FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
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
|