There are the film purists who make strict distinctions between art films and movies, and then there are the auteurists who feel compelled to protect a particular director. Sergio Leone purists will probably consider the MGM 2-disc special edition DVD of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly a somewhat mixed blessing because it involves some serious, though well-intentioned and mainly justified, tampering with the director's original cut. When it opened in Rome 40 years ago this December, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly was reportedly 180 minutes long. Leone had to cut it down to 160 for U.S. release. This seemingly definitive DVD is 187 minutes long. Not counting video and DVD viewings, I've seen this film at least ten times in theatres from New York to London to Tangiers. The first time I saw it was in a Boston-area drive-in, of all places, and it was in good shape compared to some other showings where it was either butchered or atrociously dubbed or else the color was bleached out. In Tangiers it was dubbed into French without English subtitles, and still a joy to behold. Regardless of all these impediments, defects, and violations, the movie retained its impact thanks to its sheer visual power, the dynamic between the two main actors, Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach, and the incomparable musical accompaniment composed by Leone's old schoolmate Ennio Morricone.
Special Features
Having seen The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly so many times, I thought it might be interesting to approach the DVD version from another vantage point, so I watched the first half hour with the sound turned down. It made a spectacular silent movie, but my finger was soon itching to hit the volume button. Without Morricone's music you lose the essence of the Leone experience, the recipe for the euphoria that carries you off to movie heaven. This director-composer relationship is truly unique, dating back to when they were boyhood pals. Charlie Parker called Dizzy Gillespie "the other half of my heartbeat." Judging from the way the emotional and visual energy of the movie merges again and again with the music to make a single irresistible force, Leone and Morricone are that close or closer. In the movie there are musical equivalents to Leone's at once subtle and savage sense of humor, his lyricism, his almost operatic emotionalism, and his sweeping, bravura, mother-of-all-showdown finales. The heartbeat harmony between the director and the composer lifts the climactic scene of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly well over the top to produce one of the most exciting endings ever filmed. Take away Morricone's trumpets and gongs and bells and sheer musical momentum and the level of excitement would be seriously reduced.
Morricone's contribution is the subject of one of the special features included in the DVD, along with reminiscences from Wallach and Eastwood, producer Alberto Grimaldi, and dubbing expert Mickey Knox, who supervised the English-language version. There are also deleted scenes; a documentary showing the historical background of the Civil War sequences; Richard Schickel's critical commentary; and insights into the restoration process by MGM archivist John Kirk.
One of the most challenging problems Leone faced involved the dubbing process. While I'm not a film purist, I would sooner listen to Muzak than watch a foreign film that has been dubbed. Imagine the problems involved in restoring a print and soundtrack in which the three main actors (Eastwood, Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef) are speaking English while the rest of the cast (and the director) are speaking Italian. Then imagine the task of bringing sound and image into line when reinstating scenes long since removed from the original print in which the English-speaking characters had been dubbed into Italian. For viewers who know the film well, the result is an adventure in itself. For instance, in an exchange between the "Ugly" (the Mexican bandit named Tuco, played by Wallach) and the "Good" (the nameless gunfighter hero, played by Eastwood), you are not hearing the voices of the actors who were on the scene in 1966. With Tuco, who doesn't say much in this scene, the difference is not noticeable, but with Blondie (as Tuco calls him), you are hearing the voice of a 73-year-old Eastwood speaking through the lips of the 36-year-old actor playing the scene, and it makes for a very strange moment.
Stranger still, and worth the price of the whole DVD, is the longest of the reinstated sequences. There you are, watching a movie you think you know by heart, and suddenly you're thrown off course by a wholly unfamiliar scene. What makes the sequence all the more disorienting is that it begins as an apparent soliloquy by Tuco, who is usually too busy living up to his role as "the Ugly" to waste time on anything quite so openly theatrical. If you're a fan of David Milch's Shakespearean series Deadwood, now in its third season on HBO, you'll feel right at home in this scene. Tuco's speech begins with a formal flourish, which he repeats with great style: "If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?" As often happens with Leone, you're aware of the spectre of commedia del arte as Tuco enters waving a very white and very dead hen, which he makes into a kind of prop, talking to it, mouth to beak, almost in the manner of a ventriloquist coaxing words from a dummy. It's easy to see why this bizarre interlude was judged dispensable. The irrepressible, eloquently animated Tuco is already a thoroughly magnificent character, thanks mostly to Eli Wallach, who gives not only the performance of his career but one for the ages, transforming the stereotypical Mexican bandit into a lovable rogue (if you can imagine a psychotic Sancho Panza) who by the end has become Everyman rooting for gold in the graveyard of civilization. Tuco is one of the great movie characterizations, bar none. But what makes this speech especially peculiar is that the 85-year-old Wallach is speaking through the lips of his younger self, and as a consequence, the Mexican accent so beautifully managed in 1966 has been subverted by the Brooklyn accent of a octagenerian Jewish actor from Flatbush. Only in the magic kingdom of DVD could such wonders take place. Of course a Leone purist might not be amused, since this weird turn of events is, needless to say, not something the director intended.
Hold the Spaghetti
Speaking, again, of film purists, my wife and I used to have to watch what we said whenever we were in the company of friends who would have scorned us for speaking of a "cheesy Italian western" in the same breath with, say, Fellini's La Dolce Vita. In his not particularly inspired notes for this DVD, Roger Ebert admits that having been a movie critic less than a year when he first reviewed The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, he lacked the wisdom "to value instinct over prudence" and thus gave it only three stars — "perhaps because it was a 'spaghetti western' and so could not be art." Exactly. Hang a label like that on a work of art and and the director becomes the filmic equivalent of a hack. When Leone came to Monument Valley after making The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and shot another masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, his stock as an artist finally began rising at least to the extent that the film was hailed by autuerist critics like Andrew Sarris. Typically, sadly, and ironically, it was Leone's last and most disappointing film, Once Upon a Time in America, that finally brought serious film people around. No doubt it helped to have Robert DeNiro heading the cast, but what really made the 1983 film respectable was a simple change in genre. A movie about Jewish gangsters in New York during Prohibition couldn't be tagged with the spaghetti western label. As for why a great director executing a departure from the stigma of pasta would stick the DeNiro character with a name like Noodles, go figure. But the lapse says a lot about why the movie falls short. Imagine if Tuco had been called Taco or Tamale.
As one who championed Sergio Leone when it was filmically incorrect to do so, I still have unfond memories of certain wilfully dismissive notices like the mainstream reviewer Judith Crist's sneering putdown of Once Upon a Time in the West wherein she scolds Leone for making a killer out of that blue-eyed American icon Henry Fonda, devoting a full measure of her disgust to the scene in which he kicks a cripple's crutches out from under him. She neglects to mention that the cripple is a vicious railroad tycoon who hired the Fonda character to do his dirty work, which included the slaughter of a homesteader and his family. Then there was Renata Adler's outraged vigilante ambush of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in the New York Times, a notice so notorious Richard Schickel uses it in his DVD commentary as a way of defining the dynamic behind one of the greatest moments in the film. Referring to the prolonged, graphic beating Tuco endures in a Union prison camp, Adler says that anyone who would remain in the theatre after that scene is not the sort of person she would want to have anything to do with. I'll admit I could have done without that scene. At first I thought Leone had gone too far — at least until I heard the music of the other half of his heartbeat. Adler chooses to overlook (or simply failed to perceive) the fact that Tuco's beating is accompanied by one of the most beautiful of Ennio Morricone's compositions, played by a band of heartsick Confederate soldiers at the behest of the Union authorities, the purpose being to cover up the sounds of torture at a camp infamous for its abuses. One young soldier playing the violin is weeping. This balancing of poignance and violence is the heart and soul of Sergio Leone: beauty underscoring bestiality, the power of the good in art heightening and illuminating the forces of the bad and the ugly in human nature.