Flick of The Day: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Very often great art is not recognised as such until long after the artist has passed on. There are innumerable tales of the great and good that end with "and he died penniless". Thankfully cinema is one of those forms where your art will live on to be remembered for good or ill. Perhaps Michael Bay should remember this next time he decides to inflict a Transformers film on an unsuspecting public. Director of today's flick of the day, Sergio Leone is one whose reputation has only grown since his death in 1989, perhaps due to the small body of work he left behind, each of which is a true classic. From his "Man With No Name" trilogy which concluded with today's flick to his Mexican revolution epic A Fistful of Dynamite which we previously reviewed here to his final film, the gigantic Once Upon a Time in America, his work was bold, epic and entertaining.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo in Blu-ray Packaging)

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is the final and best instalment of Leone's first foray into the Western genre. As with the previous films A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, Clint Eastwood is once again the mysterious enigmatic stranger. As with each of Leone's film's, it is bigger and grander then the last. Eastwood is the good of the title and along with Eli Wallach as the loudmouth and ugly Tuco and the irredeemably bad Lee Van Cleef are in search of stolen Confederate gold during the ugly depths of the Civil War. In an epic journey across country, they cheat and double cross each other before a final showdown at a graveyard, justly lauded as one of the great finales in modern cinema. 

Each film Leone directed had a habit of being grander and more epic in scale then his previous efforts and as a time went on took longer to create. He spent at least a decade working on his final film and was rumoured to be developing a film based around Stalingrad, perhaps too large a canvas for any director. This need for grandeur is present in today's film with a number of large-scale set pieces that give the film a much more substantial feel then previous efforts including an extended sequence at a civil war battle taking place on either side of a river, with a network of trenches and huge numbers of extras, it is on a scale that even today has the power to make an audience go "Wow".

Of course spectacle is nothing without a great story and actors to carry it. Leone then is very lucky to have Eastwood in perhaps his most iconic role outside of Dirty Harry and perfect as the taciturn loner that the audience immediately identifies with. It helps of course that Wallach and Van Cleef offer such great foils, with Van Cleef's Angel Eyes one of the great screen villains. 

Blondie: [counting Angel Eyes' men] One, two, three, four, five, and six. Six, the perfect number.   Angel Eyes: I thought three was the perfect number. 

Blondie: I've got six more bullets in my gun.

The film is violent, even by today's standards but the dry wit of Eastwood's Blondie and the oafishness of Wallach's Tuco leaven proceedings and give the violence a dark humour which I believe is probably at the root of its continued popularity nearly 45 years after its release.

Leone is one of the all time greats and this is one of his best work's. Backed by a fine cast and another memorable Ennio Morricone score, it is dark, humorous and action filled adventure in an old west that never really existed except for in the mind of a group of gifted Italian film-makers. A great film.