The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

In Leone’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” the title of the film alone breaks tradition by introducing a third element into the western landscape, but the titular labels themselves are proven to be completely extra-diegetic in their application. In early commercials for the film, Tuco, the character labeled in the final movie as ‘The Ugly,’ is deemed ‘The Bad’, as if the two titles are interchangeable, and in the film itself the characters are introduced out of order altogether; Tuco, Angel Eyes, Blondie. 

‘The Good’ character takes part in a bounty hunter con, ‘The Ugly’ loudly teeters between threatening and saving ‘The Good’s life, and ‘The Bad’ is the most honest of the three. The moral ambiguity of all three characters, driven by the very greed condemned in “Shane” and made visually apparent in their rapid shifting between costumes and loyalties in the surrounding Civil War, questions the reliability of their own labels. Tuco’s mantra, “There are two types of people in this world” becomes ironic as well in the face of the film’s title, a joke perhaps, poked at the tropes Sergio Leone inherited from his genre’s cinematic past. Not even these follow archetypical lines, but reveal a much darker western world; “Those with loaded guns, and those who dig” implies that if made into groups, ‘victims and perpetrators’ is more accurate than ‘good and bad’.

In an interview, Leone said, “In our society, man is forced to undergo violence of every kind without being able to react. In the old West, a man with a pistol could make his own justice” (Sui). A sense of righteous violence plays a role throughout the Western genre, but unlike the vigilante harbinger of justice, much of the violence in Leone’s final Dollars film is pointless. The film takes no sides on its Civil War backdrop, providing honorable and detestable characters on either side of the war, making a point of their futile martyrdoms and allowing, through Blondie, empathy for those who suffer on either side. Leone himself, who looked to John Ford’s westerns with admiration, admitted, “the killings in my films are exaggerated because I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek satire on run-of-the-mill westerns” (Flint).

Within the historical context that “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” was created, we can interpret Leone’s take on the civil war as a reflection of the social climate regarding America’s involvement in the Vietnam War in 1966. While Tuko runs off to find the treasure, Blondie stays to offer water and a cigar to a dying soldier, choosing to blow up the bridge not because it is the fastest way to the graveyard, but because the lives he believes it will save. Angel Eyes uses the violence and brutality of war for his own pursuits and gain, reveling in death and the pain he causes. Tuko occupies the quick, loud, and most commonly seen (in terms of people and in screen time) space between ‘the Good’ and ‘the Bad’s two extremes, chooses to remain completely detached from the whole affair while operating around the battlegrounds unless it immediately benefits him. Within the morally ambiguous world Leone creates, to be good means to prevent death when possible, to be evil means to use it for personal gain; a set of beliefs that become political in light of the widespread opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War. Violence is pointless, says Leone, and justice cannot be reached through it.