Anti-Heroes: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (Dir Sergio Leone, 2h35m, 1966)
This incarnation of the Western gunslinger's shadow falls everywhere from Lucas' Star Wars, to Stephen King's seminal novel cycle The Dark Tower, to Mad Max (1979) and its sequels and Escape from New York (1981). To understand the impact of Eastwood's most famous role, and our fascination with the anti-hero, we must go back to his finest outing, in the final film of the 'Dollars' Trilogy, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). More than simply the anti-heroic figures of the Old West at their best - much of this a rebuttal to heroes and villains so black and white that their hats denoted it! - this is Leone as a director, and the Western as a genre at its best.
Against the backdrop of the American Civil War - a conflict across which the central trio criss-cross, adopting, and discarding the trappings of both sides, and which Leone and his cinematographer for both this and the ellagic Once Upon a Time in the West (1970) depict at colossal scale - three men search for $200,000 in stolen Confederate gold. Each of the trio is introduced in a sequence that sketches their personality in, Luciano Vincenzoni Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli and Leone's script depicting Lee Van Cleef's Angel Eyes - "The Bad" - murdering a man and his son for information on the location of the solider Bill Carson, invaluable in finding the gold, and then killing the very employer who assigned him the job.
Introduced against Blondie, as the Man with No Name is called here, as "The Good" is Tuco (Eli Wallach's "the Ugly"), a violent, crass bandit that acts as the film's comic relief, but also its emotional centre against the steely Angel Eyes and the impassive Blondie. With the duo's con in repeatedly claiming the bounty for Tuco and Blondie rescuing him from the hangman's noose growing thin, so Blondie abandons Tuco in the desert, kickstarting both a chain of revenges and uncomfortable alliances between the two that will take them across two deserts, each left at the other's mercy for long sequences in which the viciousness of both men, and their propensity for violence are tested, eventually encountering the figure of Carson near death.
A breakneck chase between the trio follows, with the vicious Angel Eyes hunting them both, to the graveyard where the gold is buried, and one of the Western's great climactic duels. It is here that Leone's great collaborators come into their own. Tonino Delli Colli's cinematography, that so often makes landscapes of the faces brought into extreme close-ups, or shows hands furtively reaching for guns, making colossi of the three duellists in massive Techniscope widescreen, almost overpowers audiences with its scale. Matching Delli Colli's imagery is Ennio Morricone at his blistering best, from the coyote yell that gives the film its iconic, and often reoccurring main motif, across which Alessandro Alessandroni's Fender twangs. All of this builds to the single greatest piece of music the Maestro may ever have composed, the 'Ecstasy of Gold', Tuco's ambition and greed and delirium at being so close to the prize, and to untold riches - all of it encapsulated in the wordless soprano vocals, and accelerating strings.
It is the sequence that defines the film - Delli Colli's near-minute introduction to the graveyard, building to the palpable excitement, the camera finally chasing Wallach's running figure across the purpose built cemetery set in the South of Spain, blurring grave after grave after grave into a swirl of colour - nowhere in cinema does what drives the Western, what drives the anti-hero, coalesce as perfectly. Yet, by this point, by this release valve, this arrival at their goal, we have seen Tuco suffer, and caused suffering - Wallach is too charismatic for us to hate him, too nuanced for us to want to see him dead, and against the impassive Eastwood, more complicated and more fun. Against him is Van Cleef, cruel and professional - the film's grey morality carries into the American Civil War that rages in the background, and just as the war is tremendously wasteful of human life, so Leone depicts good, and evil men on both sides of the conflict, Angel Eyes spending much of the film's middle third in the guise of a Union Sergeant. In a film that otherwise neither pure good now pure evil, it is the far from angelic bounty hunter that is the film's true villain.
In the middle stands Blondie, the anti-hero personified. Even once he dons the poncho that links him back to the far more moral figure in the other two 'Dollars' films, and transforms in a single piece of costuming into 'The Man with No Name', Blondie has left one man for dead, used another in repeated scams, and shown, despite his pragmatism and occasional generosity, that he is simply less greedy and less cruel than his counterparts. Sometimes, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly seems to say, that's enough. In the shadow of that flapping poncho stand some of our favourite characters in 1960s popular culture and beyond - neither truly good, nor truly bad, but the right person, at the right time.
Leone may have bettered the Dollars trilogy in the ellagic Once Upon a Time in the West, Eastwood may have played more nuanced antiheroes, such as his role as William Munny in his own Unforgiven (1992), but few films in the Western, and beyond, are as perfect an encapsulation of why we are drawn, time and again, to the antihero, like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. can be watched on AppleTV and is available on BluRay from Arrow Releasing
Next week to 1960s Paris, and the ultra-cool Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï
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