This could have been so much more
Fleshing out a few plot points and letting those villains live up to their epic potential.
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The big problem to me is that this whole film felt very rushed. I liked the opening scene, it was very action packed. The rest of the film was ok until it reached the middle. There are a couple of things that just didn't work:
- There are basically only two songs in the soundtrack. The main theme sounds awesome, but it does get a bit repetitive by the end. Then there's the comical chase theme which gets more annoying every time it's played.
- The plot feels like a first draft script. It centers around a conspiracy to frame a guy for the murder of the town's patriarch. We know that he's innocent and the supense supposedly comes from the questions: 'Who's the real killer? And why are they after this innocent guy?'. The big problem is that we repeatedly see flashbacks of the murder happening, and we see the killer slowly emerging from the shadows. I can recognize Lee Van Cleef's silhouette from miles away, so there's no surprise in this plot twist whatsoever. When he finally reveals his role in the assassination he explains his reasons in a very throw away fashion: "He was a crook, so I had to kill him".
- The film ends in one of the most anti-climactic duels featured in any spaghetti western. There's no creativity, we just see the heroes gunning down the villains and that's it.
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I agree with your 3 points
The soundtrack is huge and it works as one big instrumental piece, it features a lot of transitional parts, like the one used by Tarantino; IDK what happened, but is a shame because most of the OST was wasted
We all know from the very first flashback that Van Cleef is the killer, if the film would have spent more time developing the logic and the reasons behind the actions, we could had a masterpiece
And finally, yes, the final duel has no tension build up whatsoever, a shame that all the energy the film puts into each side of the conflict is completely wasted in a sequence, that fails cinematically to put you in the middle of such deadly affair
I'd like to add, that I loved the opening sequence, and the time it takes to establish each side of the conflict
A build up of tension, that the film never truly manages to deliver to a cinematically satisfactory conclusion