The Making Of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly And The Birth Of The Spaghetti Western
It was always going to be tough for Sergio Leone to finish his Spaghetti trilogy with something sufficiently triumphant to top A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More. With 1964’s Fistful, he’d shown how the western could be redefined using the script from Akira Kurusawa’s samurai epic Yojimbo and a largely unknown American actor called Clint Eastwood. Meanwhile, 1965’s For A Few Dollars proved that sequels could actually impose upon the original picture, but even with an enhanced budget, it was hard to see how Leone could push the envelope any further.
With The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, Leone didn’t so much push the envelope as ram it down the film world’s thaot. Tapping into his experiences as a director of sword and sandal flicks like The Colossus Of Rhodes, Leone took the real-life story of the Reynolds Gangs (a band of Confederate sympathisers who buried their loot in a cemetery in Colorado) and gave it the epic treatment usually reserved for Bible stories. A superbly overproduced score, a cast of thousands, colossal fight scenes, bloodshed, honour, betrayal - it was like the bastard child of Cecil B DeMil;e and Sam Peckinpah had decided to make a movie together.
And besides throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, Leone came up trumps with his casting. With Eastwood continuing as the Man With No Name, this third outing would set the seal on the tight-lipped anti-hero becoming a staple of action cinema. The director also rehired Lee Van Cleef, who’d been superb as the avenging Colonel Mortimer in For A Few Dollars More, only this time casting him as the satanic ‘Angel Eyes’ Setenza. Leone also forked out for the services of New York stage actor Eli Wallach, whose malevolent influence he’d enjoyed in The Magnificent Seven and How The West Was Won, giving him the plumb part of ‘ugly’ Mexican gangster Tuco.
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