Faces The Size Of Landscapes

Three men want the same buried Confederate gold and only fragments of the information, so they cannot kill each other and cannot cooperate. Leone runs that deadlock for nearly three hours across a Civil War that the film treats as pure obstruction: prison camps, artillery duels over a pointless bridge, a monastery full of amputees. His method is the opposite of classical Western staging. Instead of medium shots of men in landscapes he cuts between extreme close ups of eyes and extreme wides of empty ground, so geography becomes emotional rather than practical. Ennio Morricone's score does not accompany the action, it conducts it: the final standoff in the cemetery is edited to the music rather than the other way round, which is why it plays as a three way aria.