The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

Introduction

Back in the pre-blockbuster era, there was a some-what foreign trilogy known as the ‘Dollar Trilogy’ or the ‘Man With No Name Trilogy’. These films offered the potential, not only for storytelling in action films, but also the dawn of epics. Released in 1966, set a century earlier in 1862, viewed in the 60s and still watched continuously by a modern audience.

As film has always been, it’s about the strong and compelling story, molded around action and character. Set during the American Civil War (the action), three men go head-to-head (the character), working against and with each other for a fortune of gold (the story). Maybe it should have been called The Action, The Character, and The Story. Take one glance at this film and you can see that it’s so well balanced in these three aspects - it’s a wonder how many films after it failed in these aspect, with this perfectly good example to follow.

I chose this film based on it being a classic known to all generations. It is a film that covers the whole board that most people either love it or haven’t seen it. I want to explore its themes and its own history in setting, release and the legend it carries as it still stands today.

Sergio Leone, the director, has a distinct filmmaking style that I want to analyse and review at points in this essay - such as his apparent ownership of the spaghetti western and how the film world viewed his ideas. I feel Leone sets a good example of filmmaking 101. Although he knew exactly what he was doing, he also made some parts up as he went along and invented a lot of unconventional techniques. Such as the extreme close-ups, and (a technique never used in American films) an over the shoulder of a character firing his gun at another in one shot of the camera - this had never previously been done. The standard in America was to have two separate shots of a man firing his gun and then a man reacting to being shot. Leone did it his way, not knowing the industry standard. All of this shows in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

I wonder if the audience back in 1966 considered it the classic it is today? Does context influence the production and reception? If this were a modern film, what would be different? What if it was released in the 1980s? The 1980s is around when blockbusters become an industry stretch goal standard, and sci-fi’s were very big at the time, with the likes of Star Wars. Westerns were a dead genre, would this film have been a bomb due to poor timing? These are the questions I want to explore.

Genre Theory

Introduction to Genre Theory

Genre is an important label to define film. An audience can base their thoughts of a film on genre. Some people don’t like certain genres while loving others, cornering themselves into watching only one type of film, either giving them a strong opinion on their preferred genre or a smoggy one if they can’t be honest with themselves. Genre plays a big part in pitching a film. It’s one of the first things the producers want to know, what anyone wants to know. When you

describe a film to someone, the description always starts with “It’s a comedy” or “It’s a psychological thriller”. The genre is the very first thing anyone wants to know about a film.

Spaghetti Western

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is a Spaghetti Western. Why is it called a spaghetti western? Because they derived from Italy, as did spaghetti. This seems like a silly really, but really it is quite appropriate for what spaghetti westerns really stand for. Spaghetti westerns are/were an over-the-top action and violence focused westerns. If I had to compare them to the films of today, it would possibly be the likes of Transformers and other CGI, action heavy ‘blockbusters’. The very popular and successful ‘Django Unchained’ could be considered an American Spaghetti Western, as Tarantino was heavily influenced by the over-the-top-ness of spaghetti westerns in all of his films, not just Django Unchained - including the famous spag- west character Django. All though, deep down, unlike most Hollywood films today, spaghetti westerns had a real true and honest meaning to them, despite what the American critics would think.

Spaghetti Westerns vs American Westerns

Spaghetti Westerns were not very popular to the Americans. As American history is only short and only consist of a couple of hundred years, the 1800s were the peak of their history. The 1800s included westerns. As the Italians came along and started doing their own westerns, inspired by the tradition American west and adding the, back then, horrific violence and relentless characters, the Americans saw these as parodies and felt that they took away from their traditional tales. This was partly intentional and partly in context of the different cultural backgrounds of Italy and America, this is how Italians perceived the American west.

American westerns usually consisted a solid good guy, who save the good and innocent people, and solid bad guys, who were bad for no reason other than to carry the plot. Although Spaghetti westerns carried this theme for a while, they eventually went off in a different direction of, to put it black and white - bad guys vs bad guys. Looking at the grey area, it was more mysterious “bad” guys, trying to be good guys, while not paying any attention to the good guys and focussing on things for their own benefit. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is really The Bad, The Bad and The Bad, but they’re all bad in their own ways. We have Blondie (Not so blonde Clint Eastwood) the man with no name, the Good - the mysterious guy who does nothing for others unless there’s something in it for him, but doesn’t go out of his way to harm the innocent. Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) the Bad, sort very clever bad guy who plays and manipulates other people to get what he wants. And finally Tuco (Eli Wallach) as the Ugly, he’s a bad guy in a petty thief kind of way, he’ll kill, rape and steal to get what he wants - but all he really wants is to have a good time while making everyone else have a miserable time. Compare these characters to another classic such as ‘The Searchers’, although The Searchers is an outstanding classic in it’s own right, it no where near had as much depth in character compared to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Character

This was one of the very few films in which the characters themselves stood the test of time. These are characters that can be thrown in to any situation and it works. The best way to

example this is to show characters that are largely inspired by those in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. The Driver character in the 2011 neo-noir film ‘Drive’. He’s quiet and mysterious, and intimidating without a word being said - directly inspired by Clint Eastwood’s man with no name, also the Driver is never named, he’s only ever called ‘Kid’ or ‘Driver’, making him a man with no name. The film Drive in turn has inspired the arcade retro-styled videogame ‘Hotline Miami’ - featuring a quiet and mysterious character, again with no name - fans have decided to call him Jacket because of the letterman jacket he wears. The game thanks ‘Drive’ and it’s director, Nicolas Refn Winding, in the credits for the inspiration. Modern westerns have taken the similar characteristics too, such as the film ‘Cowboys & Aliens’, Daniel Craig’s character starts off as the quiet mysterious Man With No Name type character, that eventually fades away along with the films plot. The ‘coolness’ of Clint Eastwood’s character could describe the same characteristics as James Bond.

Reception Theory  Introduction to Reception Theory

Modern audience are difficult to assess based on opinion and can only be done through fact and statistics. So here are some facts and statistics. Granted, the facts will be based on opinions of critics, and the statistics will be the measurement of similarity of opinion.

The Bad (reviews)

It might surprise you, the reader - depending on age, to know that The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly was original not critically successful. For example, in the original review by the film buff Roger Ebert, back in early 1968 when the film was first released in America, late 1967 - a full year after the Italian release - Roger Ebert had given the film a very very mediocre review. Visit rogerebert.com yourself, search for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and click once on the film poster for the review. The film gets top marks and is under the “great movies” section on his website - making me look like a liar. Remove the “great-movie-” part in the url and we find his original review of the film from 1968. Yes, he reviewed the film twice. It seemed he felt fairly hasty with his original and needed around 35 years to think about it for a bit - and so has hidden his original review making it a struggle to find. Maybe he was embarrassed to give a film, today considered one of the greatest, such an okay review - making his opinion part of a minority and he knew no one listens to the minority and readers may stop reading his reviews due to his differences in opinion. Or maybe he just felt the write-up was out-of-date and didn’t consider enough of the film. In Roger Ebert’s original review, he goes on to say “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly has only the thinnest plots.” Is he wrong? Is he right? At the time he may have seemed right, as other critics gave the same impression.

The New York Times, back in 1968, reviewed the film in the following words, in a fairly brief reception “[The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly] must be the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre.” It is known at the time of cinema that spaghetti westerns were looked down upon by critics. They were popcorn-flicks with mindless violence and weak plots. It wasn’t art house, it wasn’t deep drama, it was all out action... from a glance.

A modern audience of critics look at a film with a bit more of an open mind, because with the Internet - everybody’s a critic. Everyone has their say. As English teachers may have taught you, when it came to poems - everything must be analysed. School children are often naive, and when a teacher asks “The author wrote that the curtains are blue. Why do you think that? Tell me why?”, most kids may think “It doesn’t mean anything they’re just blue.” But during my time of writing my own stories and filmmaking, you come to learn that everything means something, otherwise it shouldn’t have been written with detail. Blue is a colour related to depression. Curtains keep sunlight out and keep a room dark. They also stop people looking through your window. It means a number of things that are all completely relevant - and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is no exception.

The symbolism of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly appeared to go right over the critics heads at the time of 1968 - probably because the film wasn’t taken very seriously as spaghetti westerns were bad mouthed. For example, earlier mentioned Renata Adler’s counterpart at Los Angeles Times called the film “The Bad, The Dull, and The Interminable”, in a humorous attempt to spoof the title - like that’s never been done before - or even Variety’s “The visually striking, the dramatically feeble, and the offensively sadistic.” If I didn’t know any better, I’d imagine these critics looked at some clips of the film on Youtube and then wrote the review from the top of their heads while vaguely watching something completely unrelated on the television in front of them. Reviewers seem to look past the art direction, character development, story structure and cinematography and look purely at the negatives - as if there are any negatives. Positives are looked at in the wrong light. As Time magazine shines their broken flashlight on the film, all they could say was “the good is Leone’s camera work, the bad is the wooden acting and the storyline’s stretched probabilities, and the ugly was Leone’s insatiable appetite for beatings, disembowelings and mutilations.” Although some what accurate, it’s being looked at all wrong - but this is what opinion is and it’s hard to express the difference between opinion and fact. Rather than the storyline’s “stretched probabilities”, it could be called “plot driven coincidences which make for a fine and enjoyable story”. Rather than “Insatiable appetite for beatings and disembowelings”, it could be called “As close as it gets to the real depiction of the gritty slum of the wild west.”

The Good (reviews)

I’m not going to sit here and say professional critics are wrong, because they’re not. If they didn’t enjoy the film, they just didn’t and they made their points. But jumping forward 30 years-ish and the film is a critical phenomenon and is praised through-out. Roger Ebert takes back his rash words and has now given the film a full star (4/4) review on his website, mentioning “Looking up my old review, I see I described a four-star movie but only gave it three stars, perhaps because it was a "spaghetti Western" and so could not be art.“ backing up the fact that spaghetti Westerns was not a seriously taken genre. Despite The New York Times’ slating words, the film is now a New York Critics Pick on their website. So what happened for critics and the world to change their mind? The film didn’t change, it’s exactly the same - regardless of the extended cut, it runs the same story, themes, and character.

I believe it is all about context. The context changed. It’s not the 1960’s anymore. Opinions and taste has changed. If the 60s was the decade of fantasy and western (The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Jason and the Argonauts, 2001: A Space Odyssey), the 70s was the decade of blockbusters, gritty dramas and the rebirth of Sci-Fi (Jaws, A Clockwork Orange, The Deer

Hunter, Star Wars, Alien), and the 80s was the decade of comedies (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Back To The Future, Ghostbusters), just like fashion - the industry changes rapidly. In the mid 2000s there was an explosion of gory horror, such as Saw and Hostel. As hundreds of thousands of films come out every year, all trying to contend with each other and being the best at the same genre, very few stand out. The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly is a part of that very few from the 1960s. Out of all the westerns in that decade, the audience of the future looked back and noticed that film standing taller and stronger than the others. It’s fair to say the film is poor when it is surrounded by a cloud of poor films. Critics get sick of watching the same film over and over again, especially when it’s supposed to be a different film. But what the critics came to realise is that The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly sums up every spaghetti western in to one.

Now, does the film really stand the test of time? Or is it forgiven for being an old film for which the audience are blind to its faults. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly still receives poor reviews, as well as outstandingly strong. Looking all the web, I can’t find a single professional critic in the past 20 years to give the film a bad review. It is heavily praised. Empire Magazine ‘5/5’. Total Film ‘5/5’. Timeout Magazine ‘5/5’. The list goes on. Comparing the opinion of the general public is a different story. IMDB has a rating system based on the opinions of mainly the general public, or film buffs, or whoever can be bothered to rate and review a film. They’re not professional critics, but they do have solid opinions in their own right. The most recent review on the site simply titled “Can you say, boring?” by Josh Vanderburg, of which this is his only review, calls the film “long” and “boring” and goes on to tell the reader that he only watched the film because of much the film was praised and gives the film one star out of ten based on him feeling that the film was “drawn out” and “long” and “boring”. Other than that, he makes no other comments on any other aspect of the film - so as a reader and a film lover myself, all I can say is “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” And he clearly doesn’t as he’s not making any sort of effort to actually review the film, just that it is boring. Now I’m not saying this just because I disagree with him. If someone wrote a review and all it said was “This was a good film.” I would agree, but I would still say “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Because there’s a certain standard to write a review for a film. Looking at the other end of the spectrum for the 10/10 reviews (written in 2001, whilst the other was written in 2013 - telling me that Josh Vanderburg is mostly likely a young person) this was written by MadReviewer and titled “Brutal, Brilliant and one of the best Westerns ever made.” This write- up reflects from the previous that the film is long “but there’s not a wasted scene in the film.” He doesn’t say much else about the film, except that it’s “brilliant”. So it is recognised that the film is long, but some find it boring and some find that it’s worth it. And that apparently sustains the difference between a 1 star review and a 10 star review. Looking through the reviews, the general audience don’t seem to know about the numbers in between 1 and 10. It’s either good for 10, or bad for 1 - who knows what it’d get for ugly.

The Ugly (reviewers)

Looking back at a possible age difference between the two “reviewers”, I looked into IMDB’s statistics to see the average ratings from each age group. What I found was rather surprising. 18 and under: 9.3, 18 - 29: 9.1, 30 - 44: 9.0, 45+: 8.6. Although these are all high scores, the younger generation rated higher than the older generation. It’s clearly that opinions will never be solid on this film, or any film for that matter. As consistent it may seem, when you divulge

into the subject matter, it becomes apparent how inconsistent an audience can be. It’s near impossible to pin views and opinions on one group type. I can certainly understand why younger generations would not enjoy this film. It’s long, and dated and compared to films today, a bit light on the violence. Films today are all huge explosions, shaky cam and quick cuts. But there are young people who appreciate old films for what they are and what they’re supposed to be - rather than what they want them to be.