Review of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) by Sinews — 10 Apr 2020

So much runs through the viewer's mind during the climatic graveyard scene near the end The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Somehow, through all we've have been put through for the last 3 hours, the brutality of America's bloodiest war, the many, many twists and turns that we've been put through, the highs and lows of the truly epic journey across America's sun-scorched, anarchic, savage bastard child west, nothing else matters besides what is going right now at this very instance. Despite Morricone's heavenly "Ecstasy of Gold" drumming everything, meaning the scene, its characters, the action, and the audience along, it's really a moment of restrained triumph, as Tuco the Ugly frantically gallops across this massive graveyard which more closely resembles some great Roman coliseum in search of the one thing that he could ever mean something to someone like him, some arbitrary object of gratification with which we, the audience, have had dangled in front of us for what feels like an eternity. Suddenly, the whir of excitement and triumph comes to a dead stop. The heavenly mariachi is silent now, and the almost spiritual catharsis which has briefly unified this character, this film, and this audience as one shared soul in search for something greater has finally hit a fever pitch from which words escape. The entire world has stopped and even the Heavens seem to have lent its undivided attention - Tuco has found the gold.

Somehow, despite Clint Eastwood's top-billing and his position firmly at the bottom of the film's title, Tuco scans as the main character of this affair. He sets the adventure in motion, he discovers the gold, and most importantly, he's the one we empathize with, the one we actually care about. Somehow, his greed, his wretchedness, his disregard for anything which could be considered ethical or cosmically important in any way do nothing to hinder our view of him as a sympathetic human being as deserving as anyone of just one moment of satisfaction. He suffers all throughout the movie as some creature who has never been loved or even tolerated by anybody else. He can't even get by for his own brother, who couldn't loathe him any more were he the devil himself. Like many of the greatest characters of the genre - Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden, Jesse James, among others, he embodies the wild west in human form - an amoral force for chaos that we, against our better instincts, have qualities that we see in ourselves.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is the idealized west and it's also the grim, violent, bleak west. Its gorgeous landscapes that seem to melt like butter across the screen and then some and its gunslinging good guys and bad guys that we can't help but throw our weight behind are all present and accounted for, just as are the harsh, morbid realities that plagued real people that really existed and really felt at this time. It's this atmosphere, of grit and spit and grime and dirt and famine that make The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as profoundly timeless as they are. This is no surprise coming from Sergio Leone, the man who could make riveting cinema out of 10 uninterrupted moments of three guys waiting for a train in the middle of a desert.

It should come as no surprise that among this film's many merits is the simple reality of just how ahead of its time this movie was. Its archetypes and arid, scenic backdrops aren't just present in modern fiction, they're almost the bread and butter of a well-told story. Star Wars, Red Dead Redemption, Blood Meridian, Grand Theft Auto, Pulp Fiction, Breaking Bad; just drops in the pan of the vast sum of works of fiction that almost certainly owe more than their fair share of inspiration to this film. We certainly don't love these settings and these characters because they bring out the best in us. There are absolutely no morals, no higher truths with which to ascribe to, and certainly very little compassion on display here. And yet, it would be a difficult position to defend that they bring out the worst in us either, being that they are able to get us to feel tremendously for the plight of even the most wretched characters and see some great redeeming power in the virtue of earnestness for earnestness's sake. Most accurately is that these stories simply bring out the most human in us, and that is the very essence of storytelling itself.