Duck, You Sucker! or a Fistful of Dynamite (1971)
Written by Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Donati, Sergio Leone, Roberto de Leonardis, and Carlo Tritto
Directed by Sergio Leone
Leone’s time with the western came to an end with this picture. He couldn’t know, but it would be his penultimate film, causing his career to be framed through the lens of the genre forever. That’s not bad because Leone completely transformed western cinema beyond the borders of Italy. American filmmakers could no longer make westerns that sanitized the past in the ways they once did; that had to reflect the harsh survival that went on as America spread itself out across the continent. Duck, You Sucker! is not his greatest western, but it’s still not completely terrible. When watching the work of a director like Leone, it’s hard to critique the quality of any of his career. It’s at a level few people ever reach. What informed this movie was not Leone’s love of westerns but the rising up of left-wing revolutionary activism in Italy and a desire to highlight that the country as it stood was not going to survive unless things changed.
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