Sergio Leone’s most famous spaghetti western culminates in what’s possibly the greatest standoff in film history. The movie’s three titular characters converge on the rumored site of buried treasure — a graveyard in the desert — and, in a scene of spine-tingling tension, face an ultimate reckoning. It’s a dramatic masterpiece. Building in an airy stillness with each twitch of the jaw, each grimace, each cold, calculating look, the set piece has an almost cosmic majesty. Underlying the whole thing is the score of legendary Italian film composer Ennio Morricone. For this climax, he was reportedly instructed by Leone to make it sound as if the “corpses were laughing from inside their tombs.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/pmdAsL1n6q4]