THE BAD THE GOOD AND THE UGLY Movie Review

With the final chapter in Sergio Leone's epic trilogy, which began with A Fistful of Dollars and continued with For a Few Dollars More, highbrow critics began to notice that there was something going on here, and they'd better reckon with it. Some took the easy way out, switching their writing on these films from “reviewing” to “criticism” by fishing out that holy grail, symbolism.' The Man with No Name' (Clint Eastwood) was a Christ figure, the films are about the individual's rebellion against imperialism, yadda yadda yadda. I won't quarrel with that (because it's true), but what some savvy folks also happened to notice is that Sergio Leone had made a bold, visionary Western epic that seemed to cross all national—and interplanetary—boundary lines. This was a West that existed in our collective memories—through photographs, stories, legends, but above all, through movies. Leone—like Renoir before him—understood the theatrical, near-operatic quality of some of the oldest, most often repeated stories. Further, he had the daring to take that most universally beloved and widely understood of all theatrical conventions—the American Western—and portray it with the panache and romantic stylization of Giuseppe Verdi. And if that weren't brilliant enough, he topped himself by putting Clint Eastwood at the center of it. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is hilarious, moving, and fantastically complex, but on the surface it's just a simple tale, set in the Civil War years, of three guys looking for a buried treasure. The real treasure is the pleasure of a narrative texture this thick and luxurious, acted by faces that seem to have been carved by tumbleweeds—Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach. Tonino Delli Colli photographed it spectacularly on locations in the south of Spain, and the great Ennio Morricone provided the score that is its pulsing lifeblood.

NEXT STOP… Stagecoach, The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West

1967 161m/C IT Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Chelo Alonso, Luigi Pistilli; D: Sergio Leone; W: Sergio Leone; C: Tonino Delli Colli; M: Ennio Morricone. VHS, LV, Letterbox FOX, MGM, FCT