The 1968 movie masterpiece Guy Ritchie is adamant is overrated: “It doesn’t hold up”
Ever heard people banging on and on about how a certain film is a ‘classic’ and a ‘must-watch’ and ‘hugely influential’ and then when you finally sit down to watch, it you’ve absolutely no idea what all the fuss was about? Well, don’t worry, you’re not alone, as even Hollywood directors like Guy Ritchie experience that.
The simple truth is that, even though the usual system of a cabal of critics deciding which of the 700 movies released in cinemas each year are worth your attention works most of the time, it isn’t perfect, and often, lots of them are wrong at the same time. When that happens, you get films that are supposed to be amazing, and people repeat the fallacy endlessly, but sometimes they’re simply not.
The other thing is that an appreciation of any kind of art is entirely subjective. You may prefer watching The Nutty Professor over The Godfather, or Dumb and Dumber over Citizen Kane, or you may not have a clue why people like Parasite so much, and as for Ritchie, his blind spot came with the works of an Italian filmmaker who put together one of the most influential trilogies of all time.
Back in the late 1990s, when the director was making waves with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the comedy crime caper that seemed to define the end of that decade and launched the careers of stars like Jason Statham, he was asked about some of his influences, pointing to the fact that he’d briefly inserted Ennio Morricone’s famous theme music to Clint Eastwood’s 1966 western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as a tribute.
The final part of a trilogy directed by Sergio Leone that had begun with A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, and continued a year later with For a Few Dollars More, the whole thing made a cinematic icon of Eastwood, forever to be known as ‘The Man with No Name’, the poncho-wearing antihero loner with few lines of dialogue but plenty of bullets.
Ritchie was a big fan of the trilogy, stating, “I felt those films were fucking fantastic”, but felt somewhat let down by Leone’s later work, including a four-hour Robert De Niro mob epic, explaining, “It was curious, when Sergio made Once Upon a Time in America [in 1984], how that didn’t work for me. And Morricone is just the fucking cat’s pussy, I mean, that man is doing it.”
He continued, “Together they did make great stuff, but it became too obvious once they did Once Upon a Time in America. He did Once Upon a Time in the West as well, didn’t he, which was earlier, and I thought it was brilliant the first time I saw it. And if you watch it now, it doesn’t hold up.”
Although Leone had retired from making westerns once the Eastwood trilogy had concluded, he was tempted back into the game for that movie in 1968 by the offer of a sizeable $5million budget and the chance to work with the great Henry Fonda.
With Charles Bronson stepping into the lead role after Eastwood turned it down, it told the story of three men battling over the fortunes of a beautiful widow and her land, and despite Ritchie’s personal feelings, has gone down as one of the greatest movies of all time, one that has influenced modern greats like Quentin Tarantino, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese.
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