#519: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Sergio Leone’s quintessential western weaves a tale of greed and mistrust
Initial release: December 23, 1966
Director: Sergio Leone
Is there a movie that defines the cultural idea of the western more than The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly? For 57 years, Sergio Leone’s seminal film has been the go-to when someone wanted an example of a western — despite all it did to deconstruct a genre that was on its way to becoming moribund.
In some ways, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (henceforth referred to as GBU) can be considered responsible for the death of the western genre. For thirty years, westerns had been the most American of film genres, but tended to adhere to a fairly static formula of rigid morality and uncomplex plotlines. This was the age of John Wayne and the Lone Ranger, a period of mythologizing the frontier period as the conquest of a wild land. In the 1960s however, Leone and a number of other European filmmakers, among them Sergio Corbucci (Django) and Harald Reinl (who directed a number of Yugoslav/West German films based on the works of Karl May) came on the scene to reshape the popular image of the Western; similar to the zankoku movement seeking to deconstruct the romantic samurai film, these Eurowesterns, and the Revisionist Western genre that they spawned, turned the usual tropes of the genre on their head. They were bloodier, more morally grey, and often had a different focus from the typical “cowboys-and-Indians” frontier justice of earlier films; a small sub-subgenre, the Zapata western, focused on the politics of the Mexican revolution.
GBU serves as the end-cap of an unofficial trilogy created by Leone, beginning with A Fistful of Dollars, an unsanctioned westernization of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo starring a nameless gunslinger played by Clint Eastwood. Fistful was an early shot over the bow for the more romantic westerns; by the time GBU came out, the “spaghetti western” was in full bloom, with Fistful and its sequel For a Few Dollars More leading the charge. Despite its place as the third film in the trilogy, GBU is actually a prequel, set during the American Civil War, though exactly when is somewhat ambiguous.
The Civil War casts a long shadow over the western; many of the genre’s heroes are veterans of one side or another, but it’s rare that such films are set with the war in the immediate background. GBU is an outlier in that regard, not least for its lengthy battle scene that seems to anticipate a similar scene in Apocalypse Now: two sides fighting over a bridge, seemingly pointlessly, with no end in sight, with our heroes only here as a stop on their way to somewhere else. The battle sequence is often hailed as the most realistic portrayal of the Civil War up to that point (though The Red Badge of Courage might have something to say about that) and for good reason: it’s all noise and thunder and bodies everywhere; a poignant scene has the lead character, “Blondie,” comforting a dying soldier he finds in a collapsed church.
So what’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly even about? We open with a Mexican bandit getting away from a trio of bounty hunters, leaving two dead and one wounded; we’re then introduced to a mercenary in black who seems to be hunting down a man who has information on a buried cache of gold. Finally, we’re introduced to the otherwise nameless “Blondie,” (who Fistful fans might recognize as The Man With No Name, played again by Clint Eastwood) who is in cahoots with Tuco, the aforementioned bandit, ripping off small frontier towns by turning Tuco in for bounty money then rescuing him before he’s hung and making off with the cash. Blondie eventually grows bored with this scam and decides to cut Tuco loose — in the desert, about 70 miles from the nearest town. Tuco eventually manages to catch up to Blondie amidst the collapse of the Confederate war effort in the American southwest, and resolves to march Blondie across the desert in revenge. When a CSA carriage comes along with no driver, Tuco stops it and finds all its occupants dead save one — the man that Angel Eyes the mercenary had been looking for. But as he reveals multiple times throughout the film, Tuco is not smart, and Blondie manages to get an important piece of info before Tuco does. The dying man has revealed to both of them the location of a grave where the gold cache is buried — but individually they only have half of the location. Between the two of them and Angel Eyes, it’s a race to find the gold before the others do.
GBU is a complex tale of greed; Blondie is, ostensibly, The Good one of the title, but the film opens with him scamming small towns and leaving a man to die. Tuco is a brash, conniving bandit, but a key scene has him reconnecting with his pious brother, who berates him for abandoning the family, only for Tuco to return the accusation — after all, his brother left to join the seminary when Tuco was but a boy. It’s a thoughtful, bittersweet moment that adds a ton of depth to the character — more than Eastwood’s cool, sardonic Blondie ever gets. Eastwood was concerned about being upstaged, and he was probably right to worry — Eli Wallach turned in a fantastic performance despite nearly dying on set five times. Despite each others’ attempts to murder each other, and their being forced to work together as without the other they’ll never find the treasure, they’re probably each the best friend the other man has got.
On the other hand, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) is unquestionably a villain; he murders his benefactor after being paid extra by his previous victim to do it, he beats information out of a prostitute, and he inserts himself into the Union army to torture information out of captured Confederate troops, looking for the man who knows where the treasure is. Of the three, he’s the only one to die, rolling conveniently into an open grave.
What really makes GBU, however, is Leone’s eye for a shot and Ennio Morricone’s iconic score. Leone has a talent for using wide shots and closeups to enhance a moment; a key example is the three-way standoff at the cemetery between the title characters in the film’s finale, all twitching hands and sun-squinted eyes in between wide shots of the men standing in opposition to each other. Morricone’s wailing score makes itself known from the jump with the opening credits, but it remains a strong, instrumentally complex rumble throughout the film. Overall, GBU is a compositional powerhouse, one of the finest examples of filmmaking there is. The plot almost doesn’t matter; that it’s such a morally complex work, sometimes funny, sometimes bittersweet, sometimes so tense it makes your teeth sing, only makes it better.
