pleasure.

Where the Jolt Is

Two places. The first is the bridge sequence, which is funny and appalling at once — two armies destroying each other over a river crossing while our heroes stand there working out how to profit from it. The film is not being subtle. It does not need to be. Tuco and Blondie are looking at a mass grave and calculating, and the picture has the nerve to leave the camera on the calculation.

The second is the cemetery. You know the one. Ennio Morricone comes in with that voice — not a melody, a voice, a woman wailing over a galloping drum — and Eli Wallach starts running through the graves, and Leone cuts faster and faster in circles that do not describe geography so much as delirium. Then everything stops. Three men, a stone, and about four minutes in which the only things that move are eyes. I have watched that sequence perhaps twenty times and my pulse still goes up. If a film can do that to you twenty times, arguing about whether it is art is a way of avoiding the experience.

And Wallach. Everybody talks about Eastwood, who is very good at being an object, but Tuco is the film. Wallach plays him as a starving man — greedy, wounded, genuinely funny, capable of real cruelty and real hurt within the same minute. The scene with his brother the priest is the only moment in one hundred and sixty-one minutes where the picture stops moving, and Wallach earns it.

What It Refuses