Well, maybe an abdomen full. You see, the Dutch director Anton Corbijn is a big fan of the zen master of Spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone, and especially his uber art film Once Upon a Time in the West or C'era una volta il West (1969), which we see playing on TV at the Bar del Monte in the medieval hill town Castel del Monte, nestled in the heart of Italy's Gran Sasso mountain range. This scene is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sechGmM9HCo. The last scene of Leone's masterpiece is Cheyenne (Jason Robards) ignominiously dying a slow painful death from a bullet he took in the abdomen (pictured), just as Clooney does in the last scene of The American. But The American pales in comparison. Ann Hornaday (The Washington Post) opines "What Leone understood, and Corbijn is still learning, is how to deploy the hoariest archetypes in ways that make even pulp entertainment artful and art entertaining."
Comparisons abound, the wide open landscapes, the facial closeups, the methodical passage of time. The hooker Clara (Italian actress Violante Placido - has an oxymoronic ring to it) is a dead ringer for Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), both falling in love for the lone gunslinger Jack or Edward or "Butterfly" (not coincidentally Charles Bronson's Harmonica or "The Man With no Name" in Leone's film). But baby-faced Clooney is no match for craggy-faced Bronson as a masterless samurai.
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