"Hello." "I'm Richard Schickel." "I will be doing the commentary on this extended English-language version - the first that comes close to the Italian version that Sergio Leone originally made." "It was truncated for its American release and is now restored - as extensively as is possible - to the director's original intention." "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was produced in Italy and Spain in 1966." "It was a film that did not get released in the United States until two years later, when United Artists acquired the film and decided to put out it and two predecessors," "For a Few Dollars and A Few Dollars More, as a group of films, and they, of course, invented, as probably everybody knows, the conceit that the Clint Eastwood character was consistent in all three films" "and was the Man with No Name." "Again, as everybody knows, he has a name in all three of the films." "In this particular film he's called Blondie, although he is, of course, not particularly a blond fellow." "And the film was, I think, a way station for Sergio Leone - in other words, the two earlier films he'd done with Eastwood had been, relatively speaking, modestly budgeted, particularly the first one," "for which Clint, I think, received a salary of $15,000, which, even by the standards of that day, was relatively low." "They had become enormously successful films in Europe, but there had been problems about releasing it in the United States, in particular the first one, which was a knock-off of Yojimbo, the Kurosawa film." "So this is a film that is much more epic in scope than the previous films." "And I think this very first shot, or the first sequence of shots, is just a typically Leone deal." "In other words, he was a director whose most characteristic trait was the alternation of tight close-ups like this one with extremely wide shots." "It gave his films a kind of an interesting operatic quality." "And I do believe that a lot of the basic setting of this kind of work, the close-ups and the long shots," "I think drew on something that people don't know too much about, which is that Leone was a rather devoted art collector and was aping styles he particularly liked." "The close-ups have a Goya-esque quality." "The wide shots, particularly in these bleak desert landscapes, owe a fair amount to surrealism, one of the visual specialties of which was these extremely bleak, wide landscapes with grotesque and often inappropriate figures placed in them." "So this was something that hasn't been particularly commented upon in such critical work as there has been on Leone." "And I think it's important - it's something he did in the very first films and something he does a great deal of in this film." "It is part of his uniqueness as a director, which, again, is something that was not particularly commented upon at the time." "People were much more interested in the violence of his movies, which, by the standards of the day, that is the standards of the mid-'60s, seemed to them particularly vivid and off-putting to genteel Americans when the pictures came out." "The Eli Wallach character is, by Leone's standards, kind of a new element." "The humour of the character, the wildness of the character - he's obviously dispensed with the four or five guys who came in to kill him here " "is new to Leone." "And the humour of it is often grotesque, but also a unique, new element in Leone's storytelling." "This film was kind of spitballed into existence by Leone's screenwriting collaborator, Luciano Vincenzoni, who took a bunch of United Artists executives to a screening in Rome of For a Few Dollars More." "And it was a packed house, an enthusiastic house, and these guys walked out and said "Wow."" ""We'd like to buy this, we'd like to buy the previous one, and have you got more?"" "And Vincenzoni just said "Yeah, there's a story we want to do."" ""It's about three guys who are in pursuit of a chest of gold."" "And that's about what he had at that point, and Leone, I think, at the point didn't even know that he had proposed this notion." "So the upshot was a much more expensive picture - this picture ultimately cost about $1.2 million, as opposed to a few hundred thousand for the first one." "It does bring back Lee Van Cleef playing "The Ugly" in this particular movie." "This is a shot - or this whole sequence here - that is worth commenting upon." "Clint Eastwood said of Leone that he was like a child when he looked at sets and locales, because when we're kids we see the house we live in as much larger than it actually is in reality." "Then when we go back as adults and visit it, we're always amazed at how small it is in comparison to our memories." "Clint said that he felt Leone saw all of life that way, that he continued to show these settings with the eye of a child, in that they are much larger than reality would dictate." "For example, this sort of peasant's home in the wilds of wherever we are is much larger than it would be in whatever reality this movie referred to." "I think that's a good point." "I think that partly accounts for his predilection for big, wide shots and the scope of Leone's vision in these pictures." "Lee Van Cleef was, as you know, a veteran actor, particularly in westerns." "He'd worked a lot with John Ford - he's notable for his appearance in High Noon." "He's a striking-looking man, who'd had some troubles and had been kind of out of the movies until Leone hired him for a much more sympathetic, and actually wonderful character in For a Few Dollars More." "He wasn't necessarily Leone's first choice for this part, but Clint Eastwood liked him a lot." "They'd worked together on Clint's Rawhide television programme, he'd found him an extremely agreeable co-star in the previous picture, so he encouraged Leone to bring him back." "And he's very very fine in this movie." "He is, without doubt, one of the most implacably evil figures ever to appear on a movie screen." "There is no softness in this man." "There is no nostalgic memory operating in him." "He is a killing machine, and he is a machine that is determined at all costs to achieve this box of gold." "And what's going on in this scene has to do with his search for a man who may know where the gold is hidden, and this peasant knows more than he wishes to talk about." "And I think, as is so often the case with Leone, we know, almost from the moment Van Cleef makes his entrance, that the man eating his chilli over there has not got long to live," "unless he accedes to Van Cleef's demands for information." "It's a scene that foreshadows much of the brutality that will ensue in this movie." "And it certainly foreshadows almost everything we need to know about Van Cleef's character." "Another thing to point out in this scene, because, again, it's a characteristic Leone moment, or extended moment, for a man who became notorious for the, I think, exaggerated violence in his films " "that is, it was exaggerated by the critics," "I don't find them all that violent, honestly speaking..." "But the whole point about violence in Leone movies is that it takes a long, long, long time for it to arrive." "There's always a lot of talk, there's always a lot of silent exchanges between the people who are going to perpetrate this violence." "Then, when the violence arrives, it tends to go very quickly." "And it is, I think, the opposite of what was then the prevailing style of western violence, which was established in the United States by Sam Peckinpah, where the act of violence was extended by Peckinpah's use of slow motion," "of blood squibs exploding in slow motion, the length of time - as another western director, Howard Hawks, said at the time - the length of time it took between the moment the bullet hit the victim and the moment the victim hit the ground." "It's the opposite with Leone." "He does an enormous amount of - what shall we say, foreplay?" " before the moment comes, but when the moment comes it tends to be brutal and quick and over." "So I don't know that you can make a particular aesthetic choice between the two methods of presenting death on the screen." "I think my own preference is for Leone's style." "I mean, this scene has been going on a very long time before it reaches the moment we've just seen here." "Again, that's a very typical Leone moment there." "Generally speaking, no distinction is particularly made between people who may or may not deserve to die and people who really don't deserve to die, but do in the accidental exchange of gunfire and so forth." "Now, in this particular sequence Van Cleef has succeeded in his mission." "He has additional information, but his employer in this story" "also is a man who, the moment we begin this encounter, we know is not going to live very long either because Van Cleef is going to take over this particular criminal activity." "He's not going to go on working for someone else who will take the lion's share of the loot." "So this establishment of the Van Cleef character as a kind of baseline of evil - of badness, if you will, referring to the film's title - takes a considerable amount of time to get set up in the film." "And I think that's another thing to mention about Leone." "Basically, with the exception of certain epic westerns " "Shane would be an example of a western that has scope and scale to it - but westerns are essentially, if not necessarily a B-picture product, but they are a lowlife product in the history of cinema." "And Leone's manner of taking all the time he needs to tell his tale and to allow scenes to play at great length - excessive length, really - represents, I think, something new in westerns." "One of the things that Clint Eastwood said about working for Leone is that he felt westerns of the '50s and '60s had become stale and cliché-ridden, and one of the things that just utterly delighted him was that Leone was attempting to re-imagine the western." "And if that entailed taking a good deal of time to work them out, if that entailed this kind of large-scale mise en scène, as the French would say, well, so be it." "And there was a delight that I think Clint, particularly in the first two movies, took in working with a man who was attempting to take the western in new and operatic directions." "Here is Mr Eastwood's introduction to the film." "He has..." "The one thing he carried through all his three Leone films were those noxious little cigars." "Clint is not a smoker, and he told me once that he had deliberately chosen the most offensive cigars to chew on and smoke because he said it put him in a really scratchy mood, suitable to his character for these shots." "I mean, those are really bad cigars, which he bought in Los Angeles at a cigar store somewhere around Fairfax Avenue." "By the time they were making this picture, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "I think Clint was to a degree disaffected from Leone." "He'd had a good time with the earlier pictures." "He'd enjoyed Leone, who was a colourful and active director - about as far from the taciturn character Clint was playing as it's possible to get, in that he was excitable and funny." "And, of course, had little or no English, and Clint had little or no Italian, so their communication tended to be in a miming sort of mode." "The set-up here, of course, is that Clint is playing a bounty hunter, and he keeps bringing in - this is only the first time " "ugly little Eli Wallach, turning him in for the reward and then, as we'll shortly see," "working it out so that Tuco does not die as a result of being brought in and they collect and split the reward that Blondie receives for this bounty scam that they're running." "In the earlier films - in particular the first one, Fistful of Dollars " "Clint had had in the script a great deal more dialogue, and one of the discussions he persistently had with Leone was to do less dialogue." "It wasn't that he didn't feel he could carry the dialogue, he just felt that this character was better realised as an essentially silent guy - almost parodying the silence of the classic western hero, going back to William S Hart," "who, of course, couldn't talk because he was in silent pictures." "But the convention that the hero does not speak a great deal in westerns is more than maintained in these films." "On the other hand, Clint also argued..." "This, by the way, is a classic moment - the moment of the puff of smoke and the appearance of the Man With No Name." "He's a kind of classic ironist of the West in this film - and in the others to a degree." "Even though he's technically the hero, he's also a kind of commentator on the life that he's participating in." "The business of shooting off hats is something that Leone had used in previous films, and was a way of establishing" "the eptitude, if you will, of the Clint character." "Eli Wallach is a new sort of a figure for a Leone film." "He was - and is - a very distinguished New York actor, an actor who had rich experience with the Actors Studio." "He had, prior to this film, been in a number of terrific movies like Elia Kazan's Baby Doll." "He played a character not unlike this character, although even more evil, in The Magnificent Seven." "Was a little bit afraid of typecasting as this kind of an ethnic figure, if you will." "But Eli is a man of terrific spirit and energy, and even today, in his eighties, is a wonderfully colourful character." "He said a wonderful thing about this figure he's playing in this film." "He said "Sergio let me have my way with that little guy", and that's certainly a true thing." "I don't think there's any particular restraint put on Wallach's character, and it makes for a lot of energy in the picture, and it is the central energy of the picture, I think." "Everything that's sort of lively and most human in the picture centres on Eli's character, who's very ambiguously portrayed." "This is a nice little sequence here - the attaining of information from this legless veteran of the major killing that is going on all around the central story of the pursuit of this gold." "This is the first introduction of what is, I think, the major theme of the movie:" "that although these guys are pursuing their own narrow, private, evil interests, it's a very small crime next to the crime that preoccupies and finally takes over the movie, which is the mass killing of the Civil War " "which Leone imagined having a larger presence in the Texas of this moment than it actually did historically." "There was some combat in Texas between the North and the South, but it was relatively minor compared to the combat that later in the picture Leone will show us." "An uncharacteristic miss by Blondie in that particular sequence." "And it's..." "This is a scene where Clint did the stunt, but urged Eli, who he took under his wing on this first Italian-western shoot that Eli had ever done, urged Eli to use a stunt double on that sequence." "And he did." "And Clint by this time, this was his third "spaghetti western" - which is just a simple term for an Italian version of a western, of a particularly and peculiarly American genre - he mistrusted Italian crews and filmmakers." "He really did feel they were fairly careless about actors, not necessarily having safety as their first concern." "And both he and Eli, in conversing about this film, talk about the fact that Clint was always urging this relatively untutored - untutored in the ways of Italian westerns " "New York actor on taking care of himself, on being utterly certain about what safety measures were available to him." "This betrayal on the part of Blondie is strangely unmotivated." "I have never understood exactly why he needs to break up this partnership, or break it up in so violent a way - in an almost sadistic way." "Do we really wanna say "almost"?" "It is sadistic." "And it is kind of a strangeness, which gets buried as the picture develops, but which certainly sets up the tension between Tuco and Blondie." "This business of leaving him here in the desert, without water, without food, without protection from the elements, is a very strange activity for this character to indulge in." "I guess it introduces an element of the absurd in this film, and I think the element of the absurd was significant for Leone." "I mean, he, in the end, is never incredibly careful about motivations." "I think his idea was that human nature was untrustworthy, dangerous, difficult to predict, and I think he liked the element of human carelessness in his films." "And it sort of fits with his whole interest in the surreal, his interest in expanding the range of what westerns could take up emotionally and so forth." "Again, here is the Van Cleef character being typically implacable, typically merciless," "and, you know, getting the job done." "This was the kind of thing..." "In the 1960s, where we were unused to this kind of violence - particularly between a man and a woman - in films, and it is the sort of thing that put off in particular the American critics of this film when it was released." "Most of the reviews could not say enough about this kind of behaviour between characters in the film." "I think now, the years having gone on and violence having vastly expanded in the movies, it does not seem particularly shocking to look at now." "But at the time it was certainly something that I would say was the major component of most of the serious reviewing of this film, and these films - the three spaghetti westerns that Leone made with Clint." "We tend, because these pictures are so vivid and partly because of Clint's presence in them and their intrinsic qualities, we tend to think spaghetti westerns began and ended with Sergio Leone." "But that's not true." "There were dozens more previous to this." "There were hundreds more after the success of these movies of Leone's." "Most of them have not survived terribly well." "I myself have seen only a handful of others, and they don't seem to me to compare to the Leone films in their quality." "This is a scene that is a vastly extended version of a scene that appeared 20-odd years earlier in a James Cagney movie called Blonde Crazy." "It's the same deal." "The criminal guy comes into, in the Cagney film, a pawnshop to buy a gun, and, you know, talks the owner of the shop into letting him heft a gun, feel out the weight and seriousness of the weapon," "and then cons him into giving him a few bullets, which he then loads into the gun and holds up the pawnshop owner with the very gun that he's thinking of buying, and walks out with the gun and the bullets in it." "Now, that's a very quick scene in Blonde Crazy - probably doesn't take more than a minute or a minute and a half of screen time." "Typical of Leone - he takes that little notion and vastly extends it." "I mean, this scene goes on a good long time." "It's the same joke, and it's one of those jokes that continues to work." "Important to say about Leone is that his father had been in the film business, had been a director of Italian films and had fallen foul of the Fascist regime in Italy." "But Leone was two things:" "he was movie-crazy by virtue of his relationship to his father, and he was also kind of America-crazy." "He was a guy who, when the war ended, just got drunk on American movies." "All throughout Europe they had, of course, not been played throughout World War II - they weren't imported to Europe, American films." "And they arrived in a kind of flood after the war, and it was a revelation, not just to Leone." "The entire French wave was taken up by seeing these movies and realising what they'd missed." "And this was most advantageous to American movies." "The reputation of directors like Hawks and Raoul Walsh and William Wyler was really made by the Europeans having this intense relationship with the movies that they had not seen from, say 1941 through 1945." "And Leone was very much a part of that, and he was also very drawn to American popular fiction, which included westerns and crime pictures and novels, film noir." "And this was enormously influential on Leone in terms of the stories he liked, the stories he wanted to do." "His big thing, though, was to lend an epic quality to these essentially very modest literary endeavours that he read." "He always claimed he read a lot of Faulkner and F Scott Fitzgerald and the major American writers." "Whether he did or not, I'm not certain." "But there's no question that popular literature was a huge influence on Leone, as were the popular movies." "Hence this kind of borrowing from Blonde Crazy and the vast extension of the little comic conceit of that early Cagney movie." "One way of looking at the character that Eli plays in this picture is that he is a kind of life force." "However nasty he is, however amoral he is, he's just a guy who's full of life in this picture." "And I think the picture, to some degree, runs on his energy." "We really like it when he appears." "He's not playing in the kind of legato mode of Clint in this picture." "He's always busy and bustling and full of cockamamie ideas and all that." "This little sequence here is to me interesting because it is where what amounts to the major theme of this movie begins slowly to be introduced." "We are in this town, and it's a town that is being, you know..." "Typical of the way the bourgeoisie appears in all Leone movies - they're all hypocrites, they all go with whatever the current flow is in their lives." "If the Confederates are in town, they're Confederates, if the Yankees are in town, they're Yankees." "If Tuco's in town, they will cooperate with Tuco, however difficult that may be for them." "That's Leone's basic idea, I think, of human nature." "But the business here is only to slightly prefigure where Tuco and Blondie will be going in the future." "He is going to attempt to kill Blondie here." "One of the things that's, of course, required of a western hero is that he is preternaturally alert." "So, even though he is preoccupied with cleaning and reassembling his gun, he will hear people who are, as we see here, beginning to stalk him and surround him and attempt to kill him." "When Clint Eastwood is around you cannot walk too quietly, because, you know, like all western heroes he is peculiarly in touch with odd sounds, odd menaces that the rest of us would not be alert to." "That's part of the spirit of the western hero, that he's better, almost magically so." "He's better at staying alert, staying ahead of the game, being ready for assaults that we would not be ready for." "And that's particularly true in this little sequence." "Particularly true in that outside an army is moving through the streets, with all the attendant noise and confusion and kerfuffle that goes with mass movement of men and arms." "But Clint can kind of cut through all that and hear the particular menace that's stalking him." "They're hoping the movement will cover their movements." "That business, incidentally, of tying the gun firing to the victims of its firing is something that was forbidden in American movies." "In other words, you couldn't show the gun firing and then its victim falling dead." "That was a genteelism that had established itself in the course of American motion-picture censorship." "Leone either didn't know or didn't care about it, and Clint said "I didn't think I'd tell him because it was a great idea."" "So you do get the shot of the gun firing and its victim falling all in the same shot, not done with cuts." "Here what is going to happen, of course, is that Tuco is going to reconstruct, in effect, all his false deaths" "that Blondie had rescued him from in their previous partnership." "In other words, Clint is going to have to put a noose around his neck and stand on a table or stool." "The difference here being that Tuco is not going to fire the gun that will separate the rope, or break the rope." "He's gonna leave him hanging there." "That is one of the most odd and violent rescues from almost certain death that probably the movies ever contained." "The notion that the big gun would intrude upon the small gunplay going on between Eli and Clint here is important for Leone to establish because he's going to establish the fact that a much more violent life is proceeding around these characters." "This is another restored scene - it's about four minutes long - that was eliminated from the first American release of the picture." "It is the introduction of this character to the fact that his narrow interests are being pursued against a background of much larger and more tragic violence." "What he is encountering here, which is the remnants of a Confederate unit that's been obviously defeated and decimated in this war" "even, to a degree, moves this thoroughly evil guy to at least an element of ironic compassion, as he looks around at the devastation that's occurred and begins to take in the notion of the vastness of killing." "Incidentally, stray dogs constantly appear in Leone's films." "You know, minor victims of major catastrophes." "I think it's something he took from Kurosawa, who also had a famous stray dog in Yojimbo." "But this encounter, again, is an interesting prefiguration of where this movie is going to go." "And the little head-shake by him indicates a miniscule amount of humanity operating in this character." "But..." "This movie is, at this level, rather nicely constructed." "That is to say, the introduction of the fact that there are vast armies in the field and near to these guys who are pursuing their little chest of gold just keeps kind of being hinted at." "You know, the explosion of the big gun in the previous sequence with Clint and Eli, and now this comparatively speaking - to what we're about to see in the film - introduction of this kind of decimation of ordinary humanity" "is actually rather nicely done." "I mean, this film is building towards a couple of climaxes that will establish, if nothing else," "Sergio Leone's - how to put it?" " pacifist credentials." "This is, in a way, quite a consciously antiwar movie." "I mean, probably in a way all great war movies - which this is only half of, it's not entirely a war movie - but all the great war movies are essentially antiwar movies." "That's the point of view that the filmmaker takes in most serious examinations of wartime activities." "We haven't said much about Ennio Morricone's score." "That's a very familiar little theme that he's used in previous spaghetti westerns." "Morricone is a great genius of film scoring." "There is just, you know, a remarkable uniqueness in what he's doing." "In other words, he's expanded the forces of available sounds, using chorals, using instruments like penny whistles, jew's-harps and so forth." "At first, I think, because there wasn't much money for scoring, but it became such a unique Morricone signature, that kind of scoring, that..." "And they set, in a way that very few film scores do." "They are part of the uniqueness of Leone's vision." "Certainly it's true of Clint, who had not heard any score for this film, and after he had made Fistful of Dollars, the first evidence he had of a finished film was actually an LP, or perhaps it was a tape, of Morricone's score" "which got sent to him when he was back in the US." "He heard this thing and said "Wow, this is really interesting."" ""I've never heard a score like this."" "And then when he saw the film with the score integrated into it, he recognised - since Clint is himself quite an expert musician - that this was..." "It wasn't the first score Morricone had done, but this was the score that announced him as a major figure in film scoring." "And the extension of Morricone's rather unique vision into this film, and the subsequent films, I think established him as one of the most important innovators in musical film history." "He has been tracked, he has been found." "Nice little moment here." ""Too bad, Shorty."" "Sorry, Shorty." "Now this is the beginning of what will be an inordinately long sequence, in which the Clint character is tormented by this walk in the desert by Eli's character." "In Christopher Frayling's really quite remarkable and complete biography of Sergio Leone, which is an extremely valuable book, he makes mention in this sequence of Leone's being influenced by the surrealist painters." "In particular, these desert sequences" "Frayling traces to the surrealist Giorgio de Chirico." "And I think it's true." "This was a painter who used bleak landscapes, and we do know that Leone knew that work." "There are other elements." "Leone was quite mad for the French painter Magritte - he even owned a small Magritte." "And you'll see touches of that kind of landscaping in this sequence." "The cameraman on this picture was Tonio Delli Colli, who was new to Leone." "And I spoke to Frayling about" "Leone referring to these pictures, asking him to take a look at the pictures, asking him to find photographically the equivalent of what some of these painters had done." "I've always particularly loved..." "There is a classic example of surrealism, I think - the vast landscape, two tiny little figures." "Again, that's something that Leone liked to do a lot." "But the parasol is a wonderful touch in this sequence." "It is just so absurd." "It is so Magritte-like - you know, who always put bowler hats on figures standing in strange landscapes." "And this is a particularly good example, I think, of the rough-and-ready surrealism of Sergio." "This is that kind of European notion that in torment there can be a considerable amount of beauty." "I think it's probably appropriate to say that by this time, by this third film," "Clint had become somewhat disaffected - not especially with Leone, but with the whole spaghetti-western thing." "He really had begun to understand, that even though these films had not yet been released in the United States, even though his long stint on Rawhide was clearly coming to an end, that he was gonna have to make his career elsewhere." "And I think he felt that in this film, although he had negotiated a much better salary than in the previous Leone pictures" " and had a percentage of this picture, actually, which was unprecedented among Italian filmmakers at the time - the truth was that I think he saw that his part in these pictures was diminishing." "Not in terms of total screen time or anything like that, but rather his importance in the film was being diminished as Sergio went for a much more epic-scale film." "Eli remembered Clint constantly saying to him that this was his last one with Leone, that he was going to have to go back to the US, was going to have to establish himself as an American movie star." "And though I think he had maybe a little bit more contention with Sergio on this and that aspect of his performance in the picture, he was still doing it in good heart." "He just knew that he was going to move on from this." "And Eli perfectly understood that, and perfectly understood that - and in fact Eli went on and made other pictures in Italy - that Clint was done with this aspect of his career." "I don't think it was anything to do with egocentricity on the part of the star." "It was really that, as he once said to me," ""I could go on doing this for another decade, but it wouldn't be..."" "That's a great little moment, as he pulls the empty boot toward him." "This little sequence here is, again, part of the restoration." "It was not included in the American version of this film when it came out." "It's new and it's good." "Again, I don't know how much establishment we need at this juncture of Eli's sadistic behaviour to Blondie, but on the other hand it's fun, especially here, where he washes his feet in the precious water." "It's worth saying that of course Clint and Eli had a good time on this picture." "Eli in particular, perhaps more than Clint, became more intimately associated with Sergio." "They took to having dinners together and took to having - to the best of their ability, given their language difficulties - a lot of conversations about movies and life and all that in general." "Eli had a great time with this movie, and I think you can see it his performance." "He was really having fun." "And given that as a movie actor he had really never had this kind of a leading role where he's absolutely central to the movie..." "He was much more of a character guy in films like The Misfits or Lord Jim." "He did tend to play kind of ethnic weirdos, if not outright ethnic villains, and this picture gives him a lot of good screen time and a lot of character to play." "And he really did make the most of it." "At this point in this lengthy sequence of - how to put it?" " heated torment, again, I think we're dealing with a Leone who is setting his own pace." "It's obvious that you could make this sequence in a lot less screen time, but, again, I like this leisureliness of the development of the movie." "It seems to me to give the film a kind of scope and grandeur that is really unexpected in a movie with the kind of dubious antecedents that this film has." "It's almost as if Leone is transcending the genre that he has invented, or reinvented." "Now, the arrival of this..." "Well, it's really a hospital wagon." "This, of course, is what saves Clint's life in the development of the film." "This is, again, one of Sergio's really leisurely revelations of the action and the significance of what these guys find in this runaway ambulance." "What will happen here is that the two of them will get the most significant clue anyone in the movie has thus far had as to the location of this famously missing chest of gold." "It's kind of cleverly set up in the sense that each of them gets one piece of information, and each piece of information will be in and of itself useless." "It requires both pieces of information in order to find out where the gold is buried." "So now these people who have been in deadly contention are - or will be - brought together out of mutual need." "Each needs the other to survive with his piece of information." "So it becomes a significant turning point in the movie." "When I was writing about this movie in the biography I wrote of Clint Eastwood," "I characterised Tuco as kind of like Till Eulenspiegel - you know, the merry prankster, outside the law, outside of conventional morality, but someone we can't help but like." "And I think I'll stand by that characterisation." "He's maybe not the merriest of pranksters, but there is something prankish in his character, and therefore something kind of very human, no matter how antisocial much of his behaviour is." "Now he's getting the information, or the partial information, that will lead on to their adventures in the second half of the movie." "What was that you said about the dollars?" "$200,000, all mine." "Was the Third Cavalry's." "Baker has nothing." "The gold..." "I hid the gold." "The gold is safe." "Where?" "Where, here?" "Again, this is a kind of conventional piece of plotting in terms of popular fiction, whether it's a detective story or a western or what-have-you - the dying man's confession that motivates the rest of the movie." "That's a significant aspect of Leone's filmmaking - there are always references to the bluntest, crudest conventions of popular fictioneering in the movies." "But in the end these films are exercises in style, of style transcending the banalities of plot and of characterisation, for that matter." "If you give the film a rich visual dimension - which Leone does in just shot after shot, just in this little, simple sequence - it finally gives the film a kind of grandeur that other films, in particular other spaghetti westerns, didn't have." "In my critical practice, I've always loved the guys who take popular conventions and in some way - with filmmakers, usually through visual means - transcend those things." "You know, give you a new and different kind of reality that transcends the conventions of the genre." "This is the moment..." "He now, having wanted to slowly kill Clint, he now must rescue him." "The sadist of ten minutes ago has now become the bosom buddy of this moment." "And that's funny." "And I think it's terrifically well played by the now desperate Tuco." "Tuco has, of course, commandeered the ambulance and is now entering on a scene that, again, was missing from the original American release print of the film." "This is really a very simple little sequence where, in effect, he's asking these Confederate soldiers for directions and trying to pass through their lines and pretend to be something he isn't, which is a Confederate soldier." "Again, it's a nice little scene." "You can understand why, in the desire of the American distributors to make a film of more or less conventional length, you could get by without this sequence." "But it's a nice little sequence nonetheless." "Again, it's worth sitting around watching this movie on home video, and we do have the time for this sort of thing." "This little soldier is a character who appeared in at least one other Sergio picture." "I think he was the ticket seller in Once Upon a Time in the West at the railway station." "But anyway, where Tuco is bringing Blondie is to a mission of the kind that dotted the Catholic American Southwest of the time." "There is, in all of Leone's work a kind of wistfulness about the Catholicism of his youth, that he was obviously brought up in." "He is a specialist in kind of bare, ruined choirs and graveyards." "In all of the panoply of conventional Catholicism, which I think he had pretty much put behind him, as many Italians do," "there is - and I'll remark on it later on in the film - he does often stage sequences, usually sequences that have some pitiable quality to them," "in disused churches or places like this mission, which are doing their best to succour the wounded of the war." "And I think that does represent for Leone some kind of wistfulness for a better world or a world that had been lost - and lost, I think, in Leone's view in the cataclysm of World War ll." "I think this movie constantly refers to the way the vastness and horror of that war destabilised people's expectations, destabilised their morality." "And I think the notion he's exploring in this movie of war as the ultimate cataclysm that destroys conventional morality is something that is very much on Leone's mind in this film, and something that I think he explored in other aspects of his work," "but most directly in this film." "This is a film that is implicitly about the lingering effects of vast combat on ordinary people, and how it afflicts their morality." "I'm not saying that Tuco would've been a saintly man without these interventions, but he might've been a slightly different man were he not so profoundly involved in this massive dislocation, which wartime has imposed upon him." "I mean, all bets are off, morally speaking, in this context." "I don't really think that when Leone was pitching this movie to Clint that he was particularly suggesting that Eli would become a dominant figure as the film worked out." "I have a feeling that part of the dominance simply arises out of Eli's performance." "It's just so compelling and so amusing that in a way it backs off Clint and, in a way, Lee Van Cleef." "When you've got an actor rippin' and tearing the way Eli is in this movie, about the only thing his fellow actors can do is back off and gracefully partner him." "Now, as this movie will develop," "Clint will manifest conventionally heroic behaviour, and even conventionally heroic ideals, but the competition for amusing screen time is bound to go to a character like Eli." "I'm not sure Clint would have recognised that to begin with when he read the script." "I think what he did recognise is that this is a movie in which Sergio is moving toward what we might call his mature style, which was for a much more epic cinema than the kind of films that Clint had appeared with him in previously," "Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More." "These are movies with much higher aspirations, much broader themes, a much bigger scope for Leone's talents." "And I think that if Clint had a problem with that, it was simply that Leone was going in his direction and Clint was going in his direction, and the two directions were, if not diametrically opposed, somewhat opposed." "I think Clint, maybe more than Sergio, was cool with that." "I think Sergio would've liked to have clung to Clint." "He came to him and wanted him to go on and do Once Upon a Time in the West a few years later." "They had meetings about it and talked about it, and Clint really just felt he was going in some other direction and that Leone had to go in his own." "Muttering for his reward here." "This is an interesting moment that's going to come up here, because the Father, Father Ramirez, is in fact Tuco's brother." "This is the uniqueness of this moment, in that Tuco is the only character in the film who has a back story, and the back story is somewhat motivating of his character." "These are the two brothers who went their different paths, one becoming a priest - a disapproving priest, obviously - and the other becoming the outlaw figure that Tuco is." "I think one of the things going on here - and it will come directly to the surface in a moment or two - is that poor people of their ethnic background really did only have two choices." "This is a thing that comes up in many crime pictures - you know, you either become a cop or a priest, or you become an outlaw if you are from dirt-poor circumstances." "That American life does not offer to immigrant people, like these two guys, a lot of choices." "You're not gonna become the CEO of a great corporation or something like that if you come from these kind of downtrodden backgrounds." "So Tuco acknowledges this in a way that his brother can't quite acknowledge." "This is something that, of course, comes up time and again in gangster pictures - a gangster picture would be something in Sergio Leone's future, of course." "Again, it's very simple stuff, but it is significant that Sergio thought to give this character - obviously betokening his sympathy with this character - some kind of a back story, some kind of a motivation for his present character." "Go on, preach me a sermon, Pablo." "What good would that be?" "Just keep on the way you're going." "Go away." "And the Lord have mercy on your soul." "Sure, I'll go - while I'm waiting for the Lord to remember me." "I, Tuco Ramirez, brother of Brother Ramirez, will tell you something." "You think you're better than I am." "Where we came from, if one did not want to die of poverty, one became a priest or a bandit." "You chose your way, I chose mine." "Mine was harder." "You talk of our mother and father." "When you left to become a priest, I stayed behind." "I must've been ten, twelve, I don't remember which." "But I stayed." "I tried, but it was no good." "Now I'm gonna tell you something." "You became a priest because you were too much of a coward to do what I do." "I do think there is some bitter truth in that exchange between those two brothers." "And I do like the thought that Clint, as I mentioned earlier, is very often the observer, the ironist who is taking in these occasional moments of high emotion." "Not commenting on them, not doing anything, but absorbing them into his understanding of what's going on in the film, in the narrative." "I like the silence that Clint maintains in this sequence." "And something in his eyes that indicates a slight growth in sympathy for Tuco." "Nothing he's going to own up to particularly, but some kind of, again, ironic understanding of this guy." "And, of course, his hypocritic rationalisations of his relationship with his brother - "He's a nice guy" and all that " "I think are very nice." "Look at the little look on Clint's face as he, who knows much better what's gone down between the two brothers, just sort of absorbs that." "Well, after a meal there's nothing like a good cigar." "It's the first thing that Blondie has volunteered to Tuco in the course of this relationship." "In other words, there is some kind of forging of a bond in this sequence." "Even though it's a very quiet sequence and not a huge element in the development of the film, it is very nice, and I think it will pay off in the future action of the film." "Each has now done all the dirt he needs to do to the other guy, so they are now free to develop some kind of a wary but authentic relationship." "Now this is again a short sequence added back in to the film that was cut in the original American release print." "It's simply a business of trying to establish where they're going." "And they do know now roughly where they should be going." "But this whole business of driving through a place where an obviously terrible battle has taken place is new to the American print." "Now, this is one of the famous sequences of the film, that these two Confederate soldiers, who are not Confederate soldiers but have their uniforms, see a troop of cavalry coming toward them and assume that they are, from the colour of their uniforms, also Confederates." "Hurrah for General..." "What's the name?" " Lee." " ..." "Lee!" "God is with us because he hates the Yanks too." "Hurrah!" "God's not on our side, cos he hates idiots also." "What's amusing about this sequence is, of course, that dust-covered they look like Confederates, but if you brush the dust off they are Union soldiers." "That, incidentally, according to Frayling is a little conceit that is taken from an Ambrose Bierce story in which the same thing happens - a man in a blue uniform, dust-covered, looks like a Confederate." "Which I suppose says something about this war, in which brother was set against brother." "But this sequence here, which again is an extraordinarily long and fairly complicated one, takes place in a Union prison camp which is called Betterville - a kind of deeply ironic comment on prison camps and so forth." "It's an extremely brutal sequence, and intentionally so by Leone." "Leone was terribly aware of Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp in which thousands upon thousands of Yankee soldiers died in the most grim and sadistic circumstances." "He was also volubly aware of - and made us aware of in various interviews - he was also extremely conscious of the concentration camps of the fairly recent European war, and wanted to make a comment on the death camps." "And this film is about - at this point - concentration camps, death camps, and he is definitely making his statement about this truly unprecedented lack of humanity in wartime." "Now here, after a long absence from the film, is Angel Eyes - which is a name, I think, Eli gave him." "He didn't have that name in the script, but he became Angel Eyes on the set and then Angel Eyes in the film." "It's a little bit enigmatic how Angel Eyes has acquired a Yankee uniform, a Yankee rank, actually de facto command of this prison camp." "He's still looking for Bill Carson, and in the previously deleted scene, which we saw a bit back, he has learned that Bill Carson is a Confederate soldier." "So I suppose there is some kind of logic that he would think" ""Well, Carson will be captured and we will find him in a prison camp."" "I don't think that logic is too intense." "It's one of those little leaps that Leone requires us to take on faith." "But, face it, that's true of lots of movies, that the logic of them is not exactly clockwork." "It's sufficient that he is here, he's as mean as ever..." "Here he is, justifying his cruelty to the prison commander, who, it's already been established, is sorely wounded and pretty much on his deathbed." "That an accusation?" "Sergeant, gangrene is eating my leg away, not my eyes." "I know the prisoners here are being robbed systematically." "I know there's scum around who are bivouacked near the camp, waiting for someone to deliver this loot." "But as long as I'm commandant, I won't permit any such trickery." "Am I clear?" "Yes, sir." "Just as long as you're the commandant." "Yes, Sergeant." "I know this leg means I won't last very long, but I pray I can manage to have enough time to amass evidence and bring to a court martial all those who discredit and dishonour the uniform of the Union." "I wish you luck." "That's one of those sequences that are almost put in so that we understand that only a few bad apples in the barrel are spoiling an honourable cause." "Of course we don't believe it for a moment." "Speaking of Morricone, this musical theme here in the prison camp is truly one of his most beautiful and haunting themes." "When we've been used to the kind of weird sounds that he has produced throughout the body of Leone's work, to find this kind of lyrical, almost Puccini-esque tune playing is really quite wonderful." "And, of course, it is a precursor of the much more lyrical Morricone style of his later works - and of course he worked for a good many conventional Hollywood films in his subsequent career." "But it is, and it will recur subsequently in this sequence." "Ah, the poison food bit." "Again, the use of these conventions rather casually in these movies is, I think, acceptable and amusing." "Again, it's Leone's bow to the heritage that he both loved and wanted to transcend, which is that of the American B-movie." "I love the coldness with which Van Cleef plays against the excitable warmth of Tuco." "It's a real nice emotional contrast in this scene." "Throughout I think Angel Eyes is..." "There's something in his utter unforgiving nature that's really deeply scary in this movie, and I think he adds sort of an element of almost profundity." "Here comes the Morricone theme sneaking back in." "This sequence is, again, another direct reference to Nazi concentration camps, many of which, as Leone was volubly aware of, contained orchestras which were composed of the inmates of the camp and who, to use the title of a television show about one of those orchestras," "were obliged to play for their lives." "Meaning that she found this scene of Tuco's torture by Angel Eyes and Wallace, his associate, to be just beyond the beyond in terms of brutality." "And you'll see in this orchestra a young soldier weeping with anguish over the fact that he knows his music is covering the sounds of this brutal beating." "But in The New York Times review of this movie, written by Renata Adler - her review was entitled "The Burn, the Gouge and the Mangle" - she wrote that "anyone who'd voluntarily stay in the theatre beyond this scene" "is not someone I should care to meet in any capacity ever."" "On the other hand, we're talking 1966 and we're in 2003, and though it's ugly" "I don't think it exceeds anything like our current standards of brutality." "And to her it is the controlling image of this movie, which she utterly despised - ignoring the fact that in these cutaways to the listening prisoners and in particular to the orchestra an enormous amount of answering compassion is expressed." "You can't deny that this is a truly brutal scene." "This is the shot I was referring to earlier of the young soldier who is all too aware of what his role is in covering this brutality." "And the tear is significant." "And so is his reaction here." "I think also the Adler review is totally unaware of the irony portrayed here - the sheer beauty of the music" "in contrast to the brutality of the action inside the headquarters of the camp." "I don't think it's a scene of pure brutality or pure sadism." "The avidity of that close-up is kind of remarkable too." "Nobody can withstand this torment, and of course Tuco must give up the partial information he has about the whereabouts of the gold." "Interesting here, in that the ostensible hero is not going to be tortured." "What's going to happen is that, of course," "Angel Eyes is going to try and make common cause with the hero." "Nice moment there, where Angel Eyes recognises, perhaps for the first time, that this is the most adept gun in the West and that he has taken on a partner who, in the end, would be infinitely more dangerous than Tuco." "This is a reference to the Brady wartime photographs that are extremely significant in terms of the visual design of this picture." "I mean, he pored over Brady photographs, Leone did, in order to get a sense of Civil War battlefields, even though there were very few Civil War battlefields in the Far West." "He did find one such minor engagement in Texas." "He was very proud of the fact that he'd found that because official histories that he had read had not made much reference to the war in the West - which was, admittedly, a minor theatre." "But he was very proud of the fact that there was historical justification for setting at least some Civil War combat in the American West." "Tuco has become, in effect, useless now to Angel Eyes and his confederate - or confederates - and he's obviously being taken away for the last time" "and this is a train journey, ostensibly, to his death." "Here is another of the restored scenes, and it's a little bit more enigmatic why the sequence that we're about to see was cut out of the American release print, because it involves an actual shoot-out and one that features the star of the film, Clint Eastwood." "And it's not a particularly lengthy thing - it's a little under two minutes." "I guess you could argue that it perhaps doesn't particularly advance the plot, but what it does advance is something of the relationship between Angel Eyes and Blondie." "In other words, they have established a more cynical and mutually-using and also wary relationship, as compared to Blondie's relationship with Tuco." "...four, five, six." "Six." "Perfect number." "That is to say it's the perfect number because he carries a six-shooter." "Were he not quite such an evil figure, you could imagine those two guys having an actual friendly relationship - which indeed they did have in For a Few Dollars More, which is really quite a lovely male relationship" "between Lee Van Cleef's character and Clint's character in that earlier movie." "In that picture the Van Cleef character is a very haunted character because he's searching for revenge for a particularly evil depredation against the woman he loves, who was his sister, actually." "So this is, for Van Cleef, I guess you'd say kind of a reversion to what he had typically played in American westerns, which was usually as a second or third gunman - but not a good guy." "Probably his best role as a sympathetic character was in For a Few Dollars More." "The unfortunate but yet totally evil sergeant is played by Mario Brega, who was, again, part of Leone's more or less regular company in his films." "The scene that we're coming up to now, which involves Tuco getting himself cut loose from his captor," "was for Eli - whose guardian angel Clint was apparently not around for this sequence " "was a pretty dangerous sequence, which we will shortly see." "Obviously the way to break his chain is to hope that a train will come along and break the chain." "The trouble from Eli's point of view is that he was very very close to the passing train and in the first take of the sequence" "was uncomfortably too close, and so Leone had to dig a somewhat deeper trench for him to be in." "He survived the first take by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin, and then got himself into a more comfortable situation for the second take." "But, as Clint kept saying," "Italian filmmaking was a rough-and-ready occupation in those days." "In fact, on the earlier Leone pictures they had no amenities of the kind that American stars are used to." "There weren't even any honey wagons." "If you had to relieve yourself, you went out behind a rock in Almería, Spain." "Things were somewhat better by the time they were making Good, Bad and the Ugly, but still you had to keep yourself alert." "The casual brutality of a scene like that is something that was certainly a Leone specialty." "It certainly fitted with his vision of American life." "One of the things that happened with Leone was that he had idealised and romanticised Americans based on his reading of American popular fiction." "Then he encountered Americans as a young guy when the Americans invaded Italy, and found, as he said, that Americans were less romantic and less idealistic." "They were perfectly happy to participate in the black market, they were perfectly happy to exploit women as prostitutes in war-torn Italy." "So his vision of America darkened and his vision of Americans darkened." "And that is something of what went into his creation of films like this one and the previous Dollar films." "He, I don't think, ever entirely lost his visionary love of the expansiveness of America, but he came to take what he thought of as a more realistic view of the American character." "And certainly the characters played by Angel Eyes or Wallace, his assistant, are examples of Leone's increasing postwar cynicism." "Now here we are in a disused hotel." "One of the things that's interesting about this movie in particular is how people keep getting detached from where they're supposed to be." "They kind of wander about and wander back into relationships that you would think would be over in the normal course of existence." "That's kind of what's gonna happen subsequent to this sequence." "In other words, how it is that Eli Wallach happens to wander to the very same town that Clint and Lee Van Cleef are also wandering toward." "Yeah, they're still pursuing the gold and we imagine perhaps that this town is somehow on the road to the cemetery where that gold is buried, but it's very coincidental and kind of non-intentional." "It has already been established that Eli Wallach stinks like a pig from his prison and other experiences at the hands of Angel Eyes, so this is kind of a nicely motivated little moment here." "And it leads to, I think, one of the best gags in the picture." "Yeah - he was in fact the first close-up we saw in this picture." "Never use one bullet where four will do." "When you have to shoot, shoot." "Don't talk." "Again, we've certainly seen that sequence before, where the bad guy - or the more bad guy - talks instead of shooting, but it's a nicely staged little sequence." "One of the things that, of course, is notable about Italian westerns is that most dialogue is not recorded on the set." "At most they would use whatever sound they took as guide tracks for subsequent dubbing of the actual soundtrack for the film." "And that was probably largely true in this movie." "Clint, on the first picture, Fistful of Dollars, was utterly convinced that Italians would lose the guide tracks, so that they would be in a difficult position should they want to dub it into English." "And in fact that happened, and Clint had kept his script and had kept careful notes of the changes that had occurred - as they always do on films - when dialogue was actually recorded in scenes." "So he was in possession on A Fistful of Dollars of the only authentic record..." "I get dressed, I kill him, be right back." "That's a great line there." "It doesn't matter." "I'll kill them all." "We have the sense that that may well happen." "I love the way the war just keeps casually intruding upon these guys' adventures." "You know, they're sitting around and the next thing you know a huge cannonball is landing in the middle of this already virtually ruined town." "And I think that is a statement that Leone is making - it's about the provisionality and accidental qualities of modern life." "That a lot of living and dying in the modern violent world..." "And we must remember that the Civil War was, in some sense, the first modern war, the first war where truly mass killing was taking place." "And this notion of the provisionality of life, the casualness with which it can be taken from us, is something that was very much on his very European mind - and the European mind had certainly been conditioned by the horrors of WW II." "So this is a sequence that I think, particularly in the way it's set up, although it kind of works out as a conventional street-shooting sequence, certainly starts out as something that has a little bit more to say" "about the casual way in which life can be snuffed out." "I don't think that Leone, in his previous two westerns, had all the wherewithal that he had in this film to do the kind of coverage that he rather obviously did in sequences like this." "But I think - and it's certainly true of his later, more epic films, the Once Upon a Time films, as it were - he certainly by then had the wherewithal to do as much coverage as he wanted" "and to put the film together very much in the editing room." "One of things you do notice in this walk-down against the bad guys - and there is certainly a reference here, I think, to High Noon, in which, in that case, one lone lawman has to take on a gang of about this size." "It certainly is a reference to that." "But I think there's more humour in the way that Leone stages this scene than, say, Fred Zinnemann did in High Noon." "I think there is a kind of post-modernist awareness that you can't quite take these highly conventionalised sequences as seriously, as melodramatically as was previously the case in classic westerns." "Funny line here." ""Idiots."" "It's for you." "Again, notice the way, whenever there's a zinger like "Idiots." "It's for you"," "Morricone's score pops in there just to give a nice little ironic, humorous emphasis to the humour of the line." "Where Eli is taking him is really to the moral centre of this movie." "It's something I've obviously alluded to before, but it is to a meaningless and brutal conflict in which two armies are drawn up on either side of a river and they are contending for the bridge that controls the river." "There are new shots in this sequence that were cut from the original American release print." "The sequence in particular, I think, is a reference to World War I, not to World War II in this case, because what we're seeing is an enormously elaborate system of trenches, and that was a trench war," "and it was a war in which the slaughter in the trenches had become, as we historically look at World War I, an unconscionable waste of lives." "But it was a waste of lives in a static warfare in which neither side could advance particularly or retreat particularly, and yet men in their hundreds of thousands were killed for these pitiful advantages - 50 yards, 100 yards " "which was then taken back by the other side in the next day or two." "So this is a direct reference by Sergio Leone to the waste of earlier modern warfare - that is to say, World War I warfare." "World War II was not, of course, particularly a war of trench warfare." "So you want to enlist." "You gotta take a test to prove it." "Well, show me." "What he is really saying implicitly, and will shortly say explicitly, is that he who will survive this war is the man who can keep himself drunk, and thus half oblivious to its waste." "You've got a career." "At the least I'd say you'll make colonel." " Really?" " Sure." "Like it says in the manual, you've got every qualification to become an expert in the use of weapons." "For this, sir, is the most potent weapon in war." "The fighting spirit's in this bottle." "It's an interesting concept, that one - the drunken commander of a rather large unit in a rather large battle." "I'm not particularly familiar with the drunken - or at least drunk-on-duty - officer in war films." "So it's kind of an interesting, novel conceit on Leone's part." "See, what this officer in his drunkenness understands is that these are guys who are kind of picaresque heroes - that is to say, heroes who are on an adventurous quest, the goal of which is less important than the quest itself." "The journey being of more interest than the goal." "And I think that's a true enough Leone characterisation of what's going on with these guys." "It's a court-martial offence to imagine, to dream of blowing it up." "A serious crime." "Even to think of destroying that bridge is just..." "Why not really blow it up, Captain?" "Now there's a good idea." "And, of course, that's what the freelance or picaresque character in a movie can always do." "I mean, without allegiance to any larger group or larger ideology, he - or they, in this case - can just look at the situation and say "Why don't we just think outside the box on this one?"" "And that's, of course, what is going to happen." "There the first explosions betoken the daily attack over this, you know, insane situation." "This is a sequence in the film that took Sergio and his company away from where they were used to shooting in Spain, which was in Almería in the flat, hot, desert-like plains of the south, into the north of the country" "where, logically, you could find a river in a mountain gorge and all the things he needed for this sequence." "I think you will see in this sequence and in its management of very large forces - much larger forces than either in the Dollar films or earlier in this film - that Leone, who had served a long, long apprenticeship as an assistant director," "often working for American directors like Raoul Walsh and Robert Wise in Italy, where American companies came because it was cheaper to shoot epics in Italy, where the salaries were low and the unions nonexistent." "And he learned his craft." "He really knew how to handle large-scale forces." "It was not just practical experience." "If you look at this sequence, you can certainly see references to classic war films - certainly some shots that put me in mind of some of the shots in Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, or Kubrick's Paths of Glory." "You know, these are kind of classic pieces of filmmaking by Leone." "A big difference here, I think, is that as the two objective observers, if you will, Tuco and Blondie, watch," "Clint speaks what amounts to the essential moral - certainly of this sequence." "Cos he speaks, as you will very shortly hear, of the simple waste of men over a meaningless object of contention." "I've never seen so many men wasted so badly." "Is it possible that Blondie has all along been a secret moralist?" "I don't know, but I think there is that movement in the character Clint's playing, that he is perhaps a better man than he knows or wants to publicly acknowledge." "What would happen if somebody were to blow up that bridge?" "Yeah." "Then these idiots would go somewhere else to fight." "Maybe." "There is the crazy logic of what's going to happen in the next few minutes." "Obviously, if you remove the object of contention, you will remove the thing that's blocking their way to the cemetery." "In this sequence - and I think it may be just there, where we saw Clint and Eli having to duck down from that explosion " "Clint had felt that they were too close to where the explosives were going off and had proposed to Eli that they move back at least a few steps, to be out of harm's way." "And that proved to be the case." "Although whether it was this sequence or a subsequent sequence I'm not certain." "Could have been both of them." "But, again, it proved Clint's point - that making movies Italian-style could be dangerous." "Take a slug of this, Captain." "And keep your ears open." "See, again, that's one of the advantages of the freelance life - these guys aren't under anybody's orders." "These guys can do whatever they want to advance their own particular needs." "So they're going to do two things." "One large, good thing, which is to blow up the bridge and end this endless, bloodthirsty, life-draining battle, but that will also, of course, clear their way toward their own more personal and private goal." "The point that's being made in this sequence is a point Charlie Chaplin, oddly enough, had made almost 20 years earlier in Monsieur Verdoux, where his character Verdoux was killing women for their money and is caught and makes a defence of himself in the trial," "and says "My crimes are paltry compared to the crimes of nations, which are blowing up one another" - by that time with atomic weapons - and doing it, as he says, very scientifically." "Leone specifically referred to that business in Monsieur Verdoux, saying that he was trying to say the exact same thing in this sequence - that the crimes that Blondie and Tuco are certainly overtly pursuing are nothing compared to the nearly genocidal murders they move through" "and here, at the bridge, get intimately involved with." "This is, of course, one of those lengthy processes by which vast objects are wired for their ultimate destruction." "The point here is, of course, to intercut it with the more intimate scenes of the colonel" "coming to his last." "What's good about the structure of this sequence is that while these guys are arranging to blow up the bridge," "a point is being made - that they know that the colonel is gonna die, and it's in a funny way their little gift to him, that they will take care of destroying the object that has destroyed him." "So it's kind of a nice irony they're working on here and it comes to a nice conclusion when the bridge finally goes up and it's virtually the last thing the colonel hears." "Now, it is important to understand that this bridge had to be blown up twice." "The verbal signal that Leone had arranged with his explosives guy he accidentally uttered before his cameras were entirely ready to record that destruction." "So it went unrecorded, and there was a delay of at least a week or ten days while the whole bridge had to be rebuilt." "Leone was, of course, furious as only he could be furious, in a slightly comical, Italianate way, but it was a miserable misunderstanding." "And although the budget was fair-sized on this movie, it certainly delayed shooting." "Kind of a comic arrangement of Clint and Eli in that sequence." "And now, after all those weeks and months, it's over." "The armies have magically withdrawn." "The way is clear for them to head for Sad Hill and the long-awaited conclusion to this movie." "But not before there is a lovely little sequence that we're shortly going to encounter." "I think, as a director, that Clint learned something about spaciousness and spectacle from Leone." "He always liked that." "He uses the word "spectacle" when he talks about Leone." "And I think he did acquire some sense of that from Leone." "Now here's one of Leone's bare, ruined choirs." "It's a church that's been bombed out of any useful existence, but it becomes the setting for, I think, one of the nicest little sequences in the film." "Again, one of those sequences that the critics of the time persistently ignored." "But what we have here is a place where obviously some skirmish in the larger battle had taken place, and Clint comes along and finds this very young dying soldier." "He recognises that this kid is not gonna live for long." "He covers him with his own coat, which is an act that has certain Biblical overtones to it, and more than that, shares with the dying soldier his trademark cigar." "Just recognise that, when he finally acknowledged Tuco's humanity back there after the mission sequence, he also shared his cigar with him." "So it is a symbolic act, and, you know," "there's a quality in this thing that we have not seen in any of Clint's previous work for Leone, this compassionate moment." "And, just incidentally there, he picks up the other symbolic item from his previous Leone work, which is his famous serape, and prepares for what I think is one of the best gags in the movie." "Maybe one of the best Clint gags ever." "You know, the famous guy with the .44" "Magnum, a toter of big guns, here fires absolutely the biggest gun of his career with uncanny accuracy, one might say." "You have to remember that there is a magical element in Leone's filmmaking." "The magical use of that gun" "is terrific." "And the second shot, for heaven's sakes, brings Tuco to Sad Hill." "And it's a wonderful shot - the notion of the gun stunning him and rolling, and he's rolling right into the place that these guys have been trying to get to for most of the movie." "And this is a sequence that meant a lot to Leone." "He had guys out digging graves for well over a week to set up this sequence." "Incidentally, there's the dog again." "Because he wanted to show the endless, screen-filling depth of war's horror." "I mean, it's just grave after grave after grave." "Now, he had brought his previous film, For a Few Dollars More, to a conclusion like this one, in a kind of graveyard shoot-out." "But this is the masterpiece of that kind of filmmaking." "Where Eli has come to in this sequence is, I suppose, a plaza that was intended to be the central ceremonial place of this graveyard." "I imagine somebody might've imagined that they would do Memorial Day services in this central plaza." "But it's the circle in which the three principals will become entrapped for the conclusion of this movie." "I think a lesser director would have done a lesser amount of running around in this sequence, but..." "I don't know." "As I say, with a Leone film, especially the later, grander Leone films, you really have to let the man set his own pace and do what he wants to do." "It's amazing to me, as long as they were cutting this film for its initial release, you could've cut a lot of this sequence without consequence to the narrative understanding of the film." "Some of the other cuts do interfere with our understanding of the film." "But that didn't happen." "This sequence plays at its extensive length." "And we are now arrived at where he thinks he has to be - at the grave of Arch Stanton." "One of the things you have to say about this supposedly shrewd and knowing character that Eli is playing is he's really very innocent." "He basically believes everything everybody tells him, usually to his ultimate sorrow." "Clint's theme." "Oh, and look, he's got the serape on." "That's not accidental." "He has never worn it before in this movie." "And also the little sheepskin vest that he wore under it in the previous movies." "He is back now, in this sequence, to his full mythic height." "This is the Man With No Name, fully costumed..." "Oops." "See, nobody's quite paying attention, they're so busy digging, realising their greedy ambitions." "So everybody has sneaked up on everybody." "The crossing has been wonderful with Eli." "They're parodistic crossings, which we've seen a number of times before in the movie." "Wonderful visual here." "They're in a circle and they've formed a kind of a triangle." "And we are at the shoot-out." "But I love the geometry of the sequence." "Something really rather classical about it." "And, again, this is a sequence that becomes almost a kind of signature piece for Leone, in that it takes a very long time and a lot of lookin' before the action of the piece can possibly begin." "The triangle re-formed and re-formed again..." "It's a beautifully covered sequence." "And novel, in that there are not an awful lot of westerns with a three-way face-down at their conclusion." "Usually two is plenty." "Usually the extra male or men have been dispensed with in an earlier sequence so that there can be a final confrontation between good and bad." "But this movie, from its very title, tells us that there are three types of guy in this - the good, the bad and the ugly." "So they have to come to this triangular shoot-out." "A long time." "A lot of wide shots, a lot of close-ups, just like we said at the very beginning of the film - basic Leone style." "And there we have a close-up and long shot all in one." "I love the freedom of Morricone's music." "I mean, there's mariachi music going there, modern stuff." "He's not wedded to the classical western thematic material." "It's movie music that refers us to the present as much as it does to the past." "It's extraordinarily effective." "It's just wonderful, the amount of time he takes in this." "The increasing tightness of the close-ups on the gun and in particular the eyes." "That's really masterful moviemaking." "And then the rhythm there..." "Perfect." "He's even an efficient killer - he gets the guy right into the grave with his last shot and then arranges his hat on his chest." "Would you say that what we have here is a kind of a motif?" "A circle." "We are describing a huge circle in the course of this movie." "We have just seen the shoot-out in the circle, the noose is a sort of a circle." "But the fact is that one time or another everybody has their heads in a noose and they're standing on a perilous platform - in this case a pretty wobbly one, but probably no more unstable than being on a horse." "And here we are, back at virtually the beginning of the movie and this great vast circle is about to be closed finally." "The only problem, of course, being how in the world is Eli going to get his share of the loot considering the circumstances he's in?" "Again, you've got to mention religious imagery." "That's a very shaky cross that he's standing on, but it is a cross, and it says probably something about Leone's spirituality, shall we say?" "I think there's something in the relationship between Blondie and Tuco that reflects Clint's relationship with Leone." "You know, the excitable small-in-stature man and the big, quiet guy who..." "Both were locked in a relationship that was mutually beneficial, but which had by this time become a pretty shaky one." "And it's fair to say that as Clint rides off in this last sequence that he is riding out of Leone country permanently." "But this is the end of one of the great modern movie collaborations." "Magical." "That shot is nothing but magical." "I think it's fair to say - and nice to be able to say - that despite the public difficulties Leone stirred up with Clint in his later career, that at the very end of Leone's life" "Clint was in Rome, Leone got in touch with him, they shared very warm and extensive meals together, and came to a kind of peaceful understanding only a matter of months before Sergio died prematurely of a heart condition." "So a kind of a peace finally comes over this - by this time - somewhat contentious relationship." "And Clint, of course, dedicated his great western, Unforgiven, to Sergio Leone and to Don Siegel, the two directors he regarded as his great mentors in his directing career." "And that's a great Leone shot of the human figure being just absorbed into the timeless and speechless and enigmatic landscape."