What makes The Good, the Bad and the Ugly such a classic? A look back at what makes this film still worth watching 50 years after it was made

In the mid-1960s, the declining genre of the Western was revitalised by the arrival of Sergio Leone (1929-1989), an Italian film-maker whose trilogy of ‘Dollar Westerns’ is now almost synonymous in the popular consciousness with the genre: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Of these three, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (henceforth GBU) stands at the midpoint between the earlier, less spectacular and lower-budgeted Dollar Westerns, and Leone’s subsequent, operatic masterpiece Once Upon A Time in the West (1968).

GBU has a relatively simple story revolving around three ruthless men in pursuit of a large cache of gold, and the misadventures that befall them on their journey. This plot was in itself not a novel idea; what differentiated the film from others that had come before it was the style of the work, the archetypal characters that populated it, and a lack of the tropes that had been staple to the genre.

To illustrate the differences between GBU and its predecessors, it would be worthwhile to compare it to another Western released the same year by veteran director Howard Hawks: El Dorado. Hawks’ film opens with a series of paintings depicting idealised scenes of the Old West, accompanied by a man singing: “My daddy once told me what a man ought to be/There’s much more to life than the things we can see/And the godliest mortal you ever will know/Is the one with the dream of El Dorado”.

Such rustic sentiments and their naive earnestness are totally absent from GBU, where young melodious men are likely to get shot, and where it is difficult to imagine any of the main characters ever having daddies, let alone crooning about them. GBU opens to Ennio Morricone’s bizarre and instantly recognisable musical score, the opening bars of which were derived from a coyote howl. The first image is of a bleak vista, into which swings a bleaker vision: a close-up of a scarred, sweaty, craggy face.

In El Dorado there are two romantic sub-plots involving the honourable heroes. GBU has no heroes, and the only named female part is that of a prostitute who is savagely beaten by the murderous Angel Eyes (‘The Bad’, played by Lee Van Cleef) as he tries to elicit information from her that could lead to the gold. El Dorado has many moments of comedy and camaraderie, the latter even between ostensible enemies. In GBU, alliances between men are precarious and provisional, and do not preclude homicidal backstabbing when the opportunity arises; levity in the film can usually be classified as either irony or gallows humour.

“The Western is finished,” director Raoul Walsh had said to Leone in the 1950s. But Leone demonstrated that more interpretations of this genre were possible; his films single-handedly boosted the Italian film industry by spawning hundreds of imitations, and forever changed the way Westerns would be seen.

El Dorado features genteel characters donning colourful costumes moving within picturesque sets. The world of GBU is dominated by materialistic men who are missing an eye, a limb, or a conscience, all of whom inhabit a war-blasted environment with desolate, desaturated landscapes. And in the end, the outcome of El Dorado is never in doubt. With GBU, the viewer is constantly surprised by turns in the plot, and it is not until the end credits appear that the unpredictability is brought to a close.

El Dorado is an entertaining film, with fine performances by some noteworthy actors such as John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Caan. But the arrival of the Leone style heralded a new type of film-making, one more in tune with the (in)sensibilities of the day, developed by an ardent cineaste for whom “cinema is life, and vice versa”.

Having imbibed countless cinematic idealisations of America as a youth, Leone was nevertheless disenchanted with Americans after his encounters with US soldiers during the Second World War. Yet, paradoxically, Leone maintained a love of the Western. The resultant combination was a series of films which dismantled, parodied, or inverted Western conventions while simultaneously forging new archetypes in the process. And one of the most important ways in which Leone did this was through his treatment of morality.

In contrast to the moralistic Westerns that preceded it, conventional morality is almost non-existent in GBU. There is no distinction between soldiers of different armies; ‘good’ and ‘bad’ folk are equally prone to suffer or die, no matter what their age, sex, or level of innocence or guilt.

And the trio of main characters, despite their titular assignations, are morally ambiguous at best. Clint Eastwood’s bounty hunter Blondie, for instance, may be labelled on-screen as ‘The Good’, and we do see him comforting a dying young soldier in the latter’s final moments, but the same goodness is not in evidence when he earlier steals a stretcher right from underneath a protesting wounded soldier. He also demonstrates sadism in his treatment of the comedic Tuco (‘The Ugly’, played by Eli Wallach), who is a robber, murderer, kidnapper, and rapist. The brutal figure of Angel Eyes seems to be a sergeant in the Union Army, but he has little compunction about utilising the services of enemy soldiers.

In the final analysis, all three men are rogues united by their desire for the gold, and will baulk at nothing to get it. The Civil War raging around them is merely an inconvenience. At one point, a bridge being jousted over by two armies is dynamited by Blondie and Tuco — and an entire battle dislocated — so that the two ronin can continue on their quest. These men live in a time and place of “the rule of violence by violence”, as Leone described it. Their private feuds reflect in miniature the wider war in which they become occasionally entangled.

The dusty and grimy people who appear in GBU are inscrutable. That the principal characters are single-minded in their determination is clear. That they possess any other lasting attributes is debatable. Apart from a scene involving an estranged brother of Tuco’s, nothing is known about the pasts of the protagonists; even their ‘real’ names are not stated (though in the original Italian version of the film Angel Eyes is named ‘Sentenza’).

It is hard to imagine them as children, or as old men. It is difficult to conceive of what they might do when they acquire the money that they are after; retirement in any form other than a bullet seems inappropriate. They seem to be not quite real, to be characters frozen in time, changeless forces of a bygone era. Even Tuco, who in a revealing moment reflects nostalgically about the fact that he has a brother who would never refuse him a bowl of soup, quickly discards his wistfulness when offered a cigar by Blondie, who says to Tuco, “After a meal there’s nothing like a good cigar”. Tuco sticks the cigar into his mouth thoughtfully, and then bursts into a grin, his eyes gleaming at the prospect of the gold that the two are on their journey towards. The characters evince a conditional and situational ethic; the only constant is their greed.

In the 1940s, the radio, film, and television star Gene Autry created the 10 Cowboy Commandments, in which the cowboy should never shoot first, hit a smaller man, take unfair advantage, go back on his word, lie, or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas. He must also be gentle with children, animals, and the elderly, be clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits, respect women, parents, and his nation’s laws, help people in distress, and be a patriot. Needless to say, virtually every single one of these laws is violated in GBU. The exception is Autry’s commandment to “be a good worker”— Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes are all exceedingly adept at violence.

Having imbibed countless cinematic idealisations of America as a youth, Leone was nevertheless disenchanted with Americans after his encounters with US soldiers during the Second World War.

This moral abyss was disliked by film critics such as Pauline Kael, who lamented the replacement of John Wayne’s principled characters by Eastwood’s killing machines, demonstrating a superficial understanding of both characterisations. For one need only observe Wayne’s trigger-happy cattle-thief in Hawks’ Red River (1948) to begin questioning Kael’s claim that the John Wayne character was a man who “stood for the right, who was a man of principle”.

It is important to note that the raw brutality which frequents GBU was not a mere stylistic exercise. “It does not involve a ‘good cause’,” Leone said of GBU. “What interested me more was on the one hand to demystify the adjectives ‘good, bad, ugly,’ and on the other to show the absurdity of war.”

This demystification was critically met when Leone’s films were initially released, with many perhaps disliking the idea of an Italian who spoke no English daring to tamper with a quintessentially American genre with films shot in Spain and Italy featuring a predominantly European cast and crew.

Anthony Mann, the American director of several older Westerns, expressed disapproval upon viewing For A Few Dollars More: “In that film, the true spirit of the Western is lacking. We tell the story of simple men, not of professional assassins … In a good Western, the characters have a starting and a finish line …” Fortunately, the directors of a later generation understood Leone’s critical commentary on the spirit of simple stories with stale narrative structures.

According to John Boorman, Leone’s films “revitalised the form because he consciously reverted to mythic stories, making the texture and detail real, but ruthlessly shearing away the recent accretions of the ‘real’ West and its psychological motivations. Unfortunately, this was not understood in Hollywood ... Sam Peckinpah was the only American director to take the hint from Leone...” Indeed, according to Leone, Peckinpah had told him, “Without you, I would never have thought of making the films I have made”.

Leone’s influence can also be seen in Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975), and many other directors were similarly inspired by his innovative techniques, including John Milius, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Don Siegel, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino, and Eastwood himself, who made a number of intriguing Westerns in subsequent years, culminating in his Academy Award-winning Unforgiven (1992).

Leone, who was possessed of an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema (by all accounts he knew entire films by heart), certainly owed a debt to the old masters, especially John Ford. Even A Fistful of Dollars, which was a close remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) indirectly owes a debt to Ford because Kurosawa himself was a great Ford admirer. Leone considered himself Ford’s pupil, and regarded the latter as a pioneer of cinematic realism. But he also recognised that Ford’s visions were sociable, optimistic, and still tinged with sentimentality or romanticism even when demythologising the West, while Leone’s more cruel and less innocent films were pessimistic and emphasised the solitariness of individuals.

Leone’s type of realism was often looked at askance; in The Western — From Silents to the Seventies, by George N. Fenin and William K. Everson (second edition, Grossman, 1973), Fenin described GBU as a “gory” and “bloody” film “accompanied by heavy use of bad language”, an assessment that many modern film viewers would find laughable.

Leone was influenced by much more than film, however; the picaresque tradition in literature and the mythical tales of Homer were significant contributors to his approach. “[...] by far the greatest writer of Westerns was Homer, for he wrote fabulous stories about the feats of individual heroes — Achilles, Ajax, and Agamemnon — who are all prototypes for the characters played by Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Jimmy Stewart and Wayne.

Homer’s stories are the great mythological treatments of the individual hero, as well as being prototypes for all the other Western themes — the battles, the personal conflicts, the warriors and their families, the journeys across vast distances — and, incidentally, providing the first cowboys. The Greek heroes entrusted the short span of their lives to their dexterity with lance and sword, while the cowboys entrusted their survival to the quick drawing of a pistol.”

A related view is espoused by Fenin and Everson, who wrote: “The frontier is, in fact, the only mythological tissue available to this young nation. Gods and demigods, passions and ideals, the fatality of events, the sadness and glory of death, the struggle of good and evil — all these themes of the Western myth constitute an ideal ground for a liaison and re-elaboration of the Olympian world, a refreshing symbiotic relationship of Hellenic thought and Yankee dynamism.” The authors then go on to compare cowboys to Centaurs, Wyatt Earp to Hercules, and the Battle of the Alamo to Thermopylae.

Leone was a collector of antiques and art, and the composition of his films was influenced by surrealist painters such as Giorgio de Chirico. The Italian theatre of the commedia dell’arte, in which there is no single hero, was also a factor. And Leone was a perfectionist, extensively studying books, photographs, and armaments of the Old West in order to ensure that what was depicted on screen was accurate. This was at variance with older directors who, according to Leone, did not do research and depended on cinematic traditions rather than actual history.

The result of Leone’s approach was, in the words of film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci, films that were “vulgar and very sophisticated both at the same time”. Or, as Sir Christopher Frayling put it in his excellent study Sergio Leone — Once Upon a Time in Italy (Thames & Hudson, 2008), the film possessed “an unusual combination of exaggerated spectacle and dirty realism”.

In Leone’s technique, form mirrors content: extreme close-ups deliver a gritty intimacy; panoramic wide shots reveal spectacle at a distance. This was a deliberate choice by Leone, who endeavoured to create “a fairy tale for grown-ups”. “The fusion of realistic setting and fantasy story can give film a sense of myth, of legend,” he said. Even the title of the film, originated by co-scriptwriter Luciano Vincenzoni, is reminiscent of children’s fables.

In many ways GBU defies easy classification. Frayling wrote of Leone: “he has always proved difficult for critics to categorise: art films/popular films; personal films/genre films; tragedies/comedies; American myths/Italian stories; Hollywood/Cinecittà.” To which one can conclude that Leone encompassed all of these and none — his was an eclectic borrowing of diverse elements from different artists, forms, and eras, all fused together with his own unique panache.

It should be noted that not all of the older Westerns were simplistic; films such as Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954) and Edward Dmytryk’s Warlock (1959), for instance, possessed a thematic complexity and featured elements which Leone would later intensify and crystallise. But it was the stripping away of certain commonplace themes (the frontier, the pioneering spirit, the taming of primitive lands and peoples, romance, friendship, and honour), coupled with the simultaneous heightening of others (greed, desperation, conflict, and grit) that made GBU unique.

In its restored version, GBU has a running time of just under three hours, making it the longest of Leone’s Westerns. Its popularity, along with the previous Dollar Westerns, boosted the careers of Leone, Eastwood, and Morricone, with all three of them going on to make landmark contributions to cinema. “The Western is finished,” director Raoul Walsh had said to Leone in the 1950s.

But Leone demonstrated that more interpretations of this genre were possible; his films single-handedly boosted the Italian film industry by spawning hundreds of imitations, and forever changed the way Westerns would be seen. The partnerships of Leone and Eastwood, and Leone and Morricone, are comparable to other great cinematic pairings such as those between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, or Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann. Now, a half-century since it was first produced, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is routinely acknowledged by critics, directors, and reviewers alike as one of the greatest films ever made.

Ford once said that “The best kind of cinema is the one where action is long and dialogue short.” It is ironic that Ford’s Westerns themselves seem garrulous when compared to Leone’s films, which are punctuated by long silences and sparse dialogue. It is 10 minutes before any dialogue is spoken in GBU.

The final three-way shoot-out, which lasts just seconds, is preceded by four minutes of furtive, fearful glances between the three gun-slingers. The tension is ratcheted by Morricone’s triumphal trumpets as the close-ups become tighter and the cuts accelerate in pace. Here the small movements of the actors and the artfulness of the director tell us all that is necessary; no words are required. Perhaps this is what Tuco meant when, after despatching a carelessly talkative bounty hunter, he said: “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”

The author is an antiquarian and freelance writer.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, April 24th, 2016