The Bad, The Worst, and The Ugly

My next stop on my tour of classic movies may cause me to detour into another genre for a little while.

The movie was the Clint Eastwood classic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. For as long as I can remember I have been a sucker for a good western. Maybe its because of the intrinsic nature of man to live a life un-tethered in a search to find their identity or maybe its just because I like the idea of wearing cowboy hats and shooting stuff. Whatever the reason is that they intrigue me, I am going to explore a few westerns over my next couple of reviews, so please shoot (pun intended) me a message if there is one you think that I MUST review.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a classic spaghetti-western, so named because of its Italian director. Originally, much of the dialogue was shot in Italian, which explains why so much of the talking does not sync up with the moving mouths. The film is actually the third in a trilogy of movies, the first two being A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More. It also is widely considered one of the best westerns of all-time and Quentin Tarantino went so far as to call it the “best directed movie of all-time” regardless of genre. What better place to start my journey?

To be honest, I was underwhelmed. Once again, my main beef was with the plot. The movie is very long (three hours), but the plot is extremely simple and much of the movie could have been omitted. “The Good,” played by Clint Eastwood, was good in name alone. He was a double-crossing grave robbing bounty hunter, not exactly the typical protagonist of the genre. Eastwood is great as the cocksure quick-drawing outlaw and is full of to-the-point one liners (my favorite being “There are two kinds of people in the world, those with loaded guns and those with shovels”). “The Ugly” was a loutish bandito who actually teams up with Eastwood (after they leave each other for dead a couple of times) to find buried treasure. “The Bad,” played by Lee Van Cleef, was probably my favorite character. He’s a smooth murderer who has no problem with disposing of anyone and everyone. I think in all honesty, Eastwood’s character should have been deemed “The Bad” and maybe Van Cleef’s could have been “The Worst.”

The plot is held together by a great soundtrack and the quintessential sounds that we now associate with the genre as a whole. The director also clearly goes out of his way to criticize the Civil War as a waste of human life and goes to great lengths in an attempt to vilify the North. The climatic three-way shootout was original, but it could not make up for the tongue-in-cheek style that characterized the rest of the film.

All-in-all it was fun to watch Clint Eastwood, but this isn’t one to watch again and again. I know you are probably getting tired of me saying it, but stories drive movies, and this one wasn’t the best. I know I am probably upsetting the masses with this one, but it wasn’t my favorite.

3 stars out of 5


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-Nuss