Published on 25 Feb 2017

The Good The Bad & The Ugly: Why Is It So Good? is a great movie to look back on. It made 5 times its money back, making it a big success. But even Clint Eastwood himself thought the movie would do either really well or really bad.

It didn’t have the greatest reception from critics at that time. One of the most memorable criticisms from The LA Times said that the movie should have been called The Bad, The Dull and the Interminable”. The main reason for this negativity was due to the movie belonging to a not so popular sub genre, the Spaghetti Western, which when compared to a Hollywood western was considered as a cheap, inferior, foreign version.

In your typical Hollywood Western everything looked clean… where the heroes were handsome, and wore freshly pressed suits and had shiny new guns. But in a Spaghetti or Italian Western thing were far more gritty, dirty and violent as a whole they were perceived as been more realistic Its main characters weren’t well groomed nor necessarily handsome.

The musical scores were pretty different, from the amazing high energy music by Ennio Morricone compared to the more stately orchestral scores by Elmer Bernstein, like in The Magnificent Seven. In the 1960s the Hollywood hero was usually a great gunslinger who faced insurmountable odds taking on the bad guys and out smarting them. They were usually unselfish and down to earth. The main villains were very one dimensional, their badness was not explained, and they were often a outcasts, which meant they were either feared or hated by the local townspeople. However Italian films featured anti-heroes: instead of the protagonist saving everyone, the main character himself was either neutral or more interested in personal gain. While the bad guy was often as charismatic or powerful as the hero in order to give the protagonist a real challenge.

In Hollywood westerns the death of an antagonist simply meant the triumph of the good over the bad… going back home or having a reunion with loved ones, concluded the movies story. Whereas in its European counterpart, the death of the antagonist usually completed the narrative.

Sergio Leone had only directed a “fistful” of low budget movies at this point of his career, but you wouldn’t think that watching this film. What makes this movie truly amazing is Leone’s scope and vision. He had the special ability to use silence to help build suspicion, and paranoia when it came to one of his famous shootout scenes. Or Leone would use a long pause combined with music that slowly increased in tempo to make his action scenes feel more exciting and have a far greater payoff, even though the action would be over within a blink of an eye

Leone’s unique style involved shots of scenery that were very pulled back, where he would have small figures moving around in the distance, these wide shots were then followed by tight close ups of faces, giving you the audience this fantastic operatic feeling whenever a new chapter began Leone was great with people’s faces… he would deliberately hand pick his extras to find people who had very different looks and features… he would then pan across them giving his shots an extra sense of realism

Leone also establishes a rule where a characters vision is limited by the sides of the frame, everything outside the frame is invisible. This allows you the viewer to see only from the perspective of what the characters sees. So when Blondie and Tuco are heading towards the cemetery, they don’t notice the massive Union army in front of them and neither do you. Leone often thought that Hollywood Westerns had too much dialog, so he had his characters say more by saying less. Where most of them make eye contact with each other… pause and then start shooting!

Clint Eastwood as Blondie aka the good, is easily recognizable due to his iconic brown hat, poncho and fondness for cigarillos. But apart from that, his character is pretty mysterious… not much is known about him he says very little, and technically isn’t `good’ in a traditional sense… however he has a certain sense of honour and tries to do the right thing from time to time. Tuco aka the Ugly is the exact opposite or his partner Blondie, he never stops talking… Eli Wallach steals the show with his acting, and is easily the most complex character… always lying, switching sides, where he goes from trying to kill Blondie in one scene to pretending to be his best friend in another… He truly represents `the ugliest’ side of humanity, But that doesn’t stop you from loving his character Angel Eyes aka The Bad is evil personified. Lee Van Cleef was born to play this part