The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

• 1. Introduction

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  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly arrived in Italian cinemas on the 23rd of December 1966, with a running time of 177 minutes and a budget of approximately $1.2 million. It went on to gross over $38 million worldwide, making it one of the most financially successful European Westerns ever made. Three gunslingers. A buried cache of Confederate gold worth $200,000. A war no one asked to fight in. How did a low-budget Italian production shot mostly in Spain become, in Quentin Tarantino's words, "the best-directed film of all time"? And what does it say about violence, greed, and the myths of the American West that audiences are still asking these questions six decades later?

• 2. A War Nobody Wanted

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  Sergio Leone had read that 120,000 people died in Southern camps such as Andersonville during the Civil War. That figure stayed with him. He wanted to make a film that showed the war as "useless, stupid: it does not involve a 'good cause'." Many shots were shaped by archival photographs taken by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. The Civil War is not a backdrop in this film; it is a moral argument. Armies fight for a bridge while three men wire it with explosives so they can clear a path to a cemetery. The soldiers' suffering is real. The gunslingers' gold hunt is absurd. Leone placed both in the same frame and let the contradiction speak. Even the character known as The Bad, Angel Eyes, shows something resembling compassion when he witnesses the conditions inside an embattled Confederate outpost. The film refuses to let the war serve anyone's heroism, and it was that refusal, Leone said, that made it a satire of the western genre itself. Blondie's one spoken acknowledgment of what surrounds him, "I've never seen so many men wasted so badly," carries more weight than any battle scene because it is the only moment in the film where someone sees the war clearly.

• 3. Building the Triangle

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  Casting the three leads required Leone to travel to California personally to persuade Clint Eastwood, who eventually agreed to play Blondie for $250,000 and ten percent of profits from North American markets. That deal displeased Leone. For the role of Tuco, Leone had originally considered Gian Maria Volonté, who had played the villains in both preceding Dollars films, but decided the part demanded someone with "natural comic talent." He settled on Eli Wallach after watching him in the "Railroads" scene of How the West Was Won from 1962. For Angel Eyes, Leone had wanted Enrico Maria Salerno or Charles Bronson; Bronson was already committed to The Dirty Dozen. He turned to Lee Van Cleef, who had played a romantic character in For a Few Dollars More, saying the idea of casting him as the opposite of that began to appeal to him. Van Cleef later observed that Tuco was the only member of the trio the audience truly comes to know: we meet his brother, a priest who rejects him, and learn where he came from and why he became a bandit. Leone communicated with Wallach in French, which Wallach spoke badly and Leone spoke well. Both men shared the same bizarre sense of humor and became close friends.

• 4. On the Edge of Disaster

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  Production began at Cinecittà Studios in Rome in mid-May 1966, then moved to northern Spain near Burgos and south to Almería. Spanish army sappers built and rigged an actual, load-bearing bridge for demolition. On the first attempt, an Italian camera operator's signal was misheard as the Spanish word for "start," and the bridge exploded prematurely, destroying all three cameras. No one was injured. The army rebuilt the bridge from scratch. Leone said the scene was partly inspired by Buster Keaton's silent film The General from 1926. For the Sad Hill Cemetery climax, several hundred Spanish soldiers were employed to build a set with several thousand gravestones and wooden crosses shaped to resemble an ancient Roman circus. Wallach's experiences during filming were dangerous enough that he described them in his autobiography. He drank from a bottle of acid a technician had placed beside his soda. In a hanging scene, the horse was frightened too well and galloped for about a mile with Wallach still mounted and his hands bound. During a train sequence where his character sever a chain by placing a body on the tracks, Wallach lay prone beside the rails without knowing that heavy iron steps jutted one foot out of every passing box car. Had he risen at the wrong moment, one of those steps could have killed him. Leone, Wallach later wrote, was a brilliant director who was very lax about actor safety on dangerous scenes.

• 5. Morricone's Architecture

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  Ennio Morricone and Leone changed their working method for this film in a way that shaped how the picture moves. Rather than composing after filming, they developed the principal themes before a single frame was shot. Leone played the finished compositions on set and staged camera movements and editing patterns to match the score. The main theme is built around a two-note motif designed to evoke the howl of a coyote. Each of the three protagonists is assigned a different timbre: flute for Blondie, ocarina for Angel Eyes, and human voices for Tuco. Morricone assembled an unconventional palette: traditional orchestration alongside gunfire, whistling performed by Alessandro Alessandroni, and the soprano voice of Edda Dell'Orso, who features prominently in "The Ecstasy of Gold." Guitarist Bruno Battisti D'Amario contributed to tracks including "The Sundown" and "Padre Ramirez." Trumpet players Michele Lacerenza and Francesco Catania performed on "The Trio." The film's only vocal song, "The Story of a Soldier," with lyrics by Tommie Connor, is performed by prisoners of war during Tuco's torture sequence, making it the one moment in the score that is heard by the characters themselves. For the climactic three-way standoff, Leone told Morricone to compose something that felt as though "the corpses were laughing from inside their tombs." The resulting soundtrack, released in 1968, stayed on the Billboard album charts for more than a year, reaching number four on the pop chart. A cover version of the main theme by Hugo Montenegro reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100.

• 6. East Meets West, on Film

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  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly completed a trilogy that, according to film scholar Christopher Frayling, convinced American audiences that Hollywood had grown "bored with an exhausted genre." The term "spaghetti Western" began as a pejorative from foreign critics who assumed Italian-made Westerns were inferior. Leone's films disproved that assumption by doing something different rather than something cheaper. Critic Drew Marton described the film's approach as a "baroque manipulation" that replaces the heroic cowboy associated with John Wayne with morally complex antiheroes. Scholar Richard Aquila traced the Italian Western's outlaw protagonists to a folk tradition in southern Italy that honored figures who used any means necessary against corrupt authority. Italian director Ferdinando Baldi put it plainly: "The issue of morality belongs to the American western. The violence in our movies is more gratuitous." The film's Catholic visual heritage is also embedded in the genre itself. The outdoor spaghetti Western, particularly those shot in Spain's Tabernas Desert and Colmenar Viejo, draws on the iconography of the crucifixion and the last supper. Tarantino identified a different quality: the sheer physical reality of those shitty Mexican towns, the plates, the wooden spoons. The realism that Hollywood Westerns of the 1930s through the 1950s had been too polished to achieve. Stephen King named the film a primary influence on his Dark Tower series in his 2003 introduction to The Gunslinger, crediting Eastwood's character as the inspiration for his protagonist, Roland Deschain.

• 7. Revision and Legacy

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  Roger Ebert admitted in retrospect that in his original review he had "described a four-star movie, but only gave it three stars, perhaps because it was a 'spaghetti Western' and so could not be art." The New York Times ran a negative review by Renata Adler describing the film as "the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre." Time and repeated viewings reversed most of those judgments. The film appeared in Time magazine's list of the 100 greatest movies of the last century, as selected by critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel. Tarantino voted for it as the best film ever made in both the 2002 and 2012 Sight and Sound polls. The Italian premiere cut of 177 minutes was trimmed by Leone himself to 174 minutes before distribution; United States prints ran 161 minutes, and some British prints ran as short as 148 minutes. The 2004 MGM special edition DVD restored fourteen minutes of cut material. Eastwood and Wallach returned to dub their characters' lines more than 35 years after the original release. Simon Prescott voiced Angel Eyes in place of Lee Van Cleef, who had died in 1989. A 2014 Blu-ray used a new 4K remaster but altered the color timing toward yellow; Kino Lorber's 2017 anniversary release attempted to correct this, and their 2021 Ultra HD Blu-ray corrected the theatrical cut once more. Fans of the film located and reconstructed the Sad Hill Cemetery site near Santo Domingo de Silos, a project recorded in the 2017 documentary Sad Hill Unearthed by Guillermo de Oliveira. Since 1985, Metallica has opened its concerts with "The Ecstasy of Gold," and in 2024 the natural park around Sad Hill announced plans to rebuild the Betterville prisoner camp at its original filming location, roughly six kilometers away.