The films

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If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

The gadget-gunslinger spaghetti west arrives fully dressed in black.

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Four of the Apocalypse

Fulci does a bleak, hallucinatory western. Four outcasts cross a hostile frontier. Most do not make it.

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Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot!

Nothing to do with Django, and one of the strangest and cruelest westerns Italy ever shot.

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The Big Gundown

Sollima's best. A manhunt that keeps turning into a political argument.

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Companeros

Zapata western with Franco Nero and a very good Morricone theme.

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Day of Anger

A gunfighter mentors a despised young man, then has to face what he created. Van Cleef at his best.

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Face to Face

Sollima's smartest western: watch a decent man discover he likes it.

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The Mercenary

Corbucci's Zapata western. A Polish gun-for-hire, a peasant revolutionary, and Jack Palance in a frock.

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Keoma

Late, strange, half-sung by a folk narrator. Castellari's best film.

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The Great Silence

Corbucci in the snow. The ending would never have cleared an American studio.

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A Bullet for the General

The most openly political of the Zapata cycle, and the sharpest.

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Death Rides a Horse

Revenge, Van Cleef, and a score Tarantino lifted wholesale.

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El Topo

Jodorowsky's mystical, violent acid western. It essentially invented the midnight movie.

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My Name Is Nobody

The spaghetti western attends its own funeral, cracking jokes. Fonda, Terence Hill, and Leone's fingerprints everywhere.

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Sabata

A gadget-toting gunfighter blackmails a whole town. Lee Van Cleef, having an obvious blast.

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Django

A coffin, a machine gun, and mud everywhere. Banned in Britain until 1993.

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They Call Me Trinity

The comedy turn that ended the cycle by making it impossible to take seriously.

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Duck, You Sucker

Leone's revolution film. A Mexican bandit and an IRA dynamiter blow up the establishment together.

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A Fistful of Dollars

An unlicensed Yojimbo remake. Toho sued and won. Started everything.

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For a Few Dollars More

Van Cleef arrives and the formula locks into place.

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Once Upon a Time in the West

Fonda cast against type as a child killer. Leone's masterpiece.

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The cemetery sequence is the best three minutes in the genre.