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Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo

Director: Sergio Leone
Screenwriters: Agenore Incrucci, Mickey Knox, Sergio Leone, Furio Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Donati (uncredited)

By Roderick Heath

In Memoriam: Ennio Morricone 1928-2020

A grand panorama of dusty hills and parched riverbeds under a desiccating sun, a vast amphitheatre fit for primal drama burned clean of life, a place palpable yet dreamlike. A face suddenly and rudely thrusts itself into view, ill-shaven, dripping sweat, nostrils and eyes and nervily twitching cheeks, utterly corporeal and void of apparent sentience beyond fixated and predatory intent, deadly serious in affect and yet mysteriously comical, welded to the earth like infestation but immediately invested with the same evocation of startled awe as the landscape. In John Ford’s heroic landscapes the rock forms stand in silent regard of the dwarfed figures, demanding humans grow to their size; get real, says Sergio Leone, only a face gives meaning to the dirt. A bounty hunter, Elam (Al Mulock). An objective: a ramshackle outpost of civilised pretence out here on the edge of reality, stray dogs nosing the scraps, two riders on the approach to join the man in his quest for some sort of reckoning, be it justice official or not, and beginning a slow, dead-eyed march towards the buildings. They pause on the threshold by a disfigured ‘Wanted’ sign, and ready for a gunfight, before plunging within. Shots erupt, and another man comes crashing out through the window, a Tex Avery animation given human form: Eli Wallach’s Tuco, a shred of his interrupted lunch still between his teeth and a pistol in hand, fleeing with his enemies left holed and sprawled. Humanity in all its base reality existing upon a disinterested sphere, engaged in little myths of life and death, enacted largely by characters often too dumb to realise they’re only collateral damage in someone else’s legend. Sergio Leone’s aesthetic in a nutshell, charged with sickly humour and invocations of cosmic absurdity.

It really wasn’t that long ago when the Italian-made Western was still largely considered an absurd and comical wing of pop culture. Whilst Leone’s films quickly gained cult status, champions, and emulators, they were still often touched always with a reputation for silliness connected with a specific, verboten trait: foreignness, daring to infiltrate the clean-cut expanses of the traditional Western, with its mighty Aryan heroes reforming the prairies, with insidious baroque and lips that refused to quite curl in time with dialogue. Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) didn’t invent the “Spaghetti Western” but it did forge an endlessly imitated style, suddenly remaking minor TV star Clint Eastwood’s career and transforming the director, who had only directed one film previous in the well-made if conventional peplum The Colossus of Rhodes (1962) into an international figure. Leone’s fourth feature film as solo director, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly has journeyed from an emblem for disreputable pleasure in cinema to become regarded as one of the great works of the form. Ennio Morricone’s score long since shed even the film as a chrysalis, to become instantly evocative and self-explanatory. Who knows how many times I heard the famous title tune as a kid long before seeing the movie, and I knew almost from the first what images and situations to associate it with, coming as it always did with lampoons of gunfights and mockeries of Leone’s visual syntax with huge looming faces and expansive backgrounds.

The story of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly’s journey says much about trends in pop culture and film aesthetics. Now, if one were to take a random poll of both the general swathe of film lovers and critics to identify what might represent for them the living nerve of film, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly often ranks high alongside Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and a handful of other works. As films they have obvious differences, but also unavoidable similarities. Both channel the ancient Homeric tradition into a modern pop culture artefact and dispense with many customary dramatic values. Both sustain long, stark, wordless sequences meditating upon acts of violence and seeking, managing to seem at once atavistic and futuristic. Both distil epic reaches of experience and space down to a singular system of images, utilising the expanse of the screen frame to the utmost, moving past the limits of fallible language and instead becoming ideograms. Both were released when cinema was already shrinking to meet the aesthetic and compositional needs of TV screens, and yet such works let themselves loose on the vastest scale, and still provoke real filmmakers to try and match their spectacle.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly rounded off what’s come to be known as “Dollars” or “Man With No Name” trilogy after A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More (1966), the films Leone and Eastwood made together in which the American actor played three similar wandering, mercenary heroes. These were conflated into a single archetypal figure for advertising, taking inspiration from the way The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly concludes with the film’s iteration, known only as Blondie, eventually donning the signature poncho Eastwood’s characters had worn in the previous two films. Those characters with their mix-and-match garb summarises the synthesis within Leone’s approach, exalting the Western hero and yet offering him not simply as supergringo but a figure birthed by the blurred world between North and Latin American cultures, a pancultural creature, hinting at the way the Leone gunfighter was simply one incarnation for a figure encompassing every culture in every land, echoing back to Gilgamesh and Achilles. Of course, Leone had with A Fistful of Dollars quite happily filched from Akira Kurosawa who in turn had mimicked John Ford and so on and so on back to Homer, an internationalist chain of emulation and homage.

Far from rendering his movie a hodgepodge, however, it’s this aspect of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, the sense of happening everywhere and nowhere facilitated rather than hampered by a finicky sense of period detail and tactile immediacy, that’s helped it achieve the renown it has. By this point Leone had a production team, including Morricone and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, entirely attuned to his thinking. Leone began developing the film with his screenwriting partner on For A Few Dollars More, Luciano Vincenzoni, although Vincenzoni and he were beginning to quarrel. Leone also hired comedy writers Agenore Incrucci and Furio Scarpelli to work on the project , although Leone and others later reported they contributed little. Actor Mickey Knox wrote dialogue for the English-language version. The opening credits channel some of the pop-art derived flavour of the James Bond films, with an added dimension of historical pastiche and artistic perversion. Stills from the film are glimpsed through gritty haze to make them look like vintage photos, then painted over in hallucinatory, comic book-like colours. The second member of the title trio is Lee Van Cleef’s “Bad,” known only as Angel Eyes, the knowing counterpart to Eastwood’s “Good” Blondie, who Angel Eyes describes as the “blonde-haired angel” looking after Tuco. Both are most accomplished in making angels, and Angel Eyes name in the Italian dub, “Sentenza,” carries with it the hint of harsh judgement from on high.

Angel Eyes’ first appearance comes as he arrives at a hacienda, invested with such mysterious intensity and tensile presence he obliges fear, deference, and hospitality without needing to speak. Angel Eyes has come to kill Stevens (Antonio Casas), a Confederate deserter who’s retreated to live quietly with his Mexican wife and son. Stevens goes through the forms of hosting with Angel Eyes as if trying to mollify death itself, resulting in a long, pregnant delay as Stevens doles out food and the two men sit eating in silence. Stevens finally takes a more direct approach and tries to offer Angel Eyes something like a bribe in putting him on to a fortune in gold stolen by his compatriot Jackson, a robbery both Stevens and the man who’s paid Angel Eyes for his death, Baker, were involved in. Angel Eyes calmly accepts Stevens’ counteroffer to assassinate Baker and takes payment before confirming to Stevens he always completes a job he’s hired for, necessitating he kill Stevens anyway, as well as gunning down his son when the lad tries to intervene with a shotgun. Angel Eyes returns to Baker and reports the job completed, before then doing what Stevens paid him for and killing Baker too.

The pitch-black sardonicism apparent here presents Angel Eyes as a killer who adheres to a certain, discrete code of ethics even as he deals out death, even honouring a deal with Blondie later despite knowing it could backfire on him, although he makes sure only to allow himself to be cornered by such ethics unless he sees a way to make them work for him and clear a path. Leone would revise the sequence at Stevens’ hacienda in a more conspicuously operatic fashion for Frank’s attack on the family in Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), complete with the same brutal punch-line of gunning down a kid, and with a similar depiction of the villain as very willing to exterminate anyone but not doing so unless specifically motivated. Ancient myth is invoked in Stevens’ act of hospitality, the violation of which by Angel Eyes is a crime so deadly in such myth the abuser may find themselves cursed by eternal forces. The sound of the earthenware and wooden spoons and lips smacking in consuming food is lingered over with a sense of import in such transitory acts, Angel Eyes charged with relished good-humour in challenging Stevens to find new ways to expand his portion of life by a few more seconds.

Leone’s attention to the space of Stevens’ home, the open sprawl of rooms and arching doorways, sees Angel Eyes as a silhouetted intruder upon first entrance, a state to which he returns as he walks back out only now with two corpses lying behind him in rude geometry, the statistical stability of which disintegrates as Stevens’ wife finds the bodies and the camera reels in impersonating her dizziness before fainting away in horror. As a sequence this has resonance far beyond mere plot, recreating as it does the feeling of inevitable visitation by Death invested with a dimension of parable, and also connection with many a continental European film about World War II, like Rome, Open City (1945) and Come and See (1985). Films where the war isn’t a vast spectacle of armies jaunting about but a clammy, nightmarish experience of ordinary people constantly awaiting the knock of fate on the door, indicted by some small offence or twist of luck and left naked before power, the call of the Gestapo whisking citizens away to cells or aboard trains bound for concentration camps.

Leone avoided World War II as a subject up until the movie about the siege of Leningrad he died whilst planning. And yet the war and the way it utterly severed present from past for people of his generation and invested Leone’s sense of landscape as a theatre of carnage becomes unavoidable in thinking about his work, reaching an apogee with the wholesale slaughter of rebels and downfall of tyrants depicted in Duck You Sucker (1971). The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, set in the midst of the American Civil War, had its partial genesis in Leone’s desire to portray war as pointless and grotesque regardless of token causes, a note of humanistic cynicism reflected by many of his characters including Tuco and the hotelier Pardue (Jesús Guzmán) who mutters insults about occupying Confederate soldiers before hollering “Hooray for Dixie!” for public display, like Leone’s own take on the dirty old man from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The land in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly swaps the grand but neutral moral amphitheatre of most Westerns for a sense of the entire world given up to chaotic forces as the Civil War is waged across its length and breadth. Most importantly, Leone’s characters live their lives in a state of war, at once titanic in their independence and rodent-like in their survival craft.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly revolves around the twists of fate that will eventually draw Angel Eyes, Blondie, and Tuco together in the course of hunting down the stolen treasure, threading a path between the clashing Union and Confederate Armies, their own, private, modestly scaled dance of death contrasted by great slaughter and chaos. During Tuco’s attempt to punish Blondie for deserting and robbing him by leading him through desert to suffer and die, they encounter a carriage where everyone on board has been killed by Angel Eyes, save the mortally wounded Jackson, who expires leaving Tuco and Blondie each with part of the key to finding the hidden treasure. Tuco takes Blondie to recover in a monastery headed by his brother, Father Pablo Ramírez (Luigi Pistilli). Angel Eyes disguises himself as a Union sergeant in a prisoner of war camp, and when Blondie and Tuco are brought in as captives, having donned Confederate uniforms for the same ends, he has Tuco beaten until he coughs up his part of the secret. Angel Eyes, deciding he won’t achieve the same with Blondie, instead forces him to join his criminal gang and they set off, whilst Tuco is left to the mercies of the law. Tuco manages to escape, and he and Blondie join up again, wiping out Angel Eyes’ gang in the midst of a town under bombardment. Finally they work to blow up a bridge being fought over by the two factions in order to remove the last obstacle before their destination, which proves to be Sad Hill, a military cemetery where the gold is hidden in one of the hundreds of graves.

Leone saw the possibility in a dark inversion of Van Cleef’s previous performance for him in For A Few Dollars More, where he played the gentlemanly hero and prototypical Leone romantic-nostalgic, Colonel Mortimer. Angel Eyes is like an alternative universe version of Mortimer, corrupted and deadly, shorn of his idealistic reflexes and given up purely to anarchic purpose, much the same as Blondie offers a slightly less ambiguous take on A Fistful of Dollars’ Joe and For A Few Dollars More’s Monco. Leone wasn’t the first Italian genre filmmaker to offer up pseudo-sequels closer to variations on a theme: the horror maestro Riccardo Freda had made Il Spettro (1963) as a nominal follow-up to his The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock (1962) with characters sporting the same names but revised in nature for the sake of a new storyline. Van Cleef, with vocal cords that sound crusted with quartz shards, plays Angel Eyes with an aspect of brutal humour, a hyena grin never far from his lips, as if he’s standing slightly apart from the narrative, author to the weirdness and sadism and regarding it with amused interest in how all the pathetic creatures he torments will make their stand and how long it will take them to break: the villain as artist. The only person he doesn’t try his luck with this way is Blondie, sensing well he comes from another realm.

Blondie’s introduction as “the Good” doesn’t present him in a solitary vignette as the other two are, but revolves specifically around his initial partnership with Tuco, which sees them constantly tempting fate in repeating a profitable game. Blondie sells Tuco to the law to collect bounty money, and then uses his sublimely good shooting to interrupt the necktie parties the lawmen throw for Tuco, rescuing him and heading on to the next town to do it all over again. Blondie is immediately defined by the way he stands between life and death for Tuco, so good with a gun he can actually use it to save life rather than just take it, mordantly invested in Tuco’s survival but soon driven by his partner’s bitching and intransigent resentment, as well the imminent probability of him losing his worth, to break up the act. Blondie robs Tuco at gunpoint and leaves him facing a long and thirsty trek back to civilisation. Blondie’s abandoning of Tuco has an aspect of calculated punishment: like Angel Eyes/Sentenza, he delivers punitive judgements, but his seem more like goads, challenging Tuco to find a way of living without his guardian. Tuco’s response is to stumble into the nearest town and, in an ingenious vignette, visit a gun seller, disassembling his stock of revolvers and piecing together a single, perfect instrument for killing.

This scene, as well as deftly illustrating Tuco’s professional smarts as a man who knows a gun to its finest spring and pivot – “Every gun makes its own tune,” Blondie notes later – also encompasses Leone’s method in picking and choosing aspects of the Western and other narrative forms he likes and spurning the leftovers, creating an unholy chimera that’s also a smoothly functioning device for delivering mayhem. The sequence also mimics in more comic fashion Angel Eyes’ intrusion upon Stevens as cues are given wordlessly and the turn of the meeting’s meaning from hosting to criminality is likewise cued by unspoken realisations. Tuco loads and tests his new weapon and then easily bests the storekeeper in a game of power, the authority seller wields over buyer in the mystique of the petit-bourgeoisie not just reversed but actively and exactingly avenged as Tuco shoves the shop’s open/closed sign in the shopkeeper’s mouth. Tuco is the first of Leone’s Caliban-like creatures, not quite of the human world but rather representing it in all its srambling cunning and frustrated need, certainly not inhabiting spheres of archangels and lord demons like Blondie and Angel Eyes. The Ugly would be move to the narrative centre in Duck You Sucker and Once Upon A Time In America (1984). Tuco might also be the most thoroughgoing anarchist in a movie, save perhaps Harpo Marx, and prefiguring Rod Steiger’s Tuco variant Juan in Duck You Sucker, who robs, strips, and rapes the bourgeoisie.

The tension between Tuco’s rambling alternations of nervous bonhomie and blazing spite and Blondie’s taciturn demeanour is the engine of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Tuco drives Blondie into the desert in revenge, taunting his former partner from horseback with relished water as Blondie is burned terribly by the sun and collapses in dehydration, and Blondie seems doomed when the carriage pulled by stampeding horses heaves into view. Tuco manages to halt the vehicle and finds it carries a load of corpses, save one man with an eye-patch who is close to death: Jackson, using the name Bill Carson, proves willing to give up the secret to his treasure with his dying breath simply for water. The marvellous breath of the dreamlike in this sequence hinges on the way Leone follows Blondie and Tuco through the desert in a relatively conventional system of dissolves with oddball details added for effect, Morricone’s giddy music accompanying the sight of Tuco protecting himself from the sun with a lady’s pink parasol, whilst his friend becomes a walking rump roast. When the carriage appears, curtains fly like shrouds for the crew of the dead on this ghost ship in the desert, a vision that might have been conjured by Boecklin or De Chirico in painting mysterious dreamscapes and emblems, even as it serves a straightforward plot purpose. The underlying comedy in Blondie and Tuco’s relationship surfaces again as Tuco makes a play at convincing Blondie he’s dying once he gets him to the monastery. Tuco plays the anguished pal and mourner, to get him to cough up Jackson’s last revelation, only for Blondie to toss a cup of water in his face and set their game back in motion. But soon Blondie is moved enough by witnessing Tuco fighting with his priest brother to offer a small sign of fraternity in offering Tuco his cigar, a gesture that despite their occasional attempts to kill each-other shows Blondie and Tuco are well aware each is the closest thing either has to a brother, as eternal citizens of the wilderness.

A greater part of the affection, bordering on relieved joy The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, often stirs resides in the near-complete avoidance of overt moralism and few traditional niceties of dramatic stakes. Leone spurns swerves into romance or other discursions that might soften or detract from the elemental nature of the characters and their quest, offering instead a chain of blackly comic gags dressed up in action movie garb involving the incongruity of the characters’ travails and the general arbitrariness of the world. Many of the vignettes revolve around gamesmanship both enacted between the characters to see who is the most accomplished warrior, and the director and the audience, presenting variations on familiar Western movie scenes and melodrama cliffhangers and finding brazen ways out. This is at its most overt perhaps when Tuco seems to have Blondie at bay in a hotel, forcing him to enact his own hanging, only for a stray Union shell to crash into the building and shatter the structure, delivering Blondie as if protected from on high. The one aspect of traditional character shading lies in the brief portrait of Tuco’s uneasy relationship with his brother Pablo, a relationship that nonetheless scorns the usual portrayal of the saintly priest stirring pious feeling in his bandit brother’s heart as in so many old-school gangster movies. Tuco instead fiercely turns on Pablo and decries his posturing and affectations of superiority, condemning affectations of virtue and superiority that refuse to consider how the world makes people what they are, as Tuco reminds Pablo they only had two choices as boys to escape the grinding poverty of rural Mexico, through the church or banditry, and Pablo didn’t have the balls for the latter profession.

Despite the official amorality, the film works as a burlesque-cum-appropriation for the morality play, as inherited from medieval theatre. Tuco is the emblematic man in Leone’s thinking, a creature out of Rabelais, crude, cruel, reactive, scrambling, debased, clever in a low sort of way, but also capable of flashes of mad passion, vision, and pride that elevate him above the animal. He exists suspended between the Manichaean extremes of Blondie and Angel Eyes, Blondie acting as his guardian angel and Angel Eyes his tormenting demon, a status underlined in the final fight where he seems to add a new edge of danger and unpredictability to the ritual gunfight, even if he turns out to have been rendered impotent by Blondie. When Tuco first enters the monastery, Leone wryly frames him peeking out from under Jackson’s appropriated eye patch with a painting of Christ on the cross in the same frame, and Blondie himself is correlated with Jesus as he lurks behind a carved statue whilst listening to Tuco and Pablo have it out. Easy to take such touches as curlicues on Leone’s pervasive baroque, of course, more sarcastic commentary on the notion of religious parable than example, which doesn’t necessarily discount the constant, ironic nudging of symbolism throughout. The characters literally follow a trail leading to a graveyard, a great orchard of death where they must duel to see which of these mighty individualists must join most soon the community of fallen.

But the evocation of spiritual pain in Tuco is specific and needling, the anger he unleashes on Blondie in part a rage against God, The Fates, nations, systems, what have you, for making him such a wretched and spasmodic creature, the pure flare of his hate and hunger the closest things to reasons for living. And so Tuco must wander from confrontation to confrontation, game to game, rage to rage. Leone considered the three characters to be a schismatic exploration of himself, Blondie as the methodical and conscientious portion, Angel Eyes as the most coldly professional and venal, and Tuco as the reactive, very human part. Or, superego, id, and ego. Tuco’s first attempt to corner and kill Blondie after emerging from the wilderness comes as he chases him to the hotel, having hired killers go in the front door to give Blondie a target whilst he comes in the window, a viciously amusing piece of tactical legerdemain worthy of his foes. Blondie’s lucky escape demands Tuco track him across the countryside, plucking his signature cigars from his campsites, testing to see how hot they are (a motif pinched from Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, 1930). Eventually he comes upon Blondie in the middle of reforging their old partnership with a new bandit. Tuco, with malevolent deliberation, refuses to allow Blondie to save his new partner: “Sorry Shorty,” Blondie murmurs in regret as the wretch writhes in the noose. Such is life.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly is about greed of course, but greed is almost treated as a transcendental value alongside revenge and love in Leone’s universe, aware of its most corrosive aspect but also ruefully attuned to the way it provides basic motive not simply to current and liminal goals in the characters but to the entire life function. The hunt for money is emblematic of the hunt for so many other things, the need for stature, place, security, power, sex, the very things these characters lack. In this regard The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly might even be described as a revision of one of its strongest inspirations, John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), insofar as where Huston allowed just so much sentiment as to present ways its protagonists could find such recourses without money, Leone refuses that much concession: the choice is either to engage in the ruthless sport of acquiring capital or to remain so much human dogshit. Tuco celebrates having something Blondie needs, water, during the ordeal in the desert, a figuration Leone offers as motivating human society at its most basic and ugly: it’s not enough to have, but to have when someone else does not. The spectacle of the war initially has little meaning to the protagonists beyond complication: the story of three men trying alternately to enrich and save themselves amidst utterly trying circumstances that represent the normal world merely raised to a slightly more zany and trying pitch.

Behaving in accord with such a presumption, Blondie despite his angelic associations is just as immersed in the squalor of the world and its problems as Tuco, accepting the extremes of life and death with stoic demeanour and lightning draw. His relative decency is glimpsed in his sidelong gestures of mercy – sparing rather than killing Tuco when he know well what strife it might entail, offering up a drink to a wounded warrior, spreading his coat over another and giving him a puff of his cigar. Blondie is offered as a neo-Spartan, laconic in speech, refined in arts of war, confident in battle, not a heroic blank and hardly superhuman. Many a filmmaker good and bad has tried offering up their own “Man with No Name” variant over the years and most often fail, usually misapprehending how Eastwood’s characters like Blondie present the ultimate iteration on the strong-and-silent type: Leone discovered and depended on Eastwood’s capacity to embody rather than simply play, to be the still centre of the whirlwind. That’s what lends weight to the way he registers events large and small, alarming and shocking, with minute intensifications of his habitual scowl like registrations on a Richter scale, describing the inner landscape of a man who’s seen everything twice and knows the way of the world, and has settled for merely affecting outcomes in the small pocket of it around him, offering succour when he can even as he readily expects the world to start shooting lead at his head a few seconds later.

Angel Eyes’ evil is marked out by his ruthless employment of expedience and brutality as both the best tool for obtaining swift results and a source of energy in itself, sadistic power granting godlike pleasures. Angel Eyes pummels Jackson’s prostitute girlfriend Maria (Rada Rassimov) as he tries to make her give up his whereabouts, shoves a pillow over Baker’s face to muffle the blasts of his gun, and directs the abuse of prisoners in the prisoner of war camp. Leone heavily hints that decency in the world can only accumulate in the world in the way Blondie parses it out, although bad can metastasize far more quickly than even Angel Eyes can commit it. Maria is first glimpsed being tossed from a carriage after being mauled by some men, and although she’s only a momentary player in the film, Leone grants her one of his most dramatic camera gestures. He zeroes in on her face to register her offence as she berates one lot of bastards, before encountering the even more menacing monstrosity that is Angel Eyes in the shadows of her lodgings. Angel Eyes’ regime in the POW camp is sustained by taking advantage of the crippling illness of the actual camp commander, Captain Harper (Antonio Molino Rojo), but he finds ready helpmates in the bored, mean, greedy underlings in the camp to torture prisoners into handing over secreted valuables, skills turned on Tuco as Angel Eyes seeks his part of the secret. The sounds of torment are masked by a guard forcing an orchestra formed by the prisoners to play a languorous ballad, “The Story of a Soldier.”

Leone pulls off one of his most singular sequences here working in concert with Morricone, the syrupy emotionalism of the song, which seems a burlesque on something like “The Green Leave of Summer” from The Alamo (1960) and other faux-folk pop songs used as leitmotifs in Westerns, offered with a taste of ash in the mouth in the way the stirred wistfulness is entirely earnest but can only work when offered in counterpoint with intimate brutality and perfect cynicism. “More feeling,” insists the guard conducting the orchestra, as the musicians play with tears streaming down their faces in full awareness what use their talents and sentiments are being put to, whilst Angel Eyes’ preferred heavy Corporate Wallace (Mario Brega) threatens to squeeze Tuco’s eyes to pulp. It’s as affecting and disturbing a counterpoint of emotional textures as any in cinema, and the crux of Leone’s cinema both literally – it comes halfway through the middle film of his oeuvre – and metaphorically, his essential theme of longing for some other realm, the past, an idyll, in alternation with the ruthless present, the inescapable brute fact, distilled to its essence. Leone’s quick success and capacity to work on an international scale spared him having to labour in many other genres unlike compadres like Mario Bava and Sergio Corbucci. But flourishes here and there in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly represent the closest he ever got to making a horror movie in Bava’s fashion, in the way Angel Eyes attacks people in their darkened rooms, the clashing primary colours in some night shots, and the gothic décor hovering around Pablo’s monastery. Whereas Bava’s most fitting tip of the hat back at Leone would be not one of his own, rather half-hearted Westerns, but the Viking saga Knives of the Avenger (1966).

The blankness of the central trio’s names, noms de guerre won through being reduced to avatars for prodigious capacities that ironically grant them more specificity, more identity, than more familiar names, contrasting the names heard elsewhere that tend to actually be pseudonyms or attached to enigmas, to the point where they seem almost totemic, linked to mysteries and cosmic forces. Bill Carson. Arch Stanton. Names attached to faceless men, dead men, ciphers. Part of the mystique the film weaves around itself results from the way it deftly avoids showing key events. The actual robbery of the cashbox is legend, and the coincidence that draws Blondie and Tuco into the drama is the direct result of Angel Eyes’ actions but is presented as an act bordering on divine provenance. Tuco’s savagaing at Angel Eyes’and Wallace’s hands comes in part for stepping into the shoes of “Bill Carson.” Representatives of authority have a similar aspect of insubstantiality: Harper, the commander of the POW camp, and Captain Clinton (Aldo Giuffrè) who commands the Union side of the forces battling over the bridge, both finish up flat on their backs, trying desperately to impose something like morality and sanity upon situations that instead obey a logic stemming purely from the basest precinct of human experience. Blondie and Tuco’s shootout with Angel Eyes’ gang of hired guns comes in a town left as a ruined and deserted shell by warfare. As if to literalise the threat of a random and hostile universe, Leone has artillery shells explode around the ghost town sending up clouds of dust, as the two factions stalk each-other in the gloom, providing both obscurity and cover and the threat of instant annihilation, a sneak preview of the nuclear age for the roaming, pistol-packing Dons Quixote. For the moment the gunslingers are in their element, shooting down snipers and taking out goons left and right, Blondie and Tuco a perfectly lethal combination even if Tuco does pause to cross himself after taking out enemies.

As potent as the trio are in terms of their specific talents, they’re still absurd figures closer in many ways to the knockabout victim-heroes of silent film comedy like Chaplin and Keaton, and the beloved Italian comic Toto, actors who often played men trying to hold down a tenuous place in the universe and satisfy primitive needs whilst straining to retain a sense of themselves as dignified men, dealing with conspiracies of chance and unruly objects, with roots in the Commedia dell’Arte as well as their highfalutin’ modernist counterparts in the Theatre of the Absurd. Given that the film’s working title was The Two Magnificent Tramps, the connection doesn’t feel far off Chaplin or Samuel Beckett. However limited the input of Age and Scarpellito, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly still often feel like it has one foot planted in a slapstick tradition about hapless people trying to do a job of work despite all ridiculous obstacles. The characters must negotiate trials and challenges with all their wits in a manner that resembles slapstick comedy’s exacting sense of cause and effect, as when Tuco, chained to the hulking brute Wallace, has to come up with a means of escape, a ruse that begins with asking to piss off the side of the troop train they’re riding, begging for a little privacy. Tuco jumps off the train, taking Wallace with him, beating his torturer to death against a rock and then arranging the handcuff chain over a rail so another passing train can sever it. Smart. But: “God’s not on our side because he hates idiots also,” Blondie mutters when he and Tuco are caught in Confederate uniform by Union troops, because Tuco mistakes them from a distance for Rebs as their blue suits are caked in dust. Later Blondie takes pot shots at Tuco as he tries to break away from him and get to Sad Hill first, firing a cannon at him with the same laidback, reality-rewriting precision Bugs Bunny might have tormented Elmer Fudd with.

Leone repeatedly distils visual humour and narrative velocity from the way his framing reflects the tunnel-visioned obsession of the characters. Variations on this motif include Tuco and Blondie riding headlong into a Union camp, in the climax when the men are so preoccupied the don’t notice Angel Eyes sneaking up on them, and the mordant punch-line where Tuco finally cradles the retrieved gold in joy only to look up and see a noose Blondie has readied for him. The best-known and greatest variation on this game of concealment and revelation comes when Elam, missing an arm from the opening battle with Tuco, finally catches up with his foe as Tuco is acting on a chance for a bath in a war-shattered and deserted city, sinking into a metal tub amidst foaming soap bubbles. Elam’s long, relishing preamble to shooting Tuco in the tub is cut short as Tuco’s pistol erupts under the soap bubbles. Of course Tuco even bathes with his gun; of course Elam would underestimate him again. “If you’re going to shoot, shoot – don’t talk,” Tuco advises the twisted corpse of his would-be killer, a unit of curt black humour that’s both iconic in and of itself – look how Die Hard (1988) offers a variation on it – in lampooning that old movie cliché of the overly-talkative villain, and also a flash of foreshadowing humour in relation to the finale. There the three antagonists are arrested in a long, uncertain pause before the gunfight as the odds of combat and the traits of character are weighed and winnowed, both shooting and talking impossible until some infinitesimal tipping point is reached.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly is absent the tragic-nostalgic fantasias that provide the ethereal backbone for most of Leone’s other films, where the key characters subsist in the present but truly live in their memories of lost loves, friends, and kin. Characters like Duck You Sucker’s Sean who floats in dreamy reminiscences of the long-lost ménage-a-trois he lived in with his best friend and their shared girl, or Once Upon A Time In America’s Noodles, whose reminiscences are at once treasure troves of bygone delight and grimly and inescapably connected with his awareness of his despicable actions and self-delusion. Leone understood a great truth about such tendencies, that the darker and more nettled the truths abutting such fantasias are, the more intense the pining for innocence and the full leaf of summery possibility, an awareness that also underpins the fulsome and ardent yet mysteriously ironic texture of Morricone’s scoring for Leone. Once Upon A Time In The West hinges upon another such double-edged memory as it reveals antihero Harmonica’s spur to revenge as a moment from his childhood touched with immense horror and strange beauty. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly only hints at such a dimension in Tuco’s fraternal love and anger, which he covers for Blondie’s benefit by boasting of knowing there’s always a place where he’ll be welcomed with a bowl of soup.

Otherwise, Leone shifts his elegiac quality with its aura of gnawing loss and tragicomic meditation onto the more immediate spectacle of the war, most obviously in the “Story of a Soldier” scene, which hinges on the way the musicians seem to be yearning for their own lost pasts and offering a salving echo of it for Tuco as he’s tortured. The trio’s adventures constantly bring them into contact with surveys of grinding suffering and human waste. The monastery is crammed with wounded. Angel Eyes does business with a veteran who’s lost both his legs and ambulates around on his hands. A Confederate army is swept out of one town and chases Union troops from another. A Confederate spy is glimpsed tied to the cowcatcher on a locomotive. The ultimate symbol of war’s futility is the bridge, which Clinton encourages Blondie and Tuco to destroy to release the two opposing armies from their vain arm-wrestle. They’re the only ones who can do this on the level of both plot, not being soldiers and so not beholden to orders to keep the bridge intact, and the symbolic, as renegades from another age of history who haven’t yet surrendered their sovereignty to authority and regimentation. Whilst still precise in the historical detail, Leone makes the battle seem like a premonition of World War I with forces ensconced in hivelike trenches, girded by great firepower, charging out to fight and die in lunatic melees. Leone’s obsessive sense of detail helped create a concrete sense of his recreated Old West milieu – is there any other filmmaker who has made the sun seem so hot, sweat so pungent, dust and wood and metal so alive? – even as he nudged that milieu towards the edges of the surreal. That edge is most apparent when Tuco and Blondie succeed in blowing up the bridge and the encamped forces immediately vanish like so much battlefield smoke, ghosts released from the place they haunt.

Leone had Morricone write his score from the screenplay so he could build his sequences around the music, and played it on set to help define the rhythm and style of the movie. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly is then utterly inseparable from Morricone’s music, standing with Prokofiev’s work on Alexander Nevsky (1938) and a handful of other scores as one of the great achievements in uniting the two arts. The opening title tune sports choruses alternating coyote-like shrieks and grumbling chants, plaintive whistling from the bowels of the Earth, flutes fluttering in deep space, sardonic harmonica punctuations, lashes of spacefaring electronica, and lines from an electric guitar that spin and dart like an epee blade. This last aspect, a flourish of anachronism, nonetheless seems perfectly attuned to the film’s period fantasia, a touch of rock’n’roll influence just as alien and verboten as the idea of Italians making Westerns and yet instantly creating its own continent of influence. So familiar is the score it’s easy to forget just radical and strange it was in cinema at the time, with Morricone deploying his experimental training to forge sonic textures that risk inanity yet accumulate truly epic power. It almost goes without saying that as nonchalantly as directors might insert Leone’s pieces into their own movies now, nothing even remotely as innovative and ostentatious would get commissioned today.

Crescendo of both film and score comes when Blondie and Tuco, having finally destroyed the bridge and gained the land beyond, gaze out upon Sad Hill Cemetery. Tuco becomes increasingly frantic in running around the circles of graves, the presence of fortune at once tantalisingly close and maddeningly veiled. Morricone unleashes his immortal “Ecstasy of Gold” as Tuco’s frenzy grows, music surging to heights of perverse grandeur as Delli Colli’s camera spins ever more dizzily, the zoom lensing longer and longer collapsing space and motion into visual delirium, the landscape seeded with the dead promising bounty as if in ridicule of the living. Thundering drums, clanging bells, an operatic voice reaching high thrusting notes, and none it seems too much. The game, of course, has reached its final stage, but the end can only be gained when one more grave is filled, as Angel Eyes appears like a great dark bird and Blondie decides the stakes of the last throw of dice, promising to write the name of the grave containing the gold on a stone, to be the prize for the man who emerges from the inevitable shootout. The three men retreat to points around the dial of a circular plaza at the heart of the cemetery.

Leone was both repeating himself here, having already offered a gunfight in a circle designed to evoke a bullfighting arena at end of For A Few Dollars More, but also consciously outdoing himself, reaching for the definitive iteration. The idea of a gunfight evoking a bullfight was inspired by Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959), which in turn borrowed the way the besiegers at the Alamo supposedly regaled the besieged with bullfighting music. Leone presents the notion this time with total embrace of the mythic, a duel in the centre of a great graveyard, sun raw overhead, the great dream of life and death played out in a zone where the black wood of the grave markers could be the wings of ravens to carry a soul off to the netherworld and the blazing sun the pitiless promise of another day above ground, scourging skin and soul free of all sin. Morricone’s music again intensifies the informing spirit to the nth degree as his vast and sonorous banks of trumpets accompany Leone’s close-up shots of the gunmen as they shift attention from target to target. Fateful mental calculus unfolds behind squinting, flicking, parsing eyes whilst bodies remain rigid and poised. When the moment of truth arrives it comes in a blink, both Blondie and Tuco firing at Angel Eyes but only one man’s bullets hitting, as Blondie has long since pilfered Tuco’s bullets.

Even the awesome drama of the shootout is then riddled with deception, illusion, and an edge of the ridiculous, though the threat from Angel Eyes was no fake, indeed too real to even allow the possibility of another factor. Blondie offers sardonic punctuation, firing shots that flick Angel Eyes’ gun and hat into the grave with him, a gesture that somehow splits the difference between a show of a victor’s disdain for the failed contender, and a last gesture of respect for the felled foe, sending off to Valhalla with his sword and armour. “There’s two kinds of people, my friend,” Blondie declares, summarising the entire matter for Tuco’s education in the ultimate inversion of the desert scene, “Those with loaded guns, and those who dig.” The ultimate joke sees Blondie granting Tuco his share of the treasure, but forcing him to earn it once again through the existential trial that was the crux of their old partnership: a man, balanced between sky and earth, life and death, hoping the aim is true. Of course, Blondie pulls off his best shot yet. Tuco’s last cry of profane protest is drowned out by Morricone’s coyote yowls and the roll call of types recurs, each now in his appropriate place. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly might not even be Leone’s greatest film – Once Upon A Time In The West, Duck You Sucker, and Once Upon A Time In America all have equally good claims to the title, certainly richer in terms of their human drama and each taking his stylistics further by degrees. But it remains Leone’s most singular moment of connection with his audience, with the iconography he created only to eventually feel caged by, and with the unique power of his art form.