Anti-Heroes: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (Dir Sergio Leone, 2h35m, 1966)
The anti-hero fascinates us. In popular culture - from antiquity to the Byronic heroes of the 19th century, through to the Angry Young Man of the 1950s and early 1960s, the latter of which would cross from stage and literature to cinema. Yet, over in the revisionist Westerns of the 1950s onwards - High Noon (1952) - the anti-hero was also taking shape: its ultimate example, what makes us engage with the anti-hero begins here; no figure in cinema exemplifies this archetype like Clint Eastwood's "The Man with No Name", star of Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy'. This incarnation of the Western gunslinger's shadow falls everywhere from Lucas' Star Wars, to Stephen King's seminal novel cycle The Dark Tower , to Mad Max (1979) and its sequels and Escape from New York (1981) . To understand the impact of Eastwood's most famous role, and our fascination with the anti-hero, we must go back to his finest outing, in the final film of the ...
