The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Leone’s Machine of Betrayal Still Runs

Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly runs 161 minutes and spends most of them watching three men lie to each other. That is the engine of the film, and it still works. The 1966 Italian production, released in Italy on December 23 of that year, follows Blondie (Clint Eastwood), Tuco Ramírez (Eli Wallach) and Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) across the American Southwest as they hunt a strongbox holding $200,000 in stolen Confederate gold.

Trailer, via Amazon MGM Studios.

Three Men and a Strongbox

The plot is a chain of shifting alliances. Angel Eyes interrogates a former Confederate soldier named Stevens for the alias of the man who stole the gold, learns the name Bill Carson, kills Stevens and then kills his own employer. Tuco, a Mexican bandit, gets captured by Blondie, who hands him to a sheriff for the bounty and then shoots the noose apart before Tuco hangs. They repeat the trick in another town until Blondie keeps the money and strands Tuco in the desert.

Tuco comes back for revenge. He force-marches Blondie through the desert until Blondie collapses from dehydration. A runaway ambulance carrying dead Confederate soldiers arrives with a barely alive Bill Carson, who offers $200,000 in gold buried at Sad Hill Cemetery. Carson dies before Tuco returns with water, having told Blondie the exact grave. The two agree to work together and refuse to share what each knows.

Leone’s Camera Does the Talking

Tonino Delli Colli shot the film in Techniscope, and the style is the point. Leone cuts between expansive wide shots and extreme close-ups, and treats violence, tension and gunfights as stylised set pieces rather than realism. The Civil War is backdrop, not subject. The tagline says it plainly: “For three men the Civil War wasn’t hell. It was practice.”

That line is the film’s whole argument. The war is noise. The gold is the plot.

Casting a Comic Bandit

Eastwood agreed to play Blondie after Leone traveled to California to persuade him, for $250,000 plus 10 percent of profits from the North American markets. Leone was not happy about the deal. He had considered Gian Maria Volonté for Tuco but wanted someone with “natural comic talent,” and chose Wallach based on his work in the “Railroads” scene of How the West Was Won (1962). Wallach was skeptical about playing the type again until Leone screened the opening credits of For a Few Dollars More. The two got along, sharing a similar sense of humor, and Leone let Wallach change his outfit and recurring gestures.

Van Cleef saw where the weight sat. “Tuco is the only one of the trio the audience gets to know all about,” he said. “We meet his brother and find out where he came from and why he became a bandit.” That is accurate. Blondie stays a drifter. Angel Eyes stays a killer. Tuco gets a priest for a brother, and the brother rejects him.

For Angel Eyes, Leone first wanted Enrico Maria Salerno or Charles Bronson, but Bronson was committed to The Dirty Dozen (1967). Leone wanted Van Cleef again, reasoning that Van Cleef had played a romantic figure in For a Few Dollars More and should now play the opposite.

Where the Film Was Actually Shot

Despite being an Italian production, the film was shot primarily in Spain. The Tabernas Desert in Almería, the Arlanza River valley near Hortigüela, and the purpose-built Sad Hill Cemetery near Santo Domingo de Silos all stand in for the American Southwest. The cemetery is not a location the production found. It built one.

The Score and the Silence

Ennio Morricone composed the score, and this paper’s view is that it carries scenes the dialogue leaves bare. The film marked Leone’s third collaboration with Eastwood and his second with Van Cleef, and the trio of leads is the reason it holds. The screenplay came from Age & Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni and Leone, based on a story by Vincenzoni and Leone — four writers, and the result still moves like a chase.

It was promoted in the United States as the third and final installment of the Dollars trilogy. That framing undersells it. The earlier films are leaner. This one has a war in it, a cemetery, and a bandit with a brother who wants nothing to do with him.

What Actually Matters Here

The gold is a device to keep three men in the same frame, and always was. What matters is the structure of the betrayals, and Leone knows it. Each man holds one piece of the answer, which means none of them can kill the others until the grave is found. That is a machine, and it runs for 161 minutes without stalling.

The weakest stretch is the middle, where the mission and the Union prison camp slow the pursuit. The film is long, and it sags there. Eastwood is a fixed point. Van Cleef is a threat with a smile. Wallach is the one who changes, complains, prays and gets left in the desert twice. He is the reason the film has a pulse instead of just a style.

Aldo Giuffrè appears as the Alcoholic Union Captain, Luigi Pistilli as Father Pablo Ramirez, and Rada Rassimov as Maria. Antonio Casale plays Bill Carson, the dying man whose secret sets the last act in motion. These are small roles doing structural work.

The Verdict on Sad Hill

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is not a war film that happens to have gunslingers, and it is not a Western that happens to mention the Civil War. It is a film about three men who cannot trust each other and cannot afford to stop. Leone’s wide shots and extreme close-ups are the grammar of that standoff, and the Sad Hill finale is the payoff the whole running time builds toward.

This is a great film with a sagging middle, and Wallach’s performance is what holds it upright.

Clint Eastwood · Eli Wallach · movie review · Sergio Leone · Spaghetti Western · The Good the Bad and the Ugly