THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
Directed by: Sergio Leone.
Produced by: Alberto Grimaldi.
Written by: Age-Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni & Sergio Leone, from a story by Vincenzoni & Leone.
Director of Photography: Tonino Delli Colli.
Edited by: Eugenio Alabiso & Nino Baragli. Restored version by Joe D'Augustine.
Music by: Ennio Morricone.
Released by: MGM/UA.
Language: English or Italian.
Country of Origin: Italy/Spain. 180 min. Not rated.
With: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef & Eli Wallach.

Two-Disc Set, including 18 min. of added footage. Commentary by film critic and historian Richard Schickel. Deleted scenes. "Leone's West" making-of documentary. "The Leone Style" documentary. "The Man Who Lost the Civil War" documentary on Brigadier General Henry Sibley. "Reconstructing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" featurette on the audio re-recording and film restoration. "Il Maestro: Ennio Morricone and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" featurette. Poster gallery. International theatrical mini-posters. English & Italian audio. Cantonese, English, French, Mandarin & Spanish subtitles. Trailers.

This 1966 spaghetti Western exemplifies why Italian director Sergio Leone is a master filmmaker, with his work affecting such disparate artists as Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino. Its wide shots and extreme close-ups; its exaggerated camera movement and shot length - at times slowly-paced and at others roving; and its landscapes juxtaposed with minute detail make the movie both intimately neorealist and epically mythic. Certain features - such as the aforementioned wide shots, along with composer Ennio Morricone's evocative, almost mournful, score - revel in an elegiac and iconic tone acknowledging the film's debt to and admiration for the genre it is deconstructing.

The good (Eastwood), the bad (Lee Van Cleef), and the ugly (Eli Wallach) race each other to hunt down a buried $200,000 treasure in the Southwest during the Civil War. The characters are contradictory: the good has a morally ambiguous persona, the bad does not seem too much worse than the others, and the ugly’s backstory is appealingly embodied by Wallach. Though its title sequence accentuates the Western's picture book origins, and Eastwood's character is the genre's typical "loner," the movie also offers a unconventional perspective on the Western genre (such the moment in which the music stops abruptly the instant Eastwood gets off his horse, or when Van Cleef appears toward the end without any explanation). However, in its implicitly pacifist outlook, the film seemingly fails to recognize that there are some causes - in the case of the Civil War, the abolition of slavery - that are worth fighting for.

DVD Extras: The commentary by Schickel is filled with ideas and background that enhance the movie. For instance, the critic notes that the "Man with No Name," as Eastwood's characters came to be referred to in Leone’s films, was an invention of the films' American promotional campaign, since the movies were all released simultaneously in the U.S. in 1967, with Eastwood named differently in each. Schickel also discusses how Leone's films tend to feature drawn-out, almost parodying, sequences building to bursts of violence, as opposed to the excessive brutality of director Sam Peckinpah's films.

"Leone's West" and "The Leone Style" are illuminating and entertaining. Wallach insists he was not going for laughs as the ugly (AKA Tuco), which is incredible, since the part is a comedic tour de force. Eastwood himself shows a humorous side in some segments, laughing at his own puns and malapropisms, and citing "the laughs, the insanity, the good food" as what he enjoyed about the Leone experience. The film restoration extra is enlightening due to its unwitting questioning of whether a film can ever by restored without losing the intangible integrity of the original release. Furthermore, the examination of Morricone's collaboration with Leone demonstrates how significant the music was to the latter's films, to the degree that he structured sequences around it. However, the extra on Brigadier General Henry Sibley's losing Civil War campaign - mentioned in the film - is dull, playing like a History Channel reject. Finally, of the deleted scenes, most interesting is the extended torture sequence of Tuco. Although the scene in the restored film is a chillingly literal symphony of violence, the deleted footage is a sequence that, despite having been found, the restorers opted to leave out due to the master print's poor quality. Reymond Levy
August 2, 2004