"This is Christopher Frayling, the biographer of Sergio Leone, taking you through The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "Now when The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was shot in April to July 1966, there were in fact over 70 other Italian or Italian-Spanish Westerns being made." "And there was this huge pressure to go one better, and this time Leone went a lot better because he had a budget of 1.3 million dollars," "A Fistful of Dollars had had a budget of 150,000 and For a Few Dollars More, 600,000." "So he has 1.3 million dollars, half of which was put up by United Artists and the rest was raised by producer Alberto Grimaldi." "He had three Americans in the leads:" "Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach." "He had these elaborate credit titles, which are like distressed photographs of the American Civil War by Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady, but colored up in Andy Warhol pop art colors, so you kind of have a '60s twist on archive photos of the American Civil War." "But there were an awful lot of films in opposition to this going around." "There was an actor who called himself Clint Westwood, there was a director who called himself John Fordson, and Leone called it a terrifying gold rush going on in Italy, with more and more Italian Westerns spewing off the assembly lines," "getting more and more violent, more and more ugly to look at." "He wanted to move out of that league with this movie and make an epic about the American Civil War which was at the same time an Italian Western." "He brought in some new scriptwriters, Age and Scarpelli, who were famous for writing farces and slapstick comedies as well as dramas." "He brought in a new director of photography, Tonino Delli Colli, who was to work with Leone on every film after this that Leone ever made, taking over from Massimo Dallamano." "Carlo Simi, the great production designer who was responsible for both the sets and the costumes on this film, because they were all very much of a piece." "And the music by Ennio Morricone was the most elaborate yet, with each of the main characters having a version of the main title theme." "So you have a soprano flute for Clint Eastwood, the Good." "You have an arghilophone, which is a ceramic instrument with holes in it, for Lee Van Cleef, and you have a screaming choir for Eli Wallach." "And so they take up these three different instruments with the main title theme that then builds up with bugles and electric guitars and drums and strings into this kind of old-fashioned Italian Western theme that slowly moves into an epic soundtrack theme." "Luigi Lardani did the titles as he had for Leone's other films and it finishes with a joke of Sergio Leone's name being made as a canon fires at a horse." "And according to the shooting script we're in a village on the borders of Texas and New Mexico." "And a face belonging to the Canadian actor Al Mulock blocks the landscape, and throughout this movie, the landscapes are either too full or too empty." "Huge vistas of the Spanish landscape or faces blocking the way." "In this shooting script it says, "This face blocks the view of a ghost town in the middle of nowhere, a coyote howls, the wind whistles, the doors crash, canvas rustles."" "And you have all these natural sounds rather like the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West." "And what it looks like is there's going to be some showdown." "Two bad guys come from one end of town and one bad guy appears at the other end." "And what we think is there's about to be a face-off." "Carlo Simi, the production designer, was asked to find a plateau in the highlands of Almería, where there'd be these marvelous vistas in all directions." "So you got the sense of a ghost town that really was in the middle of nowhere, made of old wood, as if it had been inhabited and then people had moved on." "And he rather overdid it because he chose a very, very remote location and several cars overturned on the track up to this piece of highlands, and Leone was absolutely furious with Carlo Simi for choosing something that was so out of the way," "so inaccessible and so difficult to get to." "But when Leone walked, and he didn't walk very often, but when he walked with Carlo Simi to this spot, he got there, and he saw the buildings and the clanking doors and the canvas of the wagon rustling and he said," ""Have you bought me to this..." "My God, it's wonderful."" "And then the crew with all the coaches and all the paraphernalia of the crew arrived in this plateau, this windswept plateau in the highlands of Almería." "All for this effect of a ghost town in the first sequence of the film." "This is Leone moving into a different production league to the other movies, a different league altogether." "So they're walking down the main street together, the scrunch of boots, that Leone sound effect." "In fact in the shooting script, it said, "There will be musical effects to underline the tension."" "But they obviously decided to go for choreographing natural sounds as a piece of sound design on the soundtrack instead." "And the whole thing about Italian movies is that everything is post-synchronized." "There's no direct sound, so by the time you've shot the movie that's just the beginning of laying all these soundtrack effects." "And as Leone said, the sound is at least 40% of the movie, and this opening sequence of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a good example." "Al Mulock was to appear in the opening sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West as well, as a memory of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "So they're not shooting each other." "They're all three after the same guy." "Into the saloon." "And out of the window, with a piece of meat in one hand and a bottle in the other, our introduction to Eli Wallach as Tuco." "Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez." "His name's Pacifico, but there's not much peaceful about him, this Mexican bandit." "Leone cast Eli Wallach not as people think after seeing him as Calvera, the bad guy in The Magnificent Seven, but after seeing him as the bad guy Charlie Gant in How the West Was Won, in the railroad sequence of that Cinerama epic" "where Charlie Gant plays the last of the bad guys who robs trains." "And there's a moment at a railroad where Gant mimes the shooting of two pistols at George Peppard's children, and they flinch at this moment of mime." "And Leone saw that, he said, "At that moment I knew that Eli Wallach would be a great clown." "And even though he worked at the Actors Studio, which is not the kind of acting that I like very much," "I'm sure he's going to be the right guy for this."" "And as Eli Wallach said when he smashed through that window, little did he know that A, he'd be spending the next 10 years working in Italy, but B, it would change his life." "It was the performance of his career." "And then we cut to a farm in Almería near San José and the arrival of the second protagonist of the movie," "Lee Van Cleef, as the Bad." "Notice his high-stepping Andalucían horse." "Lee Van Cleef had had a very bad car accident in 1958 in Beverly Hills which smashed his left kneecap, and he walked with a limp and he sometimes had to use a step ladder to get on and off a horse." "So they had very highly trained circus horses for him to ride." "Yet, it's one of the distinctive features of Van Cleef in these movies." "You get these high-kicking horses, it was so he'd be comfortable on them." "But he's a younger man than the character he played in For a Few Dollars More." "Colonel Mortimer is an old, romantic, end-of-the-line kind of character." "Lee Van Cleef in this film is a lot younger." "His makeup is intended to make him look at least 10 years younger than the Colonel." "And in the shooting script, Lee Van Cleef's name was Banjo, which is a slightly odd choice." "But while they were filming it, his name was Sentenza, meaning judgment or sentence." "And if you look closely at the Italian actors' lips when they're talking to him, they say the word Sentenza throughout." "But for the American version they changed it to Angel Eyes." "And this wonderful idea of the irony of calling the man with the gun-sight eyes Angel Eyes actually came from Clint Eastwood." "It wasn't in the script, it was made up on the set." "And so everyone calls Lee Van Cleef Angel Eyes." "The farmer who lives in this palatial farmhouse, called Stevens in the film, was played by the Spanish character actor Antonio Casas." "And his wife, by the Cuban actress Chelo Alonso, who had in fact appeared in a lot of sword and sandal epics after working at the Folies Bergère in Paris." "She started off as a dancer and her career was beginning to go into decline." "And she plays the nonspeaking role of Stevens' wife in this sequence." "And Stevens' youngest son is played by the same little boy as played the young child in For a Few Dollars More, who sits under the boardwalk and watches Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood go through their paces." "So he was already a Leone veteran." "Stevens is sitting down to a meal, and Lee Van Cleef used to tell a great story about the shooting of this sequence, that Leone's command of English had got better but it wasn't that good." "I mean, mainly he knew the phrase, "Watch me" or "Very hat, Clint, very hat,"" "or "Watch me, Clint." "Watch me, Lee."" "And on this occasion they were walking through this sequence and Leone said to Lee Van Cleef," ""Eat the minister, eat the minister."" "He thought, "I knew this was a strange film, but I'm supposed to eat the priest?"" "He meant, "Eat the soup, minestrone."" ""Ministeri, sit down and eat the soup. "" "So Leone had a strange way of communicating, but it seemed to work because I think Lee Van Cleef's performance in this sequence is the best thing he did in this film." "It is so sinister." "He moves very slowly, his eyes absolutely riveted on his prey." "He smiles in the most sinister way and a little bit later on in the sequence he says the phrase, "Nice family,"" "in the most sinister way you can imagine." "I think this is Lee Van Cleef at his best." "Always great emphasis on eating in Leone's films." "The details of eating, bits of food stuck around people's lips." "This was something of a specialty." "We're about to have the first reference to the American Civil War in this, after this long, long moment of silence." "Because the whole thing about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was that it was set in a real historical setting for the first time in a Leone film." "And it's set at a very particular time, we're in the autumn of 1861 and General Sibley is about to move from Texas to New Mexico and bring his Confederate forces into New Mexico for the great invasion of New Mexico." "And he moved deep into New Mexico until the spring and summer of 1862 when he was repulsed at Glorieta and other places." "And this is the background, we've got the Confederates arriving, we've the Confederates retreating, and the mayhem that's created on both sides as the background to this film." "They are in a battle zone." "And this complicated story that we're hearing from Stevens about a cash box, a Confederate cash box that's gone missing, and the three people who know about it, which is a kind of detective story element in the film," "is the first reference to the American Civil War." "Name of Jackson." "And a lot of people said to Leone when he was making it," ""Look, the American Civil War was mainly east of the Mississippi."" "I mean, most movies about the Civil War are set in the east of America." "There wasn't a proper Civil War in Texas." "Yes, there are movies about gun running, and horse stealing and espionage and escaped convicts in Texas and New Mexico, but a pitched battle in Texas in the American Civil War?" "Well, Leone went off to the Library of Congress and got a whole series of books out to try and prove to the nay-sayers that this in fact had happened." "And he found a whole series of books on a pitched battle that took place at Glorieta in 1862 in Texas." "And he got the story that he wanted." "Why do you think Jackson may be assuming another name?" "The name that Jackson's hiding under now, which becomes Bill Carson, in the original shooting script, interestingly is Kid Russell, and Kid Russell was the name of a famous painter of the Wild West," "Charles B. Russell from Montana, and obviously the scriptwriters originally thought of any American name they could think of from the history books and put in Kid Russell, and it was subsequently changed to Bill Carson." "Yes." "Nice family." ""Nice Family." Only Lee Van Cleef can say it in quite that sinister a way." "He of course had played bad guys in Hollywood Westerns way back to High Noon at the beginning of the 1950s, where he played Jack Colby and had hoped to play a bigger part but ended up as one of the three gunslingers" "waiting at Hadleyville Station." "And what he brought with him to Italy was that memory of all those bad guys that he had played in Hollywood." "His career had taken a downturn in Hollywood in the early '60s, partly because of his road accident and partly because he just wasn't getting the parts except on television, and the Italians came to his rescue." "And using Lee Van Cleef's physiognomy in this way, as if it's an old master painting, was Leone saying, "I loved all those Hollywood movies,"" "and they're all distilled into Lee Van Cleef's performance." "But he was never more sinister than he is in this film." "We've seen the caption for the Ugly, which was the arrival of Eli Wallach, and in the next sequence we'll see the caption for the Bad, who is of course Lee Van Cleef." "In the American publicity for the film and the trailer, they got them the wrong way around and called Eli Wallach the Bad, and Lee Van Cleef the Ugly." "So in subsequent films that he made after this which were released in the States after 1968, he kept having taglines like "Mr. Ugly comes to town,"" "which is completely incomprehensible." "This guy is the Bad, he's not the Ugly." "Eli Wallach is the Ugly." "Eat the minister." "He's continuing to eat the minister as he goes through this sequence." "I always see the job through." "These strange hysterical strings that you get at this point recurs two or three other times during the movie at moments of extreme violence, later on when Lee Van Cleef beats up a prostitute called Maria, and later still in the Civil War sequence." "It's reserved by Morricone for moments of extreme tension." "In a Hollywood movie the bad guy does not shoot the entire family, but in this movie he shoots the child as well as the father." "Rather like the Henry Fonda character in Once Upon a Time in the West, you can tell a bad guy 'cause he's a really, really bad guy." "First visual reference to the Civil War, a Confederate uniform, as Sentenza or Angel Eyes goes back to Baker to report what he's been up to." "Baker is played by a veteran Spanish actor called Livio Lorenzon, and it's interesting 'cause he'd appeared in a movie called La Grande guerra," "The Great War, which was made in 1959, which was written by Luciano Vincenzoni and Age and Scarpelli, the two scriptwriters of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "And it was all about two rogues who get drawn into the First World War, one from Milan, played by Vittorio Gassman, and one from Rome, played by Alberto Sordi." "And their adventures get increasingly dark." "They start off as two rogues trying to con each other in the First World War and then there's a pitched battle and they see the slaughter, they see the wounded being picked up in between, up and over from the trenches," "they try and set up a telegraph line in the middle of a pitched battle but only manage to link themselves up with the Germans because it's the Italians against the Germans, and they both end up getting shot by a firing squad in the last sequence." "And the man playing Baker played a large part in the Grande guerra, which audiences would have remembered, and there are strong resemblances between The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the Grande guerra." "Instead of it being the First World War, it's the American Civil War, but the whole concept of putting two con men in the situation of a real-life historical carnage with all the mayhem going on around them" "which emphasizes the absurdity of the war is very much the scriptwriter's idea of Vincenzoni, which he brought to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "But you know the pity is, when I'm paid, I always follow my job through." " You know that." " No!" "Angel Eyes..." "The idea of shooting someone through the pillow probably came from the Tourneur film, a Great Day in the Morning made in the mid 1950s about the American Civil War," "Hollywood movie with Robert Stack." "It was a favorite Leone movie." "And here we have the second caption in case you had any doubts as to which of the title characters this is." "The original Italian title, well, the original Italian title was Two Magnificent Rogues or Two Magnificent Tramps, and that was the title under which it was sold to United Artists." "But then it became Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo." "The Good, the Ugly and the Bad, and it was thought when translating it into English that it alliterated better as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "This is the countryside north of Madrid, rather near where Fistful of Dollars was shot for Eli Wallach's second entrance." "Three bounty hunters are trying to bring him in for his reward and we're about to be introduced to the Good in the most iconic way imaginable." "You know you've got a face beautiful enough to be worth $2,000?" "Yeah." "So, where's he come from?" "He's suddenly appeared like a ghost." "It's a great cinematic moment." "We don't see him, we hear him." "We see the back of his head, we see his hat, we see the match, we see the cigarillo, we see a part of his coat and we see the growth of beard, that's all we need to know about him." "Down with the camera to his gun hand." "It is the most iconic entrance in '60s movies." "The whole memory of the last two Leone films is there, except he's not wearing his poncho this time or his sheepskin waistcoat." "He's wearing a rather natty frockcoat and a different kind of hat." "But there's no doubting this is Clint Eastwood who in the script is called Joe throughout." "Not the Man with No Name, but Joe." "This is Joe, the bounty hunter, wearing his gun belt from Rawhide, a glimpse there." "Now, Eli Wallach accepted the part of Tuco after watching the credit titles of For a Few Dollars More which amused him mightily, with people having target practice with all the names." "And when Clint Eastwood was offered the part of Joe, he hesitated for a while because he could see that the part of Tuco was a large part and in fact was likely to dominate the film, and that whereas in the first movie he was by himself" "and in the second movie he played opposite Lee Van Cleef, in this one there were three of them." "And slowly he was being edged out, the landscape was important, the design of the film was important, the epic sweep of this film was important, but the character of the Man with No Name, or Joe," "was becoming diminishingly important, but he accepted in the end." "But the relationship between Tuco and Eastwood is really interesting." "Tuco is incredibly vocal, obviously improvising like mad a lot of the time, whereas Eastwood is very, very silent, building up to the moment at the end of the film where he becomes the Man with No Name from A Fistful of Dollars." "He's preparing himself, as it were, to go in a circle." "This set was at Elios Studios in Rome and was one of the first sequences to be filmed before they went to Southern Spain and to Madrid." "The set was built in 1964 for another Italian Western." "It was just off the Via Tiburtina in Rome, and the studio had been founded in 1962." "One of the most recent movies to be shot here was Corbucci's Django, where the entire main street was a sea of mud, and it looks as though they haven't actually changed the main street since Django." "It remains a sea of mud." "Who the hell is that?" "One bastard goes in, another comes out." "None of this was in the shooting script and part of it seems to have been improvised, part of it written at the last minute." "The elaborate curses that Tuco shouts all the time, the "One bastard goes in two bastards come out,"" "these incredibly convoluted phrases that he has, a lot of this was improvised." "Wallach remembers that the fact that he wears a belt and braces was improvised 'cause he noticed that Leone did that." "The man didn't even trust his own trousers, so Tuco was the same." "The chaps that he's wearing, which don't seem to be for their traditional purpose but are a sort of style statement, a Hispanic style statement, he found in Western Costume in Hollywood before he arrived." "The strange way in which he crosses himself, where he crosses himself and wipes his nose at the same time." "He doesn't quite believe in the Almighty but you never know." "Maybe, maybe for superstitious reasons he ought to do that." "All of that was improvised on the set." "And Leone responded by putting in various improvised effects as well." "But these elaborate curses in fact got to the point where on the shooting script it simply says, "Insulti, Tuco. "" "That's all you need to say and leave Eli Wallach to do the rest." "And here's the first of the scams where, and it might have come from the W.C. Fields movie My Little Chickadee where there's a similar idea, where Tuco is turned in to be hanged in a village." "Here's a list of his crimes, so he's been incredibly busy, and you get these wonderful social comments on the town from these faces that Leone pans along who are watching this public execution." "But this is going to be a public execution with a difference, because standing in a barn overlooking this is the guardian angel in the form of Clint Eastwood." "Again you don't have to see him, you just see a puff of smoke and his theme from the soundtrack." "Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez..." "Known as "The Rat."" "In the shooting script it says, "Detto il porco," "known as the pig. "" "He changed from being a pig to a rat during the course of the movie being made." "And Wallach remembers that he tried to encourage Leone to put cotton wool buds in the ears of the horse, which was quite common practice when making Hollywood Westerns, because there was a little charge of dynamite inside the rope" "that exploded in order for the rope to break, and he was worried that the horse might be spooked." "And Leone said, "Don't be so silly." ""Putting cotton wool buds in the ears of horses?" "I never heard of anything so stupid in my life."" "So he didn't and the result was that when the rope exploded, the horse bolted, and it was all Wallach could do to hold on." "So he was right." "In this sequence where they're sharing the spoils, the scriptwriter Luciano Vincenzoni said, "Look, what I wrote was," ""'Four for you." "Four for me.' And sharing the spoils."" "And it would simply be in a landscape of New Mexico." "But Leone spent a long, long time finding this location with the overhanging rock and the ramblers in the background and the mountains, which completely transforms the scale of the sequence." "And Vincenzoni couldn't believe it when he saw it at the premiere, that the sense of scale, that the choice of location the production design had brought to it, completely transformed the dialog." "It's also a very famous moment. "There are two kinds of people in this world,"" "the first time this phrase comes up." "On the shooting script it translates as," ""The world is divided into two categories, Joe."" "But in translating it, translating the original Italian dialog," "Mickey Knox, who prepared the American version brought up this phrase, "There are two kinds of people in this world,"" "which would recur at the end of this movie as well." "Nothing." ""Wanted in 15 counties of this state."" "Now, this is a more prosperous town for the second scam between Tuco and Blondie and in the script it's called Valverde, this place, which is historic, a place associated with Sibley's invasion of New Mexico." "Obviously more up-market, with lots of Euro faces living there." "It's obviously a more middle-class town." "And Eli Wallach reminisces that while he was sitting there with the rope around his neck in this set which is a part of Carlo Simi's set from For a Few Dollars More, the El Paso set from For a Few Dollars More," "he thought to himself, "What am I doing sitting on a horse" ""in the middle of the Spanish desert when I could be doing Chekov on the stage?"" "And he went, "Grr!" in that way as an improvisation." "Leone loved it and kept it in." "But the Bad, Sentenza, Angel Eyes, is in the same town and he's talking to this half-soldier." "Originally there was much more dialog between the two of them." "But the script ghost doctor, a man called Sergio Donati, who doesn't appear on the credits, rewrote the dialog for this part of the movie in order to explain some bits that are subsequently being cut." "It has a rather sick joke in a moment." "This is the first of the mutilated characters." "There's a Confederate with no legs, there's a Union soldier with an arm missing, there're all sorts of people who're dismembered and bodies lying everywhere in this field of battle and this is the first reference to the mayhem that war causes." "But as he goes into the bar the character says, you know," ""If you find Carson, I wouldn't like to be in his shoes."" "Which I'm afraid is a bit of a bad joke." "Watch the way Lee Van Cleef walks in this very stiff, emphatic way following his accident in 1958." "You don't see him walking very often." "Glad they got him..." "a man guilty of all those crimes." "People with ropes around their necks don't always hang." "What do you mean?" ""The condemned is also guilty..."" "Even a filthy beggar like that has got a protecting angel." "First big religious gag, the heavenly choir singing, with reference to the guardian angel Blondie," "Biondo on the script." "Actually, Clint Eastwood isn't blond in coloring as you may have noticed, but everyone calls him Blondie throughout the film because to Italians he seems fairly blond." "There's a moment later on in this film where they reach a monastery and the Angelus is playing on the bells as Clint Eastwood arrives." "That's the angel." "This time the rope doesn't break so easily." "And they had a discussion about whether Eli Wallach should use a stuntman for this next moment." "In fact, you'll see Clint Eastwood on his horse but Eli Wallach is an Italian stuntman chasing him, where the gag is that Tuco is running faster than the horse." "But Eastwood's on the horse, the stuntman's in front of him." "So they've left Valverde and now they are in the desert." "The desert of Almería, the scrublands of Almería." "And this strange use of landscape..." "There aren't many people who can make the landscape of the Wild West look sinister, but Leone is certainly one of them." "Usually it looks archaic or naturally beautiful or national parky, but by having either the landscape too full or too empty," "Leone creates the idea that it's a very dangerous place to go through." "He has a kind of urban sensibility where the landscape's concerned." "This is a place you go through at your peril." "And in the middle of the desert are these two characters like dots in the landscape." "But you know that they're very sinister." "They walk through the landscape as if it was a block of flats in Rome." "They don't walk through the landscape as if it was the Wild West." "What do you mean?" "I mean, our partnership is untied." "Note that Tuco's wearing his belt and braces like the director Sergio Leone." "You filthy, double-crossing bastard!" "Of all the stinking, dirty tricks..." "One of the aspects of Tuco's cussing and swearing, "Insulti, Tuco,"" "was taken from the Robert Aldrich film Vera Cruz, where Burt Lancaster keeps saying, "You dirty son of a..."" "and you never hear the last word because there's a fanfare of trumpets from somewhere that blots out the last word." "It's a running gag in the movie and this comes into The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as well." "Vera Cruz was a favorite Leone film." "So the way Tuco's insults get more and more convoluted and sometimes segue into shrieking choirs on the soundtrack came from that film." "And here's the title of the third of the iconic characters, the Good." "So the Good is capable of doing very unpleasant things, i.e., cutting Tuco loose in the desert, the Bad is pretty capable of doing horrible things, and the Ugly isn't ugly at all." "He's actually the most attractive character in the movie." "So part of Leone's idea is to take those three labels which are usually treated as absolutes or as essential characteristics," "Good, Bad, Ugly, and actually say, "In real life people are a bit more complicated."" "And the Good is perhaps the most complicated of all." "Because he's less trustworthy in some respects than Tuco." "Towards the end of the film," "Tuco honors his side of the bargain by giving away a piece of information." "But the Good doesn't honor his side of the bargain and doesn't give the proper information." "So in some respect he's less trustworthy than the Ugly." "So these labels aren't absolutes." "He's deconstructing the signs, if you want to use an elaborate term." "But he's taking the words from the traditional Western and saying they're a bit more complicated than that." "We're now in Santa Ana at night." "It's another corner of Carlo Simi's El Paso set from For a Few Dollars More." "And Maria the prostitute is played by the actress Rada Rassimov." "She's coming back home expecting to find her boyfriend, but of course instead she finds Lee Van Cleef who's got the information from the half-soldier and is on the track of Bill Carson and the gold." "Bill?" "It has to be said that women are not treated well in Leone's early Westerns." "They tend to be either Madonnas or whores, and this is an example of the latter." "And Lee Van Cleef was so upset about what he had to do in a moment, slapping this woman around to get the information, that he actually refused to do it." "And they had to use a body double for the hands actually striking the woman and then do cut-aways of Van Cleef standing there, 'cause he said, "There are very few principles I have in life and one of them is I don't kick dogs," "and the other one is I don't slap women in movies."" "So Leone had to arrange it a different way." "Where is he?" "Much of this was pruned on first release for censorship reasons." "It's fairly extreme." "And the whirring violins again, like we got at Stevens' farm where the family were massacred." "Reserved for moments of extreme tension." "There's a brutality about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that has this strange mixture of slapstick..." "Someone once called it "slapstick with a gun license," you know." "There's slapstick on the one hand and all this comedy with Tuco and Eli Wallach and the comedy of the iconic Clint Eastwood, but there's also this heavy physical brutality which is partly to do with the Civil War but is also a part of Leone's style." "Tuco's made it across the desert and walks across this Carlo Simi bridge which is across a river that's long since dried up, one of the ramblers of Almería." "It's a wonderful sort of pointless image, a bridge across a nonexistent river, and he makes his way into the town, according to the shooting script, the town of Buffalo Wallow." "And this town was another corner of Carlo Simi's El Paso set, which is a very substantial set in Almería, and you can see..." "Hardened buffs can recognize the hills in the background." "It's one of the side streets of El Paso." "It was obviously a great investment near Tabernas in Almería and it is in fact still standing." "It's interesting, Tuco in the movie is actually tougher than Blondie because when Eastwood is confronted with having to walk across 70 miles of glorious sun-baked sand he can't make it." "His face gets blistered, he passes out and he's about to die as we'll see later in the film." "But Tuco makes it." "And on various occasions Tuco is physically more tough than his counterpart." "In the shooting script, this is Mr. Jackson." "Mr. Jackson's gun shop." "But during the shooting, because they changed the name of one of the bad guys to Jackson, so it got confusing, he became Mr. Milton the gunsmith, who's played by Enzo Petito." "To make it even more confusing, on the final script" "Buffalo Wallow turned into Valverde." "So they decided that this was the town of Valverde after all." "Basically they're jockeying around with the map of New Mexico and the Texas border in 1861, '62, taking various names from Sibley's invasion and jockeying them for position and attributing them to various villages." "So this may be Buffalo Wallow, it might be Valverde, and frankly it doesn't matter." "And here's Tuco choosing his weapon for preference." "And he ends up with a composite gun that has the handle of a Navy Colt, a Smith  Wesson chamber and a Colt barrel." "The weapon of choice of Blondie is a Navy Colt, and when he's shooting through ropes, a Henry rifle with a telescopic sight." "And in the final scene he ends up with a Sharps' rifle." "Angel Eyes, who eventually enlists, as we'll see, in the American Civil War on the Union side, has a new model Army Remington." "So there's a lot of detail of firearms." "Leone was something of an American firearms buff and so was Carlo Simi." "They amassed a large archive on the subject." "And Eli Wallach reminisced to me about when he was shooting the scene, he had to make it look as though he knew what he was doing." "Picking up the guns, listening to the sound they made." "The interchangeable parts between the Colt guns and the Smith  Wesson." "And actually he knew absolutely nothing about firearms." "He had to pretend." "But everyone believed him, he really looks as though he knows what he's doing here." "A celebration of the industrial design of the revolver, interchangeable parts." "He customizes his own gun from the first piece of industrial design in history that had fully interchangeable parts." "And this sequence, which was in fact cut from early American and English prints of the film, it's a long story about the length of the film, but originally it was three hours long and it was cut to 148 minutes," "and this was one of the sequences that went, the sequence at the gunsmith." "The original idea for the sequence in fact came from the James Cagney film, Public Enemy, where Cagney goes into a shop, and tries to buy something and the shop owner says..." "And he says, "How much?"" "and the shop owner says, "$20." "No, how much?" "$40."" ""No, how much?" "$60."" "And what you think is a commercial transaction is in fact a robbing of the shop." "And that's what gave the scriptwriters the idea for this." "Very often the stimulus for the script wasn't just Westerns, but was film noir gangster movies, remembered moments from Hollywood films." "In fact, there's two moments from Buster Keaton as we'll see later on in this film." "So they're fairly eclectic in their sources." "This was a rare reference in Italian Westerns to the Native Americans, the Indians." "A comment about racism, really, in the Western, where cardboard cutouts, wooden cutouts of Native Americans are used for target practice at the back of a gun shop." "Tuco thinks he's knocked over all three." "And in fact he has." "And here's the moment taken from Cagney, where we realize..." "I mean, how on Earth can Tuco, having walked across the desert with no money in his pocket, how can he actually pay for this gun?" "Well, we're about to find out." "The hat, by the way, was from Western Costume in Hollywood." "Eli Wallach chose it with the veteran Western director Henry Hathaway and brought it over to Spain with him." "Leone loved it, thought it looked great." "Said, "Let's keep it in."" "This process of improvisation again." "Tuco's part got bigger and bigger and bigger." "If you read the shooting script, it's not actually that large a part but in the movie he comes to dominate." "And in one sense Clint Eastwood was right to be worried." "He's become kind of a guest star in his own movie." "Hugely iconic, hugely charismatic." "But Eli Wallach is walking away with the movie from under everyone's nose." "And having a terrific time." "Two hundred dollars." "It's all I've got." "Here." "But at least he leaves him a bottle of whiskey, and later on Lee Van Cleef will do the same in a similar situation, which is a sign that he has a little bit of humanity." "He may be a rogue, he may be on the take, he may be a con man but there's a streak of humanity in him." "At least leave the guy some whiskey." ""Closed," mouth closed, very Leone gag." "So it becomes one of the characteristics of Tuco." "And here we are in Santa Fe, which is yet another part of Carlo Simi's El Paso set from For a Few Dollars More, being recycled for the third or fourth time." "And the Confederate artillery are coming through and the hotel is in fact the hotel that had been featured in For a Few dollars More." "The hotel room where Blondie is staying with the gun that he has taken to pieces is the hotel room which was occupied by Colonel Mortimer," "Lee Van Cleef, in the earlier film." "This is first really direct reference to the Civil War in the movie, the specifics of the Civil War between 1861 and spring 1862, and the only reference to a real historical character in the whole cinema of Leone," "because General Sibley is about to be shown in person." "There he is, and he's on an ambulance, which is a kind of euphemism for the fact that he was often indisposed during the campaign." "Actually, he was an alcoholic and he often had some difficulty keeping control of himself." "So the idea of Sibley arriving by ambulance surrounded by these bearded Santa Fe gamblers, his bodyguard, is a kind of historical accuracy." "It's very unusual for Leone to have that realistic view of history." "And it's a slightly jarring moment." "He once said, "I don't want to make a movie about Napoleon," "I don't want to make a movie about Davy Crockett." "I like making movies about ordinary people" ""who get caught up in these events despite their best intentions."" "But there's a moment where Sibley actually makes an appearance." "So, Tuco has assembled his three compadres and they're going to find Blondie." "You rotten criminals." "How dare you?" "Unusual use of a gun." "Holding the barrel up to his lips." "And Blondie's taking his Colt Navy to pieces." "Notice the snake grips on the handle of the gun, which were in fact from Clint Eastwood's revolver in Rawhide." "It was a sort of good luck charm to use it in the Italian Westerns, just like the gun belt." "Firearms experts tell me that there's a bit of a historical inaccuracy here." "Navy Colts in the American Civil War were percussion cap pistols." "So, he's got a Colt Navy and he's taking it to pieces, but he's got Colt .45 metallic cartridges that he's putting into them." "So there's a little bit of a slip there historically." "Great detail." "Very Leone that." "That the surface detail looks accurate." "And guns being taken to pieces and all this hardware outside," "Witworth canons and American Civil War artillery pieces." "But percussion cap pistols don't shoot quickly enough, so let's have metallic cartridges." "What the hell?" "The cross-cutting of these two scenes, again, took Leone into a different league from the production point of view." "Hundreds of extras in Confederate uniforms in the street outside of Santa Fe with all these troops, the artillery and so on, largely played by the Spanish army, courtesy indirectly of General Franco, who wanted to attract all sorts of moviemakers" "to actually make films in Spain." "Intercut with this thrilling moment of," ""Will he get the gun back together again in time in order to shoot the people who are coming to get him in this hotel bedroom?"" "Clint Eastwood once said..." "Someone once asked Clint Eastwood whether General Franco minded the slightly subversive movies about war which aren't very good on chivalry and rhetoric and patriotism." "They have a much more down-to-earth attitude to life." "The point is survival, to get through this war intact." "And did Franco mind that?" "And he said, "Franco didn't mind so long as you didn't make a movie set in contemporary Spain."" "If you make a movie set in the 19th century in the Wild West of America, he didn't care at all, that he just wanted the money to flow into Spain and work for Spanish technicians and craftspeople" "and set builders and the laboratories." "So, a very subversive look at the American Civil War was made in Spain in 1966." "Part of the image of the war came from the film La Grande guerra, the film about the First World War, but it also came from a book that Luciano Vincenzoni had been reading for many years by a man called Ferdinand Céline," "a French writer, which was also set in the First World War." "And Céline's book is all about a hero called Ferdinand who finds himself in absurd situations in the war." "He doesn't want anything to do with the war but he keeps finding himself tangled up in the First World War, in the Ardennes and in Flanders, and there's chance encounters, there's all sorts of coincidences." "There is extreme brutality and gore and surrealism going on all around him, and the atmosphere of the book, which is called Journey to the End of the Night, which is Vincenzoni's favorite book, permeates the whole of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "Instead of the First World War it's the American Civil War, but the absurdist message that, "Don't believe in ideals, just believe in survival," actually is the thing they have in common." "This is a version of the American Civil War for readers of Catch-22 and for recent listeners to Bob Dylan's With God on Our Side." "It actually had this atmosphere of the mid '60s to a T, where the war was concerned." "I once saw The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in summer 1968 in San Francisco in a cinema, and later on when the Clint Eastwood character commenting on the war says, "I've never seen so many men" "wasted so badly," the entire cinema erupted." "It was at the height of the Vietnam War, and the attitude to war as a kind of absurd bloody nightmare and the issue was survival absolutely captured the moment." "It may be set in the 1860s but it had a huge resonance in the mid 1960s as well." "And there is a moment coming up where, paradoxically, the war actually saves Blondie's skin." "It's the first of three occasions in the film where the war intervenes to save the life of one of the characters." "On this occasion it's the old rope trick with Tuco getting his revenge for all those times he had nearly died with the rope scam earlier." "And a mortar will score a direct hit on the hotel which will save Blondie's life." "Later on a Confederate ambulance in the middle of the desert, just as Blondie is about to be shot by Tuco, comes into earshot and eyeshot and saves his life." "And later still Tuco is about to be thumped by Sergeant Wallace at the concentration camp and the hoot of a train signal saves his life." "So the war, which is going on all around them, they are trying to get out through this battle zone in order to find the gold, the war is a necessary evil, actually serves to save their lives." "It's one of the paradoxes, one of the surreal paradoxes of this film." "It has a splendid sense of construction, the way the war is brought into the story at certain moments." "Eastwood wearing a very '60s hippy shirt on this occasion." "Only later in the film will he don his famous denim shirt and sheepskin waistcoat and poncho." "There's the mortar, there's the direct hit." "Eastwood's part of the main title theme." "And this is a sequence that was in the Italian print but was cut from the American and British prints of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and was only put back 35 years later." "It's Sentenza, Angel Eyes, played by Lee Van Cleef, riding through the desert." "And the first reference to the American Civil War theme on Morricone's soundtrack." "He wrote various Civil War themes." "One, A Ballad of a Soldier, one for the battle, and one for a march." "And it's this mixture of, sort of, bugles and lament and a sort of yearning theme for the war." "And he arrives in this burned-out ranch that according to the shooting script is called Koslowski's Ranch." "It was an actual historic place involved in the Sibley campaign." "A burned-out civilian ranch, 20 miles south of Santa Fe, where the Bad, played by Lee Van Cleef, encounters real badness in the form of the mayhem that the Civil War has caused." "There's a wonderful shot now as the camera goes around to him, taking his point of view." "Very expansive shot, very redundant shot in Hollywood terms, but a marvelous piece of Leone's rhetoric, just seeing the mayhem that the war has caused at a ranch in New Mexico." "And Leone said that scenes like this were very much based on the Charlie Chaplin film made in the 1940s Monsieur Verdoux, which is all about a Bluebeard figure, a murderer, who, in court, when he is accused of murdering all his wives," "says, "Compared to Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Stalin, I'm a mere amateur."" "It's a comedy of murders where the domestic murders engaged in by Chaplin are set against the mass murders of the Second World War, and Leone took that idea, he says, and transposed it again into the American Civil War." "Yes, Lee Van Cleef may be a very nasty man, but look what the war does to Confederates." "Another example of mutilation." "We have had a legless soldier." "Here's one with one leg and all sorts of people crouched in this ranch." "The mayhem of war." "We really are in a battle zone." "Slight shake of the head from Lee Van Cleef." "Even he is upset by this." "But he is on the track of Carson, wants to find out where he is." "So he's gotta find someone to ask, and eventually he finds a Confederate sergeant who helps him." "The sergeant is played by the actor Víctor Israel, but the voice was actually put in 35 years later for the restored print." "And Van Cleef's voice is a sound-alike because Lee Van Cleef died in 1989." "On Lee Van Cleef's gravestone are the words "The best of the bad."" "Our government has spared no expense." "As you can see, we are treated very well." "They're living on corn cobs." "Another reference to food." "We've had chicken in the pot, we've had minestrone soup." "There's lots of references to eating, but starving troops, wounded troops, at Koslowski's Ranch living on corn cobs." "And you ask me if I know someone." "I just don't know what you drifters could be thinking." "First of all, the sergeant thinks that Angel Eyes might be a deserter, and when he realizes that he isn't, he decides to give him information." "And the second transaction with a whiskey bottle." "Earlier, we've had Tuco giving the half-drunk whiskey bottle to the gunsmith, and now we have the Bad giving the whiskey to the Confederate sergeant." "He's not all bad." "They've already left." "For Glorieta." "Canby's front line is right on their heels." "Those poor young devils." "Glorieta was the battle where Sibley was decisively thrashed in the spring of 1862." "Another specific historic reference." "So the Confederates have been pushing into New Mexico." "After Glorieta, they're pushed back again in a very ignominious retreat across the desert back to their base in Texas, which had huge losses." "Five hundred Confederate dead, 500 captured." "It was a disastrous campaign for Sibley." "But Glorieta was the place where the great confrontation took place." "And now we are back to a scene that was in all the original prints as Tuco rides through the Almerían desert and comes to a crossroads, which actually had featured in" "For a Few Dollars More." "Last time this was used, Lee Van Cleef went to the left." "He's looking for Blondie, and all he finds is a cigar stub." "And in fact, there was a famous missing sequence that was actually shot but was cut by Leone." "But little bits of it turn up in the French trailer, in between the Lee Van Cleef scene and this in the desert, which takes place at a town called Socorro, in the piazza of Socorro, where you have someone doing a recruiting speech for the Confederates" "and Tuco takes a hat around the women and the old men who are listening to this recruiting speech and gathers what they think is a collection for the war, but is in fact for himself, leaves the hat outside," "goes into a hotel where Blondie is in bed with a Spanish woman." "The only moment in the Dollars films where Clint Eastwood actually has any kind of a relationship with a woman." "The woman slips out, steals the hat, Tuco goes out into the street again and sees the money has been taken from the hat and all there is, is a half-lit cigar." "So, he's on the track of Blondie, but loses the money, which he was conning out of people who were giving to the Confederacy." "That would have happened just before this sequence, with Tuco finding all sorts of burned cigar stubs." "The cigarillo is all you need to know about Blondie, and he's getting closer and closer because the cigarillo is still alight." "There are stills of the Socorro sequence, little bits of movie in the French trailer, but Leone deliberately cut it 'cause he thought at this moment, it really was slowing things down too much, and the movie was getting much too long." "He was asked to put in a movie of two hours." "It was running for three hours plus." "Something had to happen." "This was the first movie where Leone had trouble over length." "Hereafter, all his movies would overrun like mad, and have to be cut at the last minute, in the case of Once Upon a Time in America with disastrous consequences." "One of the things about the cuts that occurred after the Italian release is that a lot of the geographical place names disappeared from the movie." "So Glorieta, the battlefields of Sibley's campaign, all of those names disappeared, so you don't know where the hell you are." "It is a sort of Never-Never Land of the Southwest, a sort of surreal twilight zone in the desert." "Does it matter?" "I don't know." "There is more history, certainly, in this print." "But does it matter how specific it should be?" "We are, after all, watching a very strange fantasy." "This is a real Almerían village, Adobe Village, which a lot of people thought was a set, but is in fact one of the white-washed villages you find in Central Almería." "Near Los Albaricoques, where the final sequence of For a Few Dollars More was shot." "And there's Eastwood with his Henry rifle." "Poor Shorty." "Sorry, Shorty." "Shorty isn't mentioned in the shooting script." "Again, that was either improvised..." "The idea of calling this hapless man Shorty, it was either improvised or happened at the last minute." "And now Tuco is gonna get his revenge with the desert." "And these desert sequences were filmed in part of a national park to the east of Almería called Cabo de Gata." "The sand dunes for these miles and miles of glorious sun-baked sand." "And if you notice on Tuco's saddle, where it came from I don't know, is a pink parasol behind him, which will lead to one of the great surreal moments." "And when Leone was describing these sequences, he was very upset that people thought that they should be cut when the movie first opened." "In fact, they were cut to some extent, some details were cut from them." "Because he thought that Tonino Delli Colli's camera work was worthy of the great surrealist painters and he said that these sequences in the desert were an example of surrealism riding the range." "Sergio Leone was a great collector of paintings." "His father had collected paintings, but lost his collection during the Mussolini era, and Leone was determined to build up the family patrimony." "And in the year that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was made, he bought a painting by the Italian surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico." "And it's a painting which is very typical of de Chirico, its high contrast, hard-edged look to it, as if it's in the midday sun, it has a colonnade down the middle, and a statue of the goddess Ariadne," "and a very surreal juxtaposition of the goddess and the colonnade and the midday sun, and it's slightly trompe I'oeil, but the colonnade leads towards the distance, and in the distance, you have an American locomotive" "with a smokestack and a cow catcher and smoke coming out of the smokestack." "A mixture of the American Wild West and the surreal Rome of 1914." "And Leone was very, very fond of de Chirico, and there is no doubt in my mind that a lot of these sequences in the desert were based on de Chirico's paintings." "So Tonino Delli Colli is up there with the great surrealist painters, and Delli Colli, when I asked him about this, he said," ""Look, we didn't actually have the paintings, as it were, with us when we were shooting, but very often, when we were planning our sequences and our shots, yes, we looked at lots of postcards and reproductions of paintings."" "And there were two other painters that Leone liked referring to in his films." "One was Goya, a painting in the Prado Museum in Madrid, which he'd first encountered when making" "The Last Days of Pompeii in Spain, in the late 1950s." "And this was a painting called The Third of May 1808." "It was painted in 1814, and it's of a firing squad during the Peninsular War." "And it shows the French troops lined up shooting a Spanish patriot." "And when Tonino Delli Colli first saw that painting, a reproduction of that painting, when they were preparing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he said, "My God, the son of a bitch invented back lighting."" "The way in which the peasant is lit, the way he's so sharp and the rest of it is so sharp, he could have been a lighting cameraman, and that was one source, Goya." "And another was the painter Diego Velázquez, because one of Leone's all-time favorite paintings in the Prado was a painting called Las Meninas, 1656, or The Maids of Honor, or The Family of Philip IV, which is an amazing royal portrait" "but it isn't." "It shows the back of a canvas, it shows Velázquez looking around the canvas, and it shows the Royal family, which is the subject of the painting, reflected in a mirror in the far distance." "And the whole thing is a piece of trompe I'oeil about how oil painting happens." "It's a painting about the process of doing oil painting, and Leone loved that idea." "The juxtaposition, keeping the audience on its toes working out the puzzle of what's going on was very much his style of moviemaking." "There's a moment later in the film where they first come across the trenches at the bridge, which seems to me to be very much in the tradition of image making." "But here, the presiding visual genius is de Chirico." "Pink parasol, Mexican bandit on a horse, man in a hippie shirt, it's so surreal." "What on Earth are they doing in the middle of the desert of Spain?" "It's also post-Lawrence of Arabia, and in a way the music by Morricone nods its hat in the direction of Lawrence but also in the direction of biblical epics of the '50s and '60s." "Cello, piano, gong and corps anglais playing this insistent desert theme which isn't the jokey main title and isn't the insignias of the main characters." "It's the kind of expansive epic music you get in a movie like Lawrence of Arabia, which of course had been a huge success a couple of years earlier, and which had been one of the first movies to use the Almerían desert" "for the scenes around Aqaba." "So Lawrence was very important to everyone when they were shooting in Spain." "And here's Tuco at his most sadistic, constantly taunting Blondie, and making as if to help him but actually just having fun at his expense, getting his own back for having walked across the desert himself." "Great makeup job." "When Clint Eastwood subsequently went on to make a film called Kelly's Heroes, he was cast opposite the comedy actor, Don Rickles, who said of Clint Eastwood," ""He was the only actor who could speak with flies on his lips."" "And there are various moments in these sequences where there's a lot of flies buzzing around their faces that must have been very carefully worked out." "This shot was cut from..." "The grabbing of the boot and Tuco washing his feet, and then trying to get Eastwood to drink the water that he was washing his feet in were in fact cut from the American print, although they were in the original Italian print," "and were only put back 35 years later." "This is one of the cuts in the desert sequence that upset Leone because he thought it was so brilliantly shot." "These sequences also nod in the direction of a favorite Leone Western, Yellow Sky, made by Wellman in 1948, and shot in Death Valley, where you also have miles and miles of sun-baked sand, and a ghost town with a door made of old wood slamming" "and coyotes and rags in the wind and that whole kind of desert landscape, and that was a favorite Hollywood Western of Leone." "And there is the odd nod in its direction in these desert sequences as well." "So you've got this strange mixture of surrealism, Lawrence of Arabia, the American Civil War, Yellow Sky and goodness knows what else." "His cinema is nothing if not eclectic." "Extreme sadism from Tuco." "He may be an attractive character in some ways but he certainly isn't at his most attractive in these sequences as he taunts Blondie, like a cat playing with a mouse." "This is very nicely cut into the original print so it's absolutely seamless as Eastwood clambers over a sand dune." "Notice that Tuco has his gun in his pocket." "Leone's original idea was that he should have this composite gun on a lanyard round his neck and it should be constantly dangling between his legs in a suggestive manner." "And he'd do a twist of his hips, and the gun would go up and he would catch it in his hand." "And when Wallach tried this the first day on the set he said to Leone," ""Well, you have a go and see if it's possible."" "So Leone put this lanyard round his neck, and had the gun between his legs and tried to do it, and all he did was hit himself in the balls with a Colt gun, and said, "All right, you win." "You can put it in your pocket."" "And thereafter Tuco wore the gun in his pocket throughout the movie." "And here he throws a bottle with remarkable aim," "I can't believe they did this first time, rolls down the sand and hits Blondie." "And bottles are rather improbably American." "They look like Chianti bottles from a cantina in Italy." "Maybe in New Mexico they are authentic but the whiskey bottles tend to have raffia or rope around them." "And they tend to look like the kind of bottles you have hanging in an Italian bar." "But this is the moment of truth." "Tuco made it across the desert." "Blondie is not going to." "He isn't tough enough, his skin is too fair." "That's what happens to blonds, they are not very good in the sun." "And here for the second time, the Civil War intervenes to save their lives, to save Blondie's life." "You can hear this carriage and you get the sound of the trumpet, the sound of the bugle for Morricone's Civil War theme as this carriage from nowhere in this surreal way hurtles through the desert." "What's it doing in the middle of the desert?" "Turns out to be a Confederate ambulance at full throttle." "Choral interlude." "Bugles." "It's a wonderful shot but completely unexplained like ghost riders of the sky coming through the desert, and it has distracted Tuco's attention so Blondie lives to fight another day." "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!" "Whoa, boy." "Easy, easy." "Easy, easy." "Attaboy." "That's nice." "It's very Leone, this." "The camera is first of all in the driver's seat of the coach." "Then this tracking shot along the horses." "To tell you that this is the Confederate States' Army, 3rd Regiment, and earlier in the film with the half-soldier we've had details about the fact that Carson is involved with the 3rd Regiment, so that alerts us to the fact that maybe although Tuco doesn't know it, maybe" "Jackson alias Carson is inside this ambulance cart full of Confederates." "It's very expansive camera work." "You know, in traditional Hollywood terms a lot of Leone's camera work is very redundant, very exaggerated, it is not necessary for the telling of the story." "But it creates this atmosphere of flamboyance." "He's taking the traditional way of..." "The traditional Hollywood way of shooting such a scene, if there were such a scene, and notching it up several steps further." "He's taking film language and making it more extreme so it draws attention to itself and throughout the movie he does this." "In fact, with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly there is a confidence about Leone's camera movements, in some ways the camera just won't keep still, it's constantly on the move." "And it's one of..." "It was his most flamboyant movie so far." "It also uses the letterbox image brilliantly." "You know," "Fritz Lang said that CinemaScope was only useful for snakes and coffins." "Well, I think Leone shows that it's pretty good for rifles as well, because it's constantly exploring the barrels of rifles and guns in this letterbox image." "Now, in the shooting script, the man with the eye patch is Kid Russell, but in this version he has become Bill Carson, which may be a reference to the famous Army scout Kit Carson, who was in fact historically involved in the Canby-Sibley campaign in 1862," "so it may be a reference to Carson, which the Italians found in history books, but Tuco doesn't know any of that." "He has to discover it." "This snuff box that he finds here with Carson's name in it will play a key part in the story later on." "And this is a very Leone or Wallach gag." "He's about to sneeze because of the snuff, but he starts concentrating, he hears a sound behind him, he's got enough self-control to control his sneeze." "Because one of the characters is alive." "This Confederate corporal." "200,000 in gold." "It's yours." "Just get me water." "The role of Jackson alias Carson who at one time was known as Kid Russell is played by Antonio Casale." "Carson." "My name is Bill Carson now." "It's Carson." "In fact there's quite a lot of featured" "Spanish and Italian players playing the three," "Baker, Stevens, Carsons, the three..." "Baker, Stevens, Carson, the three who know the secret of the Confederate gold and who are slowly being pieced together as the story progresses." "These are the second leads, as it were, of the movie." "Baker has nothing." "The gold..." "I hid the gold." "The gold is safe." "Where?" "Where, here?" "Here?" "Talk!" " Huh?" " In the cemetery." " Which cemetery?" " The one..." "And now, we are setting up the story of the second half of the film." "The gold is buried in a cemetery." "And Tuco gets to hear about the name of the cemetery, but Blondie gets to hear about the name on the grave, so they have reasons to keep each other alive in a very cynical way for the rest of the film because they" "know half the secret each." "Yes?" "Like the half-soldier, this is a very sick joke about someone who is wounded and dying but wants water, but can't get the name out." "You talk first, huh?" "I'll give you water later." "We have had a half-soldier, we are gonna have someone who's had his arm shot off and here's Carson struggling to say something, and all Tuco wants is the information." "And the line when Tuco says that, "I am Lincoln's grandmother." ""Tell me what's that about the dollars."" "In fact in the shooting script it says more prosaically," ""And I'm called Lincoln, let's talk about the dollars."" "So another example of Mickey Knox in translating the Italian script into American, ready for the dubbing studios, making it into a much funnier line." "Somehow Blondie has managed to crawl from where he was to the back of this Confederate ambulance and Tuco throws a water canteen at him, not a bottle this time but a water canteen, and scores a direct hit again." "It's difficult to imagine back to the mid '60s and how cynical this view of the American Civil War seemed." "The traditional Hollywood approach to filming the American Civil War, one thinks immediately of Gone with the Wind, or Raintree County or the Civil War sequence of How the West Was Won, which was directed by John Ford." "In fact, there's a famous credit title in How the West Was Won," ""The Civil War directed by John Ford,"" "and to many of us in Europe, actually, it seemed as if he had, but it mattered which side you were fighting for." "If you fought for the South, it was nostalgia, Magnolia, moonlight, states given over entirely to the growing of cotton, the old way of life." "And there were a lot of Westerns about people who were still fighting the Civil War in the years after 1865, so that mattered, while the North was central government, rationality, Lincoln, the building of the railways, industrialization, and that mattered" "as well, so which side someone fought for was the moral touchstone of the movie." "And they might have seemed cynical, like Robert Stack in Great Day in the Morning, but at the end he actually signs up for the Confederate Army." "He finds his commitment." "There is something wrong with not being committed." "But in this movie, none of the lead characters are remotely interested in the Civil War or what it stands for, it's someone else's war." "Rather like the Second World War must have seemed to Sergio Leone as he was growing up in Rome." "That Mussolini and the Nazis against the Allies, it seemed like someone else's war, and this is very much the product of that kind of thinking about conflict." "It is someone else's war which occasionally intervenes as an irritant in your life, but basically you're after survival, you're after the gold, you're out for number one, you want to make as much money as you can, and everything else is a side issue." "It's very much in tune with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and other writings and movies about war in the mid '60s." "And indeed like Guerra, this film about the First World War that was made in 1959 initially." "But it was a surprisingly cynical view of war in the mid '60s and it chimed when the film came out in 1968 in America, it chimed with American thinking about that as well." "This is another sequence that was cut after the Italian print was circulated, was cut in the American print and cut in the English print as they arrive at a Confederate bivouac, and the sergeant who takes the message here is played by" "the same man as played the station master, the ticket collector, in the first sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West, the famous sequence at the station." "Are you reading when this man is dying?" "where he tries to collect the money from Jack Elam and gets himself locked up in a cupboard for his pains." "There's very often a character in Leone's films who is like the sort of "Fuzzy" Burnette or Arthur Hunnicutt, sort of grizzled" "Western character who is a bit of an eccentric and played by a comedian, and this is an example." "A lot of background about where they are and where they are on the map, where they can find somewhere for Blondie to be looked after." "It's suggested they go to the San Antonio mission, and again, not essential information, but more of a sense of the fact that they are in a war zone." "And here they pull up at the mission." "The Angelus bell is ringing for the arrival of the angel." "And the location is in Almería near Los Albaricoques, the village where the end of For a Few Dollars More was shot, and it's called the Cortijo de Los Frailes, "of the brothers."" "It's a 19th century chateau with a chapel and outhouses attached." "And it had a certain notoriety because in the 1930s, a young couple ran away and hid in this chateau, and Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish playwright, wrote a play called Blood Wedding all about this elopement," "because it ended in tears." "The parents caught up with them and the couple both got killed in a vendetta." "And in historical fact it actually took place in this building which is now derelict, but in this film it's used as the mission which is also a war hospital in San Antonio." "Just like the scene at the ranch where Lee Van Cleef looked in and saw some of the side effects of war, here we have a mission where the Franciscan Friars are trying their best to look after the carnage" "that is caused in war, but not doing too well." "The younger monk in these scenes was played by Angelo Novi, who was the stills photographer on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "And just as Carlo Simi, the designer, had a cameo in For a Few Dollars More as the bank manager, so the stills photographer had a cameo on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as a friar." "All right, put a fresh bandage on him." "Put him in my cell." "Easy." " Out, soldier." "Out you go." "Come on." " Look out for him, please." "He's like a brother to me." "Hey, Father, I..." "And just as we have had the Angelus bell ringing and a golden-haired angel, and all sorts of slightly mocking references to Roman Catholicism and religion, we are about to get a great Tuco moment which is rather like the way in which he crosses himself," "where he wants to be seen on his knees before this image of Jesus, opens his eye patch, 'cause both his eyes of course work," "Carson's eye patch, closes it down again, makes sure no one is looking at him." "Maybe someone is watching, so I'd better get on my knees, swelling choral music, cross himself," "clasp his hands in prayer." "Apparently praying for Blondie, but wants to make sure that the Friars see him doing it." "He's both young and strong." "That's what's kept him going until now." "He should regain his strength in a very short time." "Thank you, Father." "You don't know how much this boy's life means to me." "Thanks be to Jesus." "Thanks to all of you." "But actually, there is something else on Tuco's mind." "A slug of whiskey is probably going to do the trick rather better and a fly lands on his face at just the right moment and he smiles." "Nice little trill on the soundtrack as the firewater reaches his gut." "Tuco is a wonderful..." "He's a sort of a carnival character in this film." "He plays the part of Sancho Panza to Clint Eastwood's Knight of the Rock-Hard Countenance." "And in the tradition of Italian and Spanish literature going right back to the Renaissance, there was very often this carnivalesque character who ate a lot, who swore mightily, who belched, who represented the kind of life force" "like Sancho Panza, who was a clown in effect, and was always contrasted with the chivalric, rather hard, slightly bloodless character, the Don Quixote character, which is the equivalent of the Clint Eastwood character in this." "So really, Eli Wallach is playing Sancho Panza to Clint Eastwood's Don Quixote." "And it's a very Mediterranean character." "A very unbuttoned character." "It's not part of the Hollywood tradition at all." "Umberto Eco, the philosopher, referred to it as the Renaissance looking back with godless nostalgia, to the great romps of medieval times, only this time instead of them being religious stories, they were a form of clowning and a rather more subversive form." "He called it, like other critics of the time, carnivalesque, and if ever there was a carnivalesque character in this movie, it is Tuco." "It's good to have somebody close by... friends or relations." "Do you have parents, Blondie?" "It is very unusual in a Leone film to have any background to the characters." "In Fistful of Dollars, there was in fact a bit of exposition about the Man with No Name, but it was cut, and so we learn nothing about him." "He's a stranger that arrives from nowhere that goes from nowhere." "We never understand anything about his background, and the same with the Eastwood character in For a Few Dollars More, although we know quite a lot about the family background of Colonel Mortimer." "Well, in this film we learn a little bit about the fact that these two characters are alone in the world." "At least Tuco says they are, and he understands vulnerability and he is brilliant at exploiting vulnerability in others." "And he is beginning to show a much wider range of emotions than is usual in Leone characters." "In fact, Leone once said to me that the three main characters, this is slightly alarming actually, but the three main characters in the film represented parts of his own personality." "That Eastwood was the together, professional, cautious side of his character who made sure that there was an exit before he moved into any situation, that Tuco was the life-loving carnival sort of anarchic side of his character," "and that the robotic side of his character, which one hopes wasn't too well developed, was represented by the Lee Van Cleef character." "But of all the characters, he said, "The one I really love is the anarchist."" "That Tuco was one of his favorite characters in all the films that he made, and he found him a truly touching character, when later on we do learn about his family background and Tuco tries to put a brave face on it." ""And at that point," said Leone, "he becomes truly touching."" "And it is the anarchists, the ones who don't really believe in left or right in politics but who get through life drinking a lot, swearing a lot, and loving life a lot, it's those, that's where Leone's heart lies and it lies very firmly with Tuco." "I'll always honor your memory." "I swear, I'll always honor your memory." "And here is a wonderful moment of slapstick amidst all the nasty makeup and the carnage of war in the room next door." "Is he gonna tell him?" "No, he isn't." "He's just gonna throw water in his face." "It's best not to trust anybody." "Wonderful punctuation of the music again." "Just as each of the characters gets a little phrase of the main title theme, it comes in as kind of musical punctuation." "When The Good, the Bad and the Ugly came out, a famous review was written in January, 1967, by the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, where he said that the early Italian Westerns were basically trying to be copy Hollywood Westerns." "Cowboys and Indians and Buffalo Bill, hero of the Far West." "And they resembled American television movies." "And then he went on to say that, of course, in Italy there was no Wild West." "There's no frontier, there's no cowboys, there's no frontier towns." "So whereas Hollywood is about a myth," "Italian films are about a myth about a myth based upon the viewing of movies." "So they are at one step removed from the films themselves." "But he said with this film, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the Italianization, the Mediterraneanization of the Western was complete." "This is a Mediterranean movie." "A lot of its cultural reference points are Mediterranean." "So it's taking the original Hollywood idea of the American Civil War and turning it into a Mediterranean movie." "And I think that's probably a just thing to say." "Particularly in this sequence where Tuco meets his brother, Padre Ramirez, a riot of Roman Catholic iconography, all these statues and baroque cherubs lying around in the mission office." "And Ramirez was played by Luigi Pistilli, who had played Groggy, the last of the bandits to die from Gian Maria Volontè's gang in For a Few Dollars More." "The problem was he couldn't speak a single word of English." "And Eli Wallach remembers having some difficulty with this sequence, 'cause he's talking away in English but Padre Ramirez is talking entirely in Italian." "It's my rare example in Leone's cinema of getting some social background to one of his characters." "We learn about a society where the options open to young people are either to become a bandit or to become a priest." "A sort of third world society where you go one way, or you go the other." "And Padre Ramirez went one way and went into the church, a great employer, and Tuco went the other and became a bandit." "And Tuco's attempts to be family-minded and to actually get a bit of jollity into the occasion and be brotherly are very touching in this scene." "Nine years?" "Italian critics at the time were slightly worried about this scene." "They said that Leone was selling out, that because a major American studio had been involved in the film, this was rather sentimental for Leone." "He had a very hard edge in his first two films," "Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More." "And here was a slightly sentimental music and a human relationship emerging, a very different form of cinema." "You could equally argue against those critics that it was Leone growing up." "He's actually getting interested in the human side of his characters, whereas in the early films they are like grotesque puppets from some Italian puppet show, wandering through the puppet stage somewhere in a Never-Never Land in New Mexico and Texas, but actually in Spain." "That at last he's getting interested in the inner person with Tuco and this scene tells you an awful lot about him, and actually enhances the audience interest in him." "You learn nothing about Lee Van Cleef, you learn nothing about Clint Eastwood." "Lee Van Cleef, in fact, said in an interview that because so much information was given about Tuco, the audience's sympathy went to him and their interest went with him and it loaded the dice in Tuco's favor." "It was the beginnings of a new form of cinema for Sergio Leone and some Italian critics were muddled by this." "So suddenly they start behaving like children." "They are trying to be mature grown-ups talking about the family and why hasn't Tuco been home and mother died and father died recently." "But suddenly they are beginning to lose their temper and they are gonna scrap like two children in a minute." "You remember, when you left to become a priest, I stayed behind." "I must have been ten, twelve." "I don't remember which, but I stayed." "I tried, but it was no good." "Now I will tell you something." "You became a priest because you were too much of a coward to do what I do." "So Tuco has provoked him." "So that they are gonna start scrapping." "They are gonna knock over those statues." "It's gonna end in tears, it's like two children." "And Blondie's watching, unbeknown to Tuco." "And it's important that he sees this because it makes sense of the subsequent scene." "And as a good Christian, Ramirez says, "Please forgive me, brother."" "Please forgive me, brother." "Camera goes along the horses as usual to get to the point where they are getting up onto the driver's seat of the coach." "The bell rings and off they go." "And this was the dialog which Leone said convinced him of just how touching a character Tuco was." "'Cause Tuco pretends that everything is all right with the family, but Blondie knows it wasn't." "Ah, my belly's full." "Nice guy, my brother." "I didn't tell you my brother was in charge here?" "Everything." "Like the pope almost." "He's in charge in Rome." "Yeah, yeah, my brother, he say to me..." ""Stay, brother." "Don't go home." "We never see each other." "Here there's plenty to eat and drink." "Bring your friend too."" "Whenever we see each other, he never lets me go." "It's always the same story." "My brother... he is crazy about me." "That's so." "Even a tramp like me, no matter what happens..." "I know there's a brother somewhere who will never refuse me a bowl of soup." "Sure." ""Sure." He knows the truth." "Well, after a meal, there's nothing like a good cigar." "So he hands him the cigar, Tuco looks at it." "Does Eastwood know the truth?" "Does it matter?" "Let's get on with the story." "And there's a wonderful moment where Tuco just reflects for a moment and then hunches his shoulders and the music tells you, "Come on, let's get on with it." "What the hell?"" "It's a very subtle moment between the two men." "And just in case we've forgotten that we are in a war zone, because now we are in March, April, 1862, and the Battle of Glorieta has taken place, and so there is a lot of carnage around this part of the country." "There's a sequence here that was cut from all the prints after the Italian release and has only just been put back 35 years later." "It has Tuco consulting a map to try and find where Sad Hill Cemetery is." "And in a moment we will see all around them, the remnants of the battle that's taken place between Canby's Union forces and Sibley's Confederate forces." "He looks to the side, we get the bugle music of Morricone's Civil War theme, and we are reminded, in case we had forgotten in all the family background," "that we are in a battle zone." "And this is Clint Eastwood's voice dubbed in 35 years later and it's also Eli Wallach's voice dubbed in." "So, together again at last." "And again, just in case we are thinking that the characters are getting committed by seeing all this carnage around them, there's a wonderfully cynical moment coming up about which side they're on." "Remember, they are dressed as Confederates and some troops are coming and they look like Confederate troops." "And here's a gag that comes partly from the Buster Keaton film The General, where Buster Keaton is playing a Union spy who waves at his fellow Union troops, but then suddenly remembers he's dressed up in a Confederate uniform." "But it is also and more importantly from an Ambrose Bierce short story called One of the Missing, which is a wonderful story about the American Civil War that Leone had read." "And it's a Union Private who is dying, surrounded by lots of bodies." "And the last word of the story is "The dust was so thick on his Union uniform that he could almost be a Confederate."" "So the only thing that separates the two sides from the point of view of our two heroes is a lot of dust." "Cut to all of them in lock step as they go to a concentration camp." "And this was a huge shock also, in the mid '60s, 'cause people knew about Andersonville Concentration Camp run by the Confederates in Confederate Georgia, where there were 32,000 inmates and 13,000 of them died," "amidst starvation, lack of supplies and even cannibalism." "And it was a major scandal of the American Civil War." "And various attempts have been made to make a movie out of Andersonville." "There was a famous novel called Andersonville in the 1950s, and Stanley Kramer, the producer, was gonna make a film with Fred Zinnemann directing it, but it never happened." "It's too much of a downer." "I mean, it's a very, very nasty story." "But what was the shock in the mid '60s was to see a concentration camp associated with the winning side, with the Northerners." "This isn't Andersonville in Confederate Georgia, this is Betterville in New Mexico," "Betterville Concentration Camp, run by the North." "A wooden stockade with various watchtowers, with big trenches to take the dead, with no shelter for the inmates except for the Union officers." "It's in fact based on a series of steel engravings of Andersonville dated August, 1864, which Carlo Simi, the production designer, got hold of." "I've seen his reference materials and he designed this based upon the original Andersonville." "We've been introduced to Corporal Wallace, the man calling the role, who is played by Mario Brega, the Roman actor who appeared as Chico, the bad guy in A Fistful of Dollars, and was also one of Indio's gang in For a Few Dollars More." "Well, he plays Corporal Wallace, an even more unpleasant character." "And we're now being introduced to Captain Harper who is the Betterville Camp Commandant, played by the actor Antonio Molino Rojo in a kind of makeup that makes it look as though he is at death's door." "And he really leads us forward to the character of Mr. Morton in Once Upon a Time in the West, the man running the shop who is also seriously disabled and dying, but has a sense of mission." "It's just that time is running out for him." "And this brings the three characters together." "Remember that Van Cleef, Sentenza, Angel Eyes, has found out that Carson might be in Betterville Concentration Camp." "So there he is on the left with his back to us." "Carson's name is called, and this is what he's been waiting for." "He has enlisted in the Union Army, gone to Betterville Concentration Camp precisely to meet Carson 'cause he thinks Carson knows the secret of the gold." "And at last the three of them come together." "Van Cleef knows about Carson," "Eastwood knows the name on the grave, Tuco knows where the graveyard is." "These three guys have got to get together." "Yeah, that's me." "Please, Carson... answer "present."" "What are you, deaf?" "Mario Brega's specialty was playing characters that punched people like that." "Only this time he's been given a bad eye, in keeping with all the dismemberment and disability that's all surrounding him, as a symbol of the war." "Wallace's left eye seems to have lost its pupil and he's got a scar running through the middle of it." "Great piece of makeup." "Sergeant!" "Remember, too, that a very successful film in Europe had recently been The Great Escape." "And there's one or two shots in the way that Betterville is filmed which are taken from John Sturges' film The Great Escape." "A shot that's coming up of the inmates looking wistfully through the stockade at the wilderness beyond and thinking, "Is it worth escaping?"" "which are very similar to an equivalent shot in The Great Escape." "Instead of motorbikes it's horses." "For the last time, Sergeant..." "I'm telling you, I want the prisoners treated as prisoners." "No more brutality." "There's hundreds of prisoners out there and only a few men to guard them." "Which was the issue in Andersonville." "That when the trial took place of those who were responsible for Andersonville, the defense was the supply lines weren't good enough, there wasn't enough staff to run it and so the only substitute for proper resourcing was extreme brutality." "And Commandant Wirtz, who was the man in charge of it, always claimed that that was the problem." "He was under-resourced so he had to be sadistic in order to keep order." "It was a very similar argument, but it had never been applied to the Union side." "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." "Very nasty again, Van Cleef at his most sneery." "The man with the gunsight eyes, "Just so long as you are Commandant,"" "which isn't going to be very long and then the safety catch will be completely off, and the Bad can do what he likes." "...and bring to a court-martial... all those who discredit and dishonor... the uniform of the Union." "I wish you luck." ""I wish you luck," a very cynical line." "I want to bring in anyone who brings discredit to the Union." ""Well," says the Van Cleef character, goodness knows how you're going to do that."" "A very mid-'60s sentiment about idealism." "That whole sequence of the Camp Commandant was in fact cut from the British print, which went down to 148 minutes on first release." "And we lost the gunsmith, we lost this sequence in the concentration camp and we lost various other trims, to take it down from three hours to 148 minutes." "But that's an important piece of context, both about the Civil War and about the kind of moral ambiguities that are surrounding this story." "There are good people, they're fighting the good fight, but it's an uphill struggle." "Two of Van Cleef's gang who are part of this scam, stealing from the prisoners, were played by Aldo Sambrell and Benito Stefanelli, who were regular hard men for Leone in his first two films." "In fact Stefanelli was a stunt coordinator and stunt director as well, which he was on this film." "So, to the strains of Morricone's Civil War lament, one of his three Civil War themes, the bad guys decide to lay low." "And in fact we are about to have the one piece of music that's justified by the story, actually internal music which relates to the story." "Remember, in For a Few Dollars More there's the chiming watch and in Once Upon a Time in the West there's a harmonica where a main musical theme is justified by the story." "Now, what's coming up is the concentration camp orchestra, which will play a soldier's lament, a Confederate lament to hide the sound of the brutality that's going on inside this room, as Tuco is beaten up" "to give the information to Lee Van Cleef about where the gold is hidden." "So the theme, The Ballad of the Soldier, which we've had reference to on the soundtrack, will now become a vocal theme" "with a choir singing it on the soundtrack." "It's in fact the only song with English words that was ever to appear in a Leone film." "More eating." "We've had the soup, we've had the corn on the cob, we've had the chicken, we've had the potatoes, and now we go back to "eat the minister."" "Whiskey and minestrone." ""I'll bet he got himself an easy job... and he never forgets a friend."" "I never forget old friends, Tuco." "In a lot of Italian Westerns, 'cause subsequently after his success in this film" "Lee Van Cleef stayed for many more Westerns in Italy, in the late '60s and early '70s, he was often to wear a toupee to make himself look younger and more of the action hero." "But in this movie it's Van Cleef's real hair." "He was a veteran actor in Hollywood who had been around since the early '50s and Leone wanted him to look like that." "Well, if you were with Sibley, that means then that you..." "His carnival character is eating as if it's his last meal, which it well might be, but he's really shoveling it down and wants another drink as well." "Sancho Panza's belly is empty." "In fact, Eli Wallach went on to play" "Sancho Panza in a version of Don Quixote on American television." "And the character was one of his personal favorites as well." "And if you look closely at Eli Wallach's lips in this speech in a moment about Angel Eyes, you'll see that he's in fact saying Sentenza, not Angel Eyes." "So when the film was shot, Van Cleef was still known as Sentenza." "It was only when the dubbing occurred into English that Angel Eyes came along." "Sergeant Angel Eyes." "And of course, the orchestra playing outside is not just a reference to the American Civil War, but is a reference to Auschwitz and concentration camps in the Second World War where precisely camp orchestras played in order to hide the cries of the condemned." "So a European audience would have picked up on this reference." "In fact there are lots of references, not just to the American Civil War but to the First World War, the Céline book and the film La Grande guerra, but later on there will be references to the Second World War as well with the Battle of the Bridge." "So, yes, it's the American Civil War, but it's also a statement about the whole of warfare." "It's a kind of surreal fusion of different historical wars from the 1860s onwards." "So here's the snuff box again that was first discovered in that Confederate ambulance." "And the song begins with the Confederate orchestra." "The words for the song, The Ballad of the Soldier, were written by a British songwriter called Tommy Connor." "Now I hate to lower the tone, but Tommy Connor was the man who wrote the deathless number I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." "And he also wrote the English words for the German Propaganda song" "Lili Marlene, which was made famous by Marlene Dietrich." "So, it is extremely bizarre that a songwriter who did the English words for Lili Marlene should be writing the words for the concentration camp orchestra in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "And his whole idea of torture, Leone once said, goes back to those movies made in 1944 and 1945 about collaboration with the Nazis in the Second World War." "Looking just like a photograph by Mathew Brady." "And cutting to this shot that almost could have come from The Great Escape, of them all standing there looking outward through the stockade." "There was in fact some dialog here originally in the shooting script, but they cut it." "So Wallace is the hard guy who comes in and beats up Tuco to Angel Eyes' orders." "Again this was trimmed when the film first came out, just as the attack on Maria the prostitute was cut because of excessive brutality." "It's a very nasty scene which goes on just a little bit too long and Van Cleef smiling that half-smile as he watches." "There is a lot of torture in Leone's films." "You know, Dr. Villega being tortured in Duck, You Sucker, and other characters being tortured in For a Few Dollars More." "There were all sorts of direct references to the Resistance in the hills above Nazi-occupied Rome and those who didn't join the Resistance and who were thought perhaps to have collaborated or to have worked too readily under the Nazi regime." "So this idea of torture, will you crack under torture, would you talk, would you give away your colleagues, went very, very deep in Italian film culture in the 1960s." "And again audiences would have picked up on this." "It isn't just the American Civil War, what's being enacted is that other war when the Nazis came into Rome, when the Allies were bombing Rome and where American soldiers had landed at Salerno and were marching north." "Rome, Open City which has a famous scene where someone is tortured at the SS headquarters on the Via Tasso in Rome to give away details of the Underground, and doesn't do so and gets shot at dawn." "Leone remembered all those things and they come through in these sequences." "A touching shot of a Confederate boy crying as he plays this Ballad of a Soldier and because he can hear what's going on inside the room." "Play that fiddle, you!" ""Play that fiddle."" "He certainly found some hungry-looking extras to play the choir and Confederate band." "And you know, there were a lot of memories in the Italian film industry of those who fought for the Resistance in the Second World War and some of those went on to make" "Italian Westerns where themes of the Resistance come through." "Like Giulio Questi's Django Kill where Questi, the director, claimed there were all sorts of direct references to the Resistance in the hills..." "And Eli Wallach has recalled having a discussion with Mario Brega about the finer points of how to deal with a scene like this." "In particular, applying finger pressure just on the temples in order to have maximum effect on sobering someone up in that way." "So the idea is Tuco gives Mario Brega a seminar on how to be a sadist, he looks as though he doesn't need it." "What did he say about the money?" "The whole point is that Tuco knows the name of the cemetery, but he literally doesn't know the name on the grave, so it's not a matter of whether he's tough or not." "He actually hasn't got the information." "Sad Hill Cemetery." ""Sad Hill Cemetery."" "Which grave?" "I don't know." "I don't know, I tell you." "And you can tell from Van Cleef's facial expression he believes Tuco when he says he doesn't know." "It's not a matter of holding out 'cause he knows that Tuco's spirit has been broken." "So he's gonna have to deal with Blondie." "So Blondie comes in, in his Confederate uniform, and has thrown at him the costume that he will wear in A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More." "His denim shirt, his sheepskin waistcoat, his shrunk-to-fit jeans." "That trademark costume of the Man with No Name is thrown at him courtesy of Lee Van Cleef." "So that's where he got it and he's gonna wear it for the rest of this movie as well." " Where?" " To find $200,000." ""For you the war is over."" "This, of course, was almost a parody line even in the mid 1960s and the kind of thing you got in bad Second World War movies where the Nazi commandant would say, "For you the war is over."" "Well, Lee Van Cleef says it with a straight face." "You're not gonna give me the same treatment?" "Would you talk?" "No, probably not." "That's what I thought." "Not that you're any tougher than Tuco... but you're smart enough to know that talking won't save you." ""You're smart enough to know that talking won't save you."" "So it's not in the end a matter of toughness, which is just as well, because Blondie has shown that he isn't in fact as physically tough as Tuco." "It's a matter of knowing that he's gonna get shot anyway, so why should he give away the information?" "He knows just how bad Lee Van Cleef is." "You've changed partners, but you still got the same deal." "I'm not greedy." "I'm only taking half." "So he gets back his gun belt from Rawhide and gets back his Man with No Name outfit." "Yeah." "And as Tuco and Corporal Wallace walk to the railway station which was filmed at La Calahorra, near Guadix in Spain, exactly the same location as the opening sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West." "And in fact, Flagstone, the town in Once Upon a Time in the West was built about 300 yards away from the railway line." "We actually go past Mathew Brady taking a Civil War photo of all these Union officers in their Sunday best." "So if we hadn't got the references, and there are many, many references to the Civil War photographs of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, there was another example of a real historical figure, unusually in a Leone film, just to nudge us in that direction." "During the rest of the movie and in particular the Battle of the Bridge, there'll be various setups that could almost have been taken from Mathew Brady portfolios of photos, taken at Antietam and Gettysburg and the carnage on the battlefield." "There are a couple of moments which are taken directly from those photographers." "And it almost comes as a surprise to see Clint Eastwood walking into them." "If I ever get you down... you're gonna need a lot of help to get up again." "So, he's about to be thumped, train whistle saves him." "That's the third time that a moment in the war has come and saved their skin." "There is the mortar in the hotel, there is the Confederate ambulance and now the train." "So he's not gonna get thumped to pulp by Wallace, he is gonna get on the train." "And on the front of the train is a Confederate spy strapped to the cowcatcher." "And there isn't any partner this time to shoot you down." "Always these locomotive scenes were made in and around Guadix and Calahorra because the main Guadix-Almería railway line ran there and it was a matter of getting the engines from Guadix, dressing them up to look like Wild West engines," "getting the rolling stock and putting them on that main railway line." "And as the train pulls out there is a very detailed moment which is very Leone, where there is a mortar on the back of the train" "surrounded by a wooden cage to protect it which again looks as though it's either taken from an archive photo or perhaps from Buster Keaton's The General, which itself was based on a close viewing of the armaments of the American Civil War." "This sequence just coming up was in Italian prints when it was distributed but was cut from the American prints, and certainly from British prints, and was only put back 35 years later." "It's Lee Van Cleef bivouacking with the strange sound of these birds in the background, and it introduces us a bit to his gang of hard men, whom we've only seen in medium shot up to now" "and haven't really been introduced to." "Although Italians would notice their names on the credits." "So you got Blondie half-asleep, but not really sleeping, and Lee Van Cleef." "The camera goes from one to the other." "Blondie has his hand on his gun all night." "Hears a sound, shoots as one of Van Cleef's men walks up to him." "Van Cleef doesn't seem to mind at all, his men are completely expendable." "If they come up too silently, that's what they deserve." "So that tells us something about Van Cleef and the others come out of hiding." "And we get a close-up of each of them to introduce us to Van Cleef's gang of carpetbaggers." "This is the only moment where we actually meet them." "In the prints that circulated in America and Britain from 1968, we never were introduced to these characters." "Aldo Sambrell, Benito Stefanelli, all of them well know from Leone's earlier films." "Six..." "Perfect number." "Isn't three the perfect number?" "So we have a sound alike for Lee Van Cleef and we have Clint Eastwood dubbing his own part 35 years later." "Train whistle to show that they're near the railway line and to link with Eli Wallach on his journey to prison." "Union troops are now victorious." "Sibley has been repulsed at Glorieta and other smaller engagements, and is on his way busily retreating out of New Mexico back into Texas with huge loss of life." "So instead of the first half of the film where Sibley's troops are pouring into New Mexico, what we would get now is a sense of Union troops fighting back and pushing him into the desert." "So this is a Union troop train working for Canby against Sibley's forces." "Sure would like to put your paw on it, huh?" "Nobody goes to sleep in a Leone film." "You always keep a weather eye open, in case someone's going to steal your armament when you're asleep." "Nobody trusts anyone." "It has the atmosphere of a Looney Tune or a Warner Brothers cartoon where there is absolutely an atmosphere like Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny." "There is no sense of trust between the characters at all." "It's a matter of who's gonna get the upper hand and who's gonna have the edge and when are they going to have it." "It has a cartoon-like quality, the lack of trust." "Like cats, nobody closes their eyes properly." "And Tuco eats messily, he swears, and on this occasion he's peeing out of the side of the train, which is a scene that wasn't characteristic of the West." "And I think it may have been a first, but he is using it as a way of pulling Wallace off the train." "Again this was trimmed, this moment where he bangs his head against the stone." "That was taken out of British prints for censorship reasons." "The brutality was thought to be a little bit too much." "And a famous moment now is coming up which was originally derived from the Buster Keaton film Our Hospitality, where Buster Keaton is roped to, playing a character called McKay, is roped to the bad guy and he drapes the rope over the railway line" "and waits for the early steam locomotive to go over the rope to separate him from the bad guy." "Well, this is a variation on that." "They are handcuffed together and the handcuffs were made of soft lead and it was draped over the railway line and Tuco waits for the next train to cut through them." "It's the only way of cutting himself loose." "And Wallach remembers making this scene because it very nearly got quite unpleasant." "There they are lying, there is Wallace on the railway line, there is Tuco, there's the soft lead of the handcuffs between them." "And Leone wanted the train to come along and he wanted everyone to know that it wasn't a stuntman who was actually lying by the railway line." "So he kept saying to Eli Wallach, "Turn towards the audience and make sure that your head is well in shot,"" "and Wallach noticed that slung underneath the railway carriages were some metal steps that were narrowly missing his head and that if he did put his head any higher he would in fact have it banged very badly and possibly fatally." "But, "No, let's do it again," said Leone, and eventually they did agree to do it again, but only if they dug a hole for Wallach to go in so his head wouldn't be sticking up too much." "And he lives to fight another day." "And a remarkable shot." "Takes off his jacket, gets back on the train without the train even slowing down." "So Tuco is back on his journey, and a bit of Morricone punctuation to remind us of what a slapstick moment it was." "Now most of the towns we've encountered in this film, very often parts of Carlo Simi's set in Tabernas in Almería, were in quite good nick." "But we are now going to be introduced to a town that's been flattened by the retreating Confederates and the advancing Northern troops." "It's the town of Peralta, and this sequence was in fact shot north of Madrid at a place called Colmenar Viejo, which was a standing Western set." "Here we have, to match the Confederate spy on the front of the cowcatcher, a looter, who is about to be shot by a makeshift firing squad." "He brings his own coffin to the party, he gets shot." "So these are little vignettes of moments in the Civil War." "There isn't much glory and chivalry there." "There's looting, the spying, there is dismemberment and that's the kind of stuff you get in battle." "But the troops are moving through this town of Peralta and the set had in fact been there for some time." "It was known in the trade as Aberdeen City, the set, and it was made for a Raoul Walsh film called The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw which is a very rare British Western that had been made a few years before with Kenneth More as the sheriff" "and Jayne Mansfield as the saloon girl." "And the set was standing at Colmenar Viejo, north of Madrid, quite near where Fistful of Dollars was shot, and Carlo Simi, the production designer, did a series of drawings, distressing the entire set," "turning it into matchwood and rubble and a town which had been under mortar fire." "So what you've got is a town that's been bombarded from all sides." "The shell of a town, a refugee town, which has a rather modern ring to it." "And they've got to get through this town in order to get to Sad Hill Cemetery." "Reintroduced to Tuco, he's got off his train, he's made it to Peralta." "So Blondie is in Peralta and so are Tuco." "They got to get together and take on Angel Eyes' gang." "But we are about to be introduced to another character that we were first introduced to eight months before in the autumn of 1861." "We are now in the spring/summer of 1862, and we're going to meet an old friend who has been hanging around since that scene in the ghost town." "One of the people that Tuco shot, who has lost his arm as a result of that incident, played by the Canadian actor Al Mulock." "He was originally to have been played by the Hollywood character actor Jack Elam, and in fact on the shooting script, this character here was referred to as Elam throughout." "But eventually they got Jack Elam for that wonderful grizzled face with his wayward eye for the first scene of Once Upon a Time in the West," "Leone's next film, and instead Al Mulock played the part." "It gives an idea of the passage of time." "Again that's quite unusual in Leone's films where you're in this kind of Never-Never Land where you don't know how much time has passed." "But here's someone who makes reference to the fact that he was shot eight months before." "One of the aspects of Leone's films that is still underrated is the contribution of production designer Carlo Simi and his assistant, the art director Carlo Leva." "It's detailed, it has that distressed, dusty, destroyed kind of look to it." "Leone towns are very desolate, remote places." "Either the Adobe model or the ghost town at the beginning made of old wood." "And there is a very detailed kind of peep show historical kind of production design." "Everything is magnified a bit, everything's exaggerated a bit." "The rooms are a bit bigger than they should be." "There is a bit too much rubble lying around." "But it was to have a huge influence on production design." "And Carlo Simi was a trained architect who had first got into the business in the 1950s working on films like Helen of Troy, with the production designer Ken Adam." "He had also worked on Romulus and Remus, a film that Leone had written and that was directed by Sergio Corbucci." "But he came into his own with Fistful of Dollars and he had this very close creative relationship with Leone." "Somehow Leone had these larger-than-life images in his mind, and Simi was the man who could create them for him." "And these scenes made at Colmenar are a very good example of that." "It's all a little bit over-the-top." "It's like the music, it has an amplified, exaggerated feel to it." "And we are about to lead up to one of the great gags." "Just like "there are two kinds of people in this world."" "There's the great bathtub gag, which was to have an afterlife in of all places, the John Wayne film Big Jake, which took this joke and reworked it." "I never thought..." "I remember the surprise, I never thought I'd see the day where a spaghetti Western joke would end up in a John Wayne movie, but it did." "The thing about the gunfights in this film is that very often one or other of the parties is unprepared." "It's not like Fistful of Dollars or Few Dollars More where they're all straight shoot gun-downs or shootouts between two people who are thoroughly prepared." "People are often sort of discovered metaphorically with their pants down and they have to recover the situation, which adds a bit of extra tension to the sequence." "So here is Wallach having a bath with his soapsuds." "I've been looking for you for eight months." "Whenever I should've had a gun in my right hand, I thought of you." "Now I find you in exactly the position that suits me." "I had lots of time to learn how to shoot with my left." "When you have to shoot, shoot." "Don't talk." ""When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk."" "In a way, that could be the motto of Sergio Leone's films where the dialog was kept to a minimum, the music was heightened and there is a lot of action." "In fact, I was once doing an interview with Tonino Delli Colli who famously doesn't have much time for critics." "He said to me, "You know, the trouble with critics is they treat movies as if they're Picasso paintings." "You know, we try to get the lights in the right position, we try to stop the actors walking into the cameras and that's our job."" "He has a very downbeat description of what the role of the director of photography is." "And I said, "I guess your motto in life could be," "'If you are going to shoot, shoot." "Don't talk about it."' He said, "Exactly." "I don't like critics talking about it very much."" "That phrase has come in very useful." "And here is a very good example of Leone's use of landscape." "You know, you've got this bombed-out city, Peralta." "And they're walking through it with this urban sensibility." "The game is to get from one end of the town to the other, so they can move on." "And Tuco will sort of crouch and hide in corners." "Eastwood will walk with pride down the middle of the street because he is pure cool and has this great sense of timing." "And they're just gonna walk through this Western landscape." "They are not gonna pause, they are not going to get nostalgic about it." "They are not going to turn the desert into a garden or do anything productive with the landscape." "They just got to get through it like you get through a street in a city in order to drive through it and get through the other side as quickly as possible." "And that's their attitude to the landscape." "And where the morality of these characters is concerned, this ambiguous morality, the Ugly who is actually quite charming, the Good who is capable of very unpleasant behavior, the Bad who occasionally has moments of humanity," "Leone said that one of the starting points for that aspect of the film when the title, it was originally called" "Two Magnificent Tramps, Two Magnificent Rogues, and when they settled on the title The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he said his thinking on this was based upon an old Roman song, which was sometimes used as a nursery rhyme which went," ""A cardinal is dead, who did good and bad things." "The bad he did very well and the good he did badly."" "And that idea runs through all the relationships in this film." "That there is good and bad in all people, and that maybe the absolute categories of the traditional Western needed challenging." "Maybe there were shades of gray." "But, of course, there is a cartoon-like quality to the characters as well, that, you know, they are not particularly nuanced or complex human beings, apart from Tuco." "And in fact Clint Eastwood has said that the Eastwood character, who's almost like a cartoon character, would seem ludicrous in a painting by Renoir, would seem ludicrous in a serious piece of art." "It's the slapstick with a gun license." "It's the adventure movie with tragic consequences." "It's those sort of juxtapositions that make sense of these characters." "They are very like cartoon characters, like the Fox and the Cat in Pinocchio, the relationship between the two of them." "But it has its subtleties as well." "It doesn't matter." "I'll kill them all." "They shot him at close range." "So you haven't just got Blondie and Tuco walking through Peralta." "You've also got mortar fire." "You don't know where it is coming from." "It might be from the Union side, it might be from the retreating Confederate side." "But mortars, bombs and smokescreens appear all the time as a kind of unseen force that alters the game." "They'll come looking for us." "Watch out." "There's two of them." "I want that blond alive." ""That blond," they keep saying, "That blond." He isn't blond." "That isn't his natural coloring." "But on the Italian script it says, "Biondo,"" "and in the published novelization of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly he's called Whitey, but I'm afraid Clint Eastwood isn't blond." "It's a matter of where you're sitting, I guess." ""I want that blond alive."" "So Tuco is now wearing a cowboy hat rather than the straw sombrero that he got from Western Costume." "He's beginning to look like a Western gunman, although he doesn't have a holster, he has his gun in his pocket." "Were you gonna die alone?" "A moment of camaraderie which is underscored by electric guitar and insistent drum beats of Morricone's score." "A moment of warmth between the two men." "They actually need each other." "They are not gonna get through this individually." "Two against Angel Eyes' gang is quite something, but one would be impossible." "Look at the difference." "Eastwood cool, striding down the street in full view of everybody, whereas Tuco is scurrying around the corridors like a rat." "Different philosophies of life embodied in their actions." "Example of Morricone's percussive score rather like the score for the robbery of the Bank of El Paso in For a Few Dollars More, he uses for this walking down the street." "Aldo Sambrell in close-up in the foreground, one of the surviving bad guys." "Percussion, piano to punctuate this, and they are just about to shoot them and the Civil War intervenes again to save them." "A mortar from nowhere blows up in the street and provides cover for the good guys to get away." "Whoever is firing these mortars, they are very, very helpful." "As Leone said about this film, it's a series of curtains of dust and smoke behind which all these games of deception take place." "So just as the dust on the Union uniform makes it look like a Confederate uniform, so the smoke and dust in this town provides cover." " Angel Eyes is mine, huh?" " All right." "And there was a piece of improvisation or a late decision for the scene that's coming up because Angel Eyes leaves a note for them, and on the shooting script the note says, "Bravi." "A presto."" ""Bravo, both of you." "Till later."" "But in this version it's, "See you soon, idiots."" "And Tuco can't read the word "idiots." "Idi..." "Idi..."" "And Clint Eastwood says, "Idiots." "It's for you."" "But if you look closely at Clint Eastwood's mouth movements, he is in fact saying, "It's for us."" "And the idea to say, "It's for you,"" "obviously occurred to them in the dubbing studio." ""Idiots."" "It's for us." "No, it isn't. "It's for you, Tuco."" "Tuco has difficulty, is challenged where reading is concerned, which will be important later on when we get to the graveyard." "And if you noticed, there is a change of scenery." "There is much more greenery in these latter sequences of the film, and, in fact, the Betterville Concentration Camp was also filmed in a different part of Spain to the rest of the film." "Up to now most of the film has been made in Almería, in the deserts of southern Spain or on sets just north of Madrid, with interiors shot at Elios Studios in Rome." "But Leone once said that southern Spain looks like Arizona or New Mexico but northern Spain looks like Virginia." "And so we are moving into a different world of greenery where the sequences were shot just south of Burgos in northern Spain, in the region of Castilla-León." "And this sequence was filmed at Covarrubias, with the River Arlanza in the distance, a location chosen by Carlo Simi for reasons which shall be explained with this wonderful overhead shot." "This is a great example of Leone's trompe I'oeil effect." "There they are with their map." ""Where are we?"" "Suddenly some Union troops are there." "They appear out of nowhere." "The crane goes over the bushes and you've got this vast battlefield just out of their sight line." "It's like a surrealist juxtaposition of just the kind that Leone liked." "We've got trenches." "We've got a huge array of Civil War artillery." "Some of it borrowed from the war museum in Madrid, and some of them were designed by Carlo Simi based on prints of the period." "The big Parrot guns and the Rogers' battery were designed by Carlo Simi, and I have seen the drawings, whereas the mortars tended to be borrowed." "So you have got a mixture of real historical weaponry and specially designed weaponry." "And here you have the Neapolitan actor/comedian Aldo Giuffrè, who was a pupil of the great actor De Filippo, and who is the Union Captain, Captain Clinton, the last of the character studies in this epic film." "Giuffrè delivers a homily about how the only way to get through war is to get completely sandblasted, to get drunk." "And it's the last kind of cynical statement from a serving officer in the battle lines." "The only way to get through this is to get drunk." "And in fact the speech was taken from a famous piece of Italian literature by a man called Emilio Lussu and the book was called A Year on the Plains, and it's all about the First World War." "And a First World War officer says in this text," ""The only way to get through this is to get drunk."" "Very, very cynical." "The man in command of all these troops and he has to get sandblasted in order to get through the day." "So they've stumbled on a battlefield, and again, you know, people might say, they are probably in Texas by now from New Mexico." "So what are they doing in Texas?" "Why is there about to be a pitched battle in Texas?" "I mean, one associates carnage in pitched battles with, say, Antietam Creek in the American Civil War, where the creek was stained with the blood of soldiers of both sides, or with Gettysburg, but one doesn't associate it with Texas." "And although there was Glorieta, there wasn't a pitched battle on this scale in the Texas theater of war, and incidentally, there weren't any railroads in this theater of war yet, either, because they hadn't been built." "But what the hell?" "It's a statement about war in general." "The trenches of the First World War, a speech which Italian audiences would recognize as being from a book about the First World War, but also concentration camps, the Second World War, Nazis." "It's a statement about war in general." "So does it matter there wasn't a pitched battle in Texas?" "I guess it doesn't." "You want to enlist, hmm?" "Let's go." "Come on, gentlemen." "Come on." "And part of this sequence was cut after the Italian release from American and British prints, where the officer lays it on..." "This bit." "Where the officer lays it on about booze and takes them on a conducted tour of the trenches and shows them the battlefield." "This was all cut and was put back 35 years later." "Whoever has the most liquor to get the soldiers drunk and send them to be slaughtered..." "is the winner." "We and the ones over on the other side of the river only have one thing in common." "All of us reek of alcohol." "When they did the recce of the River Arlanza and the Valley overlooking it, which seemed perfect for this pitched battle, they hadn't accounted for the fact that in the summer it almost entirely dried up, and they were shooting this film" "between April and July, and this was late in the shooting schedule, so we're in June-July 1966." "So, Carlo Simi had to design a barrage to actually redirect water to the River Arlanza in order to flood it, and get water under that bridge in the month that they were making it." "That will become an important part of the story, when our two heroes place the dynamite charges on the bridge and have to wade through the river in order to do so." "The Rebs have decided that damn bridge... is the key to this whole area." "This was the most elaborate sequence that Leone had ever made up to this point as a director." "Of course he'd been involved in the 1950s in the chariot race in Ben-Hur, in the siege of Troy from Helen of Troy, stuff in the arena for Quo Vadis, but in his own movies this was the first time he'd really had the budget to go for it" "with a lot of members of the Spanish army dressed in Union uniforms on one side of the river, and dressed in Confederate uniforms on the other for a pitched battle." "And partly this pitched battle was a reference and Leone, actually, when I interviewed him about this, said it was a Keatonian echo, which was a slightly pretentious way of saying it's a reference to Buster Keaton's film The General, 1926," "where there is the Battle of Rock Bridge." "The famous scene where a Union officer sends a train across a burning bridge and says, "Ah, well, it's all right." ""The bridge will stand up, it isn't burned out yet."" "And the locomotive gets halfway across the bridge, and the Union commander sees the bridge collapse and the train nosedive into the river." "And that's very much what Leone had in mind, the Battle of the Bridge from The General, just as there's been an earlier reference to Our Hospitality by Keaton." "Of course, the other great cinematic reference is Gone with the Wind." "Itself a film full of refugees, and hospitals, and the side effects of war." "The collateral damage of war." "And containing that famous crane shot of all the wounded soldiers at the railhead in Atlanta, Georgia, which is very like both this sequence and the sequence which follows it in the cemetery, with miles and miles of uniformed soldiers, many of them dismembered," "who have been damaged or wounded by the war." "So there's reference to Gone with the Wind, but there's also reference to The General." "And, in the fact that this is utterly pointless as an engagement, the real historical events that Leone may have had in mind from the American Civil War are obviously Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, the famous doomed charge, but also the three-day engagement" "at Antietam Creek, which also involved a river, and which also involved huge amounts of bloodshed." "And which was photographed by some of the Civil War photographers, which gave Leone the visual reference for these." "So it may not have happened in Texas but it did happen in one way or another." "This supremely pointless engagement centered on a bridge." "Sergio Donati, one of the screenwriters who worked uncredited on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and did a lot of the final polishing of the script, and a lot of the post-production between July and December, 1966," "with editor Nino Baragli, which was an incredible task because Leone over-shot like mad and there were many, many options in the editing, and the sound design took a very long time." "In fact, Baragli said the experience was like being pulverized, sitting in the editing room for so many months." "But Donati said at one point, when looking at sequences like this, he said to Leone, "Why don't you make a small movie?" ""Your movies are getting bigger and bigger and bigger." "Each film you make has a cast of thousands, there is a set piece sequence." "Where is it going to end?" "You are trying to turn into David Lean." "Why not make a movie set in an apartment in Rome in the present day which is a small-scale thriller, or something like that, or an Antonioni-style movie?"" "But Leone had very grandiose ideas and was fascinated by spectacle." "So his movies got bigger and bigger, and they don't come much bigger than the Battle of the Bridge." "So the two sides converge on this bridge designed by Carlo Simi." "It's a destroyed stone bridge which has a wooden superstructure, it's a mixture of stone and wood." "And of course there's the famous story told by all the different participants of how the blowing up of the bridge went wrong in the live action version of the "Ready when you are, C.B." gag." "Basically the charges were laid by Spanish artificers and the Spanish officer who had been in charge of laying this dynamite was given the honor of pressing the detonator when someone said the word "Vaya," "Go." "Go for it. "" "And the Spanish officer was chatting to a props man and misheard the word "Vaya," pressed the detonator and the bridge blew up, while Leone and Tonino Delli Colli, the director of photography, watched from above and could not believe their eyes." "It had taken 3 weeks to build this 200-yard bridge, and it was going to take a long time to rebuild." "But the Spanish army stepped into the breach and rebuilt it in two and a half days flat." "So they were able to re-shoot the blowing up of the bridge, but it was a bad moment for everybody." "They also put so much dynamite on it that they were worried that a Renaissance monastery, which was two miles away from the River Arlanza, might actually be rocked by the explosion." "But, luckily, that didn't happen." "So the local historians could breathe a sigh of relief even though there were two explosions for the price of one." " Blondie?" " Huh?" ""I've never seen so many men wasted so badly."" "This was the line that got a cheer when I saw it in San Francisco in 1968." "Blondie standing there with this bird's-eye view of the battlefield, making a judgment on these troop movements." "It chimed so well with what was on the audiences' minds in the Western world in the mid to late 1960s." "Yeah." "Then these idiots would go somewhere else to fight." "Maybe." "In Le Grande guerra, The Great War, this film written by Luciano Vincenzoni and Age and Scarpelli, there's a scene where our two heroes become stretcher-bearers during a lull in the carnage." "And they wander around carrying the stretchers and the camera in a series of tracking shots surveys the results of all these Italian troops coming out of their trenches in the First World War and it's a very shocking sequence." "But also with a comedy element, and that's picked up on in this scene that's about to happen where Blondie and Tuco decide to take the explosives to the bridge on stretchers in a lull during the proceedings." "And what's extraordinary is these two self-serving bastards, 'cause that's basically what they are, are about to make the Union officer's dream come true." "He's been dreaming that someone will blow up the bridge and then they won't have to fight this mad engagement every day with all the carnage that happens." "And it takes Tuco and Blondie to do that for him for completely different motives." "They're not interested in the American Civil War." "They're interested in getting to the other side of the river so they can go to Sad Hill Cemetery and find $200,000 in gold, in Confederate gold." "A little of this will help." "Another Italian bottle to offer the Union commander." "Take a slug of this, Captain." "Keep your ears open." "I guess this is one of, in a strange way, this is one of the most realistic depictions of the American Civil War ever put on film." "It doesn't have the well-scrubbed, over-lit look of Gone with the Wind, or the sanitized Raintree County approach to battle." "You really get a sense of carnage, of bullets hitting people and of the damage that could be done with the kind of ammunition that was available in 1861 to 1865, so graphically described in that famous TV documentary series about the American Civil War." "If you got hit by one of those bullets, the chances are that gangrene would set in and you would lose a limb." "It did a lot of damage even when you were only scratched." "There's a real sense of that kind of damage being done in this sequence." "And even despite all that Leone allows himself a moment of comedy with these two sort of Laurel and Hardy characters carrying a stretcher with the explosives on it." "It's like "loot" written on a bag of two thieves breaking into a house." "It's almost a cartoon image as the stretcher-bearers take away the wounded in this lull in the battle." "And playing against the comedy of the scene, this lyrical choral version of one of Ennio Morricone's American Civil War musical themes." "It's the theme that was whistled when they arrived in the concentration camp and played on the harmonica." "In fact, it was played on the harmonica when they first arrived at the concentration camp by Franco De Gemini, the man that played the harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West for Charles Bronson." "But here it's tenor voices humming." "So it's lyrical and sad and emotional, but what's going on is quite surreal." "Here's the water in the River Arlanza courtesy of Carlo Simi's barrage in order to prevent it being dried up." "And again, there are moments in this sequence which were cut from both the American and British prints." "We just got a sense of them strapping dynamite onto one of the legs of the bridge, but here there's much more." "...it sure would be a pity." "And at last it's the moment for Tuco to admit his half of the secret and to ask Blondie to admit his half." "The interesting thing is Tuco tells the truth and Blondie lies, as we'll subsequently discover." "So, il Buono, the Good, is not necessarily as straight as he seems and il Brutto, the Ugly," "is not necessarily as ugly as he seems." "Of course, there had been a lot of blowing up of bridges in spectacular cinema in the years preceding The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "Famously, obviously, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and that's referenced in the whistling as the troops in lockstep arrive at the Betterville Concentration Camp." "The Colonel Bogey theme is also referenced here with the blowing up of the bridge." "The Pride and the Passion about the Peninsular War in Spain made by Stanley Kramer with Cary Grant also involved the blowing up of a bridge." "But I guess the most specific reference is John Ford's The Horse Soldiers, the engagement at Baton Rouge, where John Wayne refuses a slug of whiskey just before the engagement, which is possibly satirized in the Union commander, not only refusing a slug of whiskey" "but actually pouring it down his throat in order to get through the day." "The final scene of The Horse Soldiers involves the blowing up of a bridge and an engagement in the American Civil War." "So that may have been a reference as well." "Very often the movies of John Ford lie behind Leone's visual decisions because they made a huge impact on him when he was a child and it took him a long time to exorcise them and get them out of his system, and this would happen a lot" "in Once Upon a Time in the West, where there are many, many references to John Ford's movies." "This is a wonderful moment now where Tuco, when asked to give his half of the secret, can't quite bring himself to say it and enunciate the words." "It's a classic Eli Wallach moment." "He's trying to get the words "Sad Hill" out." "The name of the cemetery is..." "Sad Hill." "Now it's your turn." "The name on the grave is..." "Arch Stanton." "Arch Stanton?" "Tuco is right to be a bit quizzical about this." "It isn't, actually, as we'll discover." "But it's too late to make an issue of it." "And there's a cut here from the bridge with this very short fuse to Tuco and Blondie being about half a mile away as they jump in, which is slightly farfetched." "But there's a story there, too, because Leone wanted the two actors to sit very close to the bridge when the explosion happened." "And Clint Eastwood said to Leone, "I'll do it if you will, Sergio."" "And eventually Sergio Leone stood about half a mile away watching and two extras sat there during the blowing up of the bridge, and as you can see, debris flies around in a very dangerous way striking both of them." "So in take one the bridge blew up by mistake and in take two, two extras were nearly very badly hurt, but Eastwood and Wallach very sensibly didn't want to lie quite so close to the blowing up of the bridge." "When asked about this Sergio Leone smiled and said," ""Bridges tend to get blown up in my movies."" "And this isn't a minor explosion of the River Kwai kind, this is almost like a thermonuclear explosion as the entire bridge goes up and covers the neighborhood with smoke." "Close-ups of military hardware." "Final show of aggression between the two sides before they decide it's a complete waste of time and move on somewhere else, leaving the way clear." "A smokescreen covering the passage of time." "With the two of them asleep." "And then the following morning an improvised moment from Eli Wallach where he remembers getting up and stretching his legs as if he wanted to have a pee after a night's sleep in this rather uncomfortable position, and Leone thought" "that was absolutely hilarious." "It appealed to his rather earthy sense of humor." "So they kept it in." "Here's Tuco with his bottom showing and his legs crossed, being woken up unceremoniously by Blondie." "And then," "Tuco stretches his legs." "And they have indeed all gone, just leaving the sandbags and the basket work and the different barrages and trenches completely deserted but all the weaponry's gone." "There's Tuco adjusting his dress, having left a trail of pee on the ground." "And this shot is a reconstruction of a famous Civil War photograph by Alexander Gardner of the carnage after a battle." "I mean, much of it is based on Civil War archive photos but this one is very, very direct." "So they've got to the right side of the river and they're nearing destination." "But where is Lee Van Cleef?" "Where is Angel Eyes?" "He seems to have been out of the story for a very long time." "There's a very touching moment now with a chapel up on the hill where a young soldier is dying and rather like the transactions earlier in the film, giving a bottle of whiskey, giving a cigar, helping out" "various people on the edges of the battle," "Blondie will do just the same thing as a dying moment with this soldier." "How he manages to strike a match on his wet trousers," "I'll never know." "But somehow he succeeds to light up his cigarillo." "And there's a young Confederate soldier in amongst the rubble of the chapel." "So Blondie gives him his coat to cover the wound." "And also gives him a cigar, which leads to a moment which amongst cinema-goers in the '60s was very famous, the last moment of Jean-Luc Godard's film À bout de souffle, where the Jean-Paul Belmondo character, who has been" "sort of imitating a gangster throughout, gets shot, and on his dying breath the smoke from his cigarette trails out of his mouth, and you know that he's died when the smoke stops." "And this is a moment that's recaptured." "À bout de souffle." "Out of breath." "Breathless." "And Jean-Luc Godard will be referenced in the last moments of Leone's Duck, You Sucker, as well." "Pierrot le fou, another film with Belmondo, with the death of James Coburn." "But here it's À bout de souffle, and cineastes in Europe in the mid '60s would have recognized it immediately." "And Eastwood in exchange for his coat picks up his famous poncho." "So he's got his sheepskin waistcoat, he's got his denim shirt, and he's now got the poncho as well, and he's ready for the final settling of accounts, where he'll be dressed in iconic style at last." "And at last Tuco literally bumps into Sad Hill Cemetery." "The location is Carazo, south of the River Arlanza." "Leone employed 250 soldiers to dig what he referred to as 10,000 graves in two days in this vast military cemetery at Sad Hill." "And in the middle of the cemetery are stone graves, so it's built around a consecrated cemetery, but it radiates outwards in all directions." "A most wonderfully evocative set." "And the music is a theme by Morricone called The Ecstasy of Gold." "A simple four-note theme starting off on piano and oboe and then moving into bells and choir and clangs and drums and the soaring soprano voice of Edda Dell'Orso to become one of Morricone's most famous themes in his work for Italian Westerns." "The moment with the dog when Tuco arrives at the cemetery was in fact improvised." "They'd set up the sequence and Leone unleashed this dog to watch Tuco's instant reaction to it and Eli Wallach bristled." "So amidst all this organization there's an improvised moment and he's got to find the tomb with Arch Stanton written on it." "Shortly after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was completed, there was a parody of it that came out in Italy with a well-known comedy duo called Ciccio and Ingrassia and the film was called The Handsome, the Ugly and the Stupid." "It was made in 1967 and it finished it up in a graveyard." "They're looking for a grave with the name Smith on it." "And they see this graveyard with hundreds and thousands of graves and every single one has the name Smith on it." "So they can't find the gold." "But in this case they know there's only one Arch Stanton." "And Tonino Delli Colli, the director of photography, told me about how this sequence was filmed." "Basically he wanted to get a long shot and a close-up of Tuco running in circles around this cemetery, both at the same time." "So he put a pole on his tripod and a camera at each end, and on one of the cameras he had a 25mm lens, and on the other he had a 75mm lens." "And he turned them together so you got the shots of the graves spinning, but you also got the shots of Tuco, and as he put it, it took half the time to shoot it and it was much easier to edit." "Leone and Morricone have both said that the themes for the last 20 minutes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the musical themes, were written before the film was shot, and it certainly looks as though" "the movie was cut to a preexistent theme." "But none of the actors remember it being played on the set, unlike in Once Upon a Time in the West where they can all remember this open-reel tape playing the themes which they acted to." "But I think the thing that seems to have happened is that the music had been written and scored for a sort of minimal orchestra and Leone had it in his mind when he shot it and knew that he was going to cut to that music." "I think what we're watching, in other words, in the summer of 1966 is the birth of the rock video." "A piece of film that's exactly cut to this swelling theme on the soundtrack." "Music videos begin here." "The other thing that Tonino Delli Colli recalls is that there's a lot of close-up work from now on in the movie, and traditionally close-ups were knocked off by cameramen last thing in the evening, because you didn't need lots of extras" "in the background and you're not doing master shots, and so on." "But in Spain they were working 14 or 15 hours a day, said Delli Colli, and it was daylight in Spain till about 9:30 at night." "And Leone kept shooting and kept shooting until he was good and ready to stop, and they'd start with wide-lens shots and finish up with close-ups." "But close-ups took a very, very long time to set up, and Delli Colli kept saying, "Can't we go home?" ""It's the end of a long working day." "No, no." "Just one more close-up."" "And Delli Colli said that sometimes he had discussions with Leone, and the discussion consisted of Leone saying, "Bugger off, we'll continue till I'm good and ready."" "Now, Tuco was introduced with a dog running into a saloon in that ghost town at the very beginning, and a dog walked into the cemetery just as he arrived." "Now he's behaving like a dog as he digs through the earth in order to get to the coffin in Arch Stanton's grave, so the rat is becoming a dog." "Camera pulls back, shadow of Blondie, like a ghost he appears." "Tuco would have known he was there." "It's a real cinematic moment." "This figure is appearing, we haven't seen him before." "Presumably, Tuco would have seen him walking from about half a mile away." "But you pull back the camera and it discovers Blondie." "And it's about to happen again with the third of the lead characters." "But here in pantomime we have Tuco, "Will I pull my gun?" "No, it's not worth it." Blondie smiles." "Tuco's made the right decision." "Tuco picks up the spade, the shovel, to start digging again." "Yep." "Get digging." "But suddenly another spade appears underneath the camera's eye." "Organ music." "And at last, il Cattivo, the Bad, Sentenza." "Angel Eyes has arrived to make the triangle complete." "You're not digging." "Throughout the film there's a whole series of threesomes where in desert sequences or pieces of landscape where there aren't any telegraph poles or mountains to give you a sense of perspective, where the triangle creates the sense of perspective." "Three figures, one in the distance, two on either side, and one cut off by the frame on the edge, which create this perspective through the human beings who are inhabiting it." "And when asked why he did this, Leone said," ""It's like the paintings of Edgar Degas." "He did that with ballet dancers, where you have one in the distance to create perspective, one on the left, one on the right cut off by the frame of the painting." "And that sort of triangulation creates its own perspective."" "And that's what he was trying to do." "I'll write the name on the bottom of this stone." "This is the final time that Blondie lies in this movie," ""I'm gonna write the name on the bottom of this stone."" "In fact, he doesn't write anything, as we'll discover." "So, if he wasn't to survive the duel, nobody would know where the gold was hidden." "A moment of recognition of the way that il Cattivo uses his gun." "Very macho moment as the two size each other up as professionals." "And here in the script, it simply says, "The three..."" "In the shooting script, "The three in a triangle in the desolation of the cemetery." "Immobile." "Only the wind and the stones and the grass." "A long act of tension."" "And that's all it says to describe the next five minutes." "And on the soundtrack, we have a piece of music, a swelling piece of music by Morricone which is a kind of stately bolero, the kind of thing you might have played at a bullfight." "Flamenco guitar played very aggressively by Bruno Battisti D'Amario, castanet, mariachi trumpet." "And after the first verse, we have a reference to For a Few Dollars More, where a music box takes up the theme for a moment, which is a kind of wink in the direction of Leone's previous movie." "And the entire thing as these three characters sidle up into position, is cut to the music." "And Leone when describing this scene said," ""This triello," he even invented a word to describe it." "It is not a duello, it's a triello." ""This triello is a sequence which gave me the greatest satisfaction, especially from the editing point of view." "The journeys of all the characters come to a conclusion within it, and the whole film can be read in the eyes of the main characters." "Tuco has the eyes of a rat, anxious, calculating, naïve." "Blondie has the eyes of a guardian angel, assured, intelligent, amused." "Angel Eyes has the eyes of a robot, cold, collected, implacable." "I always enclose the final sequence, the denouement of my films within the confines of a circle." "It's there that Clint kills Gian Maria Volontè in For a Few Dollars More, that Clint, Eli, and Lee confront each other in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." "It is the arena of life, the moment of truth at the moment of death." "The first three close-ups of each of the actors took us an entire day." "I wanted the spectator to have the impression of watching a ballet." "A ballet, a dance of death." "And I had to accumulate shots of their cunning in action, their looks, their gestures, their hesitations." "The music gave a certain lyricism to all these realist images, so the scene became a question of choreography as much as suspense."" "And as they put themselves in position for this triello, it really is a matter of choreography, a copybook example of editing, that's been used in film schools ever since the mid 1960s as the great example of cutting to music an action sequence." "The so-called movie brats in the late '60s encountered it in film school in California and it had a huge influence on their films." "Scorsese, Milius, Carpenter," "Spielberg, George Lucas." "And then, it had a huge influence on the films of the video brats of the 1980s." "Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino." "Tarantino has called this sequence his favorite in any movie he's ever seen, his all-time favorite sequence in the movies, the triello at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "It had more influence on the history of film than any other sequence in Leone's cinema." "Eli Wallach remembers that the equipment was quite primitive." "They took a long time to change the lenses on the Techniscope cameras for the faces, for the hands, for the medium shots, for the long shots." "So, they had to wait an age." "They had to wait days to get this sequence in the can." "Hands creeping towards guns." "And look at Lee Van Cleef's hand, he has a piece of his finger missing." "And in real life, Lee Van Cleef did not have a piece of his finger missing." "So the hand they're using is a prop hand, as it were, a body double, to show that this man, even he has been damaged by his life as a gunfighter." "Time stretched, time dilated." "It's extraordinary." "This has nothing to do with real time." "It has nothing to do with what might happen in the real world." "This is a purely cinematic moment which makes sense on the editing bench and with these visuals and with this music." "A virtuoso piece of filmmaking." "And, of course, it turns out it wasn't a triello after all." "It was a duello because Clint Eastwood has emptied Eli Wallach's gun in the night." "So, basically, it was between the Good and the Bad, as it always is in Westerns." "And the Bad ends up being shot, so he falls very neatly into a dug grave all ready for him, about to be joined by his hat and gun." "So, like in a children's game," "Eastwood walks into the middle of the arena, which is like the Coliseum in Rome, or some gladiatorial combat." "Those who are about to die salute you." "And he picks up the stone where he's alleged to have written down the name on the grave." "But he hasn't written anything." "And so, he speaks Tuco's line back to him." "You see, in this world, there's two kinds of people, my friend... those with loaded guns... and those who dig." " You dig." " Where?" "So, up to now Tuco has always had this line," ""There's two kinds of people in this world,"" "but it's been taken up by Blondie now." "So, it turns out that the grave is the one marked "Unknown,"" "next door to Arch Stanton." "So, Tuco has found the Arch Stanton grave, which would've taken Blondie a very long time." "So, it's now a question of digging up Unknown." "There's no name here either." "And there was nearly a bit of an accident when they were shooting this moment that's to come which Eli Wallach recalled." "Remember, there was the question of whether they put cotton wool in the horse's ears, there was the question of the soft lead handcuffs and the train, there was the question of the bridge blowing up prematurely." "Well, this time they put some acid in the pouches of gold in order to weaken them, so that when they were struck with a shovel, they would open." "And the props man put some of this acid in a bottle of Spanish lemon soda which Eli Wallach was rather partial to." "And just before filming this sequence, he took a swig of this lemon soda and got a mouthful of acid, quickly realized what it was just as it hit his lips, and spat it out." "But it was quite a near one." "This movie was quite dangerous to make in some respects." "So, weakened by the acid, the pouch opens." "Blondie!" "It's all ours, Blondie!" "And we have another cinematic moment here, where the camera goes up with Tuco and we have a noose." "Reference back to the scam at the beginning of the movie, if you'd remember that far back, when they were shooting through the rope and turning Tuco in for all of his various crimes." "So that's been set up just outside camera range and it's another one of those purely visual moments that works as cinema but wouldn't work in real life." "Now I want you to stand up there and put your head in that noose." "So the Good is behaving in rather a nasty way to his friend Tuco, but, of course, it's a way of putting distance between him and the bandit." "Tuco has to stand on the cross and put his head through the noose, rather like the way that Blondie had to stand on a chair in the hotel in Santa Fe and put his head through the noose and Tuco was going to shoot the legs off the chair." "Only this time, Blondie just rides away, leaving him standing on the cross until he falls over and throttles himself." "So he's got riches beyond his wildest dreams at his feet." "Tuco is the proud owner of $100,000, half Arch Stanton's $200,000." "The trouble is he can't spend it and he can't get to it." "And in a version of the sort of water torture, he can look at it without being able to reach it." "It's positively Machiavellian." "And the black horse, which presumably belongs to the guy in black, il Cattivo, Lee Van Cleef, has a Sharps' rifle inside its scabbard by the saddle." "And that's the horse that il Buono will use to ride away." "Four for you..." "So a memory of them sitting in that canyon in New Mexico," ""Four for you and four for me."" "That time way back when they had the conversation about how to go 50-50 or whether Tuco should get more than 50% of the proceeds 'cause he's the one who's doing the suffering." "A Tuco-eye view of this $100,000 at his feet." "And just as the film began with this big face blocking out the landscape, a moment of landscape of Almería and a big face blocking it out, it ends with Clint Eastwood, the Good, getting on his horse" "and riding off into the geology of Northern Spain, a speck on the landscape." "Leone originally wanted to end this film with a helicopter shot." "And there are many stills of him actually setting up this shot." "The idea was you get a helicopter shot, which was unusual in the mid '60s, it would take off and the two of them would be mere specks on the landscape." "This guy standing on the cross on the one hand, and Blondie on his horse on the other." "And you'd get this big, big shot of the entire landscape." "But he couldn't keep the camera still." "The technology wasn't developed enough." "It wobbled too much." "So, in the end he decided to do the big long shot on which the movie ends, with Clint Eastwood riding off into the geology of Spain." "We're about to get some choice examples of Tuco's swearing," "Vera Cruz-style, which go with some of the convoluted curses that he used earlier in the film." "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly opened in Italy on Christmas Eve, 1966, and in the course of the next few months, it made $4.3 million, which was a very respectable figure." "But worldwide, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was more successful than any other of Leone's films." "It opened in the United States in January, 1968, following the release of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More at the end of 1967, and it made $6 million in the United States" "over the ensuing two years." "So, United Artists, which had put up half the 1.3 million which was the budget, did very, very well out of their investment." "In fact, 1968 was a very good year for United Artists." "It also propelled Clint Eastwood into the front rank of cinema stars." "Even though he hadn't made a successful Hollywood movie yet, he was credited as being the fifth most popular movie actor in the world as a result of his success in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "I guess this is the quintessential Italian Western." "As Alberto Moravia said, "This is the moment when the Italianization of the Western was complete."" "It's the quintessential Italian Western with Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach," "Ennio Morricone, and Sergio Leone at the peak of their powers, all working together on an epic journey through the Wild West." "It remains the classic Italian Western." "And a final curse and homage to those Burt Lancaster scenes in Vera Cruz, where the trumpet fanfares mean that we can't quite hear what he says." ""You're the son of a..."" "And exactly the same thing happens now with Eli Wallach." "Just a dirty son of a bitch!" "Wallach is the choir, Eastwood is the flute," "Van Cleef is the arghilophone." "So, in the main title theme, each of the characters is taken up again, bringing them together in the main title theme." "And off we go into the countryside around Burgos." "It's still there but it's very overgrown." "I once went on a pilgrimage to that cemetery at Sad Hill." "And you can see it if you stand about a mile away as a kind of circle through the thicket, but it's overgrown and become part of the Spanish ecology again."