The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
★★★★★ — The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
There are Westerns, and then there is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Released in 1966 as the third and final entry in Sergio Leone's so-called Dollars Trilogy, the film arrives at the tail end of a run that had already reshaped the genre. Where Hollywood had long favoured clean-cut moral simplicity in its cowboy pictures, Leone was more interested in greed, survival, and the particular comedy of watching bad men compete to be slightly less bad than one another. Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, the film follows three men: Blondie (a quiet, calculating type), Angel Eyes (a professional killer with no allegiances beyond the next payday), and Tuco (a fast-talking Mexican bandit with rather more going on under the surface than first impressions suggest). All three are hunting the same buried Confederate gold, and all three would cheerfully sell out the other two if the opportunity arose. It is not, in other words, a film with heroes in the traditional sense. The tagline puts it plainly enough: for these men, the Civil War was not hell. It was practice.
Leone, who had already laid the groundwork for his reputation with For a Few Dollars More and its predecessor, brings a scale here that borders on the operatic. Shot across Spain, with additional production work courtesy of the Italian company PEA and distributed through United Artists, the film runs to a rather uncompromising 161 minutes, a runtime that would make most modern studio executives reach nervously for their spreadsheets. Leone fills that time with long silences, lingering close-ups, and wide landscape shots that treat the American Southwest as a character in its own right, even if much of what we see was actually Almería. Ennio Morricone provided the score, a collaboration with Leone that had by this point developed into something genuinely symbiotic. The main theme, those whistled notes and twanging guitars, had already become recognisable shorthand for the genre itself.
The casting is a careful three-way balance. Clint Eastwood, who had built his screen persona across the earlier Leone pictures, brings his trademark economy here, a man who communicates more through narrowed eyes and cigarette positioning than through dialogue. (Eastwood's work across this period is worth exploring separately, whether in Hang 'em High or the very different emotional register of Million Dollar Baby.) Eli Wallach, cast as Tuco, is arguably the film's most energetic presence, a polished but unremarkable character on paper who in Wallach's hands becomes something far more watchable. Lee Van Cleef, who had spent years in supporting roles before Leone revived his career, brings a cool, almost bored menace to Angel Eyes that sits in neat contrast to Wallach's chaos. Leone, for his part, would go on to push his particular brand of epic filmmaking even further in Once Upon a Time in the West and later Once Upon a Time in America, but this remains the film most people reach for when his name comes up.
If aliens showed up tomorrow and asked, "What is cinema?" this is the film I'd show them. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly isn’t just a Western; it’s THE Western. A film so vast, so physically real that no AI, no CGI, no billion dollar studio could ever recreate the sheer scale of it. You squint your eyes when dust flies into the screen, you want to swat the flies away in the sweltering heat. It truly immerses and it's astounding for a film heading into it's 60th year since release. And then there’s Ennio Morricone... the fourth main character. His score doesn’t just complement the film; it is the film. It speaks where words aren’t needed, turning every duel, every moment of silence, into something truly majestic. That final showdown? Perfection. Cinema in its purest form, transcendent.
I find it difficult to argue with any of that. Films this confident in their own rhythm are genuinely rare, and there is something almost unfair about how well it all holds together across nearly six decades. The Morricone score in particular has a way of making you feel the weight of a scene before the images have fully registered, which is a trick very few composers have ever pulled off with such consistency. If you have somehow arrived here without having seen this one yet, do yourself a favour and clear an evening. And then maybe a second evening, because it tends to demand a rewatch before you have even finished the first.
Rating: ★★★★★ | Year: 1966 | Watched: 2025-04-01
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Sergio Leone: Duck, You Sucker (1971) · Once Upon a Time in America (1984) · A Fistful of Dollars (1964) · For a Few Dollars More (1965)
More with Clint Eastwood: Million Dollar Baby (2004) · High Plains Drifter (1973) · Hang 'em High (1968) · Unforgiven (1992)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)
