By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Sergio Leone’s iconic 1966 spaghetti western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach.
Symbolising how silly movie fans can truly be, this “western” – principally shot in Spain in the Italian language by a Roman director with a motley cast of Europeans absurdly masquerading as denizens of America’s Old West – is often hailed by critics, commentators and fans as one of the best that this usually shoddy genre has tossed up. This is one of the best? Really? Pull back on those reins, hoss! If The Good, The Bad And The Ugly was a horse, you’d shoot it for moving too slowly!
Have you seen Bad Girls? What about Maverick? Cowboys & Aliens? Now, they’re real westerns…apart from the Martians, of course. They move quickly, they make sense, and they’re actually shot in America. If any other genre than westerns, war movies, and horror flicks were shot in Italy and passed off as America, you’d be able to hear the derisive laughter from the bottom of The Grand Canyon! It’s the inherent silliness and childishness of the entire genre that makes a monumental cock-up like The Good, The Bad And The Ugly possible.
In what other genre would Clint Eastwood’s somnambulistic brand of acting be accepted as a genuine performance? He’s so wooden that his missus at the time must have had splinters all over her inner thighs! Eastwood is matched in his cigar store Indian acting style by Lee Van Cleef as the film’s squinty, apparently evil bad guy. Obviously feeling the need to over-compensate for these two cinematic dullards, co-star and notorious ham, Eli Wallach, really goes to town, chewing the scenery like a pop-eyed prisoner on day release at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Combined with director Sergio Leone’s leaden pacing, the truly shithouse dubbing, and Ennio Morricone’s ear-shredding score, it all mashes together to make The Good, The Bad And The Ugly mainly bad and most definitely ugly.
