Face to Face

Face to Face (Faccia a faccia, 1967) is Sergio Sollima's spaghetti western, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Tubercular history professor Brad Fletcher heads west to mend his lungs and instead falls in with the outlaw gang of Solomon Bennett.

At first the mild scholar is repelled by the men around him. The longer he lives under frontier rules, though, the more something buried in him comes loose. Step by step Fletcher takes over the gang and runs it with a cold, calculating cruelty the bandits never had on their own. Meanwhile Bennett, the hardened gunman, starts to grow a conscience. The two men quietly trade places while you watch.

The Volonté–Milian pairing is why people call this one of the smartest entries the genre produced: Sollima wasn't filming shootouts so much as the way power rots a man from the inside. Ennio Morricone wrote the score, and the picture stands as part of his celebrated political-western trilogy. Stream Face to Face (1967) online on iFILM.