TGTBATU
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly – The great classic of double crosses and double-double crosses, between Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Walach. Great great great great great!!! It takes 30 minutes to introduce the three main characters, each of them getting a short film of their own to establish their characters. There’s no language for the first 10 minutes!! Close-ups of craggy, scarred, bearded, sweaty macho faces glaring and twitching, magnificent. Great opening credits full of gunshots and clunky animation, hilarious video game of “blast-the-horseman-with-a-cannon” with 1979 graphics.
There are double-crosses and back stabs, murderers for hire, pitiless torture and beating. During the bloody beating of Tuco by Angel Eyes a local band plays, the musicians wringing emotion out of the song, the violinist red-eyed and can barely continue. Wow. Great soap suds murder as a man bent on revenge catches Tucco in the bath – except he’s armed!! Great gun “purchase” scene. Destroyed town. Ugly landscapes around cemetery. Showdown triangle of death in a satanic round piazza. The final double-cross is Blondie’s.
The extended version is three hours long, all of it good. Great reunion between Tuco and his brother.
Tuco and Angel Eyes are in the film quite a lot, it’s hardly a film that features much of its star, The Man With No Name, despite already being the third film in the series. But apparently Eastwood had already tired of working with Leone because of his dictatorial methods and his gluttonous character – it was the last time they worked together.