Tonight on TV: This film is “the spaghetti western par excellence” and could have had a sequel

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly : Sergio Leone’s masterpiece

When talking about the spaghetti western genre it’s hard not to think of it first Sergio Leonewho directed the most famous and important films in the history of cinema. In fact, despite a short filmography (eight films to his credit), we owe the filmmaker several monuments, starting with his Dollar trilogy: For a handful of dollars (1964), And for a few dollars more (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Quentin Tarantino recently stated that he believes these three films “what no other trilogy has ever managed to do“, that is to say that each feature film manages to be better than the previous one. In this, we can say that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the last masterpiece of this trilogy.

The film is set in the midst of the Civil War (which places it chronologically before the first two works). We find there Clint Eastwood as the “man with no name,” nicknamed Blondin by his accomplice Tuco, played by Eli Wallach. Together, they develop a scam in which Blondin delivers Tuco to the town sheriff for a reward, before saving him from hanging. Only, Tuco begins to tire of being the one with the rope around his neck.

The two men then separate, but not on good terms. Their reunion will be particularly violent, with Tuco forcing Blondin to walk in the desert. Until the moment in which Blondin hears the last words of a soldier who tells him the location of a treasure. Tuco will then do everything to be forgiven, but without counting on their meeting Sentence (Lee Van Cleef)who also wants to get hold of the gold.

A great success that continues to please

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly It differs from the two previous works of his cynical view of war. Since the protagonists do not belong to any faction, Sergio Leone makes the conflict and the death of men even more absurd. One sequence in particular indicates this, when Blondin and Tuco find themselves in the middle of a fight Confederate and Union forces fight on a bridgeThe dead pile up on both sides, and Blondin also responds: “I have never seen so many people die beforeEven the captain of the North will no longer support this massacre. Before dying he asks the two men to destroy the bridge for all this to end. The scene of the explosion, particularly suggestive, almost turned into a tragedy.

If the press had not been unanimous when the film was released (spaghetti westerns were not well regarded at the time), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is today considered a referenceand its impact on pop culture it’s obvious. The band Metallica uses, for example, this song in the introduction to their concerts The Ecstasy of Gold composed by Ennio Morricone.

The success of the feature film worldwide has been impressive, with over 11.3 million viewers in Italy, or even more. 6.3 million viewers in France. For some, like Seattle’s Sean Axmaker Post-intelligenceAnd “spaghetti western par excellence“, while Jean-François Rauger of World he wrote on the occasion of a rebroadcast of the film that it is a “model of intelligence, virtuosity, humor and baroque violence, (which) masterfully closes the famous Dollar trilogy“.

The expected sequel

This conclusion may not have stopped there. Given the immense success of the film, It was considered a sequelexplain ScreenRant (which quotes the book Dictionary of the Italian Western by Marco Giusti). Not directly from Sergio Leone, who would have tackled another trilogy (Once upon a time…), but by the screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni who would have written the screenplay for a feature film set in 20 years later The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The idea then was to find Tuco chasing Blondin’s (dead) nephew in hopes of recovering Confederate gold. Eli Wallach would be contacted, as would Clint Eastwood the narrator of the work. But Sergio Leone preferred to withdraw from this project to distance himself from the western genre. And without his approval, the project was abandoned. Which is certainly better given the perfection of the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Source: Cine Serie

Ray

Ray Ortiz is a journalist at Gossipify, known for his coverage of trending news and current events. He is committed to providing readers with accurate and unbiased reporting, and is respected for his ability to keep readers informed on the latest news and issues.