It's a fair point, but is it any less elaborate than breaking into a stable, killing a horse, cutting off it's head, sneaking into a guy's bedroom with it and placing it under his bed clothes, re-arranging then to look like nothing is out of place, and doing ALL this at night in such silence that you are never detected and there is even a guy sleeping in the bed?Sometimes the dramatic effects a director is looking for don't bear too much scrutiny. And anyway, the images of menace that the bullet outline creates is not only aimed at the character of Eve, it is actually aimed at us the viewer. On Eve it is there to make her scared enough to answer the first line of dialogue in the film without hesitation. "Where is he?"On us it is there as yet another of the slightly surreal images Leone so often enjoyed using to disorient his audience, and I for one so often enjoy watching.
The task of the director in OUATIA is to make the viewer care for a group of sometimes violent, amoral and murderous gangsters. I think Sergio Leone succeeds. The segment of the film which shows the gang as boys I think enables the viewer to care for the characters.
So why wouldn't Max have Moe killed, rather than allow him to survive for decades where he could at any time have linked Max to the Cabinet Secretary? Moe never went into hiding.
What do you want from us, Don?
But the endings to all three films are nonsensical, at least by my narrow, classical lights. (Some other, older films had endings I couldn't or wouldn't swallow at all, either: Random Harvest and Dark Victory are two that come to mind.)