The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - Review (scherpschutter)

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A Film by Sergio Leone…

Template:Underconstruction Introduction

Not so long ago Sergio Leone was only a cult figure, today even people who are unfamiliar with the western genre know his name. He is considered by many as the greatest director of western movies in history, eclipsing even the names of a Ford or a Peckinpah. His movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is on top of most people’s lists with favourite westerns, and Quentin Tarantino has called it the best directed movie of all time. The title has been referred to in fashion, construction, baseball, politics, pop music and God knows what more. Morricone’s theme music has been used (and misused) so often, that it has become instantly recognisable to people of all ages in all corners of the world.


Looking for the Ugly

According to Dario Argento, who interviewed him at the time for an Italian newspaper, Sergio Leone had several films in mind after completing the second dollar movie, among them a biopic about Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickock (with Sophia Loren as Calamity Jane) a remake of Viva Villa! (a romanticized biopic of Pancho Villa), and an adventure movie set in war times. Some think The Good, the Bad and the Ugly originated in combining ideas for the remake and the adventure movie set in wartime. Leone wasn’t really fascinated by the Mexican revolution (unlike some of his colleagues), nor in the historic figure of Pancho Villa, but had been impressed by Wallace Beery, who had portrayed the revolutionary as the typical, ebullient Latin character. He wanted to keep the character, but use it within a different context. The background for his movie, wouldn’t be the Mexican Revolution, but the American Civil War, his main character not an altruist who was concerned with the destiny of his people, but a good-for-nothing who tried to survive in war time by using the hostilities to his own advantage.

Leone’s original choice for this ‘ugly character’ was Gian Maria Volonté, but he was afraid the character would become a neuropath when played by Volonté, and that was not what he had in mind. But then he saw Eli Wallach (some say in How the West was won, other say in The Magnificent Seven) and all of a sudden he knew he had found the right actor: a dramatic actor with a natural talent for comedy, who reminded him of both Wallace Beery and Charlie Chaplin.

Eli Wallach is The Ugly.
  1. The anchor point

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the third and most ambitious part of Sergio Leone’s so-called Dollar Trilogy, and also his third movie starring Clint Eastwood, the man who made himself a name by becoming No Name. Eastwood had been a cynical opportunist in A Fistful of Dollars and a bounty hunter in For a few a dollars More. In the Good, the Bad and the Ugly he’s an opportunist again. In the triptych ‘good-bad-ugly’, he represents the good. But don’t be fooled: like the opportunist and the bounty hunter from the previous two movies, the good is basically interested in money.

In For a Few dollars More, Eastwood’s No Name had appeared alongside a second protagonist, Colonel Mortimer, played by Lee van Cleef, and the newcomer had stolen the movie away from him. Now a third character was added, and again the newcomer would walk away with the movie. Eli Wallach’s ambiguous character is the anchor point of the story, with two other characters, one good, one bad, contrasting with his ‘ugly’ nature. Neither of them was to be defined in traditional terms of morality. Blondie is only ‘good’ because he isn’t as ugly as Tuco, and Tuco is only ‘ugly’ because he isn’t as bad as Angel Eyes. But all three are rather merciless opportunists, ready to kill if necessary, and ‘villains’ in the traditional good/bad polarisation of the western movie. Leone wanted to demystify the adjectives, and at the same time show the absurdity of war. He was, in his own words, pursuing a theme Chaplin had exposed in Monsieur Verdoux, a study of a 20th century Bluebeard, operating on the eve of WW II, who confuses the people who have sentenced him to death with questions about the true meanings of good and bad.

  1. The Plot

The plot is relatively simple. Tuco, a Mexican outlaw, teams up with Blondie, an American bounty hunter. The American will turn the Mexican in, collect the reward money, but rescue him from hanging by shooting through the rope. As a couple of illusionists, they travel from town to town, repeating the same trick everywhere. Angel Eyes, on the other hand, is a hired gun who is looking for a Confederate soldier named Bill Carson, who knows of the whereabouts of a load of gold. The two stories intertwine when Tuco, who was double-crossed by Blondie, leads his former partner into the desert to kill him. They meet a moribund Bill Carson, who tells them about the gold, hidden on a cemetery: to Tuco he tells the name of the cemetery, to Blondie the name on the grave. The two dress up like Conferate soldiers, but they’re captured by the Union and brought to a prison camp. Tuco has taken the identity of Bill Carson, and attracts the attention of Angel Eyes, who works in the camp as a sergeant. After a long series of incidents, with endless double-crossings and changing alliances, the three men arrive at the cemetery ...

Lee Van Cleef is The Bad.
  1. Ecstasy on the Altar of Death

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is an assured work, made by a film maker at the peak of his art. The movie has been called a comical nightmare as well as a study of the horrors of war. It is deeply rooted in the tradition of the picaresque novel and the commedia dell’arte, two Latin literary traditions. The picaresque story of three adventurers chasing the same treasure is punctuated by brief but poignant images of the war. We catch glimpses of executions, humiliations and torture, and it all culminates in this protracted scene of the trench war for a crucial bridge. The three men can be real bastards, but the war is shown as an inferno of destruction and pain However, Chris Frayling has pointed out that the war, perversely, also intervenes to save the life of Blondie and Tuco: A mysterious Confederate death wagon appears from nowhere, distracting Tuco’s attention, a mortar shell breaks the beam from which Blondie is about to be hanged, Southern mortar fire provides a smoke-screen, from behind which Tuco and Blondie can pick off the members of Angel Eyes’s gang during the shootout in the ‘war ghost town’. This is the true absurdity of the war, and of life. Blowing up the bridge, basically a selfish act (“If those idiots stop fighting, we can cross the river”), also becomes an act of mercy: Blondie and Tuco save lives by destroying the object the men are fighting for, and the sympathetic Union officer, the ‘philosopher’ of the movie, can rest in peace. This idea of life by destruction, is mirrored in the famous ‘ectasy of gold’ scene, with Tuco running in circles to find a name that can change his life in the midst of this altar of death, the cemetery called Sad Hill.

  1. The characters

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is also a character study Artaud style, which means the characters are illustrated by means of their actions and by confronting them to each other. Tuco, the Ugly, is open and direct, acting out of an earthy simplicity, without much recourse to postures, nor showing any lasting feelings of remorse or hate. His feelings are changeable to an almost ridiculous degree, but they’re not fake: every time he tries to fake a feeling (Blondie being his one and only true friend for example), he shows up for what he really is, a child begging for a cookie. Compared to Tuco, both the Good and the Bad are calculating personalities. Blondie misses Tuco’s immediate strong emotions, but he has more insight in the vicissitudes of life. He doesn’t fathom the true meaning of war (“I have never seen so many men wasted so badly”), but he understands some of the personal tragedy of the people involved in it, and the pain they suffer, both psychically and mentally: there seems to be some understanding between him and the sympathetic Union officer, and he shows real compassion when he meets a dying Confederate soldier. Furthermore, he discharges Tuco’s gun prior to the final shootout, so he won’t have to kill him. The Bad, Angel Eyes, is shown as a cold professional, who will execute any assignment he’s been paid for, even with a sadistic smile. Intellectually he is the direct opposite of Blondie: he has no feeling of empathy, but he understands the mechanisms of war so well he can use them to his own purpose. His calculated brutality is often frightening.

  1. The Actors

These types are all played to perfection by the three formidable leads. We’re so familiar with the characters and the actors playing them, that it’s hard to imagine Leone had someone else in mind for the part of Angel Eyes. For the second time in his career, he thought of Charles Bronson (he had already wanted him for A Fistful of Dollars), and Van Cleef was contracted very late in the process. Actually, he made this film back to back with The Great Gundown. Leone’s relationship with Wallach and (especially) Van Cleef was excellent, but he and Eastwood began to drift apart. According to Leone Clint had asked too much money ($ 250.000), and Clint was dissatisfied because he felt that Eli Wallach had the better part. There’s one small element of Eastwood’s character, that has escaped most people who have written about the movie: he picks up the famous poncho from the side of the dying soldier, wearing the distinctive garment only in the film’s finale. The two other parts of the trilogy are both set after the Civil War, and when Blondie rides out of this movie, he is on his way to A Fistful of Dollars. Like this the trilogy can start all over again, ad infinitum. It leaves us with the difficulty that No Name would be a wealthy man at the beginning of Fistful, which makes it unlikely he would ever want to mess with the Rojos and the Baxters, but it’s an elegant narrative device. I like it.

Clint Eastwood is The Good.
  1. Sources of Inspiration

Two other works of art inspired Leone in particular while making The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, an Italian film from 1959, La Grande Guerra, directed by Mario Monicelli (and co-scripted by no less than three screenwriters also involved in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Luciano Vicenzioni and the duo Age & Scarpelli), about a group of not-so-brave soldiers who try to avoid war hostilities, and the novella Deux Amis by 19th Century French author Guy de Maupassant, about two French fishermen who accidently get lost between the lines during WW I. Both works are rather light-hearted at the surface, but thought-provoking and deeply pessimistic at the core. The same qualities shine through in the above mentioned Monsieur Verdoux. In the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly the adventures of the three men are often seasoned with funny one-liners and moments of great burlesque humour, but there are also fast shootouts, elaborated scenes of physical and mental torment, and moments of great brutality. We get images of ruined towns, mutilated men, improvised army hospitals full of heavily wounded casualties, war thieves digging their own grave before being executed etc. Often described – even by American critics – as the most impressive depiction of the Civil War, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is also a bitter foreshadowing of the great conflicts of the 20th century: The scenes of the entranced armies fighting a bloody battle over a bridge, seem to refer to the French and Belgian battlefields of WW I, while Leone has admitted that he thought partly of the Nazi concentration camps with their Jewish orchestras when he was filming the scenes in the Northern prison camp.

  1. Conclusion

Funny, violent and meaningful, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is close to perfection. A few jokes may be a bit insipid and I don’t really like this shootout in a ghost town between Tuco and Blondie and Angel Eyes’ men. Some scenes, like the triello, the shootout with three on the cemetery, and the ecstacy of gold, Tuco’s run around the graves of Sad Hill, belong to the most beautiful ever filmed. Morricone’s score is one of the best of his impressive career. If you haven’t seen this film yet, you have some work to do.

The different versions: The film was originally released on DVD with a running time of 155 minutes. Most recent releases have some 16 minutes of restored scenes, cut from the original theatrical release. On previous editions most of these scenes were added as extras, with Italian dialogue. The “Grotto scene” is a completely new scene, the “Sorocco sequence” a photo and text reconstruction of an apparently lost scene. The Lee van Cleef part is better defined now, and the scene with him making inquiries about Bill Carson in an improvised army hospital, is particularly strong. Other scenes seem to add little to the movie, and many have expressed the opinion that MGM should have created a menu option, so we could watch the film with or without them. Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood dubbed their new lines, while Simon Prescott replaced the late Lee van Cleef.


... The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (IMAGE)

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