Arguable one of the best Westerns ever made, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” is Leone’s first masterpiece. Having invented the spaghetti-western a few years prior by virtually copying Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” frame by frame as “A Fistful of Dollars” to such a degree that Toho sued him, Leone used the spaghetti-western as a form to attack the, in Leone’s opinion, dominating morality of American Puritanism.

In order to do so, Leone re-invited the genre. By re-examination the last days of the “West”, an American torn apart by civil war, about to be civilized by the railroad, his protagonist was “the man without a name”, a mythical figure raised by the American spirit, but without the crippling morality: It was in “A Fistful of Dollars” that we saw a gun fired and the bullet hitting its target in the same frame, a presentation originally forbidden by MPAA. The fact that Eastwood's character ("The Man without a Name") is a criminal, who robs and lies, and yet is the hero, with whom we sympathize, marked a significant change in the paradigm in the Western. The characters in Leone’s Westerns are selfish and completely without any moral: Sentenza shoots Stevens and his son in cold blood, then takes his money and goes and kills Baker, and “Joe” (Eastwood) backstabs Tuco for no reason.

Re-inventing the genre, Leone re-invented the imagery. “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” is full of almost surreal imagery: the ghost towns, the lonely house in the middle of nowhere, the huge cemeteries, the trenches: all noting upon the films central motif: Death. Where lonely houses or settlements aren’t unusual in Westerns, they are normally surrounded by lifestock or fields: In the Westerns of Leone, they are surrounded by dry land. Notice the opening sequence: broken down wagons, broken barrels, torn posters – all suggesting decay and an end. We are likewise constantly introduced to imagery of noses, guns, cemeteries and dead people. It if wasn't for the films boyish humour, this would very well be the most depressing and bleakest Western by Leone.

As an extension of re-inventing the genre, Leone also re-invented frame compositions: not only transitions between extreme close-ups and extreme long shots, but he introduced the now iconographic Leone close up (EECU – Eyes Only), on which Eastwood once joked, “in those days I was such a bad actor, they only shot by eyes.” The cinematography of Colli is breathtaking in its use of scope and how it composes in space. Another Leone element is snailcrawling pace: All his Westerns are incredible slow. Where the tendency in American Westerns moved towards a faster pace and more graphical killings (especially by Sam Peckinpah), Leone did the exact opposite. His Westerns spends eons of time, before a sudden shooting.

As revisionism, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” stands directly opposite Leone’s other seminal Western, “Once Upon a Time in the West”, with its cynical view on both the genre and the west, full of humour and pathos. Where “Once Upon a Time in the West” is serious and full of drama, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” has the same tone as films like “Gunga-Din”, full of boyish action and often corny humour: Actually, there are many similarities between “Gunga-Din” and “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”. Nevertheless Leone is able to set a serious tone by his motif of decay – and present the most impressive composed show-down in any Western. 

Henrik Sylow