The Good, The Bad and the Ugly movie review.

 I watched the extended English version on Prime Video. I think I was around ten years old when this movie first came out. If memory serves I saw it at my neighborhood drive in theatre The Rebel Drive In Theatre Gadsden/Attalla Alabama. This is a long meandering movie. The extended version is a good three hours long. Filmed in Italy it's one of the famous Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. The American West of the Spaghetti Western is vast and epic. Rolling hills and vast deserts and wide open spaces. It is also the inspiration of the Dark Tower lands in Stephen King's epic. Not the crummy movie that came out recently. I"m talking about the seven book series. The Good the Bad and the Ugly is a masterpiece. It also brings the horror of war specifically the American Civil War in to play. Now in reality I believe the civil war was mostly an East of the MIssissippi affair. Not totally but still it's odd to see the Union and the Confederacy fighting in this mythic Western background. One of the most telling scenes is when the Union and the Confederate's are rushing at each other on a bridge and killing each other Clint Eastwood's character says something along the lines of "I've never seen such a senseless waste of men." Still, this isn't a civil war movie.

  It's a movie about human greed and the three main characters play it to the hilt. Eli Wallach is brilliant and has some of the best lines of the movie. Lee Van Cleef plays the Bad as a cold and deadly as any Western villain.. The Good by Clint Eastwood is the quieta and fast as lightning gun that you would expect.

Oddly for the movies of that time and this there is no actual romantic interest. No beautiful woman to entice our hero from his appointed mission. That is both a strength and yet a weakness of the movie. This movie could have cut out the Civil War scenes and been a tighter, faster and leaner movie. But, still it works. I watched most of it yesterday evening and finished this morning with coffee. Fun stuff. Also, the first 10 plus minutes has no dialog at all. It works beautifully. But, I highly doubt anybody today would have the guts or artistic sense and skill to pull that off. 

All in all there are more entertaining Spaghetti Westerns and certainly faster moving Eastwood films. But, this holds up 53 years later and there are tricks and skills that modern film makers could learn from.