The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Clint Eastwood is Blondie, Eli Wallach is Tuco and Lee Van Cleef is Angel Eyes, three men who wind up in search of the same thing, a fortune in stolen money buried somewhere during the Civil War.

Angel Eyes is the bad in the title, a man who kills for money. In this case, he’s been hired by an ex-Confederate named Baker to squeeze information about a former partner named Jackson from a Mexican peon.

Before dying, the Mexican tells Angel Eyes that Jackson is now using the name Bill Carson. And he tells of the lost case of gold. The latter is news to Angel Eyes, who decides to kill Baker and launch a search for the gold himself.

Tuco is the ugly in the title, a small-time bandit with a list of crimes large enough to have a $2,000 price tag on his head. He’s repeatedly caught, turned in for the bounty, sentenced to hang, then shot down from the rope in the nick of time by Blondie, the good in the title.

The more often Tuco escapes, the higher the reward climbs. Then Blondie decides to dissolve the partnership, leaving Tuco to fend for himself in the desert. It’s a favor Tuco won’t forget.

But as he’s getting his revenge, marching Blondie through a desert with no water, the two come across a Confederate ambulance. A man inside begs for water. He identifies himself as Bill Carson. He’ll provide information on where to find $200,000 to the man who gives him a drink.

Tuco winds up with the name of the cemetery where the gold is buried. While he’s fetching water, Blondie gets the name on the grave marker where they can find it. Now they need each other, and the stake is much higher than $2,000.

Of course, there’s still Angel Eyes to deal with. Not to mention the Civil War that is raging all around them.

Eli Wallach as Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Review:

This is the third and best of Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name or Dollars trilogy. At least that’s how it’s known, though Clint Eastwood’s character does have a name, albeit sometimes seldom used, in all three films and there’s nothing about dollars in the title of this film.

That matters little. This is indisputably one of the most ambitious and most entertaining of the hundreds of Spaghetti Westerns churned out from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, perhaps surpassed only by Leone’s own “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

Van Cleef and Eastwood return from “For a Few Dollars More,” this time partners for the briefest of periods as Blondie seems to have more of an allegiance with Tuco. That said, none of the three men are particularly “good,” or particularly trustworthy. Any alliance the men form has selfish motive. In fact, over the course of the film, the “good” Blondie wracks up the highest dead body count of all three men.

The trip to Sad Hill Cemetery takes us through war-torn towns, to a prisoner-of-war camp, to a monastery and through a seemingly pointless (but filmed on a grand scale) Civil War battle over a bridge of little importance that’s costing thousands of lives.

And it all ends in a wonderfully staged three-man showdown in the middle of that cemetery, with the name of the grave where the money is buried written on a rock, presumably the prize for the one man who survives.

Oh, yeah, and Ennio Morricone provides another brilliant score, including the well-known theme song, which became a Top 10 hit in the U.S.

Rada Rassimov as Maria in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Directed by:
Sergio Leone

Cast:
Clint Eastwood … Blondie
Eli Wallach … Tuco
Lee Van Cleef … Angel Eyes
Aldo Giuffre … Union captain
Luigi Pistilli … Father Pablo Ramirez
Enzo Petito … Storekeeper
Rada Rassimov … Maria
Claudio Scarchilli … Mexican Peon
John Bartha … Sheriff
Livio Lorenzon … Baker
Antonio Casale … Jackson / Bill Carson
Mario Brega … Wallace
Antonio Casas … Stevens
Antonio Molino Rojo … Capt. Harper
Jose Terron … “Shorty” Larson

Runtime: 161 min.

Music: Ennio Morricone

aka:
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo

Jose Terron as Shorty Larson in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Memorable lines:

Angel Eyes: “When I start off to find someone, I find them. That’s why they pay me.”

Angel Eyes: “You know the pity is, when I’m paid, I always follow the job through.”

Tuco: “There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend. Those with a rope around their neck and the people who have the job of doing the cutting. Listen, the neck at the end of the rope is mine. I run the risks. So the next time, I want more than half.”
Blondie: “You may run the risks, my friend, but I do the cutting. We cut down my percentage — liable to interfere with my aim.”

Angel Eyes, watching Tuco with his neck in a noose: “People with ropes around their necks don’t aways hang.”
Stage passenger: “What do you mean?”
Angel Eyes: “Even a filthy beggar like that has got a protecting angel.”

Tuco: “You never had a rope around your neck. Well, I’m going to tell you something. When that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the devil bite your ass.”

Blondie, riding off as he leaves Tuco alone in the desert, shouting obscenities: “Such ingratitude, after all the times I’ve saved your life.”

Tuco to a recuperating Blondie: “Come on, come on. The party’s over. The wagon is all ready to go. The way the wounded are pouring into this place, we’d better get the hell out of this place, before we get caught up in the war.”

Tuco to Wallace: “I like big fat men like you. When they fall, they make a bigger noise. And sometimes they never get up.”

Tuco, after gunning down a one-armed bounty hunter: “When you have to shoot – shoot. Don’t talk.”

Blondie to Tuco, after Tuco has climbed out of a bathtub to greet a man at his hotel room door, gun drawn: “Put your drawers on and take your gun off.”

Blondie to Tuco: “You see, in this world, there are two kinds of people: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”

Mario Brega as Wallace in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Trivia:

The Spanish Army assisted with the filming of the Civil War battle scene and with the construction of the bridge it is fought over. A captain in that army was given the privilege of lighting the fuse to blow up the bridge. But he lit the fuse too early, before any cameras were rolling. The army rebuilt the bridge free of charge for a second ka-boom.

A restored version of the film includes several scenes that were never dubbed into English. For that version, Eastwood and Wallach returned to dub their lines; Van Cleef had died by that point. His lines were dubbed by Simon Prescott.

In a DVD extras interview, Wallach describes some rather frightening moments on set. In one of the hanging scenes, gunfire spooked the horse he was on. It went galloping off with him on its back, a noose around his neck and his hands tied behind his back. And, near the end of the film, there’s a scene where Tuco whacks a bag of gold coins with a shovel and it splits open. To make sure the bag would open easily, the film crew treated it with acid. The acid was stored in a soda bottle, and Wallach accidentally took a swig.

In the theatrical trailer, Angel Eyes is the “ugly” and Tuco is the “bad. That’s because the Italian name of the movie translates into “The Good, the Ugly and the Bad.”

Charles Bronson, who would appear in Leone’s next film, was reportedly offered the roles of Angel Eyes and Tuco.

Eli Wallach as Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)