The good, the bad and the ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo in Italian) – 4 stars (Excellent)
After enjoying unexpected commercial success with “A Fistful of Dollars” and “A Few Dollars More,” Italian director Sergio Leone ends his “Spaghetti Westerns” trilogy with “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
Surprisingly, even at this point in his masterful directing of made-in-Spain westerns, Leone would not enjoy a dime of critical adulation, as only the Laurel Awards would give Clint Eastwood a single award for Action Performance, and that was so runner up.
Hollywood and its stars ignored Sergio Leone just like Johnny Depp. They refuse to acknowledge that even westerns or pirate movies can be artfully done and have unique acting performances. Clint Eastwood is The Man With No Name and Johnny Depp is the perfect pirate as Captain Jack Sparrow. There will never be another equal in these roles.
At least one film director, screenwriter and actor, Quentin Tarantino, has identified Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as “the best directed film of all time”. It was Tarantino who gave moviegoers “Reservoir Dogs.” “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill (Vol. 1 and Vol.2)”, among others.
But let’s go back to Leone, who helped write the script primarily with Luciano Vincenzoni. It was Vincenzoni who came up with the film’s premise: three rascals in search of treasure at the time of the American Civil War, and its title.
The rogues triangle included The Good (Clint Eastwood, a professional gunslinger referred to as “Blondie” in this film and who would become The Man With No Name in later Western spin-offs of his character), The Bad (Lee Van Cleef, a self-centered hitman known as “Angel Eyes”) and The Ugly (Eli Wallach, a self-centered outlaw known as “Tuco”).
Long story short, the plot involves first establishing the three rogues as bona fide killers. Blondie then becomes a pseudo bounty hunter in partnership with Tuco, turning him in for the bounty, rescuing him before he is hanged, and repeating the process until Blondie leaves Tuco in the desert to die. Tuco survives and lives to find Blondie and return the favor.
As Blondie is about to die as Tuco forces her to walk across the desert, they are interrupted by a runaway driverless carriage loaded with corpses. Except for one body, Bill Carson, lives long enough to tell Tuco where $200,000 worth of gold is buried in exchange for water. As Tuco goes for water, Carson tells Blondie the exact grave in a cemetery where the gold can be found. Suddenly, they have a compelling reason to be partners again.
Dressed in the Confederate uniforms of the dead, Tuco takes Blondie, who is near death, to a local Catholic mission run by Tuco’s brother, a priest. Blondie’s recovery goes well, but Tuco’s reconciliation with his brother doesn’t.
Blondie and Tuco abandon the mission and end up being captured by Union soldiers and taken to a prison camp where Angel Eyes (now a Union sergeant) personally takes it upon himself to torture the captives. Angle Eyes notices the gold, has his enforcer beat Tuco senseless, and learns the name of the graveyard. He then hands Tuco over for the bounty, frees Blondie (who knows the exact location) and he and his gang of 5 thugs head to the graveyard with Blondie.
Tuco manages to escape on his way to his hanging, appears in a city that has been foolishly bombed by Union forces and crashes into Blondie, Angel Eyes and their gang of 5. Blondie and Tuco manage to kill all 5 thugs while Angel Eyes escapes. , and now the three of them are heading to the cemetery.
On the way to the cemetery, Blondie and Tuco find themselves in a full-blown Civil War battle over a bridge that crosses a river into the cemetery. They witness the ongoing carnage, they blow up the bridge, and then the soldiers from both sides, as well as Blondie and Tuco, move on.
Once in the graveyard, it’s inevitable that the three rogues will face off in one of the greatest western showdowns ever filmed. The Confrontation is filled with masterful panning shots, extreme close-ups, and a clever sequence of final events from Leone. If you haven’t seen this movie, you must, it may be the best western ever made. If you’ve seen it, you should watch it again to better appreciate Sergio Leone’s masterful direction.
There are many great moments in this movie. Two of my favorites involved Tuco. In the first, while Tuco is in the bombed town, he manages to find a bathtub and take a bath. As he does so, a bounty hunter (remember Tuco still has a price on his head) confronts him naked in the bathtub.
At the beginning of the movie, the bounty hunter is one of the three gunmen who confront Tuco and Tuco shoots all three of them. The one facing Tuco lost his right arm but survived and now shoots with his left. He reminds Tuco of his anguish and as he does so, Tuco kills him with his gun that is hidden under the bubble bath water. Tuco then utters this memorable line: “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.”
The other scene that I love is when Tuco walks miles and miles out of the desert and enters a town with a gun shop in front of him. After diving into a watering hole, he confronts the owner, remakes a gun out of parts from three other guns, then goes outside to test the gun.
Knock three standing figures down, turning them on their sides, then fire three shots to slice each one in half. Two figures immediately fall and the third remains upright. Tuco takes a shot of whiskey, and then jumps and when he lands, the third target drops. This is a boy’s movie, and you really need to be a boy to fully appreciate what I’m sharing here. Tuco’s role in this scene helped coin the word cool.
Moviegoers watching this movie at the time were unaware that Eli Wallach (Tuco) nearly died three times while playing his role.
He was nearly poisoned on set after drinking acid that was used to burn the bags full of gold coins so they would open more easily when hit with a shovel. A film technician had poured the acid into a bottle of lemon soda and Wallach did not know it. He drank a lot of milk and ended the scene with a mouth full of sores.
In another scene where Wallach was about to be hanged while riding a horse, the rope was severed by a pistol shot, but the startled horse galloped for almost a mile with Wallach’s hands tied behind him and the noose still on. tight around his neck.
In a third scene, in order to cut off his captor’s handcuffs, Wallach places his captor on the railroad tracks and waits for a train to pass and break the chain attached to the handcuffs. He was a foot from the track and bows his head to the ground as the train passes. The entire film crew and Wallach were unaware that heavy iron steps protruded from each carriage and any one of the numerous carriages with iron steps would have decapitated Wallach if he had raised his head.
Wallach would later acknowledge and complain in his autobiography that set safety was not one of Leone’s main concerns in directing the film.
For the record, Tuco’s full name in the film’s script was Tuco Benedito Pacifico Juan María Ramírez.
Because Sergio Leone barely spoke English and Eli Wallach barely spoke Italian, the two communicated in French. Because an international cast was employed, only Eastwood, Van Cleef, and Wallach spoke in English, and they were dubbed into Italian for the debut release in Rome. All other members of the international cast spoke mainly French or Spanish and were later dubbed. This explains the fact that none of the dialogue in the film was completely in sync.
Here are three interesting facts from the kids’ movie:
1) The stash of gold in the movie was $200,000, which doesn’t seem like a lot of money today. However, gold was worth more than $20 an ounce in 1862 and $628 an ounce in 2006, so gold was actually worth more than $6 million in today’s money.
2) In the movie, Blondie (Clint Eastwood) used a Colt 1851 cartridge conversion revolver with silver snake grips and a Winchester 1866 “yellow boy” with elevated ladder sights. Angle Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) used a Remington 1858 Army percussion revolver. Tuco (Eli Wallach) used a Colt 1851 Navy percussion revolver with a lanyard. The soldiers used Gatling guns with drum magazines and Howitzer cannons.
3) Clint Eastwood wore the same poncho without replacement or cleaning during all three of Leone’s spaghetti westerns. In the second movie (For a Few Dollars More) it can be visibly seen that his poncho was patched up after being pierced by 7 bullet holes from Ramón’s Winchester in For a Fistful of Dollars. The repaired area, originally on the left chest, is worn over Eastwood’s right shoulder blade in For a Few Dollars More.
With virtually no acclaim at the time, Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is now considered a classic by many critics. was part of Times “100 Greatest Movies” of the last century, and is one of the few films to enjoy a 100% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (rottentomatoes.com). The Good, The Bad and The Ugly currently sits fifth in the Internet Movie Database’s top 250, all of which isn’t bad for an Italian guy directing an American Western.
Even the master film critic Roger Exert recognizes Leone as an excellent director and recognizes two other Sergio Leone films as unquestionable masterpieces: “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and “Once Upon a Time in America.” (1984) ).
Sergio Leone was born in the cinema. His father was Roberto Roberti (also known as Vincenzo Leone), one of the pioneers of Italian cinema, and his mother was actress Bice Valerian. Sergio Leone was born in Rome in 1929 and died in Rome in 1989 of a heart attack. He remains one of the great directors in the history of cinema.
Copyright © 2008 Ed Bagley
