Locations
The province of Almería was a main part of the film’s locations, although due to the story’s approach, in which the main characters embarked on a journey where they travel from an arid landscape to a more luxuriant one, many other enclaves were involved in addition to the Almería ones – among them, it should be mentioned those that materialized in the province of Granada and Burgos and in the Autonomous Region of Madrid.
The inclusion of Eli Wallach in the cast is one of the novelties and main appeals of this film. Wallach perfectly depicted the Mediterranean, Latin, picaresque and sarcastic spirit contained in Leone’s pictures, which were features that distinguished them from the classic American westerns. Wallach’s Tuco can be put on the same level with Don Quixote’s Sancho, that loyal squire indispensable for the main character to shine.
After the indisputable public success achieved by ‘For a few more dollars’, which nowadays is still one of the most-watched films in the history of the Italian and Spanish cinema, Leone could tackle the project he wanted. He decided to close his ‘Dollars Trilogy’ with ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, an ambitious project, whose title already simplified the roles of the three main characters, brilliantly played by Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef.
The success of ‘For a few dollars more’ was colossal. Leone’s style was perfectly defined, and it was imitated by numerous film makers. The European industry started profusely producing westerns, and most of those pictures emulated, with different degrees of success, Sergio Leone’s western standards: the anti-hero, violence, music by Morricone, the very first close-ups of the characters’ eyes… Spaghetti western had just been established and Almería became known as Europe’s Hollywood.
Leone was so astounded by the versatility and plasticity of the Almería landscape that he located most of his second western in the land of the Indalo (Almería’s symbol).
The cinema history of the province of Almería would not exist as we know it today without Sergio Leone’s great contribution. The Roman film maker revolutionized the western genre with his celebrated Dollars Trilogy. Thanks to this thematic and aesthetic revolution, Almería was favored as the ideal place to shoot films, especially, westerns.
