There are a handful of films that are so ubiquitous and ingrained in our culture that it can feel like you’ve already seen it before ever watching a frame. You know the name, the characters, the story, sometimes the score, and in a few special cases entire scenes or sequences. Everyone watching The Godfather for the first time knows that someone will have a rude awakening next to a horse (or at least its head). Nobody needs to hear Indiana Jones say it out loud to know that he hates snakes. We all know that Ilsa wants Sam to “play it again” and that Rick will be looking at her, kid, before she takes a plane out of Casablanca. It takes a special kind of film to cement itself so thoroughly, a badge of honor beyond just being something great or notable. I was unaware, however, that Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was one of these precious few, however, until I watched it for the first time and Ennio Morricone’s masterful score began to play over the opening credits.
I’d like to say that The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was one of those formative movies for me, something I watched quickly after first watching Kill Bill and becoming obsessed with Quentin Tarantino. It would have been so easy to immediately seek out the spaghetti westerns that influenced him, but alas I did not. At the time, the western was not a genre I felt particularly drawn to. By the mid-2000s, the western had more than fallen out of vogue. Despite the occasional traditional one (such as the very solid 3:10 to Yuma remake from James Mangold), nearly every new western was a riff on a riff on a riff, set in a more modern era (though still speaking to the American myth such as No Country for Old Men). There were plenty of callbacks and sendups in the cartoons I grew up with, from “Tiny Tunes” sketches to An American Tail: Fievel Goes West”. I’d seen enough content to feel I had a general understanding of the long-diminished genre.
It wasn’t that I was unaware of the Leone Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and the movie we’re talking about right now) or the concept of spaghetti westerns being markedly different from the traditional kind. While Tarantino didn’t lead me to his American influences he did make me interested in his peers and friends, first being Robert Rodriguez. I’d seen Rodriguez’ Spy Kids films in theaters (including the truly absurd 3-D one), but it was Quentin’s guest-directed scene in Rob’s Sin City that got me interested. I watched his debut feature El Mariachi and not long after Desperado, learning they were part of a loose trilogy inspired by Leone’s seminal works. I was also a dumb teenager who had no interest in watching a trio of old movies from the ‘60s starring Hollywood royalty, Clint Eastwood, in his (arguably) most famous role. Despite my ever-growing love of film, I just wasn’t particularly interested in exploring film history. I didn’t even watch The Godfather until I was in college if that’s any indication of my naïveté.
Luckily, my sentiments would change as I got older and discovered how many great movies I’d so rudely ignored, though it still wasn’t the western that I sought out. While living as a single man in his mid-to-late 20s, I was looking up potential décor when I found the perfect statement piece for a movie lover like myself – a series of minimalist-inspired movie posters for a ton of classics that I wanted to hang above my TV. But as I was picking my favorite films to represent, I was drawn to the poster made for Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, a movie I’d embarrassingly never actually seen. I wanted to buy it, but I also felt that it would be disingenuous to display it so proudly without actually having watched. So, I looked up where it was streaming in 2016, and, low and behold, there it was on Hulu. In fact, nearly every Kurosawa film was available there – it didn’t take long before I’d watched not just Seven Samurai, but also Hidden Fortress, Rashamon, Throne of Blood, Ran, Kagemusha, and the truly indelible Yojimbo.
What struck me about Yojimbo was how much more like a western it felt to me than a Samurai flick. Nearly all the action takes place in a one-street town, the hero spends most of his time in a Japanese saloon, and we even end with a showdown where the hero and villain stare each other down before the final confrontation. Every trope that I’d grown up seeing in modern media was there and, while I knew that Kurosawa was heavily influenced by American films, I was shocked to see him diving so deep into his own version of a western. I looked it up online to learn more about its influences, from the John Wayne westerns of the ‘40s to the Dashiell Hammett novel, “Red Harvest”. But more than the influences on Yojimbo what I found fascinating was what it actually influenced itself – a filmmaker named Sergio Leone who would go on to remake it nearly shot for shot as the first true spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars.
Starring a then-unknown Clint Eastwood, himself trying to leapfrog from the small to big screens, Dollars is exactly as advertised. The story of an unnamed drifter coming into town and pitting two warring families against each other to free the rest of the citizens follows nearly every single beat of Yojimbo’s tale (to the point that Kurosawa and Toho Studios would eventually sue Leone and settle out of court for 15% of Dollars’ worldwide gross). The only real difference (besides the setting) is that Dollars is in both English and full technicolor. Otherwise, they’re the same film. Yojimbo has a great sequel, Sanjuro, that is more of a cat-and-mouse comedic thriller than a western, so I was more curious than ever what Leone’s version of a sequel would be. I watched A Fistful of Dollars, a much darker and sinister revenge plot where Eastwood’s Man With No Name ends up helping a desperate man get revenge on the man who raped and killed his daughter played with great sympathy by Lee Van Cleef. It’s a truly nasty film that still manages to maintain just enough of the lighthearted charm of the first to warrant one more entry and complete the trilogy, a prequel/origin story for No Name set against the backdrop of the American Civil War called The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
Where the first two Dollars films are either just under or just over two hours, the third installment is a three-hour epic. I had watched the trailer on YouTube (a very funny curio that lists the wrong actors as The Bad and The Ugly due to a mistranslation) but otherwise had no idea what to expect. I rented the film, turned out the lights and Ennio Morricone’s score began to play. I nearly leaped out of my seat – I knew this music. This was the sound that I’d heard my entire life to signal we were referencing the Wild West. This was the music of cowboys and bandits alike. It was at that moment, watching the opening credits play while a tune I’d heard a million times overplayed through them, that I fully understood my mistake in waiting so long to watch The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. This wasn’t just a classic movie I would eventually get around to – this film was already deep in my bones.
The Good
Despite its length, one of the remarkable things about The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is how quick it truly feels from start to finish. At times it seems like the movie is even playing games with us, constantly having people appear out of nowhere as if they didn’t even exist until they entered the frame. Narratively, the movie is a fairly straightforward story about three men traveling across the American Southwest during the Civil War in search of a missing stash of cash. Structurally, however, it’s an extremely episodic trek from place to place as our characters eventually find themselves in the right place at the right time over and over and over again, culminating in one of the truly greatest showdowns in movie history. Each person has their own motivations (though none actually extends that far beyond “greed”), and each person has their own methods. It’s the contrast of personalities combined with the extreme episodes they face along the way that keeps the film rolling along, something Leone would move away from in his later work (as great as it all is).
The structure is introduced right at the start. From a deep shot of the desert, we see a haggard-looking man slide into frame (more in this later) before he is joined by a few compadres. They’ve come to a saloon in the middle of nowhere to arrest an outlaw, something we’ve seen in countless westerns before. What we haven’t seen is that outlaw jumping through the window, turkey leg in hand, and a freeze frame that lets us know that this man, Tuco (Eli Wallach), is The Ugly. We jump from this comedy immediately to a tense thriller of a scene, a kid riding his mule to gather water spots an ominous figure riding toward his family home. The man, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef, here playing a very different character than the last movie in the series), asks the father of the house about some ill-gotten money he’s been hired to find. When he kills the man and his other, older son we know even before the title card that he is The Bad. When Clint Eastwood’s Blondie is introduced just one scene later, we already know the sequence is going to end with us learning that he is The Good. Three scenes and twenty minutes later and we’re officially off.
The rest of the first hour of the film is mostly disconnected, though we can see the strings being pulled. Blondie has saved Tuco’s life and now the two work together to scam the local towns out of their reward money (Tuco is a very, very wanted man). It is only when Tuco gets a bit too greedy for Blondie’s liking that the latter leaves the former for dead. Meanwhile, Angel Eyes returns to the man who originally hired him and takes him out, planning to take the money for himself once he finds one more source. By the time Tuco and Blondie are violently reunited, with Tuco now having the upper hand and dragging Blondie through the desert without water, it doesn’t take a genius to know that the pair will eventually get wind of the same money Angel Eyes is after. It’s at the end of the desert sequence when the two meet a dying Bill Carson, Angel Eyes’ target, and each learns a different piece of information about where the money is buried. One knows the name of a graveyard, the other the name on the grave it’s under.
The rest of the story takes us to a monastery near the Mexican border (if not across it), a Union Army prison camp, a war-torn village, a battle on a bridge, and finally the graveyard where the cash resides. Some stops ratchet up the tension, with battles and gunfights, while others give us unique character moments, such as Tuco reuniting with his priest brother before leaving him high and dry. With each new location and challenge it’s easy to get excited for just how our characters will make their way out of it. Late in the film, when it appears that Blondie and Tuco have shaken Angel Eyes, they happen upon a river they need to cross and two armies on either side. We know it will be a riveting adventure to get across, but seeing the battle play out followed by our heroes blowing up the bridge to force the armies to leave is a bigger thrill than we could have predicted. That the movie manages to still have a more exciting climax on the horizon is a miracle.
The Bad
A notable aspect of Sergio Leone’s filmography is that five of the seven films he is credited as director are all westerns in one form or another. Sure, there are a handful of directors who are also known for directing predominantly westerns, John Ford being the most notable one, but all of them are American except for Leone, an Italian. The western, as a genre, began as a way to codify the myth of American westward expansion. It whitewashed the popular image of a cowboy from a multi-racial profession into one of stoic white American manhood, and it portrayed the battles against Native Americans defending their lands as a war between good and evil, with white Americans as the side of the good. To be fair, not every western was this cut and dry and many did manage to explore these themes as problematic, but when made from a chiefly American perspective the willingness to truly condemn the actions of America’s manifest destiny often fell short. The Searchers, an absolutely scathing rebuke of American attitudes towards Indigenous peoples by 1956 standards looks woefully inadequate and, at times, outright racist to modern eyes.
What being Italian allowed Leone to do was explore the themes that the western genera had spread around the world from an outsider’s point of view, from someone more removed from the contemporary attitudes of modern Americans despite casting Clint Eastwood in the lead role. The first two films of the Dollars trilogy, Leone’s first attempts at the genre, don’t exactly try to dissect the genre rather than allow Sergio to play in the sandbox for a bit. The wild west was a perfect setting for his Yojimbo remake given that film’s inspirations, and his second effort was a great exploration of the revenge that permeates some of the darker westerns of the time (particularly, again, The Searchers). But there is one notable difference between Leone’s westerns and those of his idols – there are no Native American villains. Well, there aren’t any Native American characters to begin with, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Yes, the antagonist of For a Few Dollars More is named El Indio, but outside of that, it’s not exactly a part of his characterization.
With The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Leone felt more comfortable confronting some of America’s evils head-on, or at least show that he was aware of how much the western genre was founded on flawed myth-making. Many have already pointed out that the only thing making one character good, another bad, and a third ugly is purely based on the title cards that play in the opening sequences and I am somewhat inclined to agree on the surface. But the more I watch this film the more I begin to see why Leone chose each character for each designation. Blondie is obviously the good, if only because of his willingness to share the wealth. He’s the one man not looking to take the money for himself at any point, and he makes numerous efforts to help out others in times of need. He’s greedy like the others, but in a way that ensures it doesn’t have to be just him who wins. For the final shootout, he lets Tuco shoot with a gun that he unloaded the night before. Sure, it prevents Tuco from shooting him, but it also means that he plans to let him live, at least for now (and in the other films, which take place later on, he helps both a town and a grieving man find peace).
The difference between Angel Eyes’ bad and Tuco’s ugly is far more than just the looks. Lee Van Cleef was certainly better looking than Eli Wallach, particularly based on their appearances in this movie, but it is their character that Leone seems to be commenting on. An odd note is how the Italian title for the film, Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo puts “ugly” second and “bad” last. Aside from the alliteration that the title allows for, I find it an interesting distinction for how Italians and Americans might view the characters. Angel Eyes is overtly evil from the moment we meet him – he murders a father and son in cold blood followed by the man who hired him before he’s even met the other characters. He’s blindly guided by his greed, much like the oil and rail barons that ravaged the American West after the Civil War in search of more and more power. He is bad chiefly because of how openly he carries out his evil. To many Europeans, at least in their minds, that is the worst way to be. But Americans have a different point of view – we almost admire those willing to be so bold about it. What we truly despise are those ugly enough to pretend they’re your friend right before they stab you in the back.
That is exactly who Tuco is from start to finish. While we never see any of it, we are at one point read a long list of reasons he is wanted by every single town and settlement in the old west. Murder and rape abound, it is clear that he has never tried to live an upstanding life. Regardless, he begs and pleads his way across the three hours of film to reach the graveyard where the money is, relying on the kindness of strangers and the pity of good men to survive. He tries every chance he gets to kill Blondie or learn his half of the secret, and yet he is called ugly rather than bad. In the American title of the film, ugly is last and therefore considered the worst of the three. So while Angel Eyes will die in the graveyard, it is Tuco who will be forced to hang, and only if he holds on long enough for Blondie to shoot him free will he get to keep his half of the money.
The Beautiful
Despite the title, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is an unbelievably gorgeous movie. Much of the film is shot in either extreme long shots or extreme close-ups, allowing us to marvel at the majesty of the American West (or, rather, Spain doubling as America) while also understanding the emotions playing out on every character’s face. That opening shot, going from the landscape to the man’s face is an instant recognition of the rhythms the cinematography will have throughout the picture. Master cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli managed to keep everything in perfect focus regardless of the distance, and it is very easy to get lost in the visuals before realizing that you aren’t even paying attention to the dialogue. The first time I watched this movie I’m not sure I fully understand what was actually happening – I just knew that I enjoyed looking at it.
Aurally this film is also a masterpiece. Sure, the opening credits score is iconic but the entire score is brilliant, as one should expect from composer Ennio Morricone. While the main theme plays at various inflection points in the movie, it is the way Morricone uses unique melodies to punctuate specific scenes that stands out to me. Starting with Angel Eyes’ introduction, we hear a beautiful acoustic guitar play what should be a theme to a jaw-dropping sunrise that soon morphs into something sinister as the bad man approaches the house. The guitar is choppy and disjointed rather than flowy and melodic, just as Angel Eyes brings discomfort to the otherwise perfect morning. When Quentin Tarantino uses the theme himself for Bill’s introduction in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 it’s a perfect evocation of that piece’s power.
Of course, no discussion of Ennio Morricone’s score would be complete without mentioning “The Ecstasy of Gold”. Currently playing in the background for Modelo commercials, many people know this theme as Metallica’s announcement music, playing before every one of their shows right before they take the stage (having seen it happen in person, it’s unbelievably epic). But before it was either of those, this music played as Tuco approached the graveyard in elation, thinking he’d finally escaped Blondie and was about to take the money for himself. He runs in circles and the gravestones become a blur while the camera follows his every move, faster and faster every second. And just before we collapse from dizziness, Tuco, the music, and the camera all stop, and the grave is found.
It’s not the end, though, and there is one last piece of brilliance left for Delli Colli and Morricone to elevate into transcendence – the three-way Mexican standoff. With all three principals finally in one place with the money on the line, Blondie proposes a shootout between them, with the money being split between whoever survives. For the next five minutes, the score builds once more, Morricone wringing every ounce of tension he can out of an out-of-tune guitar and perfectly calibrated piano. Delli Colli first shows the broad landscape as he gets closer and closer until all we see are the eyes of the good, bad, and ugly. The crescendo hits and the shots fire – Angel Eyes is dead, Tuco tricked, and Blondie victorious. With his half of the money he gets to ride off into the sunset, and the main theme plays once more as the movie comes to an end. It’s masterful filmmaking and a perfect end to a perfect movie.