The Desert Southwest

Location from The Dollars Trilogy by Sergio Leone / United Artists

The landscape of the Dollars Trilogy — endless, merciless, indifferent to the men crossing it, and more beautiful than anything happening in the towns.

Leone filmed in Almería, Spain — the desert there substituted for the American Southwest and became its own thing, mythological rather than documentary. The landscape is not realistic; it is an idea of the West, larger and emptier than the actual territory, shaped to accommodate standoffs and arrivals and the kind of silence that precedes violence. Every film in the trilogy uses the desert as counterpoint to its characters: the scale makes the men small, and their concerns — money, revenge, survival — small in turn. And then Leone cuts close on the eyes, and the concerns are everything again.

Appearance

Flat or gently rolling terrain under a sky that is either blazing white at noon or a deep orange at the golden hour Leone loved. Rock formations, dry arroyos, scrub vegetation. Distances that trick the eye. The heat makes everything shimmer. There is very little shade and no one has been maintaining the roads.

Also known as: The Desert, The Southwest, The Territory, The Badlands

What They Know

• Filmed in the Almería desert of Spain — a landscape that became its own Western myth
• Used by all three films as transitional space and as the setting for desert-survival sequences
• The distance and scale are narrative tools: Leone used them to establish the weight of arrivals and departures
• No water, no shade, and a very long walk from anywhere — being abandoned here is a death sentence

Connections

• contains — san_miguel
• contains — el_paso
• contains — sad_hill_cemetery

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