The pinnacle of westerns -- spaghetti or otherwise

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly has been one of my favourite films since childhood. It has Clint Eastwood, awesome music and it's long. As a child, staying up for movies was based on my father's rule of "You watch what I want to watch or you go to bed." Consequently I grew up on a diet of war movies, spaghetti westerns and film noir — certainly better than the brain-candy local soaps the rest of my classmates watched. So there was serious excitement on my part whenever this film aired as it meant I got to stay up past midnight.

It's now many years later, and I still love The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Even as a child the pan and scan butchery by the networks annoyed me, so I've always dreamed of seeing it on the big screen in all its widescreen glory — a wish yet to be fulfilled — but a big step closer with the release of the DVD.

This is, in my opinion, Sergio Leone's finest film. Leone makes full use of the screen, so the widescreen version is a must or the film loses a lot of its impact. All of the location shots used in the film are superb; lonely Mexican villages, beautifully desolate deserts, bloody civil war battlefields and isolated cemeteries — you certainly believe you are viewing the old American west instead of the Italian back hills where this film was actually shot (these films were called spaghetti westerns for a reason).

The strong interplay between the characters — without the use of dialogue — is one of the director's trademarks. Nobody else can give a scene so much meaning with just a look, as depicted beautifully in the final showdown.

A lot of the impact is derived from Sergio Leone's long time partnership with composer Ennio Morricone. Leone would take his script to Morricone prior to filming. He would then play the completed score on stage and choreograph his actors to the music, dubbing the dialogue in later — a must as most of the actors in minor roles only spoke Italian. This method of film-making melds the music to the film in ways that cannot be replicated by the usual method of post-production editing and gives the film a tremendous atmosphere.

One of the quirks I've always liked in Leone's penchant for the casting of the Mexicans — they are almost always played by swarthy, dark-haired Italians, with piercing blue eyes.

The DVD also includes 14 minutes of footage cut from the original release — which at 2 hours 40 minutes probably scared the hell out the release companies. The deleted scenes (which are all in Italian) add a new dimension to the film. One explains how Angel Eyes got to the prisoner of war camp before Blondie and Tuco — something I'd always wondered about — and a couple of the others paint Blondie as not so much of the angel as the original release makes him appear.

This is movie where the three central characters, although described as good, bad and ugly, are really not that different at heart. The civil war rages around them, but it is nothing more than a minor inconvenience to them in their quest for stolen confederate gold.

A true masterpiece of film-making, I would recommend it as an addition to any film buffs library.

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