'Sergio Leone Anthology' good as stolen gold

The word on MGM's higly anticipated "The Sergio Leone Anthology" is good; almost nothing bad or ugly to report. The eight-DVD set turns out to be a clone of the design, format and extras from 2004's excellent upgrade of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." That DVD set was so good, in fact, MGM didn't change a thing in transporting it here, down to the liner notes design.

All films are restored to their full running times (or as close as possible) and appear in glorious 2:35.1 anamorphic widescreen. They all come in English Dolby 5.1, but see comments below.

"A Fistful of Dollars," the first in Italian director Leone's "Man with no name" trilogy, looks smashing -- far better than you'd expect for a low-budget pic from 1964. Images and audio are dead-on. If you haven't seen the film for a while, you're in for some serious fun. The film holds up beautifully and young Clint Eastwood's performance is a hoot. Quentin Tarantino calls it "the best-directed movie of all time."

The marginally less-successful sequel "For a Few Dollars More," with Lee Van Cleef, exhibits a fair amount of speckling on the otherwise decent color images. The dubbed English stereo audio option proved a bad choice -- voices wandered around the front soundstage for no apparent reason. Leone purists will be listening to the straight-shot mono on these titles, anyway. You might as well join them. Fear not, Ennio Morricone's famed kick-butt scores come through with plenty of punch.

I did a long take on the restored "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" in 2004 -- check it out: Everything still applies and it'll give you a good idea of the attention to detail that went into the new Leone set. Read the review.

The Anthology also includes the DVD debut of "Duck, You Sucker," a holy grail title for fans. This is the Italian cut of the 1972 Mexican adventure (aka "A Fistful of Dynamite") starring Rod Steiger and James Coburn, running at its full length of almost 3 hours. I'll update the DVD blog as the late-night journey through these milestones of mayhem continues.

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