Now here is one where I knew exactly what scene was going to make the list. Nothing even came close in my mind when it came to sheer re-watchability: the final duel in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The movie clocks in at about three hours, which is no small commitment when you want to sit down and watch the whole thing. Payback is roughly half as long, and I still re-watch that entire movie all the time. But with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I can jump straight to the final showdown and be completely satisfied.
While this isn't my favorite Western, it's pretty incredible that a 1966 movie can still feel this impressive almost 60 years later. I also haven't watched the other two movies in the trilogy yet, so I'm going into this one without much comparison. I like it more than Unforgiven, although I see a similarity between the two: most of the movie sits at a pretty solid level, but then the ending takes everything up several notches.
And what an ending this is.
Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes standing in the middle of Sad Hill Cemetery, slowly sizing each other up, is one of those scenes where almost nothing actually happens, yet somehow it is incredibly tense. Sergio Leone just keeps cutting between their eyes, hands, guns, and faces while Ennio Morricone's score builds the tension to an almost ridiculous level. The actual gunfight lasts seconds, but Leone makes you wait and wait for it.
The cemetery itself makes the whole thing even better. The production built the massive Sad Hill set in Spain with several thousand graves, essentially turning the final showdown into a giant circular arena. Leone even asked Morricone to create music that felt like "the corpses were laughing from inside their tombs."
And then you get the payoff: Angel Eyes draws, Blondie is faster, and Tuco discovers that Blondie secretly unloaded his gun the night before. Then Blondie gets the final bit of revenge by putting Tuco in the noose before riding off with his half of the gold—only to shoot the rope from a distance and leave Tuco alive, furious, and sitting on a pile of money.
The buildup, the music, the editing, and those ridiculously intense close-ups make it re-watchable.
It's basically five minutes of three guys staring at each other, and somehow Sergio Leone turned that into one of the most memorable showdowns in movie history.
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