Absolutely I was just offering my two cents. What I was trying to say was while I don’t totally agree with you, I can see where you’re coming from.
Really? When? I don’t remember Corbucci being any worse than some other spags when it came to that stuff. Haven’t watched a Corbucci western for a few years now though.
Having been around horses my entire life, I specifically watch for that stuff in films. There are going to be horse falls in westerns…it is just part of the genre. Most times, the rider (generally a trained stuntman or horse wrangler) is well trained and can guide a horse safely to the ground without the horse being hurt on the vast majority of occasions.
A less scrupulous way is to use a trip wire where the horse is traveling at full speed and then catapulted through the air, often times suffering serious injury as the stuntman’s only concern is making sure he makes it to the ground without breaking his own neck. While I have seen Corbucci adhering to the safe method, I have also spotted him going with the trip wire method.
His most egregious crime though occurred in Companeros when Nero blows up the bridge. The explosion occurs right in front of the horse and sends him down the collapsing bridge and into the water. I can guarantee that horse broke both of his front legs. As strong and powerful as horses are, their legs are amazingly fragile.
You’re right I forgot about that one. Haven’t watched Companeros for a few years now. Didn’t know he definitely broke his front legs, but I remember it looking like it may have been a bit grim.
For me, his one instance of plagiarizing was enough. He literally catapulted his career off of the work of another man. There are so many scenes that are simply blatant rip-offs. Kurosawa easily won his court case against Leonne and made a small fortune in the process.
My opinion about him being a bit of an ego-maniac comes from the people that knew him including Tonio Valerii, Ernesto Gastaldi, and even Clint Eastwood. He was more concerned about making epics on the scale of Kurosawa that, it can be argued, it hurt the overall quality of his films. While I am simply a movie fan, Eastwood echoed this sentiment on the interview he did for the Kino release though he used a different director other than Kurosawa as an example. I can’t remember his example right now. While all of his movies are classics to be sure, I can make the argument that they would be even better with a bit of filler cut from the length. The reason that I will always believe that Kurosawa is a better director is that he let the story dictate the length of the movie while Leonne at times stretched out the story for length. Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was roughly 3 1/2 hours because that is what the story dictated but, conversely, Rashomon was only 88 minutes long.
I just believe that Leonne peaked with For a Few Dollars More and that all of his movies afterward, although classics, were hurt to an extent by his ego.
The biggest example of his ego came with My Name is Nobody which, when it first came out, he heavily downplayed his involvement. As time went by, his ego kicked in to the point that he took more and more credit for the film to the point that he virtually said that it was his film and, in the process, destroyed the career of Valerii.
Not sure how unpopular this would be counted as, but for me, all English dubbing, with the exception of the Leone films and the Lee Van Cleef Sabata films, are all down right terrible and phony sounding. The Great Silence’s dubbing is OK, but I prefer the Italian version.
I also share some of @LankyGringo’s sentiments with Leone, though for me it was more that I became disillusioned with him rather than overrated. There’s a good documentary about him on YouTube called Sergio Leone - The Way I See Things, it’s in Italian and English with English subtitles, and everybody is pretty honest in their recollections of him, but in the end they all seemed to agree he never stopped being the wide-eyed Roman kid with dreams, only that he got lost somewhere along the way.
Clint was referring to David Lean.
I don’t think there’s any problem looking at Leone’s less admirable quirks and qualities … he wasn’t God almighty! This isn’t blasphemy LOL 
Yes! Thank you.
I agree entirely about Starblack.
I get what you’re saying and I’ve always thought that Leone was flawed as an individual, but I think most great artists are, in any art form. I’ve learned to separate the art and the artist and enjoy what they produced over the years, without thinking the person them self was the paragon of virtue. Doesn’t mean I don’t feel for anyone they’ve screwed over on the way, but I can still enjoy their films or music or whatever.
I still enjoy his movies as well and even some of Corbucci’s. I probably hold another unpopular opinion there as well as my favorite is The Specialists although I do hold The Mercenary in pretty high regard as well.
Definitely not! I’m thankful for the insightful answer 
I would say that despite how good the Dollars films and Once Upon a Time in the West are, Sergio Leone is a bit overrated. He was a good director and his films made a huge impact in cinema. But he’s practically the only spaghetti western director that’s being talked about in this day in age within the modern mainstream film field and everyone thinks that’s it for spaghetti westerns. Corbucci’s name is brought up a few times because of Django and The Great Silence. The Terence Hill/Bud Spencer comedies are also brought up sometimes. But Leone’s films have become the only face of spaghetti westerns and gives alot of people the impression that his films are the only thing the genre consists of or that the genre is made up of Italian western epics when its mostly not.
For me Leone is not overrated.
I don’t care much for his faults as person (separating the art and the artist as above said by Bill_Willer), I notice his faults, but what counts are the films, and his 2 best GBU and OuTW are towering above every other SW, actually also together with 2 Peckinpahs above every other western, and belong to my favourite films ever.
But I also see the shortcomings of his other films, which all had the potential to be better, which all have their flaws, which beware them to reach the same artistic height as GBU and OuTW.
And well, I think those who only know his SWs, tend to think anyway that these are US films.
But Corbucci is indeed an underrated director, at least his best films are not that well estimated nowadays compared to famous western directors like Ford or Peckinpah or Leone or Mann.
Agreed. At least as a western director anyway. As I’ve said before I prefer The Mercenary and Companeros to The Wild Bunch and while I do like Peckinpah, I prefer Corbucci when it comes to westerns.
The Mercenary is a top 10 western, and The Great Silence also, or at least very close. Both are easily better than FoD and FaFDM.
Companeros is a flawed film, but there is some brilliant stuff in it.
Ah geez, that’s horrible. Makes me not want to watch the scene again.
Regarding the comparison between Kurosawa and Leone; the former could be as self-indulgent as any director. Kurosawa’s final film with Mifune, the supremely shot but staid ‘Red Beard’; is a slow paced, three hour melodrama in the episodic style of Dr Kildare - the antithesis of the pacing and editing in ‘Seven Samurai’. Any film pushing three hours is testing the patience of its audience and only a select few justify that runtime. Although I agree with @LankyGringo that Leone peaked with ‘For a Few Dollars More’. And furthermore it remains the archetypal Italian western.
As for Corbucci’s SW filmography; the two classics are ‘Django’ and ‘The Big Silence’. With the exception of the underrated ‘The Specialist’, the subsequent films are an erratic mix of well-made but routine (‘The Mercenary’), rehashed and too long (‘Compañeros’), interesting but flawed (‘What Am I Doing in the Middle of the Revolution?’) or instantly forgettable (‘Sonny and Jed’, ‘The White, the Yellow, and the Black’).
On the in-joke/cult favourite on here - ‘Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead’. It has an interesting premise and some original ideas. However, like all Vari’s films it’s inconsistent, and the low budget undermines the second act. But it deserves credit for eschewing the frivolous style of most 70s SWs. The Trinity formula may have been popular in certain countries for a while - but they’ve aged badly and the inane tomfoolery is just plain irritating.
I’m horrible at keeping track at Spaghetti Western directors and shamefully didn’t know Corbucci made all of these.
Maybe a controversial regarding him, I consider The Mercenary and Los Companeros superior to Django. I might’ve said when it wad mentioned earier, but while I like Django a lot, I don’t think it’s as great as others have said.
Rightly said Dean.
Ok, your reply is two weeks old, so it may be obsolete to respond to it, but I wanted to mention that it indirectly inspired me to arrange a minor Kurosawa marathon by borrowing a box set from the library (turns out I’m less educated on the man than I should be, and, if anything, I have no current university course and thus 100% spare time for another two weeks).
My general verdict after this viewing would be that Seven Samurai is indeed an extraordinary film, but somewhat the contrary to you, I would call it the overlong film compared to GBU and OUATITW, albeit just slightly. I think three hours (that is, maybe 20-25 minutes of trimming, mostly in the first half of the second act) would have been perfect, but maybe I could have embraced the 200 minutes entirely if some focus had been shifted towards the robbers, like maybe at least giving its leader a name and some characterization (…and there you have the one improvement The Magnificent Seven made upon the narrative). And that said, I definitely still think Kurosawa has a striking ability to make time flush away - Ran, at 160 minutes and inferior to Seven Samurai in most departments, is still never boring (although a bit messy at the start), and even the disappointing Throne of Blood passes the time.
It should be said however that some of the circumstances of my viewing worked against it, such as the five minute intermission, which just puts your attention off a bit when you watch the film from your sofa - why didn’t they drop it from the home video release? - and an incident which happened about 40 minutes into the film when my father overheard something which he thought sounded like “Vad fan har du gjort av bollen?!” (“Where the hell did you put the [foot]ball?!”) and nearly ruined the whole experience. I had to pause it and come back some hours later before I could take it seriously again (Lesson learned: If you’re to watch a Japanese film, especially one with much shouting and aggressive talk, make sure everyone in the room can see the subtitles and know the context - it’s a hopeless language). But to me, Ikiru is Kurosawa’s definitive masterpiece, with Yojimbo close behind - although the next film on my AK watchilist, Stray Dog, looks very, very promising to me despite not being among hist most acclaimed works.
But most prominently, I’m very curious to know exactly which sequence from, for instance, GBU you would find expendable. The dialogue-free introduction of Tuco and Angel Eyes? Would fail to set the mood for the rest of the film. Tuco’s visit at the gunshop? Would discard one of the comedic highlights. The sadistic march through the desert and the subsequent meeting with Carson? Could perhaps be cut by a minute or two, but that wouldn’t make any overall difference. The sequence in the Union camp? Would leave the alignments for the rest of the film incomprehensible and take away a great part of the anti-war message. The bridge sequence? Same there, and we would see less character development between Blondie and Tuco. You got the point long ago by now, I suppose. To me, GBU is a long tall tale where every scene is a piece of a puzzle. Could OUATITW be cut down? Yes, but cutting more than like ten minutes at most - mostly in the first half – -would ruin the melancholic, epic, almost solemn feel. Just look what the 145-minute American cut did to it (and as usual with studio-imposed cuts, they managed not to cut those minutes that were actually expendable).
In conclusion, here’s a disclaimer: Kurosawa is still a relatively new acquaintance of mine, while Leone had been a hero since my childhood. In just a couple of years, I could very well find myself appreciating the former’s work even more.