Sergio Leone turned the Western inside out with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, transforming America’s frontier myth with irony, violence and Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable music. Eli Wallach as 'Tuco' and Clint Eastwood as 'Blondie' in Sergio Leone's genre-bending 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' (1966). Three men stand in an old cemetery in a desolate landscape, facing one another in the now-famous Mexican standoff during the American Civil War. The war is raging somewhere beyond the cemetery, but the men have little interest in it. All three circle a grave containing buried Confederate gold. They know that one of them will have to kill the other two. The director does all sorts of acrobatics with the camera, zooming in on the rough faces of the trio that meld wonderfully with the harsh countryside, panning, now giving us an elegant widescreen shot of the suspicious characters circling. The camera relentlessly moves from one face to another, from eyes to hands, from hands to holsters as the seconds to the draw lengthen. It is then that a trumpet dirge swells around the men, turning the standoff into a piece of musical theatre. The trumpet solo builds inexorably towards its crescendo as the guns finally come out; the shooting is over almost before it has begun. The only hitch is that the film is not American at all. The director is not a John Ford or Howard Hawks but a relatively unknown Italian called Sergio Leone. The actors are not beloved Western film icons like James Stewart, John Wayne or Henry Fonda. The landscape is not Monument Valley but the harsh Spanish countryside. While the stars are American, they are not quite the cinematic legends they later became. There is Clint Eastwood, a 36-year-old actor best known till that point for the American TV Western series Rawhide, playing ‘Blondie’ and Eli Wallach, a highly respected stage and screen actor, as ‘Tuco’ – the eternally frantic Mexican bandit. And there is Lee Van Cleef, mesmeric as the sadistic killer ‘Angel Eyes’. With his hawk-like face, Van Cleef - until then a bit player in several classic American films - was dubbed one of the “reservoir gods” (to use critic G. Cabiria Infante’s nicely punning phrase) inhabiting Hollywood at the time. They are the three rogues of the film in question, catchily titled The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Six decades after its release in Italy in December 1966, the film represents Leone’s most audacious assault on the moral certainties of the Western. It is perhaps the Western that audiences across the globe most identify with while its influence on the Indian ‘Curry Western’ is hard to overestimate. Perhaps the single most influential and recognisable component of the film was the strange and extraordinary music by Ennio Morricone, who decided that a Western need not sound like a Western at all. At the time, the sub-genre that Leone and his fellow directors would take to new heights was contemptuously labelled the “Spaghetti Western” (‘Paella’ or ‘Macaroni’ Western are among its other names) by leading critics. It was universally derided by the high critical priests of American cinema, from Bosley Crowther to the avant-garde ones like Roger Ebert. After all, the ‘Euro Westerns’ were regarded as cheap and mindlessly violent imitations of America’s foundation myth. “I thought it sounded like a Hawaiian Pizza,” Eli Wallach had famously said after receiving Leone’s offer to work on what would ultimately become The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The film’s original Italian title was Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo; in Britain it was also known as The Magnificent Rogues, while in Germany it acquired the wonderfully suggestive title Zwei glorreiche Halunken. But none quite captures Leone’s joke as neatly as the English title. His three protagonists are not really the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. They are three varieties of scoundrels, and the distinctions between them become increasingly difficult to maintain. Caught in the carnage of the US Civil War, the three lowlifes criss-cross paths amid blasted battlefields, mass graves and columns of exhausted soldiers, pursuing their private quarry while a nation tears itself apart around them. Leone’s sly comment is that his lowlifes scarcely look more savage than the armies whose carnage surrounds them. Soldiers slaughter one another for causes they barely understand even as Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes kill for money, survival or revenge. In Leone’s world, the organised violence of war is hardly more noble than the murderous violence of three greedy gunslingers. If anything, the three rogues seem merely to have dispensed with the respectable pretext. Morricone’s radical music turned Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns into something close to opera. His extraordinary score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has the now-famous coyote-like howl which appears to emanate from the parched desert, followed by a shrill whistle, the twang of an electric guitar, clipped percussion, human cries and sudden orchestral eruptions. It is a revolutionary sonic landscape, the sound of the Western stripped of its Hollywood polish. In fact, Morricone was not recreating the sound of the American frontier as embodied in the stately compositions of Dimitri Tiomkin. Morricone was creating the sound of the frontier as myth. And therein lies the key distinction and the heart of Leone’s achievement. He did not merely set out to make cheaper European versions of American Westerns. He completely upended the rules of one of America’s staple and most beloved genres, taking the Western’s most familiar conventions and moral certainties apart. Dubious Beginnings The unlikely story began in the summer of 1964, when Eastwood, who starred in the prime-time Western serial Rawhide, was looking for distraction in films as he felt he’d stagnated with his character in the series. So, at 34, Eastwood decided upon a risky gamble: take a leap into the unknown by trusting Leone, an obscure Italian director, and travel to Rome to do a “European Western” called Per un Pugno di Dollari. The script, which Eastwood received on typewritten onionskin pages, was a rip-off of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 classic Yojimbo that pitted the anti-heroic protagonist against two warring factions struggling to gain supremacy of a border town. The budget was pitiful, shooting conditions rough, and the script largely improvisational. Eastwood, as his biographer Richard Schickel notes, was advised by colleagues to collect his paycheck first as the Italians were regarded as notorious fly-by-night operators. Charles Bronson as the mysterious gunslinger 'Harmonica' in Leone’s ominous and dreamlike 'Once Upon a Time in the West' (1968). Prior to Eastwood, Leone had approached Charles Bronson and James Coburn, believed to be his ideal choices, for Fistful, only to be turned down. Both actors later were to do some of their best work for Leone, with Bronson starring as the mysterious gunslinger Harmonica in Leone’s towering achievement, the ominous and dreamlike Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). “It was just about the worst script I had ever seen,” Bronson had said. But Eastwood trusted his instincts, taking this harsh and humble venture in his stride, getting to know Leone on location in Spain. He particularly admired cinematographer Massimo Dallamano, later a director in his own right, in the way the latter played with light. The film wrapped up and then began a long period of uneventful lull: Eastwood quietly returned home; the picture apparently forgotten and buried in the Spanish sun. Unbeknownst to him, A Fistful of Dollars had become a sleeper hit in rural Italy, its violence having deterred producers from taking a chance in the sophisticated urban North. One of the producers excitedly called up Clint, apologising for the long silence and pressing him to do a sequel. Eastwood demanded a print of the film. While that followed, the film’s soundtrack by one Ennio Morricone, credited “Dan Savio” in the film, arrived. Eastwood hadn’t heard anything like it before. A phenomenally atmospheric, unconventional mix of choral moans, natural sounds, Jew’s harp and the twang of the Fender guitar, Morricone’s score turned the Dmitri Tiomkin-ish sounds of classic John Ford and Howard Hawks Westerns on their head. The rest is hoary history. Eastwood returned to Rome to collaborate with Leone on For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). By the time The Good, the Bad and the Ugly arrived on screens worldwide, the Western’s moral arithmetic no longer worked. Prior to Leone's films, revisionism had already begun within ,the American Western, which began questioning the country's founding myths. Here, John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Howard Hawks' classic 'Red River' (1948). The process which Leone carried to its logical cinematic culmination had already begun with the American Western, which had begun questioning its own myths in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the Cold War loomed and the world entered the Atomic age. The outbreak of the Korean War and the unleashing of McCarthyism saw a crumbling of traditional frontier myths. Racism, incest, anti-Red hysteria and moral ambiguity began to enter these so-called “Adult Westerns”. Screen legends James Stewart and Henry Fonda, personifying traditional American values, appeared in hard-bitten films directed by Anthony Mann and Delmer Daves, while Randolph Scott played the morally conflicted loner in austere “Chamber Westerns” by Budd Boetticher. Leone did not so much “invent” the revisionist Western as simply take its logic further than the Americans were prepared to go. Critics of Spaghetti Westerns were particularly offended by the fact that the Italians were making Westerns at all. Who were these Europeans to appropriate America’s foundation myth, its celluloid Manifest Destiny? Full Circle In fact, Kurosawa’s film itself owed much to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, while its plot had similarities with Budd Boetticher’s 1958 Western Buchanan Rides Alone. Leone’s particular offence was to borrow without pretending to be reverent. Sergio Corbucci's apocalyptic and anti-clerical 'Django' (1966) was another twisted remake of Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' that pushed the envelope on violence. After the grand success of A Fistful of Dollars, yet another twisted version of Yojimbo followed when Leone’s friend, Sergio Corbucci, the other Sergio, “a primitive Marxist”, did his take on Kurosawa, directing the fantastically stylised cult masterpiece Django (1966). Apocalyptic and anti-clerical, pushing the envelope on violence, the famed ear-splicing scene and the mutilation of the hero’s hands took things to new heights. Corbucci’s film made a superstar of the coffin-dragging Franco Nero. Its outre violence ensured its ban in Britain for 25 years. While many of the 550-odd Spaghettis made between 1961 and 1977 were sub-par, the best ones often masked a great deal of skill and subtlety beneath their crude veneers. Most importantly, Italy’s shameful tryst with Fascism and the humiliation endured by its people in a post-war world decisively shaped the psyche of these films. The failure of the Left in shaping policy in post-war Italy found expression in anti-Fascist, left-wing themes in Euro-Westerns like Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown, Damiano Damiani’s cerebral A Bullet for the General and Corbucci’s seminal The Great Silence. Moreover, a Spaghetti Western’s shoestring budget, coupled with their use of the disenfranchised Gypsy populace in Spain’s Almeria and Andalucia regions, made it fundamentally a proletarian movie-making exercise. The result was a genre that looked cheap to American critics but could be surprisingly sophisticated about power. Its heroes were often mercenaries; its institutions corrupt; its revolutionaries ambiguous; its violence both exhilarating and repellent. As films made by outsiders, they tended to scrutinise American myths from the outside. Director Sam Peckinpah credited his blood-drenched classic 'The Wild Bunch' (1969) to the climate created by Spaghetti westerns. Sam Peckinpah, whose films led to a critical reappraisal of violence in cinema, remarked that “only the climate created by Spaghetti Westerns” enabled him to make The Wild Bunch (1969). The films boosted the careers of faded American stars and opened up new vistas for Italian and European actors. Bit players like Van Cleef became overnight icons, while Cuban actor Tomas Milian struck gold playing oppressed campesinos. But Leone’s greatest contribution may have been his sense of time. Hollywood had traditionally treated action as something that moved a story forward. Leone showed that action could be made to move sideways. The characters and the camera could wait. So could the audience. Morricone gave Leone a second language with which to manipulate time while Eastwood’s laconic Man with No Name was almost John Wayne’s photographic negative: ambiguous where Wayne’s heroes were morally legible, an outsider rather than the representative of an established order. The “Dollars Trilogy” made Eastwood a superstar from the wrong side of the tracks. Later directors, from Sam Raimi to Quentin Tarantino, treated the Spaghetti Western not as an embarrassing European imitation but as a foundational part of modern cinema. The influence did not stop in America. Had Leone not made his Dollars trilogy, India would not have had its hallowed “curry Western” in the form of Sholay (1975), which borrows several scenes from Leone’s works. The family massacre scene is lifted lock, stock and barrel from Once Upon a Time in the West, while Amjad Khan’s Gabbar Singh is modelled on Gian Maria Volonté’s performance as the sadistic El Indio in For a Few Dollars More. The American critics who complained that the Spaghetti Western was defiling the Western were certainly right about one thing: Leone was indeed gleefully defiling it by unceremoniously taking down the Western from its pedestal. He made the Western’s heroes less heroic, its villains more charismatic, its violence more unsettling, its landscapes less trustworthy and, importantly, its morality considerably murkier.
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