THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is Leone's most sustained attack on the American values psychically embodied in the Western, and contemporaneously being globally disseminated culturally, corporately, militaristically (the Cold War, Vietnam). for instance, the Civil War (and this is THE great Civil War movie, shorn of heroics and ideals) is deliberately decontextualised, so that we have no simplistic dichotomy between noble abolitionists and evil racists, or arrogant Yankees and honourable Southerners. Robbed of context, war is seen for what it is, a mass slaughter, a gigantic mirror firing squad searing the land, the logical outcome of progress.
The Civil War is often seen as the defining moment of the American 'idea', the victory of certain ideals about liberty and fraternity. Here prized Amercian liberty is a sprawl of corpses and limbs. The 'good' Yankees, the ones who might be seen as carriers of the official myth, are lame, dying, ineffectual, drunk, neurotic, in both cases prone, helpless to stop the victory of evil. The truth about America, embodied in Angel Eyes, the one effective, powerful Union leader we see, is one of torture, robbery and murder.
Many have compared the prisoner-of-war camp sequences to World War II - Angel Eyes' Gestapo-like interrogations; the prisoners' orchestra like those in many concentration camps; the equation of the compound with these camps; the wholesale fleecing of prisoners; the trains jammed with prisoners going to their deaths. What is shocking is that the men equated with Nazis are the bringers of liberty to slaves, and the creators of a space for the American dream, free from European abuses and corruption. Leone shows that American history - the genocide of natives; the history of slavery (and Civil Rights was a traumatic issue is the US at the time); the obscene culturalisation of capitalism and its concomitant military Imperialism are not all that different from the Nazi project (never mind that it was the spillover of the Civil War that offset the Wild West).
What is most bitter of all is that in the midst of this holocaust, the mythic machinations of capitalism, as adumbrated in the opening DOLLARS films, continues unabated. Indeed, so powerful is the drive of Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes, that is can actually remove the obstacle of a full-blown war, clear history and human idiocy out of their ritualistic games (the bridge sequence). History tries to catch them; they are swept up by it on occasion, but constantly elude it, looking on at the spectacle just as we do, hitting the remote control when they're sated. It could be said that they are finally marginalised by the reality of America and history, that the grotesque, extreme close-ups are replaced by sweeping long shots full of anonymous distracted mass, but it's really the other way around, America and history have no way of stopping the mythic drive, indeed it depends on it.
GOOD makes all 'traditional' Westerns look thin. Like 'Ulysses', every scene is a classic in itself, rich in detail, character, incident, critique, meaning and form. Who'd have thought in the 1960s that the greatest, most celebrated and influential Italian director would not be Antonioni, Fellini or Visconti, but a hack of sensationalist oaters. But Leone's overwhelming mastery of form is near its peak here, as he brings together all the thematic concerns of the first two films. The opening vignettes adumbrate the terms of reference - ugly is defined by gluttony and constant quick-witted flight; bad is a frightening display of murderous, yet humorous efficiency, pinned down by a curious code of conduct; good embodies a systematic defiance and humiliation of the law, inhuman greed, betrayal and attempted sadistic murder.
The geometry of circle and triangle are repeatedly invoked to underpin the fabled linearity of the west, endless combinations from the boy at the well and the climactic shootout, to the opening triangle of Angel Eyes and Tuco linked to food, Blondie not. The themes of the family (Angel Eyes' opening slaughter; Tuco and his brother), religion (the monastary hospital; Blondie as Tuco's guardian angel, with the power to give and take life; his Jesus-like ordeal in the desert, taunted by the devil), the place of the body in a mythical landscape (and Blondie suffers a horrible lashing in the desert), and the contrasting of these mythic archetypes with gross, concupicent humanity, a humanity that opens and closes the film, because this is Wallach's film, a man whose crimes have understandable motivation (women, food, money for comfort etc.), who must live in while the abstractions haunt the Western landscape.
The score, though frequently parodic and comic as ever, is one of Morricone's most beautiful, though always ironic; its elegiac, ethereal adagios scoring scenes of intolerable barbarity. In a film bursting with comedy and action, with scenes of great formal beauty (watch Angel Eyes' exit after his first slaughter), of unforgettable set-pieces, the hallucinatory finale in the field of death, where the quest of the movie (and all American quests?) is equated with the grave, where the hilariously sexualised rite is rudely interrupted, has got top them all.
The Civil War is often seen as the defining moment of the American 'idea', the victory of certain ideals about liberty and fraternity. Here prized Amercian liberty is a sprawl of corpses and limbs. The 'good' Yankees, the ones who might be seen as carriers of the official myth, are lame, dying, ineffectual, drunk, neurotic, in both cases prone, helpless to stop the victory of evil. The truth about America, embodied in Angel Eyes, the one effective, powerful Union leader we see, is one of torture, robbery and murder.
Many have compared the prisoner-of-war camp sequences to World War II - Angel Eyes' Gestapo-like interrogations; the prisoners' orchestra like those in many concentration camps; the equation of the compound with these camps; the wholesale fleecing of prisoners; the trains jammed with prisoners going to their deaths. What is shocking is that the men equated with Nazis are the bringers of liberty to slaves, and the creators of a space for the American dream, free from European abuses and corruption. Leone shows that American history - the genocide of natives; the history of slavery (and Civil Rights was a traumatic issue is the US at the time); the obscene culturalisation of capitalism and its concomitant military Imperialism are not all that different from the Nazi project (never mind that it was the spillover of the Civil War that offset the Wild West).
What is most bitter of all is that in the midst of this holocaust, the mythic machinations of capitalism, as adumbrated in the opening DOLLARS films, continues unabated. Indeed, so powerful is the drive of Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes, that is can actually remove the obstacle of a full-blown war, clear history and human idiocy out of their ritualistic games (the bridge sequence). History tries to catch them; they are swept up by it on occasion, but constantly elude it, looking on at the spectacle just as we do, hitting the remote control when they're sated. It could be said that they are finally marginalised by the reality of America and history, that the grotesque, extreme close-ups are replaced by sweeping long shots full of anonymous distracted mass, but it's really the other way around, America and history have no way of stopping the mythic drive, indeed it depends on it.
GOOD makes all 'traditional' Westerns look thin. Like 'Ulysses', every scene is a classic in itself, rich in detail, character, incident, critique, meaning and form. Who'd have thought in the 1960s that the greatest, most celebrated and influential Italian director would not be Antonioni, Fellini or Visconti, but a hack of sensationalist oaters. But Leone's overwhelming mastery of form is near its peak here, as he brings together all the thematic concerns of the first two films. The opening vignettes adumbrate the terms of reference - ugly is defined by gluttony and constant quick-witted flight; bad is a frightening display of murderous, yet humorous efficiency, pinned down by a curious code of conduct; good embodies a systematic defiance and humiliation of the law, inhuman greed, betrayal and attempted sadistic murder.
The geometry of circle and triangle are repeatedly invoked to underpin the fabled linearity of the west, endless combinations from the boy at the well and the climactic shootout, to the opening triangle of Angel Eyes and Tuco linked to food, Blondie not. The themes of the family (Angel Eyes' opening slaughter; Tuco and his brother), religion (the monastary hospital; Blondie as Tuco's guardian angel, with the power to give and take life; his Jesus-like ordeal in the desert, taunted by the devil), the place of the body in a mythical landscape (and Blondie suffers a horrible lashing in the desert), and the contrasting of these mythic archetypes with gross, concupicent humanity, a humanity that opens and closes the film, because this is Wallach's film, a man whose crimes have understandable motivation (women, food, money for comfort etc.), who must live in while the abstractions haunt the Western landscape.
The score, though frequently parodic and comic as ever, is one of Morricone's most beautiful, though always ironic; its elegiac, ethereal adagios scoring scenes of intolerable barbarity. In a film bursting with comedy and action, with scenes of great formal beauty (watch Angel Eyes' exit after his first slaughter), of unforgettable set-pieces, the hallucinatory finale in the field of death, where the quest of the movie (and all American quests?) is equated with the grave, where the hilariously sexualised rite is rudely interrupted, has got top them all.