On the surface, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is claiming to have the three most clearly delineated roles in film history. It’s simple. A good man, a bad man and an ugly man – respectively Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach. Their roles is even announced by captions at the start and end of the film, albeit in Spanish. As the plot develops, though, the walls start to dissolve and this infantile moral clarity becomes something rather more interesting.
Wallach is Tuco, the Ugly Mexican bandit. A cursing, capering goblin of a man, “known as The Rat,” only rescued from total absurdity by his lethalness. Any miniscule shreds of dignity he briefly manages to collect are quickly lost. Take the three-cornered showdown at the denouement. Eastwood gets to shroud himself in an enigmatic poncho; Van Cleef has a cool all-black ensemble. Wallach must make do with a scruffy maroon jacket splitting open at the seams. Even his very status is ludicrous. The Good and the Bad are binary opposites of the moral scale; the Ugly is a jokey alternative which doesn’t even belong on it.
In most films Tuco would be played solely for laughs before meeting an untimely death. But Sergio Leone actually makes him the undeclared star of his piece. Eastwood may take top billing but Wallach has the most screen time and the most rounded character. Only he, for one, has a proper name. Eastwood and Van Cleef are only known by nicknames, Blondie and Angel Eyes, which aren’t even particularly accurate. Wallach’s constant mutterings almost serve as old-fashioned soliloquies to share his thoughts with the audience; a marked contrast to the legendarily taciturn Eastwood. And, unusually for a Leone character, Tuco is given a background and a family. The scene where he meets is estranged priest brother and learns his parents are dead is one of the most powerful in the film. Wallach is almost shamed into repentance for a second by his brother. Then he comes back with the angry speech, “In our village, if one did not want to die of poverty, one became a priest or a bandit. You chose your way, I chose mine. Mine was harder.” Tuco is not set apart from the moral scale after all. He is actually a battleground of values, a struggle epitomised when he finds a wagon full of corpses. Instinctively he crosses himself like a good Catholic – and then gets on with looting the bodies.
Eastwood is The Good. Of course Eastwood is The Good. But precisely how Good is he? He doesn’t seem to loot corpses but does make fresh ones out of living men with no apparent compunction. We first meet him making a living by turning in outlaws for the bounty and then rescuing them from the noose. Only the greater brutality of the Civil War seems to shake him into something resembling humanity. “Never seen so many men wasted so badly,” he famously mutters as he watches the savage battle for the bridge. Afterwards when he meets a dying Confederate soldier, he covers the boy up and gives him a last smoke. (Cigars seem to be Eastwood’s sole way of expressing kindness. He offers them to Wallach on the two times they are starting to build a proper friendship.) But this strange version of last rites is an aberration, not an epiphany. Hearing Wallach ride away to try and grab the gold, Eastwood immediately strides off and starts firing cannons at him. It’s also worth noting that Eastwood started the double-crossing which constantly mars their partnership, robbing Wallach and leaving him trussed up in the wilderness. And that in the film’s spectacular climax he appears to be inflicting a particularly macabre fate on his ex-partner, only to turn it into a particularly macabre practical joke. Sergio Leone always liked to subvert the image of cowboy as image of moral rectitude which John Wayne epitomised. In this respect The Good, The Bad and The Ugly stands on a line beginning with A Fistful of Dollars and ended by Eastwood himself with Unforgiven.
Lee Van Cleef, at least, is fairly unambiguously Bad. Leone was always more comfortable with pure evil than pure good. It’s interesting, though, how peripheral Van Cleef is to the film. After introducing himself with a flurry of murders, he vanishes for a long time. And he needs a great deal of effort to intrude on the quest-cum-vendetta of Eastwood and Wallach. In both For A Few Dollars More and Once Upon A Time In The West, the whole purpose of the story is getting revenge on Gian Maria Volonte and Henry Fonda respectively. Van Cleef is just another contender for the chest of gold. One defeated, moreover, not by a quick draw buy by a piece of trickery. Eastwood secretly empties Wallach’s gun before the three-way shootout. This leaves him free to focus on Van Cleef whose concentration is divided. You can almost feel sorry for Angel Eyes as he falls into his handily open grave. He was at least willing to fight an honest duel at the end. The Good man had other plans, however.
The taming of the old West has entered American mythology. The conquering of its last frontier, replacing an anarchic land where the gun is king with the rule of law and symbols of Eastern civilisation. The theme winds around many Westerns. Only the treatment has shifted gradually. Originally it was celebratory, represented by heroic, blue-eyed Americans vanquishing evil Red Indians. By the 1950’s the tone was becoming more melancholic, particularly in John Ford’s films; realising that freedom, too, was being sacrificed. Finally the outright cynical came to the fore, in Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West and Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.
The old West is dying in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly too. Or rather, thanks to the Civil War it is being ripped apart and only desolation is appearing in its place. An innkeeper, rejoicing in the imminent victory of the Northern because he can make more money from them, anticipates the greed which would finally conquer the frontier. But he doesn’t benefit, his inn being quickly destroyed by a stray cannonball. A wagon miraculously appearing in the desert turns out to be full of corpses. Leone fills his landscapes with ruined buildings and subverts the symbols of law and society. A train ploughing majestically through the wilderness is also an instrument of torture for a Confederate spy tied to the front. Eastwood, who makes a living cutting nooses, ties one around Wallach as a grim practical joke. A bridge, that most basic achievement of mankind, is the reason for a pointless battle and the loss of thousands of lives; its destruction is the cause for celebration. One of the few structures which remains, a monastery which cares for wounded soldiers, seems almost grotesque in context. Wallach flinches in disgust when he sees the scenes of solace inside. He would be more at home in the graveyard where the film ends. There is a wide, empty space in its centre where the final shootout takes place. That would be where the church ought to be. But there is nothing. The whole area is just a disposal area for corpses, the graves marked by the most rudimentary of signs.
Passing away, too, are the personifications of civilisation. There are a few symbols of moral rectitude and none suffer happy fates. Two are doomed army commanders, one the victim of gangrene, the other slowly poisoning himself with alcohol before a bullet quickens the process. Both, incidentally, are fighting for the North. The Union is dying even as it wins the war. The only institution still standing by the end is the church, in the shape of Tuco’s brother. But he is left severely compromised, surrendering to anger, knocked to the ground by Tuco and, in his final shot, begging futilely for forgiveness. Even commercial greed and evil cannot stand up to the savage force ravaging Leone’s world. Van Cleef starts the film as a hired gun. At the end of his introductory sequence, though, he double-crosses the man with the gold and dispatches him. Similar fates meet the families trying to manipulate Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, the rail baron who thought he controls Henry Fonda in Once Upon A Time In The West. The values and morals of the old West may have vanished from Leone’s films. Brute force, though, still rules supreme.
A recent poll put the score from The Lord of the Rings as the best ever written. It’s a decent little tune, I suppose, if rather derivative; rather like the trilogy itself. But the result simply shows how much poor memories influence surveys. Nobody who has watched a Sergio Leone film in the last ten years could have voted for any other. Many movies, including The Lord of the Rings, are improved by their scores. For all its many other virtues, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly simply couldn’t exist without its music.
Ennio Morricone worked on all Leone’s major films. The professional harmony of the pair was legendary. One Once Upon A Time In The West, Morricone wrote the score first and Leone instructed his actors to modulate their movements around it. In one scene in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Eastwood holsters his gun then Wallach spins his spurs to announce his unexpected appearance, the sequence perfectly spaced by the famous signature riff. Sometimes, with their sparse dialogue, Leone’s works seem more like a ballet than a film. Or as one critic described Once Upon A Time In The West, ‘a dance of death.’
There is a sense, too, of the pair trying to outdo each other. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was easily Leone’s most ambitious piece to date, transcending the brutal revenge tales of the other Dollars films. And Morricone tried to match him on his flight upwards. Leone piled layer upon layer, creating a plot which was both an intricate, ingenious device and a simple extended duel. Morricone built fantastic, almost unearthly compositions, employing choirs, trumpets, steel guitars, a number of instruments I can’t begin to name. Every sudden shift in mood is followed perfectly by the score. The poignant suffering inflicted by war, the tension of the gunfight in the deserted town, the savage march through the desert; most memorably, the quirky theme tune announcing every plot twist or black joke. Even these, though, are overshadowed by the film’s astonishing climax.
Morricone gives us two compositions for this. Each begins quietly then builds gradually into an amazingly stirring chorus. Keeping pace with him, of course, is Leone’s direction. As the music swells, the camera moves faster and faster. The first crescendo leads to one extended blur of movement. For the second there is a series of repetitive images appearing and vanishing quicker than a blink. The effect is amazing, the film leaping out and bludgeoning you into submission.
What, though, is the story behind these monumental crescendos? A man running through a cemetery looking for a grave which is supposed to be full of gold and isn’t. And then three men having a fight over a rock supposed to have a name written on it; which, as it turns out, it doesn’t. Squalor, basically, greed and trickery. Cinema is often accused of manipulating the emotions of the audience. Leone and Morricone both manipulate ours as much as they can and all to spring another practical joke on us. At the end of each sequence, Morricone’s music is abruptly cut. There is a quick fumble of movement and the issue is resolved. Reality hits us between the eyes. And in the sudden silence, we realise exactly what we were gaping at a second ago.
