The Frame

I’ve already seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which is the third in the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood Man With No Name trilogy of spaghetti westerns of which A Fistful of Dollars is the first. I don’t like watching series out of order, but I don’t think it matters much in this case. Eastwood’s nameless character lopes into a small Texas town from nowhere and soon finds himself caught in the middle of an ongoing feud between the two powerful families that run the town. He seems to waver back and forth between amoral mercenary desires and noble actions–he may not be classical Hollywood’s Western hero, but he draws on that mythology, breathing new life into the genre. The film isn’t as good as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (I haven’t seen the middle entry For a Few Dollars More, but supposedly it isn’t either), but it’s a solid film.
Above Average