The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) Review
8 / 10
Official trailer
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a foundational Western. Seen it a dozen times across multiple decades. The 8 rating is what it earns. Sergio Leone directing Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach. Civil War backdrop. Treasure hunt narrative. Ennio Morricone score. Three-hour runtime that takes its time. The third entry in Leone’s Dollars Trilogy and the best of the three.
What strikes me about this movie is how much fun it has while showing a war that’s pure horror. Leone takes three men who’d sell each other out for a handful of coins and makes me want to ride along with every one of them, and Wallach has me rooting for the worst of the three. It’s an 8 because I’d defend nearly every frame of it and still feel the length somewhere in the middle.
The Setup
Three men want the same buried Confederate gold. Blondie (Eastwood) is the Good, though good is generous.
He runs scams with Tuco. Angel Eyes (Van Cleef) is the Bad, a contract killer who takes jobs to murder people. Tuco (Wallach) is the Ugly, a Mexican bandit who has talked his way out of every hanging he’s been sentenced to.
Each man has part of the information needed to find the gold. Blondie knows the name on the grave. Tuco knows the cemetery. Angel Eyes is following them both. They work, betray, and pursue each other across the American Southwest during the Civil War.
The Civil War isn’t background. Multiple sequences show Union and Confederate armies fighting battles the protagonists have to get through to keep moving toward the gold. The war is the chaos the gold can buy escape from. The film treats the war as horror instead of nostalgia.
The Eastwood Performance
Eastwood plays Blondie as the Man With No Name persona he developed across the trilogy. The character speaks rarely. He squints, lights cigars, and shoots accurately when shooting is required. The minimalism is the performance. Eastwood understands that he doesn’t need to act when Leone’s camera is telling the story. The close-ups deliver the meaning. Eastwood holds his face still and lets the audience read whatever it wants into the stillness. The technique influenced action movie protagonists for the next sixty years.
Eastwood made Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More with Leone first. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the third and best. After this, Eastwood went home to direct and produce his own films. The collaboration with Leone ended at the right time, on the right film.
The Wallach Performance
Eli Wallach as Tuco does the actual work of the film. Tuco talks. Tuco runs. Tuco gets captured and escapes. Tuco prays before robbing graves. Tuco delivers the longest single speech in the trilogy when his brother the priest accuses him of throwing his life away.
The Sad Hill Cemetery sequence is the Wallach performance at peak. Tuco runs through thousands of graves looking for the right one while Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold” plays.
He sprints. He laughs. He nearly weeps. Wallach plays a man who has wanted something his entire life and is now seconds from getting it. The sequence has been copied and parodied for sixty years. The original still works.
Wallach is a Method-trained actor playing a comic figure with full commitment. The combination produces a character who’s funny because the actor is taking him seriously. Tuco isn’t played for jokes. Tuco is played as a man whose life is a joke and who knows it. Tuco is my favorite character in the whole trilogy, and it isn’t close. Eastwood has the poster, but Wallach has the jokes, the panic, the greed and the one scene with his brother that hurts.
For Writers
Wallach plays Tuco’s confession scene to his brother the priest as the emotional center of a film that works mostly through visual choreography. The scene runs approximately five minutes and reveals what Tuco has been carrying throughout the runtime. He had a choice between the church and the criminal life. He chose the criminal life because the criminal life was what he could survive. The choice hasn’t stopped costing him. The scene works because Wallach plays the confession as accumulated truth instead of as dramatic revelation.
The lesson for writers is that backstory delivered through emotional confession hits harder than backstory delivered through expository dialogue.
If your character has to explain who they were, the explanation should cost them something. Tuco’s confession to his brother costs him. The audience reads the cost in Wallach’s performance. The backstory becomes character instead of information.
The Van Cleef Performance
Lee Van Cleef as Angel Eyes plays the third lead at minimum volume. He smiles when he’s about to kill someone. He talks softly. He waits.
The opening sequence introduces Angel Eyes through accumulated patience.
He arrives at a target’s home. He sits down. He eats dinner with the family. He kills them. He collects his fee from the man who sent him. He kills that man too because the target paid him more to kill the employer if he came to collect. Angel Eyes is the only character in the trilogy who’s evil instead of merely amoral. Van Cleef plays the evil without effort.
That dinner scene chills me more than any gunfight in the picture. Van Cleef barely raises his voice, sits at the family’s table, and I spend the whole meal waiting for what he came to do.
For Writers
It shows how to differentiate three protagonists by giving each a different relationship to language. Blondie speaks rarely. Angel Eyes speaks softly. Tuco never shuts up. The dialogue choices distinguish the characters before any plot information separates them. The lesson for writers is that voice is character. If your three protagonists sound the same, they’re the same. If they sound different, the audience reads them as different even when the plot puts them in the same position.
The Morricone Score
Ennio Morricone composed three themes for the three protagonists. The main title theme alternates between them through different instruments. Coyote howl whistles for Blondie. Electric guitar for Angel Eyes. Operatic male voice for Tuco. The audience learns to identify the characters by their sound cue.
“The Ecstasy of Gold” plays during Tuco’s run through Sad Hill Cemetery. Edda Dell’Orso’s wordless soprano vocal carries the sequence. The piece has been used in dozens of later films and concerts. Metallica opens shows with it. The Ramones recorded a punk version. The original recording still works better than any copy.
I’d take The Ecstasy of Gold over almost any film score written since. Dell’Orso’s voice climbs while Wallach runs, and it’s the closest a Western has come to making me feel greed as pure joy. The final standoff at the cemetery uses “The Trio.” Three minutes of staring while the music builds. Three protagonists in a triangle. Three barrels. The cuts get faster as the music gets louder. The audience doesn’t know who will shoot whom. The sequence is the entire Western genre compressed into one scene.
The Leone Direction
Leone shot the film in Spain over six months. The landscapes substitute for the American Southwest. The Italian-Spanish-American co-production allowed scale that Hollywood Westerns of the period rarely matched. The Civil War battle sequences employed actual Spanish army troops as extras.
The Leone visual language is built on the contrast between extreme wide and extreme close. The wide shots establish the emptiness of the West. The close-ups establish the faces that occupy that emptiness. Leone holds shots longer than American directors did. The patience is the technique. The audience learns to read silence as content.
The final cemetery standoff shows the technique at peak. Sixteen shots in five seconds at the climax. The shots cut between three faces, three hands, three holsters, the dirt, the sky. The audience can’t count the cuts in real time. The sequence works on rhythm instead of story.
For Writers
Leone’s cemetery standoff shows how editing rhythm can produce dramatic content that dialogue can’t match. The sequence runs approximately five minutes of accelerating cuts between three faces, three hands, three holsters. The audience experiences the standoff as building pressure instead of as scripted event. The dialogue is minimal. The visual rhythm carries the dramatic weight. The lesson for writers is that not every dramatic peak requires dialogue.
If you can deliver your scene’s emotional content through visual or rhythmic choreography, the absence of dialogue can produce stronger effects than the presence of dialogue would have.
Leone trusted Morricone’s score and his own editing rhythm to deliver the climax of a three-hour film. The trust was earned. The cemetery standoff has been studied for sixty years as the clearest example of pure cinematic suspense in Western filmmaking.
The Three-Hour Runtime
The film runs nearly three hours in its full cut. The runtime tracks the Civil War backdrop more than the gold hunt. Multiple battle sequences interrupt the chase. A prison camp sequence has nothing to do with the gold and runs for twenty minutes. The Father Ramirez visit has no impact on the plot.
The non-plot sequences are the film. The gold hunt is the structure that holds together a meditation on the American Civil War filtered through Italian cinema. The leisurely pacing is a feature. The film isn’t in a hurry because the war isn’t in a hurry. The audience either accepts the rhythm or doesn’t.
I accept the rhythm, though the prison camp stretch is where I feel every minute of the three hours. It’s beautifully made, and it’s still the one place my mind drifts back toward the gold.
The Ending
The standoff at the cemetery resolves through Blondie’s foresight. Blondie unloaded Tuco’s pistol the night before. Tuco doesn’t know this. Angel Eyes doesn’t know either. When the standoff resolves, Blondie shoots Angel Eyes. Tuco’s gun clicks empty.
The ending is Tuco hanged on a wooden cross from a noose while Blondie rides away. Blondie shoots the rope from a distance just before Tuco strangles. Tuco lands on the gold-filled grave. He screams obscenities at Blondie’s retreating figure. The film ends on Tuco’s face as he laughs through tears.
The relationship between Blondie and Tuco is the film’s actual heart. They’re partners who keep betraying each other and keep returning to work together. They’re something close to friends. The ending honors that. Blondie doesn’t kill Tuco.
He just leaves Tuco with the gold and the rope and Tuco’s own foul mouth. The exit is the cleanest moral statement the film makes.
Craft: A Foundational Western
Craft Note
Leone’s film set the template for the modern Western. The Eastwood Man With No Name persona, the Morricone scoring approach, the Leone close-up technique, the three-protagonist structure, the Civil War backdrop, the extended runtime. Later Westerns either built on the Leone approach or worked against it. The film is foundational regardless of which direction later filmmakers took.
The film is the third entry in the Dollars Trilogy and the best. A Fistful of Dollars established the persona.
For a Few Dollars More expanded the scope. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly perfected the formula. After this, Leone moved on to Once Upon a Time in the West and the rest of his career.
The 8 rating is what it earns across a dozen viewings. The film doesn’t lose ground through repeat watching. The score deepens. The performances clarify. The Sad Hill cemetery sequence still works. The film belongs in any serious Western cinema conversation.
Does The Good, the Bad and the Ugly still hold up?
An 8, and a happy one. I’d put the Sad Hill run and the three-way standoff up against anything the genre has made, Wallach gives the performance of the trilogy, and Morricone’s music raises the hair on my arms. What keeps it off a 9 for me is the length. Three hours is a lot of road, and the detours that make the film great are also the places where my attention slips.
