The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

1967 - Dir: Sergio Leone
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 30th January, 2010

This is a bit of a hybrid. Its roots are firmly set in the old wild west but the style and narrative are far more European. Its Italian director, Sergio Leone, embarked on his series of “Spaghetti westerns” with the express intention of shaking up an old genre. The somewhat less than subtle use of violence shook up a little more than the genre. Sg. Leone explains that "the killings in my films are exaggerated because I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek satire on run-of-the-mill westerns. The west was made by violent, uncomplicated men, and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures." The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has been described as European cinema's best representation of the Western genre film, and Quentin Tarantino has called it "the best-directed film of all time." - perhaps a bit of an exaggeration but the film has terrific style and forced a change of direction for action movies.
Shooting took place in Spain - the Spanish government approved production and provided the army for technical assistance; the film's cast includes 1,500 local militia members as extras.
As an international cast was employed, actors performed in their native languages. Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach spoke English, and were dubbed into Italian for the debut release in Rome. For the American version, the lead acting voices were used, but supporting cast members were dubbed into English. The result is noticeable in the bad synchronisation of voices to lip movements on screen; none of the dialogue is completely in sync because Leone rarely shot his scenes with synchronised sound.
The director established a rule that he follows throughout "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." The rule is that the ability to see is limited by the sides of the frame. At important moments in the film, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot be explained by the practical geography of his shots.

• The film was shot using a process called Techniscope. This means that you can shoot without an anamorphic lens, and only use half as much film as you would normally use. The Techniscope process places two widescreen frames on a single 35 mm frame. Like all cheapskate compromises this doesn’t quite work - if you use half of the film area it means that you have to enlarge the picture twice as much when you project it and consequently the picture tends to be fuzzier and grainier...
  
• The bridge that Tuco and Blondie demolish was an actual bridge built by Spanish army engineers. The Spanish agreed to dynamite the bridge only if the their captain could be the one to do it. The captain was so excited by the prospect that he forgot all about the film and just blew the bridge up without any cameras rolling. The army was so embarrassed that they rebuilt the bridge so that it could be blown up again.
  
• Clint Eastwood fell out with the director during the shoot. This came to a head at the dubbing session where Eastwood insisted on recording a different version of the script than that used in the final cut.