The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
The spaghetti Western has experienced a critical rethinking over the decades. At first they were considered cheap and disposable, a different kind of B film. But, with Leone's films in particular, they have earned a respect. No less than Quentin Tarantino declares that The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is the greatest film of all time, and you can sure see its influences in his films.
It was the end of a trilogy that began with A Fistful Of Dollars and then For A Few Dollars More, with Clint Eastwood playing The Man With No Name, a poncho-wearing gunman who is always cool under pressure and has more than a dollop of good luck. He was kind of the Bugs Bunny of spaghetti Westerns, getting into scrapes with nefarious figures but always getting out alive.
In this film he is running a scam with a Mexican bandit called Tuco (Eli Wallach). He captures Wallach, earns the reward money, and then when Wallach is ready to be hanged, shoots the rope and helps Wallach escape, and they split the reward money. But Eastwood tires of Wallach, and though he doesn't allow him to be hanged, does abscond with the latest reward money, and Wallach pursues him and finally catches him, and leads him on a pilgrimage across the desert, allowing Eastwood no water.
Meanwhile, Lee Van Cleef plays Angel Eyes, a cold-blooded killer, who is after a booty of Confederate gold (this is told during the Civil War during the New Mexico campaign). Wallach and Eastwood find the man who knows where the gold is hidden, but Wallach learns only the name of the cemetery where its buried and Eastwood the name of the grave. Thus Wallach has to keep Eastwood alive. Eventually, in one of the greatest endings in all of cinema, the three men meet in the graveyard.
Leone's mannerisms are on full display here. He alternated between extreme long shots and extreme closeups, and was a master at staging, as often he would show a group of men strategically placed to create interesting tableaus. This extended right down to the lasts sequence, where the three men are in a circle in the middle of the graveyard, eyeing each other, with closeups of their eyes flitting back and forth, waiting to see who would make the first move.
By screen time, and by force of nature, Wallach is really the star of this film. He gets many good lines, such as when a killer finds him in the bathtub, and tells him how he caught him, but Wallach has a gun under the suds, and shoots first. "When you're going to shoot, shoot!" he says over the man's corpse. "Don't talk!"
Wallach is also the only character who is given any sort of background, as he meets his brother, a priest, and learns of his parents' deaths. He doesn't apologize for his choices, telling his brother the only way out of poverty was to become a priest or a bandit, and each made their own choice.
The other two characters are blanks--we know that Eastwood (called "Blondie" by Wallach) is from Illinois, and that's more than we learn about Angel Eyes. These two are more types than characters, and Eastwood, in his third film for Leone, had created his own type, the man of few words and a squint who has a decent streak, even if can be cruel to those who deserve it.
The film is almost three hours long and was cut down for some releases. A long sequence with Eastwood and Wallach being capture by a Union outfit with a drunken captain, surely to show the folly of war, has been excised and for good reason. Leone also doesn't allow anyone to hurry. He is the master of the slow buildup, where characters seem to be in dead stillness, moving slowly, until violence erupts.
Eastwood never made a movie with Leone again, opting out of Once Upon A Time In The West (there was reportedly friction between the two). But this film has stood the test of time, and is one of the best Westerns made, spaghetti or not. It does what most great Westerns do--it embraces the mythos of the West, while also showing us the grim reality behind it. In the West, life was brutish, nasty, and short.
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