Free Spaghetti Westerns by Howard Hughes

pistol-packing padre, though in one sequence he is allowed to indulge in histrionics and throw hand grenades at an army parade in the name of the ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’. The film was originally called El Chuncho – Quien Sabe? (‘El Chuncho – Who Knows?’), a title as elliptical as Solinas’s plot.
The Verdict
     
    This is much better than Castel’s other political Western, Requiescant (1967), directed by Carlo Lizzani. Damiani gets the balance right between tension, action, politics and history and allows his characters to develop. Not your usual Spaghetti, then, but that was Damiani’s intention. Bullet was a surprise commercial success and opened the floodgates for the political Westerns that followed.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) 
     
    Directed by: Sergio Leone
    Music by: Ennio Morricone
    Cast: Clint Eastwood (Blondy, ‘The Good’), Lee Van Cleef (Angel
Eyes, ‘The Bad’), Eli Wallach (Tuco Ramirez, ‘The Ugly’), Luigi Pistilli (Padre Pablo Ramirez), Al Mulock (Bounty hunter)
167 minutes
     
Story
     
    During the Civil War, Angel Eyes, a hired gun, learns of a shipment of Confederate army gold that has vanished and sets about locating the one man who can identify its whereabouts, a Confederate cavalryman called Bill Carson. Meanwhile, a bounty hunter named Blondy has joined up with Tuco, a Mexican outlaw, in a bounty scam. But after Blondy double-crosses Tuco, the Mexican takes him into the desert to torture and kill him. There they encounter Carson, half-dead, who tells each of them one part of the gold’s location. Tuco knows that the cache is buried in a war cemetery on Sad Hill, while Blondy learns the name on the specific grave.
    With the two now disguised as Confederate soldiers, Blondy recovers at a monastery functioning as a war hospital (run by Tuco’s brother Pablo). Moving on, they are captured by a Union patrol and taken to a Union prison camp where Angel Eyes is working as a sergeant. He tortures the name of the cemetery out of Tuco and packs him off to jail, while Blondy sides with Angel Eyes and his gang to find the gold. Later, Tuco (who has escaped his escort) and Blondy are reunited and wipe out Angel Eyes’ gang, though their leader evades them. Continuing towards the graveyard, the duo intervene in a battle for a strategically important bridge, blowing it sky high. Eventually finding the vast cemetery, they also find Angel Eyes and the three shoot it out with a fortune at stake. Blondy kills Angel Eyes and outwits Tuco, takes half the money and rides into the distance, while Tuco is left alive – rich but without a horse.
Background
     
    This is probably the most famous Spaghetti Western of them all, no doubt due to Ennio Morricone’s distinctive theme tune (which everyone, whether they’ve seen the film or not, is familiar with). Moreover, The Good , the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most popular, enduring Westerns ever. Along with The Searchers (1956), The Magnificent Seven (1960), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), it is regularly voted into lists of contemporary audiences’ favourite films of all time. It is also unusual in that it works not only as an action film, but also as a great art movie and a morality tale. Seldom has a Western looked so beautiful and asked so many questions about human nature. It is truly epic in scale, even more so than Leone’s next film, Once Upon a Time in the West , as the Blue and the Grey (actually the Spanish army in period costume) fight it out as the backdrop to Leone’s treasure hunt.
    Leone recast his two leading men from For a Few Dollars More , but altered their characters. Eastwood was now Blondy, more a cunning conman than a bounty hunter, while Van Cleef was the villainous hired gun, christened ‘Angel Eyes’ (originally called ‘Setenza’ in the Italian version, which means sentence, as in ‘death sentence’). Eastwood even abandoned