The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

"The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly" is a great film for many reasons, for me, it's a film that I'm hypnotized to each time I see it on television, it belongs with one of those great action yarns of the 60s with charismatic stars such as "The Great Escape", "Cool Hand Luke", or "The Dirty Dozen". You get sucked into its somewhat simple plot just because it has one of those irresistible stories: three greedy desperate men each know a secret to a buried treasure and will do anything to get to it first.

The idea of this film leads to an inevitable conclusion where these three desperate men must face eachother in perhaps the greatest showdown in cinematic history.

What makes this film stand above all its contemporaries and all its imitators is it's something of pure style, made by the master of the craft Sergio Leone. Leone only made six films, but each of them are visceral exercises of violence, and love of the movies. It's no wonder a filmmaker like Quentin Tarantino chose "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" as one of his favorite films.

The film starts off with a long epilogue to introduce the three main characters; we first meet "The Ugly" Tuco played by Eli Wallach a rat faced killer who is probably the most desperate of them all to get the money. Then there's "The Bad", Angel Eyes played by Lee Van Cleef, he's the usual suspect to show up in westerns wearing the black hat and someone who goes through life without a conscience. Then we meet "The Good" played by Clint Eastwood, he's "The Man with no name" character who appeared in two previous Leone films "A Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More". His name isn't given although Tuco often calls him Blondie. Blondie is by no means the hero with a heart of gold, but in Leone's west, he is the closest to good you come by, he shows evidence of compassion, but he leads his life with a somewhat cynical look at the world, something he has carried with him throughout all three Leone pictures.

At the start of the picture we see Blondie and Tuco working together. Tuco is a wanted man and Blondie is a bounty hunter who turns him in to collect the reward. When Tuco is about the be hanged, Blondie shoots him down and the two ride off and split the money. Each time Tuco escapes, his ransom increases, but once he gets to $3000, Blondie decides to part company and leaves Tuco without any money and a horse, so he exacts revenge.

Tuco soon catches up with Blondie and takes him as a prisoner, his plan is to watch him die a slow painful death in the dessert, but fate takes a hand when they are interrupted by a runaway stagecoach where a dying man tells of a buried treasure hidden in a cemetery. Tuco overhears the name of the cemetery, but when he is distracted, Blondie overhears the name of the grave it's buried in. Without one man trusting the other with his own secret, the two are stuck together until they can find the treasure.

Meanwhile Angel Eyes is conducting his own investigation and he too knows of the treasure, it isn't soon till he catches up with Tuco and Blondie.

"The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", came at a time when the western genre was at a transition. Leone pretty much revitalized the genre along with Sam Peckinpah. Their image of the west was no longer stuff of legend like the ones of John Ford or Howard Hawks. The lines of who's good and who's bad in these films become blurred. Although, it says in the title, who's supposed to be good, bad, and ugly, Leone doesn't really leave it that black and white. Tuco gets much of our sympathy, although he's a ruthless killer, Leone gives a scene with his brother who became a monk. The idea that one brother became a bandit while another one a man of the cloth was not an original idea, yet Leone along with Wallach's performance (which should've gotten a nomination) give pathos to Tuco, and we are able to realize that he's not all that bad. Leone isn't as sympathetic to Angel Eyes, yet I suppose a film like this needs the usual villain.

The film is also one made by a man who enjoys the movies, Leone obviously loved the American westerns particularly the ones of John Ford with his use of vast open spaces. He was the forerunner for people like Tarantino who's own encyclopedia knowledge of movie history would become part of his cinema. That's not saying Leone was completely unoriginal, on the contrary. Look at the final shoot out which is a perfectly choreographed mini-movie in itself. It starts off slowly where the men get into position, perfectly composed in frame. The camera soon gets tighter into each man's faces, with the editing switching fiercely from their eyes to their guns. Leone knows exactly when the payoff should happen. The sequence is remarkably long, probably longer than it would be in real life, it's one of the great moments in cinema. A sequence like that has been copied before and we think of that as a Leone moment.

Sergio Leone was a supreme master of cinema, unfortunately he only lived to make six films, five of them in the western genre. The sixth one was a gangster saga "Once Upon a Time in America" and was probably his most complex story. With each film, Leone's characters and stories became darker, he was growing as an artist each time, it's a shame his career was cut short, but for a man who only had six films, those are some six.

"The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" was also the last film he made with star and muse Clint Eastwood, a man who's character had few words and who's face stood motionless was is probably what attracted the great director to the actor. Eastwood would come out being a huge star/director in his own right and dedicating his masterpiece "Unforgiven" in part to Leone. It's hard to wonder where the two men would be without the other. "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" is a testament between a star and director who were a match made in heaven.