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 wraps up his “Spaghetti Westerns” trilogy with “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
Surprisingly, even at this point in his masterful direction of made-in-Spain westerns, Leone would not enjoy a dime of critical adulation, as only the Laurel Awards would award a single award to Clint Eastwood for Action Performance, and that was so runner-up.
Hollywood and its stars ignored Sergio Leone as well as Johnny Depp. They refuse to acknowledge that even westerns or pirate movies can be cleverly made 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 mainly with Luciano Vincenzoni. It was Vincenzoni who came up with the film’s premise – three scoundrels in search of treasure at the time of the American Civil War – and its title.
The triangle of rogues 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 films stemming from 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 through 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 is going well, but Tuco’s reconciliation with his brother is not.
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, showing up in a town that the Union forces have foolishly bombed and bumping 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 their way to the cemetery, Blondie and Tuco find themselves in a full-fledged Civil War battle over a bridge that spans a river to the cemetery. They witness the continuing carnage, blowing up the bridge, and then soldiers from both sides, as well as Blondie and Tuco, move on.
Once in the graveyard, it’s inevitable that the three rogues will clash 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 should, it may just be the best western movie 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-out 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 film, the bounty hunter is one of 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, 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 walks into a town with a gun shop in front of him. After diving into a watering hole, he confronts the owner, remakes a pistol from parts from three other pistols, and then goes outside to test the gun.
Knock three standing figures down, spinning them sideways, then fire three shots to cut each one in half. Two figures fall immediately and the third remains standing. Tuco takes a shot of whiskey, and then jumps up and when he lands, the third target drops. This is a boys movie, and you really need to be a boy to fully appreciate what I’m sharing here. Tuco’s role in this scene helped invent the word cool.
Moviegoers watching this movie at the time didn’t know that Eli Wallach (Tuco) almost died three times while playing his part.
He nearly poisoned himself on set after drinking acid that was used to burn bags filled with gold coins so they would open more easily when hit with a shovel. A film technician had poured the acid into a bottle of lemonade and Wallach did not know about 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 frightened horse galloped for nearly a mile with Wallach’s hands tied behind him and the rope still hanging. tight around his neck.
In a third scene, to cut off his captor’s handcuffs, Wallach places his captor on the railroad tracks and waits for a train to pass by and break the chain attached to the handcuffs. He was a foot from the track and lowers his head to the ground as the train passes. The entire film crew and Wallach were unaware that heavy iron steps protruded from each car and any one of the numerous iron step cars 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 were dubbed into Italian for the Rome debut release. All other international cast members spoke primarily French or Spanish and were later dubbed. This accounts for the fact that none of the dialogue in the film was completely in sync.
Here are three interesting facts about the movie for boys:
1) The stash of gold in the movie was $200,000, which doesn’t seem like a lot of money today. However, gold cost 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 an 1866 Winchester “yellow boy” with raised ladder sights. Angle Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) used a Remington 1858 Army percussion revolver. Tuco (Eli Wallach) used a Colt 1851 Navy percussion revolver on 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 Leone’s three spaghetti westerns. In the second movie (For a Few Dollars More) you can visibly see that his poncho was patched after being pierced by 7 bullet holes from Ramon’s Winchester in A Fistful of Dollars. The repaired area, originally on the left chest, is used over Eastwood’s right shoulder blade in For a Few Dollars More.
Virtually un-acclaimed 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 it’s one of the few movies to enjoy a 100% certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (rottentomatoes.com). The Good, The Bad and The Ugly currently ranks fifth in the top 250 of the Internet Movie Database, all of which isn’t bad at all for an Italian kid 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 the 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
