Free Spaghetti Westerns by Howard Hughes Page A

his trademark poncho for the film (he only wears it in the final gunfight, after he steals it from a dead Confederate artilleryman). But Leone was obviously less concerned with Blondy and Angel Eyes and more interested in the character of garrulous, foul-mouthed Mexican bandido Tuco (played by Wallach, who appeared in The Magnificent Seven ). For the first time in a Leone movie, we see a major character with his guard down. Tuco comes across as a slightly inept, bumbling outlaw and is easily outwitted and double-crossed by Blondy; but nevertheless, using his own distinctive methods, he manages to survive. He is also a fall guy for Eastwood. It is Tuco who always ends up on his knees in the dust or dangling precariously from a rope, while Blondy strides through every situation without breaking a sweat. In return for this humiliation and betrayal, Tuco leads Blondy into the wasteland to kill him (but inevitably fails). We also learn more about Tuco’s character than was expected in a Leone film. In one affecting scene, he visits his brother, a monk, and learns of the death of his parents.
    The intricacies of the plot are down to Leone, Luciano Vincenzoni and an uncredited Sergio Donati (who co-scripted Sergio Sollima’s best movies and Once Upon a Time in the West ). Like all the best adventure films, The Good , the Bad and the Ugly relies on outrageous coincidence and surprise to power the story and captivate the viewer. The initial premise upon which the whole story rests takes place before the film has even begun. A Union patrol ambushes a Confederate gold shipment. Three of the escort survive and one of them hides the cache in a grave. Only Angel Eyes does any detective work to locate the cache – Blondy and Tuco become involved in the search by chance – and the treasure hunt is only a small part of the movie. There are also some great lines of dialogue – “If you have to shoot, shoot… don’t talk”, “There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend”, “I always see my job through” and the logical “Two can dig a lot quicker than one”.
    But it is the imaginative Civil War setting that allows Leone the opportunity to inject pathos into his West. The war gave him the chance to direct epic scenes and it must have amused him staging the battle sequences in Spain, near Madrid (a second Spanish Civil War). Every detail looks authentic (though several aren’t) and the Civil War of The Good , the Bad and the Ugly is the most convincing cinematic staging of the conflict. Refugees flee ruined towns, generals are reduced to travelling on rickety wagons, armies are shifted by railroad and soldiers kill and loot (and are executed when they are caught). This was a violent, merciless war, based partly on World War One (with entrenched armies fighting over a bridge at the behest of their idiot commanders) and World War Two (a prison camp with starving, rag-clothed inmates, high fences, gravediggers and death wagons piled high with corpses). If this film had depicted either of those more contemporary conflicts, it would have run into serious censorship problems.
    The Good , the Bad and the Ugly begins as a pretty standard Spaghetti Western (a shootout in a ghost town, a killing at a farm, a murder, a fumbled ambush) but the Civil War becomes more apparent as the film progresses and hangs over the action like a vulture. The first soldier who appears in the film is a legless Confederate reduced to selling information for a price, while several shots dwell on the dead or severely injured. Blondy (‘The Good’) is saddened by the conflict, seeing it as a waste of human life, Angel Eyes (‘The Bad’) runs a racket in a prison camp, selling on inmates’ possessions, while to Tuco (‘The Ugly’), a Mexican, the war means nothing and merely slows down his route to the graveyard.
    To the annoyance of several (mostly American) critics, there was still no room for women in Leone’s West. While other Italian Western