STEPHEN'S MOVIE GUIDE

Al Mulock, who played one of the three gunmen in the opening sequence, committed suicide by jumping from his hotel window in full costume after a day's shooting. Production manager Claudio Mancini and screenwriter Mickey Knox, who were sitting in a room in the hotel, witnessed Mulock's body pass by their window. Knox recalled in an interview that while Mancini put Mulock in his car to drive him to the hospital, director Sergio Leone said to Mancini, "Get the costume! We need the costume!" Mulock, who had appeared as the one-armed bounty hunter in Leone's "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly", was wearing the costume he wore in the movie when he made his fatal leap.

The Flagstone set reportedly cost as much as the entire budget for Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.

The main selling point to producers for the use of the Techniscope process was the savings in camera negative. But, another advantage was being able derive the 2.35:1 aspect ratio while shooting with spherical lenses which avoided the distortion created by anamorphics during certain camera moves and extreme close-ups (such as those used by Sergio Leone). This film, together with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (also directed by Leone and shot by Tonino Delli Colli) are now considered masterpieces in the use of the Techniscope system.

For this film Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa take the longest buggy ride in movie history. It begins in Spain and goes through Monument Valley.

The Indian woman who flees from the train station in the opening sequence was actually played by a Hawaiian princess, Luukialuana (Luana) Kalaeloa (aka Luana Strode). She was the wife of actor Woody Strode.

John Landis was one of the stunt men on this film.

The credits, concluding with Director Sergio Leone, last over ten minutes into the start of the film.

For the opening sequence where the three dusters waited for the train, filmmakers lightly coated the face of Jack Elam with jam and began filming close-ups while letting a fly out of a jar filled with flies, attempting to get Elam's reaction as one would light on his cheek.

The final duel between Frank and Harmonica is shot almost exactly like the one in Robert Aldrich's The Last Sunset between Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas, a film that Bernardo Bertolucci was a huge fan of.

Although Lionel Stander's establishment is located in Monument Valley, the interiors were actually shot at Cinecitta. Cheyenne's men enter with a cloud of red dust. The red dust was actually dust imported from the Monument Valley location.

Over half of the film's budget went to paying the actors' salaries.

In the opening scene, when Stony (Woody Strode) is under the water tank, water kept dripping onto the brim of his hat, causing him to flinch and Sergio Leone to stop filming. Leone was going to move Strode but, at the actor's suggestion, kept him in the same spot. Strode wanted his character to be viewed as so cool as to not let dripping water affect him. On the spur of the moment, Leone had Strode take off his hat and drink the collected water.

The film's title does not appear until the end of the final scene.