September 5, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Don't Talk, Shoot
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
What a pleasure it must have been for western fans back in the late '60s to stumble upon the Clint Eastwood films made by Sergio Leone! For one thing the movies were unlike anything American directors were doing in the genre, with their brutal view of life and their visual delirium; for another, the trio of films appeared in the States fairly rapidly, in contrast to their original European distribution, meaning that Americans got to watch the films practically all at once. But what a special thrill it must have been to see the last one, THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, on the big screen for the first time, ignorant of the pleasures and joys it was about to bestow, and unaware that the film was about to both revitalize the genre and sound its death knell.
But then, the western has always attracted eulogists. As Scott Simmon shows amongst many other things in his brilliant new book from Cambridge University Press, THE INVENTION OF THE WESTERN FILM, industry writers were decrying the death of the genre as far back as 1911, when it was only a few years old. "There seems to be prevalent a sentiment that the Western photoplay has out-run its course of usefulness and is slated for an early demise," wrote someone in THE NICKELODEON in February of that year. There must be something elegiac and somber about the western to begin with; it's a genre that celebrates, or maybe merely observes, transitions, so it is perhaps only right that each new generation is ready to chant its obsequies. Then along comes a robust entry like GBU and the genre gets a second, a third, a thousandth wind.
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From its trilling, twangy opening musical theme to its elided obscenity at the end, GBU must have been overwhelming — simply too much, like ambrosia — for sensitive viewers. I can imagine it as being akin to CITIZEN KANE in its impact, showing budding filmmakers what could be done with a camera, with music, with pace, with moral geometry. Ennio Morricone's music contributes a lot to this, but it's also Leone's investigative close-ups, which actors loved, and his amusing "revisionist" undermining of stock conventions. Life is cheap in Leone's version of the west, but wit is plentiful.
But little did these initial American viewers know that the film they were seeing was shorn of about 20 minutes. This rich serving of lush, delirious western confection actually had a few more calories to offer.
As is well known, GBU is about three Southwestern rogues interacting with and against each other against the backdrop of the Civil War. At issue is a chest of gold buried in a cemetery. Blondie (Clint Eastwood, whose character's name may actually be Joe) knows the grave name. His disputatious partner in a clever reward scam, Tuco (Eli Wallach), knows the location of the graveyard. Also interested in the money is the roving hit man Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef, his character known as Sentenza in the Italian version), who is adept at insinuating himself into positions of power, such as that of a Union officer, when the need suits him. Over the course of many months these characters flirt with each other, until they all end up in the graveyard at issue, and face off against each other to see who gets the cash. While they are at it, they will make right those injustices visited upon each other.
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How curious that today Eastwood is the least interesting element of the film. Though the series of Leone westerns made Eastwood a superstar, a perch from which he has rarely fallen, in fact today viewers are more likely to find him a cipher, while Van Cleef's character is morbidly fascinating, and Wallach's is the emotional heart of the film, a figura buffa who represents the everyman in the audience, like Jason Robards in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and Rod Steiger in DUCK YOU SUCKER.
Yes, the problem with the film comes with "the good." In other Leone westerns, the director posits a threesome: the noble caring hero, the grasping underling, and the ruthless villain. In DUCK YOU SUCKER, it's Coburn, Steiger, and a German general in Mexico. In FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, Van Cleef plays the noble guy, called Mortimer. It's as if Leone were constantly fishing around to try and get the formula right, finally achieving the perfect combo in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST — but by then no one cared anymore. In GBU, Eastwood should be the noble character. Though he evinces a few "caring" traits that suggest an interest in justice, the nobility here has been shifted to the tertiary character of a Union captain who wants a bridge blown up. This absence of real nobility in the primary trio creates a certain heartlessness that Leone tries to recompense by inserting sentimental scenes (the prison camp musicians) and fleeting manifestations of noble actions to make up for it.
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Not that it matters in the long run. GBU is a beautifully done film, one that, despite its awesome length, is actually very tight and cohesive. As Robert Cumbow shows in his study of the director ONCE UPON A TIME: THE FILMS OF SERGIO LEONE, from Scarecrow Press, the single best book about Leone's films thus far, GBU is a Rubric's cube of paired images and triplicate structures. Most things in GBU come in threes, from the three assassins at the start who try to jump Tuco to the triad of title characters themselves. Cumbow points out that the long opening sequence is designed to undermine our normal expectations of western tropes. What looks at first like a showdown turns out to be a hit. Tuco survives, of course, but the point is that Leone is making elaborate, loving, operatic jokes at the expense of the genre — and we all know that jokes are structured on "threes."
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Also, as Cumbow points out, THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY is the most violent anti-war film every made. It's "odd antiwar stance" is "a moral view that has nothing whatever to do with nonviolence." The Civil War in the film is more than just a backdrop or a contrast with the selfish greed of the characters, it's an actual impediment to them, and as Cumbow points out Tuco and Blondie blow up a bridge not because they want to give a dying Union captain a dollop of hope, but because they need to move a battlefield out of their way and the best means of stopping the Blues and the Grays from fighting over possession of a bridge is to eradicate it. Not only is life cheap in GBU, but the human body is just so much impedimental matter, be it the solder handcuffed to Tuco or the resident of the grave where the cash box ends up being discovered.
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Cumbow is very good at tracing all the things that come in threes in the film, but he also notes that Leone has imposed, consciously or not, a doubling throughout the film. Lines of dialogue are mirrored; a common statement in the film begins, "There are two kinds of people in the world …"; and one example of the visual mirroring is that the film contains two bridges, the one that the boys blow up but also one Tuco crosses in the desert, a rickety expanse over a dried up river that emphasizes Tuco's wearing down by the heat.
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In the final showdown, the three is really just two, as Angel Eyes and Blondie are really the antagonists. Tuco is the buffoon easily eradicated from the pattern. In a corpse ridden film, the final gunning down is somewhat anti-climactic. All it takes, in the end, is a bullet to kill a man. With a flourish, Blondie shoots so that Angel Eyes corpse rolls into a shallow grave, and then shoots his hat in after him. This is what Angel Eye's violent life has come to, the shitty end of a showdown to become one more anonymous body in a killing field.
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The restoration of GBU was simple. All John Kirk had to was round up all the footage, find a version of the script in English, convince Eastwood and Wallach to re-record their lines (what Tony Curtis did for SPARTACUS) and find another actor (Simon Prescott) to mimic the late Van Cleef for his dialogue in his scenes (what Anthony Hopkins did for SPARTACUS by mimicking Olivier), figure out where the footage actually appears in the film, and convince MGM that it was worth all the money.
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Well, it was worth it because in the course of his researches Kirk unearthed a sequence that few had seen, in which Tuco rounds up a trio of bandits to help him take out Blondie. In the release version, Tuco simply shows up with them while Blondie is cleaning his gun; in the new scene Tuco finds his way to a cave, where the trio hide out, and convinces them to do a job with him. In all, there are eight restored scenes, one of them appearing here for the first time, and seven of them already appearing on the MGM DVD of the film released in 1998 (and on the laser disc before that?), but in Italian with English subtitles, the English tracks having been lost.
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Besides Tuco and the bandits, these new scenes include one in which Angel Eyes visits a Rebel camp in search of Bill Carson, the guy who holds the key to the money box; an additional scene in the desert when Tuco is torturing Blondie, in which Tuco washes his feet in a bucket of precious water; a scene after the desert torture sequence in which Tuco stops by a Rebel camp at night before going on to the missionary; a somber bit of chat between Tuco and Blondie on the desert trail before they are captured by the Union; a scene in which Blondie meets Angel Eyes's gang, and where Angel Eyes delivers a line about the number three that is crucial to all of Leone's films; more between the Union captain and Blondie and Tuco at the bridge; and more conversation in the water when they are rigging the bridge.
These scenes were deleted the first time around for the obvious reason that they could be viewed by a dispassionate editor as extraneous to the main plot and therefore the studio could maybe squeeze in one more showing a day of an already overlong movie. Personally I have encountered few suites of deleted scenes that couldn't have been easily put back in, especially on DVDs where running times are not a high priority (one movie, Stallone's version of GET CARTER, doesn't even make sense unless you watch the deleted scenes on the DVD). I think that deleted scenes should always be put back in, be they good, bad, or ugly. In this case, Kirk is simply following the director's vision: Leone didn't remove these scenes, the American distributor did. Do they make the film longer? Of course. Do they make the film feel longer? No, not to me, anyway. Do they offer any benefit other than to buff or broaden a little the various characters and their relationships? Yes. They show how carefully Leone was moving his chess pieces around the board, making sure that all the characters' actions were motivated and that the intricate machinery of his simple seeming plot was well oiled. THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY is a good, possibly great, film made much better by the diligence of a film restoration team returning the work to its original dimensions.
NEXT TIME:ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO
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