Retrospective: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Patreon)

Screened at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York.

È enorme, ovviamente.

Every frame is soaked with tension. Leone dares the audience to lose interest at any moment. A shot of a man eating a bowl of stew is more dramatic than entire years of cinema. Ennio Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold" set to Tuco dashing around a graveyard is the most dizzyingly thrilling scene ever put to film. Writing about The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is almost a pointless exercise, but why not match the movie's madness with my own madness?

I suppose we could start with how The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly responds to the previous two movies. As loose as the Dollars trilogy is from a plot and character perspective, there's a clear thematic evolution in the three movies. Some of this is communicated by Ennio Morricone: the score for A Fistful of Dollars is largely built around a heroic motif for Eastwood's character. By the time The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly rolls around, there's hardly any heroic motifs (instead there's the most haunting and operatic score in cinematic history). But Morricone makes pointed callbacks to the previous movies. One is during the iconic Mexican standoff -- for a split second, the watch motif associated with Lee Van Cleef's character in For a Few Dollars More plays over Van Cleef's new, unrelated character. It makes little sense from a plot perspective, but it shows how Morricone and Leone envision these movies as one tapestry. And at the end of the movie when Blondie rides off on horseback, Morricone brings back Eastwood's heroic motif in full force for the first time since A Fistful of Dollars.

The mythical landscape of Leone's films is not a concrete place where causes and effects occur in a logical order. They're a vast sequence of echoes, responding to each other across time and space. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a prequel in that it's a covert origin story for the Man With No Name, set during the Civil War that the first two movies are responding to. But there's no sure sign that Eastwood's character in each film has experienced anything that happens in the other films. Blondie and his two counterparts are dark angels adrift in time and space, no more bound to a single identity than the titular good, bad, and ugly figures are (note how each character is juxtaposed with actions that complicate their descriptors). The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly does not exist within linear time -- it occupies its own little dimension. And only a fool would try to summarize it with a crass review.