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After Once Upon A Time in the West, Sergio Leone decided that he'd had enough of directing westerns. For his next film he wanted to go to America and make a mega gangster film that would be entirely his own. Years went by as Leone attempted to raise the money for a film he called Once Upon A Time in America. Once he was forced back into directing, on the Mexican Revolution film which he'd hoped only to produce, Duck You Sucker! But even after that film's modest success producers still came to him with western ideas or with money for westerns. And so in 1973 Leone embarked on a project to be directed by his former assistant Tonino Valerii that was to be his final adios.

His adios was not just to westerns but to Sam Peckinpah, to his own grandiose Italian quadrilogy, to the Trinity films and to the west itself. This film wouldn't just be shot in the usual studio sets and deserts. It would be made on the streets and wharfs of a great American city, New Orleans. This was typical Leone bravado, the desire to do more, in a bigger way, with a larger budget than he'd done previously.

The last truly great Spaghetti Western emerged. My Name is Nobody is an Italian-French-German co-production made in Italy, Spain and the US. It stars Henry Fonda and Terence Hill.

Terence Hill isn't the strongest actor but working with Fonda brings him to life and makes him almost interesting. Henry Fonda meanwhile has enormous stature and seems very generous as an actor, certainly he encourages those around him to do better than they might otherwise have done. Thus did Leone merge the Old West of Ford with his own Italian western history and with the new, laugh-oriented comedy western world.

The screenwriters were Fulvio Morsella and Ernesto Gastaldi. Morsella was Leone's old writing partner. This was his first collaboration with Gastaldi, an inventive author who wrote many other westerns. The score, sometimes burping, sometimes brilliant, is by Leone's school chum, Ennio Morricone.

Given that this is later Leone, there's a major striving for significance. The best scene is where the mysterious Nobody traps Jack Beauregard (Fonda) on the railroad tracks where he seems doomed to be run down by a horde of outlaws called The Wild Bunch, hundreds strong.

Let's treat Leone's repeated goodbyes to the western as we do The Who's regular farewell tours. As adioses some are better than others, and My Name is Nobody is a very good goodbye.

Big Showdown is one of the later Spaghetti Westerns. It was directed by Giancarlo Santi, who was Sergio Leone's assistant, in 1972. It's somewhat similar in plot and title to another Lee Van Cleef western, The Big Gundown. In both films Van Cleef plays a lawman or a bounty hunter out to arrest a wrongly accused man. In the earlier film the innocent was played by Tomas Milian. In this film he's played by a German actor, Horst Frank. [Alberto Dentice (Peter O'Brien) plays this, Frank plays David Saxon]

In the Spaghettis Van Cleef was almost always completely invulnerable, one of those chaps who could walk into the most dangerous of situations without the remotest possibility of harm. He even catches flying bullets with his teeth! At the same time there was a certain implausibility about him as a romantic lead since he was so much older than all the other actors and actresses. Hence the presence in most of these Van Cleef films of a younger, hairier actor who tends to be the sub-hero and get the girl. Horst Frank plays that part here [see above], the outlaw Philip Wermeer, aka 'the Jesse Kid'. He's just as silly and unsatisfactory as his name suggests.

The Big Showdown features excellent action sequences, particularly the final shootout which takes place in a succession of corrals. It's unusual in that the villains actually discuss gunfighting techniques and strategies while waiting for Van Cleef to draw. And splendid villains they are - the 3 Saxon brothers, Adam, Eli and David. All of them are terminally weird. My favourite is Adam, alias Poxy. He's clearly a fan of David Bowie in his Thin White Duke period. The oldest brother David has aspirations to be President. And this brings us to a series of stylish, black and white flashbacks in which the patriarch of the Saxon clan was murdered by an unseen assassin.

Santi is a good director. He handles the shootouts and the showdowns prior to them particularly well. Leone had asked him to direct his Mexican Revolution epic Duck, You Sucker, but after 10 days Santi was removed from that picture. The two American stars, James Coburn and Rod Steiger, had signed on believing that Leone, and not Santi, was the director... but the American stars weren't having it. They fired Santi and Leone unwillingly took over. Poor Santi! Duck, You Sucker isn't a great film and, judging by The Big Showdown, the lively Giancarlo might have done a better job.

A Bullet for the General, otherwise known as Quien Sabe? (Who Knows?), is a political Spaghetti Western made in Spain and Italy in 1966. The director was Damiano Damiani who inhabited the worlds of serious Italian cinema and popular entertainment with apparent ease. Damiani only directed one other western though, a bizarrely unsuccessful attempt at comedy featuring Patrick McGoohan, produced by Sergio Leone, called Genius.

The Genius, aka Nobody's The Greatest, was made in 1975. It is SO bad that it's genuinely thought of as the last of the Spaghetti Westerns, the film that killed the genre off.

So what's amazing is that Damiani's other western A Bullet for the General, is one of the best Spaghetti Westerns ever made. It's the story of Mexican bandit El Chuncho and his relationship with mysterious gringo gunman, Bill Tate, played by Lou Castel.

Chuncho is played by Gian Maria Volonte, one of the greatest of Spaghetti Western actors and indeed one of the greatest actors of all time. A Communist and a consumate Shakespearian, Volonte had been blacklisted until Sergio Leone had cast him as the lead villain Ramon Rojo in A Fistful of Dollars. In addition to the brilliant Volonte and the mysterious Castel, there's Klaus Kinski, Spaghetti Western's most serious scenary-eater in a fire-breathing role as Chuncho's half-brother, a Revolutionary priest.

A Bullet for the General is the model for all the Italian films set in the Revolution, none of which come near to it in intelligence, narrative or insight. The political allegory is pertinent and sustained but it never intrudes. This really is down to the excellence of A Bullet for the General in every significant area. The script establishes the basic plot elements for all the films which followed it. It sets in opposition an unwilling Revolutionary and a cool, technologically adept gringo.

The script was by Salvatore Laurani and Franco Solinas. Solinas had written the script for The Battle of Algiers. He recycled the Bullet for the General script into many other films including Corbucci's first Mexo-Western A Professional Gun and Pontecorvo's film with Marlon Brando as the gringo, Burn! It's always the same two characters in opposition and always against this Revolutionary background. The Mexican's an unwilling hero and leader. The gringo always seems to join the Revolution. Sometimes, when played by Franco Nero, he is serious. Other times, as in this film, his loyalty and his agenda are in serious doubt.

The music too is outstanding. Interestingly it was supervised by Ennio Morricone, the creator of so many brilliant Spaghetti Western scores but the composer was a Spanish musician, Luis Enrique Bacalov. After Morricone he was, for my money, the best composer to have worked in the genre.

A Bullet for the General is a great film, one of those rare pictures where all the technical credits are equally good and work in unison. There's great beauty, fantastic action, an enormous body count and a tragically doomed gay love affair!

When it was originally released in Britain A Bullet for the General was cut from 135 to 77 minutes. This is the complete version. For what more could you wish?