I’ve long said I am a Clint Eastwood fan, even to point of grading many of his films on a gigantic curve. I have also said I prefer him as a director than as an actor. But something jumped out at me when I saw his film Mystic River. Eastwood himself does not appear in the film. He’s only directing this time around. The general plot is a conflict between three childhood friends. Growing up in Boston, one of them was kidnapped and molested as a child, growing up with severe PTSD. Another grew up to be a crime boss. The third became a cop. When the mob boss’s teenage daughter was herself murdered, he takes matter into his own hands while believing his friend who had been similarly treated is the man responsible. Meanwhile, the cop friend began his own investigation. During said investigation, there’s a scene where the cop and his partner interview an old man, the owner of a liquor store who has some information. The liquor store owner only appears in the one scene, but I was struck by how animated the guy was. Like, I really found him to be a compelling actor for some reason despite the fact I don’t even recall if the character had a name.
Later I realized why: the old man was played by Eli Wallach, Eastwood’s co-star in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I’d like to think that was Eastwood giving an old pal a cameo for a role that probably would have been utterly forgettable otherwise while Wallach, old pro that he was, just injected a lot of life into a single scene just by being himself.
Growing up, I remember the first time I came across the term “Spaghetti Western,” I thought it was a term of derision. My dad, a man who is generally a big fan of Westerns, explained that it was actually a compliment. Italian filmmakers took the style and look of the genre and made it their own with international casts. As he explained it, each actor would speak their native language during filming, but later those lines would be dubbed over to allow the Italians to send the finished films all over the world. And, based on the various Spaghetti Westerns I have seen–and admittedly, I haven’t seen more than Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy”–The Good, the Bad and the Ugly may be the best of the genre. The only rival might be Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, but I haven’t quite seen that yet. But I was at least vaguely familiar with the title of this film if nothing else, and while I don’t quite remember what order I watched the Dollars Trilogy in, I think I went with the most famous of the batch first. Naturally, it was the third film, and I didn’t quite realize it at the time. Then again, I am not sure it even matters what order you watch them in.
So, what about the film itself? To put it at its most basic, three men, one “good,” one “bad,” and one “ugly,” are all looking for a hidden stash of Confederate gold somewhere in the American Southwest as the Civil War is waged around them. Westerns as a whole, until relatively recently, are all fairly basic morality tales. They can and often are still told well despite this black-and-white morality. That said, to look at the three main characters here, all played by Americans in a cast primarily made up of Spanish and Italian actors, none of them are exactly what most people would call good. This is a film where people are either victims or victimizers in many cases.
To look the three over one at a time, it might make it easier to see why. Lee Van Cleef is “the Bad,” AKA Angel Eyes. He probably has the least amount of screentime of the three, the first to learn about the gold, but often working alone as he searches for it in his own way. His introductory scene shows him going to a man’s house, learning of the gold, and then killing the man of the house on behalf on an employer. He then kills what appears to be a teenage boy coming downstairs with a shotgun before leaving the horrified widow to come see what happened to her husband and (I am guessing) older son. Angel Eyes, not his real name, then kills his employer before going off to find the gold, a mission that shows he is not above torture, bribery, and slapping one of the few women in the film around to learn more of what he needs to know. He’s the “bad” in part because, despite the fact that I am hesitant to call anyone in the film all that moral, he’s easily the worst of the three main characters.
As for the Good, that’s Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name; however, for brevity’s sake, I’ll go like the Ugly does and refer to him as “Blondie.” Blondie may or may not be the same character Eastwood played in For a Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, but since the character has no name, I have to go by the fact that, well, he dresses the same. The only reason I might doubt that is Blondie is a lot more mercenary in the other two films. For a Few Dollars More also features Van Cleef, but he’s playing a different character. Van Cleef’s character and Blondie are both looking for the same bounty there, but Van Cleef’s character is the one interested in justice while Blondie just wants the bounty. What about here? Here, he’s quick to use the Ugly for a scheme where he turns the other fellow in for a bounty and then shoots the hangman’s rope from afar before splitting the bounty with the Ugly and then trying it again in another town. He makes the Ugly do most of the work, and Blondie doesn’t really put himself in much danger. That said, Blondie is the only one of the three to express anything like disgust over the mass slaughter of soldiers on both sides of the war. The other two more or less ignore corpses when they see them (save the one they’re all looking for), and Blondie does the closest to a good deed in the film by, working with the Ugly, blowing up a bridge both the Union and Confederate armies are fighting over. Yes, destroying the bridge clears the path to the gold, but he seems to be doing it in part for a dying Union captain, the one man who seems to express the futility of the war the best, lamenting how he’d like nothing better than for the bridge to be destroyed so both sides can stop fighting over the useless thing.
And then there’s the Ugly, Eli Wallach’s Tuco Ramierz, the arguably most interesting of the three in that he actually has a name, a distinct personality, and most of the best lines. While there is a reoccurring bit about two types of people in the world, he is the one to offer the safe advice of “If you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” His introduction is the most succinct, and yet he’s the most complex of the three. Blondie is a more or less established character while being the standard Western good guy, even if he is a little tarnished. Angel Eyes, named apparently by Eastwood on set, is about as evil as they come, a sadistic man who seems to enjoy hurting people. But Tuco? He has a priest for a brother, a backstory, and despite the fact he is often on the receiving end of abuse from the other two, he’s not completely incompetent. As a Mexican, he is somewhat ignorant of what’s going on in the war, but he’s likewise, able to track Blondie after the hangman stunt nearly gets him killed. Heck, his revenge nearly kills Blondie. Tuco has a rough charm. He seems to be the only character truly capable of enjoying himself, and despite the fact Blondie knows Tuco is unreliable, the two do form a partnership off and on over the course of the film, and in the end, even though Tuco does find himself once again temporarily with his neck in a noose, Blondie does leave half the gold behind for him. For a character that is often the fool, he doesn’t make out that bad in the end.
As I reflect on it, I figure Tuco is basically a talented normal person stuck between two Western archetypes. Yeah, against most normal people, he’s more than capable. But against Blondie and Angel Eyes? He’s toast. His morality falls somewhere between the other two. He doesn’t see the waste of human life that Blondie sees on the battlefield, but he likewise doesn’t seem as inclined to kill innocents to get what he wants the way Angel Eyes does. His robbery of a general store owner leaves the guy alive and somewhat embarrassed, but most of the people he shoots are people looking to shoot him for one reason or another. And he still gets half the gold.
However, I want to say something about the pacing. While the film is never dull, it is nearly three hours long all the same. Much of the first hour is Tuco and Blondie dueling each other, essentially, as they come up one over the other until both gets half of the location of the gold. Tuco knows the cemetery where it’s buried. Blondie knows in what grave. Angel Eyes, by contrast, knows about the gold in the first few minutes, but the other two come into the hunt about a third of the way through. The three don’t meet up until the halfway point (Tuco and Angel Eyes already know each other). And still, there’s no wasted time here. Ennio Morricone’s classic score helps: it has a tempo that really propels the narrative and pumps me up for sure. Besides, I doubt anyone ever did a final shoot-out the way Leone does here, as the three men size each other up before Blondie shoots Angel Eyes dead. Tuco, naturally, was unaware his weapon was unloaded. Probably just as well. He probably would have tried to shoot both of the other two, and somehow, I figure he would have ended up dead as a result. But man, the tension of that scene, between the editing, the directing, and the score, really makes that the nerve-racking experience that it is.
Now, for the record, the other two parts of the Dollars Trilogy are in no way bad, but the two don’t reach the heights of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Between the score, the three leads hitting all their marks perfectly, and the fantastic direction by Leone, that really shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Maybe one of these days, I’ll get around to Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s not like Henry Fonda played villains all that often…
NEXT: How about a very different kind of Western hero? Come back soon for the first appearance of Sheriff Woody and his eventual pal Buzz Lightyear in 1995’s Toy Story.
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