The first time Sergio Leone took to the west with A Fistful of Dollars, I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the phenomenon that would follow in its wake. But Leone’s passionate visual direction and Clint Eastwood’s stoic antihero reinvented the American West in Almeria, Spain, as a dirty, sandblasted no man's land, populated with ugly gunslingers and feuding gangs.

Of course, the planets were aligned to usher in the era of the Spaghetti Western, and Leone led the charge following with For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, the criminally undervalued, politically charged A Fistful of Dynamite (aka Duck, You Sucker!), and Once Upon a Time in the West. Many will go on the record saying that Once Upon a Time in the West is Leone’s best, and while that might be true, its operatic realization feels a bit too romantically emphasized. All of Leone’s westerns bear their strong suit, but its The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that always stands a cut above the rest, simply for being the most adventurous. The preceding Dollars films retain the rough-hewn, fast and a loose quality with occasional glimmers of grand scale entertainment, that would become fully realized in the conclusion to Leone's trilogy.

People have poured philosophies all over the the genesis of Leone's baroque stylism. There’s something special working in his body of work; there’s no denying that. But Leone succeeded by taking the familiar pastiche of a familiar brand, chucking the standard “black hat v. white hat/bad guys v. good guys” motif aside and made something unique, providing audiences with a new interpretation of the genre. The elliptical mashup of hands, guns, and point blank facial expressions act as a photo montage of the action before it occurs - his (literally and figuratively) explosive revision of the mythic western was stylistically on par with the pop art of Andy Warhol.