The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

I will confess right up front that I don't much like Westerns. I think it's something about the role women play (either they're being punished or they're there for the guys to look at, but hey, that's their role in Hitchcock movies and I stomach those pretty well) or maybe it's because the way they make reference to good vs. bad is not how I personally see these weighty issues. Case in point, Clint Eastwood stars as the "good" guy in this classic Western, but how good is someone who shoots 5 guys dead in the space of 2 minutes so he can get a chance at laying his hands on $200,000? And I don't buy the argument that that's just the way things were then. Eli Wallach plays the "ugly" guy (what does that actually mean?), and in some respects you empathize with him more than with Eastwood. OK, so he shoots a guy who's come to kill him while he's soaking in the bathtub, but he gets to deliver a great line afterwards the essence of which we can't not agree with: "When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk." Plus he has this hilarious tic worth watching for, similar to Toshirô Mifune's tic in Akira Kurosawa's samurai films (there are many parallels between samurai and Western flicks). The music is a hoot, constantly making fun of what's happening on screen. And Eastwood is so young! He's nowhere near as scary here as in the Dirty Harry films, but you're aware that he's going to be a force to be reckoned with later.

original title: Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo
year: 1966
length: 162 min.
rating: 3.5
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060196/combined