The Good the Bad and the Ugly Review

Clint Eastwood, looming big in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

Great Movie A vast empty Western mural. The camera pans across it. Then the shot slides onto a sunburned, desperate face. The long shot has go a closeup without a cut, revealing that the landscape was not empty but occupied by a desperado very close to the states.

In these opening frames, Sergio Leone established a rule that he follows throughout "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." The rule is that the power to see is limited past the sides of the frame. At important moments in the moving picture, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot exist explained past the practical geography of his shots.

There is a moment, for instance, when men exercise not notice a vast encampment of the Matrimony Army until they stumble upon it. And a moment in a cemetery when a man materializes out of thin air even though he should have been visible for a mile. And the way men walk down a street in total view and nobody is able to shoot them, perchance because they are not in the aforementioned frame with them.

Leone cares not at all virtually the practical or the plausible, and builds his smashing movie on the rubbish of Western movie cliches, using way to elevate dreck into art. When the moving picture opened in America in late 1967, not long after its predecessors "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964) and "For a Few Dollars More than" (1965), audiences knew they liked it, but did they know why?

I saw it sitting in the front row of the balcony of the Oriental Theatre, whose vast wide screen was ideal for Leone's operatic compositions. I responded strongly, but had been a movie critic less than a yr, and did not always have the wisdom to value instinct over prudence. Looking upwards my sometime review, I see I described a 4-star motion picture but simply gave it iii stars, perhaps because information technology was a "spaghetti Western" and so could not be fine art.

But art it is, summoned out of the imagination of Leone and painted on the wide screen so vividly that we forget what marginal productions these films were--that Clint Eastwood was a Hollywood reject, that budgetary restraints ($200,000 for "Fistful") caused gaping continuity errors, that at that place wasn't a lot of dialogue considering it was easier to shoot silent and fill the soundtrack with music and furnishings. There was fifty-fifty a pathetic endeavour to brand the films seem more American; I learn from the critic Glenn Erickson that Leone was credited as "Bob Robertson" in the early prints of "Fistful," and composer Ennio Morricone, whose alone, mournful scores are inseparable from the films, was "Dan Savio." Even Eastwood'due south character, the famous Human being With No Name, was an invention of the publicists; he was chosen Joe in the commencement movie, Manco in the 2d, and Blondie in the third.

Peradventure it is the subtly foreign flavor of the spaghetti trilogy, and specially the masterpiece "The Practiced, the Bad and the Ugly," that suggests the films come up from a different universe than traditional Westerns. Instead of tame Hollywood extras from fundamental casting, we get locals who must have been hired near the Spanish locations--men who await long-weathered by work and the sun. Consider the legless beggar who uses his arms to propel himself into a saloon, shouting, "Hand me down a whiskey!"

John Ford fabricated Monument Valley the dwelling turf of his Western characters, and he made great films there, only there is something new and strange about Leone's menacing Spanish vistas. We haven't seen these deserts earlier. John Wayne has never been here. Leone's stories are a heightened dream in which everything is bigger, starker, more brutal, more than dramatic, than life.

Leone tells the story more with pictures than words. Examine the masterful scene in the cemetery. A fortune in gold is said to be buried in i of the graves, and iii men have assembled, all hoping to become it. The actors are Clint Eastwood (the Skilful), Lee Van Cleef (the Bad), and Eli Wallach (the Ugly). Each human points a pistol at the other. If one shoots, they all shoot, and all dice. Unless two make up one's mind to shoot the third man before he tin can shoot either one of them. Simply which two, and which 3rd?

Leone draws this scene out beyond all reason, beginning in long shot and working in to closeups of firearms, faces, optics, and lots of sweat and flies. He seems to be testing himself, to meet how long he tin maintain the suspense. Or is it even suspense, actually? It may be entirely an exercise in fashion, a deliberate manipulation by the manager, intended to draw attending to itself. If you savor the boldness with which Leone flirts with parody, you sympathise his method. This is not a story, simply a celebration of bold gestures.

Eastwood, 34 when he first worked with Leone, already carried unquestioned authority. Much is made of the fact that he came from television, that he starred in "Rawhide," that in those days it was thought that a movie audience wouldn't pay to come across an actor it could watch for free. Eastwood overcame that jinx, merely not any actor could have done information technology--and not with whatever director. He says he took the roles with Leone considering he wanted to brand movies and Hollywood wouldn't rent him.

Yes, but Eastwood himself was to become an of import director, and even so he must have sensed in Leone not merely another purveyor of the Italian sword-and-sandal epics, only a human with passion. Together, Leone and Eastwood made The Man With No Name not simply bigger than a television star, but bigger than a motion-picture show star--a man who never needed to explain himself, a man whose boots and fingers and eyes were deemed important plenty to fill the whole screen.

I wonder if Eastwood's character has a tenth equally much dialogue equally Tuco, the Eli Wallach grapheme. The Man With No Proper name never talks; Tuco never stops. This is one of Wallach's inspired performances, as he sidesteps his character'due south potential to seem ridiculous, and makes him a desperate, frightened presence. When he makes a clown of himself, nosotros sense it is Tuco's strategy, not his personality. Trained in the Method, a stage veteran, Wallach took this low-rent role seriously and made something evocative out of it.

Lee Van Cleef, as Affections Eyes, was New Jersey-built-in, already a veteran of 53 films and endless TV shows, many of them Westerns (his first movie credit was "Loftier Noon," where he played a fellow member of the gang). In a movie with a lot of narrowed optics, he has the narrowest, and they gleam with insane obsession.

All three men are after the fortune in Ceremonious State of war golden, and the surreptitious of its location is parceled out among them (one knows the cemetery simply non the grave, the other knows the name on the tombstone merely not the cemetery). So they know that they will remain alive until the grave is plant, and and so it is likely that each of them will endeavour to kill the others.

In a moving picture that runs 180 minutes in its current restored version, that is non enough plot, but Leone has no shortage of other ideas. In that location is the opening shootout, involving unrelated characters. There is the con game in which Wallach plays a wanted man, Eastwood turns him in for the reward, and and then Eastwood waits until he is nearly to exist hanged and severs the rope with a well-aimed shot. There is the magnificent desert sequence, later on Eastwood abandons Wallach in the desert, and then Wallach does the same to Eastwood, and the sunday burns downwardly like a scene from "Greed." There is the haunting runaway wagon, filled with dead and dying men.

And, surprisingly, at that place is an ambitious Civil War sequence, virtually a picture show inside a flick, featuring a touching performance by Aldo Giuffre every bit a captain in the Union Army who explains his alcoholism simply: the commander who has the virtually booze to get his troops drunk before battle is the ane who wins. His dying line: "Can you help me live a little more? I look expert news."

Sergio Leone (1929-1989) was a director of dizzying vision and ambition, who invented himself almost as he invented the spaghetti Western. Erickson, whose useful essay on the trilogy is at www.DVDtalk.com, notes that Leone hyped his own career "by claiming to be the assistant director on Robert Aldrich'due south Italian production of 'Sodom and Gomorrah' (1962), even though he was fired after only a twenty-four hours." Leone made a forgotten Roman Empire epic in 1961, and then based "A Fistful of Dollars" then closely on Akira Kurosawa's samurai movie "Yojimbo" that mayhap Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of "Psycho" (1998) was not the beginning fourth dimension the technique was tried.

A human being with no niggling ideas, Leone made 2 other unquestioned masterpieces, "Once Upon a Fourth dimension in the West" (1968) and "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984). By the end of his career, Hollywood was suspicious of films with long running times, and criminally chopped "America" from 227 minutes to a sometimes incomprehensible 139. Nineteen minutes were cut from the first release of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." Merely uncut versions of all of his films are bachelor on DVD, and gradually it becomes clear how skillful he actually was.