Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo / The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966 Sergio Leone)

The Quantum Leap for Leone (seriousness, scale).

It seems only right to watch Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo while reading Christopher Frayling's excellent 'Once Upon a Time in Italy', which acknowledges the contribution of production designer Carlo Simi to the Leone classics. This is certainly an epic western, in the production of which the bridge was blown up twice (due to an Italian-Spanish misunderstanding).

Eli Wallach is the heart of the film (it's perhaps his best performance), chosen not on the back of The Magnificent Seven but because Leone saw him being playful with children in How the West Was Won, and in the train / handcuff scene it's not a double (the train comes close to taking his head off). And his growl at the spectators to his lynching is a genuine out-of-character response that Leone left in.

Leone, it seems, liked his duels in circles: Simi guessed at some psychological reasons but didn't ask. But Leone was very sensitive as well, it seems - he cut the ending of Giu La Testa because someone stood up before the film had ended - Sit Down You Sucker!

Damaged people (prison camp and bridge scene), emotional reunion of Tuco and his brother Luigi Pistilli (Illustrious Corpses ) (who didn't speak a word of English), the perfection of the shots in the final duel (he was very technical, and filmed many takes). The mocking Morricone.

"There are two types of people..."

"Every gun makes its own tune."

Footnote whilst cleaning, 12 October 2017:

"Leone was inspired in TGTB&TU by photographs of the horrible condition of Civil War camps like Andersonville but also had in mind Nazi concentration camps in the scene where the cries of tortured prisoners is drowned out by the orchestra. The scenes of prison camps have a double impact, both questioning America's official line on the Civil War (it is striking how few westerns emphasize Civil War prison camps) and commenting on the eternal recurrence of wartime atrocities by bringing twentieth century political touchstones into a nineteenth century story."

'The Art of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West: A Critical Appreciation' by John Fawell.

Not sure Frayling picked up on that specifically, and the above is unsubstantiated (though I'm sure I've heard of this elsewhere)... I guess I need to read his 'Something To Do With Death' next...