The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The last and most expensive of director Sergio Leone's "Dollar" trilogy grossed a respectable $6.1 million in 1966 and solidified Clint Eastwood's status as a major Western star. Following the success of Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, 1964) and For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in piu, 1965), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, et il cattivo, 1966) signifies the aesthetic high point of the Italian-produced spaghetti westerns, which revitalized the western hero through Eastwood's portrayal of the calculating "Man with No Name." Energized by Leone's vibrant film style and Ennio Morricone's didactic score, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's international influence permanently altered popular conceptions of the western and its themes.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's plot follows the progress of three ruthless gunfighters racing to obtain $200,000 in stolen Confederate gold. Beginning the film with a series of three lovingly constructed murder scenes, Leone employs extreme long shots and closeups, piercing sound spikes, and dramatic freeze frames that introduce Tucco the Ugly (Eli Wallach), Angel Eyes the Bad (Lee Van Cleef), and "Blondie" the Good (Clint Eastwood) with his signature style of bravado exposition. As the story unfolds, all three principals form and break alliances in search of Bill Carson's hidden treasure.

The epic design of Leone's scenarios redefined the film image of the American West. After early collaborations with innovators like Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Aldrich, Leone invested his western scenes with an obviously distorted, often frenetic perspective. Unlike the stagy studio sets of B-grade Hollywood Westerns, Leone's plastic camera expanded adobe farm houses and barren deserts into exaggerated oceans of space peopled by minuscule though deadly specks of humanity. No Westerns since John Ford's dramatic Monument Valley films had offered such profoundly dynamic compositions. Leone's wild spectacles of dueling gunfighters, public hangings, Civil War battles, and prison camps create an darkly comic, self-consciously chaotic view of western society. At one point, Tucco and Blondie engage a pack of Angel Eyes' assassins in the middle of a bombed-out ghost town. While artillery continues to demolish the buildings around them, Tucco and Blondie nonchalantly utilize the rising dust as cover and peep out of new bomb craters to survey their enemies. Leone's freewheeling camerawork reaches its expressive heights during the montage of whip pans and zooms that describe the finale of an absurdly bloody Civil War battle on a bridge, and during the tension-building long shots that commence the climactic three-way gunfight in a sprawling deserted cemetery.

Much of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's success depends on Ennio Morricone's infamously parodic score. As a discordant aural accompaniment to the crazed animations and incongruous antique fonts that constitute the title sequence, Morricone's campy revision of distinctive western sounds gives all three "Dollar" films a Monty Python-flavored musical edge. For The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Morricone deconstructs clichés of the western soundtrack to create a distinctively catchy theme of shriek-propelled, psychedelic yodeling that became as popular as Eastwood's nameless hero. In the spring of 1966, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly's main theme went to No. 1 on the American billboard charts alongside the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash." With all its crazed energy, Morricone's score thematically accentuates key moments of Leone's narrative through its invocation of familiar western harmonies. In Once upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone, Robert Cumbow explains:

The score to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly taps Civil War movie conventions in its use of a lilting sentimental ballad played off a recurring march tune. The ballad, "Story of a Soldier," is derivative of the Confederate standard "Lorena" (a leading motif in Max Steiner's score to The Searchers … and in David Buttolph's music for The Horse Soldiers, for which it is the main theme). Sung phonetically by an Italian chorus, the lyrics of the song are only sporadically intelligible, but they reflect an antiwar tone consistent with both the film's treatment of war and the prevailing mood of ballads appearing during the period.

Cumbow also notes the innovative use of human voices and unconventional instruments in the soundtracks to all three "Dollar" films as an especially affecting element of "Morricone's offbeat orchestration." In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Morricone's campy vocal orchestrations amplify not only the opening credits but also the introductory vignettes and Tucco's frantic, nearly orgasmic search for the buried gold in the cemetery.

In many ways, the spectacle of Eli Wallach's drunken, disheveled Tucco embodies the heart of Leone's film. Eastwood is undoubtedly the box-office star, but the plot and the camera continually privilege Tucco's furious escapades. Grinning, chuckling, and thieving his way through crowds of bitterly serious supporting characters, Tucco's vulgarity, tenacity, and humor make him the most endearing of the three mercenaries. Leone gives Tucco the most entertaining scenes as he crashes half-shaven through a barbershop window after plugging three bounty hunters, makes faces at an appalled elderly bystander during his own execution, and surprises a would-be assassin by hiding his pistol under the froth of his bubble bath. Tucco even rules the final moments of Leone's 160-minute film as his cursing of Blondie rises in a shocking echo that initiates the last flourish of Morricone's score. Tucco clearly personifies the aesthetic agenda of Leone's entire "Dollar" trilogy. In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, themes of war, murder, and greed fuse into a pseudo-serious, gore-punctuated epic that intercuts Tucco's torture scene with the lilting strains of a band in a Civil War prison camp. Combining the deadly serious with the sickly comic, Leone's entertaining, anarchic western formula parallels James Whale's Universal horror films, Stanley Kubrick's satirical science fiction, and Tim Burton's gothic Batman series.

—Daniel Yezbick