SERGIO LEONE

Mood.

The good is the work itself -- truly epic films such as Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), which sketched huge stories on a broad canvas and brought an operatic emotionalism to the Western.

As its director's reputation is being restored, so are his films. A full, three-hour The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, starring Clint Eastwood, is beginning a national rerelease. The bad is the way their director was treated at the time -- his pictures released years late in America, most of them hastily cut and dismissed as "spaghetti Westerns."

And the ugly -- well, that's what has happened to Leone's reputation since, as the genre he pioneered devolved into parody and his own films were relegated to censored broadcasts on commercial TV.

But that's beginning to change.

Click here.

On a trivial note, it is difficult to resist pointing out that this is the third time that Clint Eastwood has been referenced on Real Art.

"But if you miss you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco."

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