10. The Dollars Trilogy
Rather than ask for clarifications about things which struck me as odd, as a small child, I'd often travel along in a state of pique, puzzling over apparent synergies between reality and cartoonish possibility. Suffice to say that I was driven close to conniptions by the tale I heard of my family waiting for a lounge sweet to be delivered, "sweet" meaning lolly, or candy. From the context it was discussed in, I imagined this thing as a giant strawberry éclair or mint leaf or liquorice bullet big enough to sit on. I pictured myself perched on soft nougat or foamy marshmallow, watching TV, and casually eating my seat. It was incredible. I was five. When it turned out to be a lounge suite, I was devastated. In a similar vein, my dad was often talking about spaghetti Westerns. I figured I'd love these things. Pasta and cowboys! A match made in heaven. Alas, I never seemed to chance upon one, flicking around the teev, and in fact it was quite a while later (like, a quarter of a century) before I learned that the term referred to films in the genre made by Italians, most notably the works of Sergio Leone, meaning that many of the most famous Westerns weren't filmed in the west at all. The seminal westerns comprised by the Dollars Trilogy, for instance,
A Fistful of Dollars,
For A Few Dollars More, and
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, was filmed in central Italy, and northern and southern Spain. The only "west" was in the script.