Sergio Leone's epic conclusion to his "Dollars" trilogy is magnificent. Many say Once Upon a Time in the West is Leone's best spaghetti western, but I'd vote for this. It runs as long as Once Upon a Time, but is more exciting and therefore feels shorter. Clint Eastwood is once again the Man With (Almost) No Name - low life criminal Eli Wallach calls him "Blondie." Eastwood is the "Good", while Wallach is the "Ugly" (though in Leone's world, both terms are strictly relative). The two are uneasy partners in a scheme to collect their own reward money, but Lee Van Cleef (the "Bad") is after a bigger payoff - a stash of stolen gold hidden in a graveyard. When Eastwood and Wallach are tipped off about the gold's whereabouts, it becomes a three way struggle for the fortune.

Eastwood (looking very young to today's viewers) is his usual stoic self, while Wallach provides excellent comic relief as Tuco. Van Cleef, while no match for Henry Fonda in Once Upon A time, makes an imposing villain. Yet what I think really makes this special is the truly epic scope Leone brings to the material through setting it against the American Civil War. All the war material is irrelevant, really, but it lends a sense of scale and effectively suggests civilisation in the west is actually crumbling, rather than waiting to arrive. At the same time, we see Eastwood's lawless hero beginning to show some humanity.

The first shot has an ugly face intrude and block our view of a wide open vista, and this effectively sums up Leone's whole style, which insistently contrasts the vast with the detailed. The first tendency is clearly shown in the scene where Eastwood and Wallach stumble across a huge battle between North and South for control of a bridge. The second approach is found in Leone's beautiful treatment of shootouts, in which he focuses on the tiniest movements of his protagonists. Both strains come together in the film's famous climax, with all three characters facing each other off in the enormous graveyard. Leone fashions a masterpiece of tension, with the increasingly frenzied editing between each man accompanied by Ennio Morricone's unforgettable music.