Product Details

• Actors: Clint Eastwood, James Coburn, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef
• Directors: Sergio Leone
• Format: Box set, Anamorphic, Surround Sound, Color, NTSC
• Language: English, Italian, Spanish, French
• Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 8
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
• DVD Release Date: June 5, 2007
• Run Time: 568 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000OPOAMU
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #53,334 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Sergio Leone Anthology (A Fistful Of Dollars / For A Few Dollars More / The Good, The Bad And The Ugly / Duck, You Sucker)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

From the innovative "James Bond Western" style of A Fistful of Dollars (1964) to the complete restoration of Duck You Sucker (1971), The Sergio Leone Anthology pays lavish tribute to one of the greatest of all Italian directors. A lifelong film buff deeply influenced by the movies he enjoyed as an uneducated youth in southern Italy, Leone (1929-1989) had officially directed only one previous film (1961's The Colossus of Rhodes) when he recruited a relatively unknown American TV star named Clint Eastwood (on a modest salary of $15,000) and made cinema history with A Fistful of Dollars, not the first Western made by an Italian but certainly the first truly Italian entry in the "Spaghetti Western" genre that Leone virtually invented. Each of the four films included in this eight-disc set are influential milestones in that once-maligned, now-celebrated genre, and while Leone's classic Westerns were largely dismissed by critics throughout the 1960s and '70s, they now stand as the masterworks of a visionary artist who was posthumously elevated into the pantheon of world-class filmmakers. To acknowledge Leone's historic impact on the genre, the Leone Anthology includes MGM's previous two-disc extended-cut collector's edition of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and applies the same deluxe treatment to A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More (1965), and, for the first time on DVD, the fully restored English-language version of the original 157-minute Italian cut of Duck You Sucker (previously known by its alternate U.S. title A Fistful of Dynamite), which was never shown in American theaters.

A Fistful of Dollars is best known in America for spawning the "Man With No Name" marketing campaign that made Eastwood a star, although Eastwood's character is clearly named "Joe" in this cleverly adapted low-budget remake of Akira Kurosawa's samurai classic Yojimbo, in which Eastwood's lone drifter vies for strategic advantage in a corrupt Mexican town divided by a bitter family feud. The operatic qualities that grew increasingly lavish in Leone's later films are evident here on a smaller scale, along with the modern, innovative score of Ennio Morricone, whose legendary collaborations with Leone (on all four of these films) were vital to the director's deliberate defiance of Hollywood's Western traditions. Fistful was an instant success in Italy and its immediate sequel, For a Few Dollars More, is often cited as the definitive Spaghetti Western, with a bigger budget ($600,000) and a charismatic costar with Eastwood (Lee Van Cleef) in an uneasy alliance between gunslingers that introduced a hint of humanity to Leone's increasingly de-mythologized vision of the West. While teaming Eastwood, Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in a ruthless Civil War-era quest for buried Confederate gold, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly completed Leone's "Dollars" trilogy (filmed primarily on locations in Spain) on a truly epic scale, introducing the darker cynicism, grander ambition, and artistic maturity that defined Leone's later films.

Leone vowed to quit making Westerns after his 1968 masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (a Paramount release not included in this set), but circumstances led him to seize the directorial reins of Duck You Sucker, a dynamic yet deeply disillusioned study of revolution that can now take its rightful place among Leone's greatest films. Like several of Leone's films, Duck You Sucker suffered a long history of cuts, re-cuts, and censorship, and the fully restored 157-minute version (unseen since the film's 1971 Italian premiere) more effectively explores the complex friendship between an Irish rebel explosives expert (James Coburn) and a brutish Mexican bandit (Rod Steiger) who becomes a reluctant revolutionary in 1913 Mexico. With explosive action sequences that remain among the most impressive ever filmed, Duck You Sucker now gives richer meaning to the film's original Italian title Giù la testa ("Keep Your Head Down"), asserting Leone's theme that family is far more important than the devastating violence of revolution. In the Leone Anthology (a variation on previous DVD sets released in England, Germany, and Japan), Duck You Sucker is the long-awaited crown jewel in a box-set of cinematic treasures. And while Leone purists will endlessly debate over the image quality (generally quite impressive) and 5.1-channel soundtrack mixes included here, there's no denying that The Sergio Leone Anthology is the definitive Leone tribute for a technically demanding 21st-century audience, and that's cause for enthusiastic celebration. --Jeff Shannon

On the DVDs
Listed is the eight-disc set (also including cast lists, scene selections, brief synopses, and behind-the-scenes details), the bonus features found in The Sergio Leone Anthology provide a comprehensive study of Leone's career, themes that dominated his work, and the historical contexts that inform Leone's classic "Spaghetti Westerns." With an even balance of lively authority and erudite scholarship, acclaimed Leone biographer and British film historian Sir Christopher Frayling provides informative commentary on A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and Duck You Sucker, while Time magazine critic Richard Schickel's equally astute commentary remains on MGM's previous two-disc release of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (Many of these features were prepared for the U.K. version of The Leone Anthology, including interviews conducted in 2003 and 2005.) In addition to a wide variety of vintage American radio promotional spots for these films, the meticulously researched and delightfully fascinating "location comparisons" show "then and now" scenes from all four films, with original film clips perfectly matched to location photos taken in 2004 by devoted Leone fans Donald S. Bruce and Marla J. Johnson.

Extras on A Fistful of Dollars begin with "A New Kind of Hero" (22:53), Frayling's behind-the-scenes analysis of the film's innovative anti-hero played by Clint Eastwood, whom Leone hired (when first choices Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Lee Marvin, and Charles Bronson proved too expensive) after seeing Eastwood in a 1961 episode of Rawhide. In the interview featurette "A Few Weeks in Spain" (8:33), Eastwood recalls the experience of making the film on location, and "Tre Voci" (or "Three Voices") is an 11-minute combination of retrospective interviews with producer Alberto Grimaldi, screenwriter Sergio Donati, and Mickey Knox, an American actor living in Rome who provided many of the post-synchronized voices for the English-language versions of Leone's films. In "Not Ready for Prime Time" (6:20), maverick American director Monte Hellman describes the circumstances that led to his direction of an explanatory Fistful of Dollars prologue for the film's American network TV premiere on August 29, 1977. Featuring Harry Dean Stanton, and filmed as an attempt to "legitimize" the Man With No Name's seemingly immoral behavior, the rarely-seen prologue (7:44) is introduced by obsessive Leone fan Howard Fridkin, who saved his Betamax recording from the one-time-only 1977 broadcast.

Frayling examines For a Few Dollars More in "A New Standard" (20:15), a "making of" featurette with emphasis on the film's male/male dynamic (described by Frayling as Leone's "invention of the brother he never had"). In "Back for More" (7:08), Eastwood recalls how he'd begun to watch Leone to inform his own directorial ambitions. "Tre Voci" (11:05) continues the retrospective interviews with Grimaldi, Donati, and Knox, and "The Original American Release Version" (5:19) examines three edits (including removal of the name "Manco" so Eastwood's character could remain "nameless" in the film's American marketing) that were made for the film's U.S. release.

Extras on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are highlighted by "Leone's West" (19:53) and "The Leone Style" (23:47), a pair of excellent documentaries exploring the film itself and the evolution of Leone's visual style as his budgets and production values grew to epic proportions. Featuring interviews with Clint Eastwood, critic and Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel, and others, these are must-see features packed with entertaining observations and anecdotes. Lending historical context to Leone's film, "The Man Who Lost the Civil War" is a 14-minute excerpt from a documentary about ill-fated Confederate general Henry Hopkins Sibley's botched campaign to expand Confederate dominance in the West. The "Reconstruction" featurette (11:07) is a detailed study of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's painstaking restoration to Leone's intended 179-minute extended cut, featuring an interview John Kirk, the MGM director of technical operations who supervised the film's meticulous reconstruction. The essential contribution of composer Ennio Morricone is celebrated in the "Il Maestro" featurette (7:47) and film music historian Jon Burlingame provides an excellent audio-only survey (12:29) of Morricone's most popular soundtrack. Deleted scenes include the extended "Tuco torture" sequence (in which the brutal beating of Eli Wallach's character is masterfully cross-cut with the melancholy performance of a prison-camp orchestra); the brilliant "Socorro sequence" that was drastically edited in previous cuts; and a French trailer revealing shots and alternate angles not seen in the film's various theatrical releases. The poster gallery includes eight posters from the film's international marketing campaigns.

For Duck You Sucker, Frayling's film-by-film analysis continues in "The Myth of Revolution" (22:10), a behind-the-scenes study of Leone's deepening artistic maturity, as manifested in the film's cynical view of political revolution. "Donati Remembers" (7:20) is a continuation of the retrospective interview with screenwriter Sergio Donati (who by the early '70s was urging Leone to return to smaller-scale filmmaking), and "Once Upon a Time in Italy" (6:00) explores the ambitious effort that went into creating the definitive traveling exhibit of material (props, posters, costumes, etc.) from Leone's archives and beyond, first shown at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, in Los Angeles, California, in July 2005. In "Sorting Out the Versions" (11:37), film historian Glenn Erickson narrates a visual survey of the various cuts and changes made to Duck You Sucker during its tortured history of global distribution, and in "Restoration Italian Style" (6:07), MGM director of technical operations John Kirk outlines the painstaking effort to restore Duck You Sucker to its original Italian premiere length of 157 minutes, resulting in the first-ever English language version based on the film's Italian-language restoration of 1996. The disc concludes with the enjoyable "Location Comparisons" (9:32), six rare radio spots from the film's original U.S. release in 1972, and (as with all other films in this set) the original theatrical trailer. --Jeff Shannon

Product Description

SERGIO LEONE ANTHOLOGY - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Four classic Leone movies given the deluxe treatment and FINALLY released in the U.S. on DVD, June 9, 2007

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WTDK "If at first the idea is not absurd, the... (My Little Blue Window, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sergio Leone Anthology (A Fistful Of Dollars / For A Few Dollars More / The Good, The Bad And The Ugly / Duck, You Sucker) (DVD)

Prepared for release in 2005 we've only had to wait two years for this deluxe reissue of three of the four Leone films included here. For those that want to know this box set has a 32 page booklet with credits and essays on the films but no postcards like the original release of "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly". If you want the collectable version, I suppose you'll have to buy these individually. This set is definitely worth picking up as it is a HUGE improvement over all the previously released home video versions of the film. All the films look terrific, have commentary tracks (although "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" is the exact same release as before)and great featurettes/extras that were released overseas two years ago.


"Fistful of Dollars" looks very good in its new DVD transfer lovingly restored although there is an odd strobe like effect in one sequence. We get a terrific commentary track from Leone scholar Sir Christopher Frayling discussing the making of the film, the delayed release in the United States (part of which was related to Akira Kurosawa's lawsuit. It was legit though since "Fistful" is an unauthorized remake of Kurosawa's classic "Yojimbo" although Leone's version of the same story is equally compelling), how Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson (who called it one of the worst scripts he had ever read...interesting considering he later appeared in "Once Upon a Time in the West")both turned down the lead role.

Eastwood reveals in a featurette that he wrote much of his own dialogue for the film, made his own script notes all of which contributed to truly making the role his own.

"For a Few Dollars More" looks exceptional. Like all the films here, it is released in an anamorphic widscreen transfer that does justice to the deep, rich colors of the films. There is one scene where there appears to be some sort of scratch on the film that wasn't corrected but otherwise the film looks beautiful. We also get Eastwood again discussing the making of the film, Sir Christopher Frayling with another very good commentary track as well as a section that compares three variations in the film (the sequence where Manco and Mortimer are beaten up has a slightly longer more brutal variation and we also see the way UA released the film with a brief trim that eliminated Manco's name to tie the film into the promo campagin that UA had for "The Man with No Name").

"The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" is exactly the same as the 2005 release on DVD right down to the graphics on the disc. Sir Christopher Frayling did record a commentary track for this after it was released hoping that it could be added to later editions (he wasn't available for the original remaster. Time critic Richard Schickel does the honors here). The extras are exactly the same. For those that are interested this includes the 5.1 mix that had new sound effects for that mix but does not include the original mono soundtrack in English.

"Duck You Sucker" comes in the most complete version released so far. At 157 minutes it is closest to Leone's original cut of the film. The film looks exceptionally good. It's clear that John Kirk went the extra mile to get this right. Also, kudos to Glenn Erickson (aka DVD Savant at DVD Talk)who worked on the featurettes and started the campaign to get these films restored and released on home video ages ago.

Again, Sir Christopher Frayling does a very good commentary track discussing the various versions of the film released. The soundtraack has been reprocessed for 5.1. Sergio Donati a collaborator of Leone's discusses working on the film in a featurette and how Eli Wallach was replaced by Rod Steiger at United Artist's insistance but that Leone never shared the information with Wallach. "Restoration Italian Style" features John Kirk who worked on this special project discusses how he went about reassembling the film for this edition. We also get location comparisons (this is also on the other discs as well)showing scenes from the film and how the locations look now. "The Autry Exhibit" is a featurette on a show assembled by Frayling and Estela Chung for a Leone exhibit. Unfortunately, that happened in 2005 when this was ORIGINALLY was supposed to be released before MGM was bought by Sony throwing this and other releases into limbo. "Sorting out the Versions" uses stills, footage used to show us scenes that weren't included in the movie.

The whole set is assembled in a cardboard foldout box with the discs resting on top of each other. There's a little holder built into the set for the booklet.

Overall this is a terrific set and an essential addition to fans of Leone's westerns. Although it took two years to get this released in the United States (that's nothing compared to the delay for the second season of "Twin Peaks" for even the release of the pilot for that show in the U.S.), it was worth the wait. I'm not sure what the Blu-Ray plans are for this release yet so I went ahead and plunked down the money for the whole set. Fans who already have "TGTBATU" may want to buy these individually although it would be more expensive than this set. MGM (and Fox which distributes all MGM titles now even though MGM is held by Sony)have done a terrific job with this set. My only complaint is that it would have been nice to have the collectable postcards that reproduced the lobby cards/posters. Highly recommended.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good as stolen gold, June 3, 2007

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Flipper Campbell (Miami Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sergio Leone Anthology (A Fistful Of Dollars / For A Few Dollars More / The Good, The Bad And The Ugly / Duck, You Sucker) (DVD)

The word on MGM's higly anticipated "The Sergio Leone Anthology" is good; almost nothing bad or ugly to report. The eight-DVD set turns out to be a clone of the design, format and extras from 2004's excellent upgrade of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." That DVD was so good, in fact, MGM didn't change a thing in transporting it into this box set, down to the liner notes design.

All films are restored to their full running times (or as close as possible) and appear in glorious 2:35.1 anamorphic widescreen. They all come in English Dolby 5.1, but see comments below.

"A Fistful of Dollars," the first in Italian director Leone's "Man with no name" trilogy, looks smashing -- far better than you'd expect for a low-budget pic from 1964. Images and audio are dead-on. If you haven't seen the film for a while, you're in for some serious fun. The film holds up beautifully and young Clint Eastwood's performance is a hoot. Quentin Tarantino calls it "the best-directed movie of all time."

The marginally less-successful sequel "For a Few Dollars More," with Lee Van Cleef, exhibits a fair amount of speckling on the otherwise decent color images. The dubbed English stereo audio option proved a bad choice -- voices wandered around the front soundstage for no apparent reason. Leone purists will be listening to the straight-shot mono on these titles, anyway. You might as well join them. [...].

In "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel does the heavy lifting in a commentary that, amazingly, runs on fumes only near the end of three hours. He maintains that Leone's artistry was lost on critics of the 1960s because of the debate over the film's violence (the New York Times pan was titled "The Burn, the Gouge and the Mangle"). Leone was relatively tame by today's standards, employing "an enormous amount of foreplay" before the killings, as in this movie's famous final shootout, Schickel remarks.

MGM's John Kirk covers the audio restoration, a sore spot for Leone purists. Eastwood and Eli Wallach rerecorded their voices in 2002 for the restored scenes, which had never been dubbed. (Everyone on the production just spoke whatever language they spoke.) Another actor stood in for the late Lee Van Cleef

The Anthology also includes the DVD debut of "Duck, You Sucker," a holy grail title for fans. This is the Italian cut of the 1972 Mexican adventure starring Rod Steiger and James Coburn, running at its full length of almost 3 hours.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An almost perfect boxed set, May 5, 2008

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mrliteral - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sergio Leone Anthology (A Fistful Of Dollars / For A Few Dollars More / The Good, The Bad And The Ugly / Duck, You Sucker) (DVD)

Among the truly great movie directors, few have a smaller body of work than Sergio Leone. He really only directed seven movies, and the first of those, The Colossus of Rhodes, is a standard sword-and-sandals flick with little of the true Leone touch. After that, he would make his mark with five westerns and finish with one of the great gangster films, Once Upon a Time in America. It is, however, the westerns that Leone really excelled, making some of the best in the genre. These so-called "Spaghetti Westerns" (because they were Italian-made) actually exceed in quality most of the ones made in the U.S. The Sergio Leone Anthology contains four of these five westerns.

All three of the "Man With No Name" trilogy are included. This is a bit of a misnomer; although all three movies star Clint Eastwood (in roles that would make him a major movie star), he does not play the same character. In the first film, A Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood plays a mercenary gunfighter who plays both sides in a gang war in a small Mexican town. A re-make of Yojimbo, this movie was made on a small budget, but already, in the first film in which Leone could truly express himself, he has created a minor masterpiece. As with all the movies in this set, this film comes with tons of extras including commentaries and behind-the-scenes material; especially amusing is an incompetent attempt by a TV studio to add a prologue to give the movie a bit of moral standing.

The follow-up, For A Few Dollars More, ups the ante by including Lee Van Cleef as a rival bounty hunter whose motives may be more complicated than the mere pursuit of money. And both Eastwood and Van Cleef would be back for the third "Trilogy" movie, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In my opinion, this may be the best western ever, and I doubt I'm alone (it rates consistently in IMDB's top ten movies). Eastwood is The Good, Van Cleef is The Bad and Eli Wallach is The Ugly, but good and evil are not really relevant terms here. It has been said that while in American Westerns, the hero is always the best with his gun, in Leone's Westerns, being the best with your gun makes you the hero, not any moral standing. The plot deals with the hunt for stolen Confederate gold during the Civil War; and while the previous films also conclude with grand showdowns, this movie has perhaps the best showdown in movie history (probably part of the reason it is one of the best films ever).

What's missing from the set is Once Upon a Time in the West, which rivals The Good, the Bad and The Ugly in quality. While this missing film deals with the end of the era of the gunfighter and the coming of civilization, the last film in the set, Duck, You Sucker, takes place after that era. Of all Leone's films, this is probably the least watched, and while good, it is bound to be a disappointment to those expecting another western like the earlier ones. Instead, this one has Rod Steiger as a bandit thief (very similar to Wallach's Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) who is converted against his will into a revolutionary by explosives expert and ex-IRA member James Coburn. Despite moments of humor, this is the darkest movie in the set, but also forms something of a thematic transition to the gangster era of Leone's final movie, Once Upon A Time in America.

Although this set suffers from the omission of Once Upon a Time in the West, it is still a great set well worth five stars. All the movies look great with once-deleted scenes again restored and plenty of extras: each set has two discs, making this an eight disc set. Even if you've seen these movies in other formats, you should pick up this set if you enjoy westerns at all. These are not just westerns at their best, they are movie-making at its best.