Duck, You Sucker (1971)
★★★½ — Duck, You Sucker (1971)
Duck, You Sucker (released in some territories as A Fistful of Dynamite, and in the United States as Once Upon a Time the Revolution) arrived as Sergio Leone's follow-up to the monumental Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), though the road to production was a troubled one. Leone originally intended only to produce, with Peter Bogdanovich and then Sam Peckinpah each attached to direct at various points before Leone took the helm himself. Rod Steiger replaced Jason Robards relatively late in the process, and the famously gruelling shoot took place on location in Spain and Ireland. The film sits at the tail end of the Spaghetti Western's commercial peak, coloured heavily by the political upheavals of 1968 and Leone's own ambivalence about revolutionary romanticism.
Duck, You Sucker! (1971), also known as A Fistful of Dynamite, is vintage Sergio Leone, epic in scale, rich in political weight, and drenched in the dusty poetry of revolution. It’s a sprawling, operatic Western set during the Mexican Revolution, following an unlikely alliance between Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger), a bandit with no cause but survival, and John Mallory (James Coburn), an ex-Irish Republican explosives expert turned revolutionary symbol. Their journey from self-interest to something resembling purpose is both thrilling and tragic, wrapped in Leone’s signature slow-burn tension, grand close-ups, and sweeping desert vistas. I love Leone’s films (the myth-making, the moral ambiguity, the sheer visual audacity) and this one has all of it. The friendship-turned-rivalry between Juan and John crackles with irony and melancholy, and the film doesn’t shy away from the brutal cost of revolution. There are moments of breathtaking beauty: the train heist, the massacre at Mesa Verde, the final, devastating twist that reframes everything. It’s a film about how revolutions eat their children, and how men become legends whether they want to or not. That said, it is too long. Several scenes drag well past their natural end point, conversations, standoffs, even entire sequences feel unnecessarily drawn out, diluting the impact. Unlike The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where every silence had weight, here the pacing stumbles under its own ambition. And while Ennio Morricone’s score is always welcome, this one feels oddly mismatched. The main theme (a jaunty, almost whimsical tune) clashes tonally with the film’s darker turns. It lacks the haunting gravitas of his work on Once Upon a Time in the West or the raw tension of The Ecstasy of Gold. Here, it sometimes plays like parody when it should soar. Flawed, yes, but still a powerful, visually stunning entry in Leone’s late-period masterpiece cycle. Not his finest, but essential for fans. A flawed epic, undone by its own grandeur, but still larger than life.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1971 | Watched: 2025-10-12
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in America (1984) · A Fistful of Dollars (1964) · For a Few Dollars More (1965) · Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)
