The Good, The Bad & the Ugly

Sergio Leone’s Italian spaghetti Western epic is one of the greatest pieces of purely visual storytelling. There’s very little dialogue, but there’s plenty of music and atmosphere to set the scene and provide the emotions. It’s like a great silent film that’s been filmed in color. This isn’t a John Wayne style Western in which we can easily tell who is good, who is bad and who is going to win in the end. Anyone could die at any minute, and there is no real hero to speak of. The Good, The Bad & the Ugly is a stark and tough piece of art.

Clint Eastwood plays the Man With No Name, probably dubbed as such because throughout this vague trilogy his name changes in each film. He is not a character so much as an archetype, which I think appears in some variation in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Eastwood, naturally, is the “good.” Lee Van Cleef is the “bad” of the title. And Eli Wallach, in full on comic relief-with-a-razor’s-edge mode, is the “ugly.”

The plot concerns the three men searching for a fortune in long-lost Civil War gold. But who cares about the plot when the film is so rich in brutal and stripped images. And at three hours long, the film veers wildly into unrelated subplots, such as the prologue. This is a film of ideas and images, not a narrative. There is nothing wrong with that when it retains a certain hard won artistic vitality and keeps your interest. Those vast desert vistas which seem to extend on and on forever aren’t pretty in any conventional sense of the word, but they are a certain kind of pleasing to the eye.

Leone paints with a cinematic brush that alternates between the widest of shots of panoramic beauty and the most claustrophobic of close-ups. There is broad humor and scenes of horrific and graphic violence and bloodshed. Much like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch from the same era, it repeatedly showcases throughout the film: that violence is not glamorous, it has consequences and it is a bloody affair. The western tropes and stereotypes are given a fresh, new, exciting life in The Good, The Bad & the Ugly.