"There’s something deliciously ripe going on in director Sergio Leone’s deservedly popular spaghetti western trilogy, featuring A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. These stylized studies of frontier brutality are orgies of more than simply violence. Early on Leone develops a schtick around the incessant inhalation of noxious substances derived from the tobacco plant and the recurrent deployment of handheld projected missiles that he soon builds to a fevered crescendo in the middle child of his trio, For a Few Dollars More. He indulges in a certain sexually-charged imagery lifted straight from film noir, but which he adeptly adapts to the demands and rigors of the spaghetti western genre of which he was both creator and master. Though Leone appears to back off some from the first two film’s steady leer in the series wildly successful finale, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I reckon an argument could be made that it’s really just an elaborately staged menage a trois between Eli Wallach, Lee van Cleef and Clint Eastwood. Anyways, throughout his magnificent trilogy, Leone crams his work with the sorta man on man action that would have made those most infamous ancient Greeks proud."
Here's the link. It gets even better.
http://djardine.blogspot.com/2004_05_30_djardine_archive.html
