The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1966)

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1966)

Director: Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach

For three men the civil war wasn’t hell. It was practice!

Three men travel across America in a blaze of gunfire to track down a dead mans buried fortune, crossing and double-crossing each other along the way.

So we’ll back for the final part of the Dollars trilogy and to talk about one of the most revered and beloved movies of all time. Where does one even begin when reviewing this film? I said in my write-up of Come Drink with Me how much I struggle writing reviews of classics movies that while I appreciate for their importance I don’t quite enjoy as much as other people. Doing a retrospective review of a legendary movie that everybody knows is incredible is even harder. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is obviously one of the best movies of all time. I was tempted to end the review there. The very title of the movie has become part of everyday vernacular and you can find hundreds of examples online where it is used in articles and essays that have nothing to do with the movie it came from. It’s currently #9 on IMDB’s Top 250 and interestingly is the highest movie on the list that wasn’t nominated for a single Oscar. That last part is crazy and shows how underappreciated this movie was back in 1966.

I honestly don’t know how anybody could watch this film and not be in awe of it, but despite making two fantastic movies in A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More Sergio Leone’s films and those of his contemporaries in the genre were still looked down upon by the snooty critics of its day. This, the final part of his Dollars trilogy, were written off as “just a spaghetti western” and therefore not taken seriously as an art form. In some ways it is reminiscent of critics today who don’t think Videogames can be art and deride them as “just videogames” clearly never having played games like Okami, Shadow of a Colossus or Journey. Famed critic Roger Ebert when talking about this film years later said he had initially written a review of a four star movie (his top mark) but only given it three stars due to him dismissing it as a lesser film simply because of its genre again in the same way that some people today view animated movies as “just for kids” when at their best they are so much more.

I have marvelled in my two previous films about Leone’s direction and he is just getting better, braver and more confident with every passing movie. I mentioned in my Fistful review how Leone liked to tell a story visually rather than with unnecessary dialogue and here he has the gal and confidence to have the first ten minutes of the film go by without a single word being uttered. When I first noticed that the movie had been going on a while without anyone speaking rather than being frustrated or bored I wanted to see how long he could go without dialogue! It is like when you watch a good long tracking shot. At first you don’t pay it much attention but then you suddenly realise that the camera has not cut in a while (or in this case nobody speaking) and are awestruck by how good it is. Of course he is not just famous as a director for his visual storytelling but also because of his wide shots and clos-ups. I just love the start to this film as in the very first shot we get a gorgeous wide shot of the distant scenery which suddenly changes to an extreme close-up as a character steps into vision. It’s Leone’s two trademark shots in one quick take identifying this as one of his movies right from the get-go.

While the opening of this film is great, it is of course the ending that elevated the movie to its legendary status with the iconic three way gun duel, or a truel as it is now known. Thousands of words have been written about the battle between Clint Eastwood’s Blondie (the Good), Lee Van Cleef’s Angel Eyes (the Bad) and Eli Wallach’s Tuco (the Ugly) which serves as the movie’s climactic pay-off and it is truly one of the greatest scenes in history and along with the crop-duster attack from North by Northwest the best scene in any of the films I have reviewed so far. It also represents Leone’s talent as a visual storyteller more-so than any other moment in all three of the films in his trilogy as again it is completely silent. From the moment we get a crash zoom of the rock that Blondie puts on the ground, supposedly with the name of the grave where the money is buried written on it, which begins Morricone’s tense score, we get two and a half minutes without ant talking where our three protagonists walk into position for the duel. Then we get two and a half more minutes of the men starring down one another before the first gun is fired and it’s a minute after that before somebody speaks again, making it seven dialogue-free minutes overall. Under any other director that could seem like self-indulgent and pretentious but Leone was gifted, not just with his own talent, but with an exceptional crew too.

The movie’s composer, as it was for all of the Dollars movies, was Ennio Morricone and his work on this movie is possibly the best work of his career, which I don’t say lightly as Morricone is to many people one of the greatest movie composers of all time. The title theme is of course insanely famous and is one of the most recognisable pieces of music from a film. Even people who have never seen the movie have likely heard it. I was recently on a road trip leaving Sydney with some friends and riding shotgun, which meant being the car’s DJ, and we came across a small old fashioned town not unlike one you would see in a Leone flick and I played The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme as we slowly drove through and everyone found it hilarious even though I am sure most had no idea what film it was from. It’s just become the unofficial theme for the western genre overall. The main theme was based on a hyena’s cry and it has a slightly different tone to it depending on which of the three characters is on-screen, which is something I loved with Angel Eyes getting a low menacing version while the Ugly’s is screeched at a higher pitch.

I adore the main theme, but what Morricone composed for the duel itself was on a whole other level. The music almost reaches a crescendo as the three men take position and the music cuts out completely and all we can hear are birds. Then we a slow chiming jingle plays from Morricone, not unlike the haunting ’30 Seconds to What?’ pocket watch tune in For a Few Dollars More, and slowly the music then gets more and more intense as it gets closer to the true climax. It’s just wonderful. I have sang Leone and Morricone’s praises for all three of their movies but I haven’t really complimented the editing of these films before. I have been very critical of editing in a lot of these 60’s movies as it’s very easy to blame all the mistakes you see on screen as being the editor’s fault but for his third spaghetti western Leone brought in Nino Baragli.

Baragli co-edited the movie officially, but he seems to be the one given all the credit for the fabulously edited finale. There’s a superb video online by Max Tohline (which you can find here) detailing all the edits of the truel and going into it in more detail than I will, but I will briefly say that the way Nino starts with the wide angle and setting the geography of the scene is perfect. With the position of all three men clear the editing begins switching between shots of the character’s faces to over the shoulder angles of one of them looking at another and then as the music gets faster so too does his editing and we see extreme close-ups of the faces of our titular characters, their guns and ultimately just their eyes with each cut coming quicker, ratcheting up the tension perfectly in sync with Morricone’s score. Then once the gun is fired we go right back to the first establishing shot showing who shot where. It’s exemplary editing and shows you don’t need a shaking camera to artificially create drama or excitement. Also the way he tells a story with his close-ups is magnificent too. The edits directly follow the eye-line of the characters so for instance we see The Bad looking right to the Ugly so the camera cuts to Tuco, then with Tuco looking to his left we go back to Angel Eyes who’s eyes then roll to his left and we are shown Blondie. It’s all so well done and further establishes who is in what position. You can also perfectly read the expressions of the actors too and I found myself really feel empathy for Lee Van Cleef’s The Bad character as he seems to know the other two are going to team up on him and that this is his final stand.

Angel Eyes also gets the most close-ups during the tense stand-off too as well as the most close-ups of his hand crawling towards his gun as he knows he will have to act first if he is to come out of this alive. I feel like Lee Van Cleef getting the most screen time during the final shoot out was deliberately done as his character had by far the least amount of screen time of the three prior to this and to make us try and get into what he was thinking at that crucial time. Clint Eastwood, as the Man Who Really Always Has a Name, gets more screen time than Van Cleef but he still doesn’t get any background to his character and keeps his air of mystery. We are shown however that he is not without feelings as he seems at a loss for how many young men were killed during the war and we see him console a dying shoulder and letting him have a peaceful final puff on his cigar before the man passes. He also keeps the dying man warm by taken off his coat and placing it on the dying soldier. Yes, Eastwood’s coat. You see The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a prequel of sorts and for two and a half hours Clint Eastwood is wearing a white duster, which doesn’t look quite right, and it’s only after removing it to keep the soldier warm does he then pick up his famous poncho from the ground and we finally get our Man with No Name in his full iconic look. Such fantastic restraint from Leone there as was his choice to not take a side in the war and paint the pro-slavery Confederacy as generic bad guys and instead opting to show that the real villain of war is war itself.

I do kind of wish we got some more character on either Angel Eyes or Blondie however as For a Few Dollars More improved on A Fistful of Dollars by giving background on two of the main three characters, but here we are back down to one. I especially wish there was an extra scene showing the adventures of Lee Van Cleef’s journey to the graveyard where the final battle takes places as he was almost absent from the last hour of this film. I said in my review of the second of the trilogy that it felt like Lee Van Cleef was the star of that movie and that Eastwood was kind of just there for the ride, well here both of them had the film stolen from them, ironically by the film’s thief Tuco.

All three leads were superb but Wallach brings the heart and emotion of the film not only gets the most screen-time of the three but he is the only one who gets any backstory too. At one point we see him meet his priest Brother and see the path he could have gone down had things worked out better for him. The scene with his brother is crucial too as prior to that Tuco was pretty much being despicable to Eastwood by making him walk for days in the hot sun without any water and then preparing to kill him when his dehydration become too much of a burden, but it’s after that scene that we start to root for this loveable rogue especially when Angel Eyes, a character far worse and one that shoots a kid (damn!) re-enters the fray. Eli Wallach is also responsible for two of the movies best moments, both of which were improvised. First, in a scene that reminds me of one in The Terminator, Tuco goes to buy a gun and after spending ages listening to the firing mechanisms of them and getting used to the feel of each one uses his chosen firearm to rob the seller. Wallach knew nothing about guns so Leone’s direction for the scene was just for him to go into the shop and do whatever he wanted so the whole moment when he puts the ‘closed’ sign in the guy’s mouth wasn’t scripted.

The other great improvised moment was when his character is in a bathtub and a bounty hunter bursts in and says he’s been waiting eight moves for the chance to kill him. Sadly for that guy Tuco was clever enough to have a gun concealed under the bubbles and so he shoots the guy dead before Wallach unscripted mockingly says “If you got to shoot, shoot, don’t talk!” which made Leone and the rest of the crew roar with laughter so it was kept in. Like the scene in the gun shop reminds me of The Terminator Tuco’s quip to his foe recalls a future one in Die Hard and I could imagine the bounty hunter replying with John McClane’s “Thanks for the advice!” were he not dead. It is amusing to me that for someone who used dialogue as little as possible The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has a lot of really funny lines especially from Tuco and his frequent “There are two kinds of people…” taunts gets a great pay-off at the end.

Getting back to the editing again briefly although I have spoken about the much imitated three way duel perhaps my favourite shot of the film is when Tuco finally discovers the graveyard and we see just how huge it is with hundreds of graves. Wallach runs around as fast as he can desperately searching for the correct resting place of the hidden money, Morricone’s epic music plays, and the sensational editing which follows Tuco and like him gets ever increasingly desperate until the camera shot literally turns into a blur as it tries to keep up until coming to a sudden stop as we see the grave he’s been looking for. It’s pure cinema magic. It’s impressive enough to watch it without knowing any of the movie’s background but if you read about it you will learn that the graves were all built by the crew which must have taken forever to do as there are hundreds it looks like! The crew also had to rebuild the bridge that Tuco and Blondie blew up as the first time it happened the cameras weren’t rolling!

So far I have done nothing but gush over this film, but is it perfect? No. For starters Leone’s insistence on recording the film silent and then having the actors dub their lines is quite annoying here in his most talky of the trilogy as nobody, not even the American actors, have their mouths match their words and it does distract me a fair bit. I also found myself wondering at one point how the three main characters all knew each other as it wasn’t explained. You might explain that with “Well it’s possible that all three gun-slingers would be well aware of one another” and while I could justify that I can’t rationalise how Angel Eyes all of a sudden became a sergeant in the American army.

Those are nit-picks however and the only other problem I could imagine someone having is with the three hour running time. There are moments when I think “Do we really need that?” such as the whole scene with the bridge but I would hate to have that explosion omitted and actually feel that the length of the movie really helps draw us in to the final showdown as we’ve seen what these three men have all been through to get where they are now and you want to see Tuco and/or Blondie get the money they’ve been searching for. Lastly one thing I haven’t really touched on is the changing of allegiances and the constant shift in power that happens with the three leads which always keep you guessing as to what will happen next. So that just leaves me to mark the movie out of ten.

10/10- I said that this isn’t a perfect movie but it’s close enough to get the full mark. Its scope, its ambition, its drama, its excitement and its downright brilliance is more than enough to give it a ten. If you haven’t seen this for some reason you are cheating yourself from a enjoying a movie that is not only a spaghetti western masterpiece but really is, despite what critics of the day may have thought, a genuine of work of art.

Best quote: “You see in this world there are two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”

Best scene: It is obviously the graveyard scene, from Tuco’s search for the grave to the movie’s closing famous final line “You’re a stupid son of a ….” which is cut off by the theme tune as Eastwood’s Man with No Name rides off into the distance in a beautiful swansong.

Kick-ass moment: Clint Eastwood lights the fuse of a canon with his cigar.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we just talked about an Italian movie filmed in Spain and we are sticking with Europe to talk about a French movie that inspired a lot of movies including a famous Hong Kong director.