How The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Plays with the Western Style
By 1966 Sergio Leone had already blown away the tumbleweeds of the Western genre with the films A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and For a Few Dollars More (1965). So when the third installment of what was later termed the ‘The Man with No Name Trilogy’ hit cinema screens expectations were extremely high. Luckily audiences were not disappointed. In this installment Clint Eastwood’s iconic character finds himself joining forces with two untrustworthy outlaws played by Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach. Their uneasy alliance is forged in order to locate a cache of stolen gold. However, as any devotee of the western knows, when you corral gold and cowboys together, you only find a rodeo of trouble.
From the very opening scene one realizes that Leone is taking the traditions of the genre and subverting them for his own enjoyment. The first shot seems to commence in a way one would expect of a John Ford film. It is an extreme long shot of the landscape, but almost instantly a disheveled and battered face steps into the frame changing it into an extreme close up. The man stares straight towards the camera surprising the audience and skewing any expectations of what may follow.
The following shot is of what appears to be an abandoned town and thanks to the Kuleshov effect the audience interprets this as being the man’s point of view. In the distance appear two men on horses; they are merely black shapes against the shimmering background. The two strangers dismount and the camera switches between them and the opposing third man as they approach each other. When they pass some small buildings the camera no longer gives us a point of view but has switched to profile medium shots instead. The two men move from the left of the frame to the right, the third walks from right to the left of the frame bringing all three closer together. For the audience there can only be one conclusion to this scene, and it must be a Mexican stand-off. The two men are going to shoot the third.
Yet, something odd happens here. The director suddenly changes the profile shot to the other side breaking the 180 degree rule. This reverses the men’s position in the frame, and disorientates the audience. The three men pull out their guns, but instead of killing each other they join forces and burst into the adjacent building with their weapons roaring. Thus, Leone fools the audience by using their knowledge of the tropes of the genre and deftly changing it at the last minute. This unusual editing breaks the established rules of classical cinema and is a visual clue that not everything is to be taken at face value.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is filmed in a ratio of 2.35:1. This wide view allows Leone to show the landscape in all its glory. Even if it's the Spanish deserts filling in for the Wild West. Leone also makes full use of the frame by utilizing extreme close ups of faces and objects. Every twitch of an eye, fly on a bleeding scab, and sweat on the brow is clearly visible. He also plays spatially with some scenes by positing his actors at either sides of the frame. The director is clearly an artist not afraid to make full use of the canvas. This mixture of wide landscapes and extreme close ups creates an uneven feeling in the film. In one outside scene the audience feels the vastness of the landscape making the characters seem insignificant. In the contrasting extreme close ups one feels claustrophobic, dirty and as dry as the sands that surround the actors.
For a piece of cinema that is famous for its music by Ennio Morricone it actually has vast stretches of silence. After the excitingly lurid credits have finished the opening theme fades into the diagetic effects of wind, banging doors and dogs barking. This bleak audio matches the desolation of the visuals. It also approximately ten minutes before any dialogue is first heard. This may be due to the fact that the film is dubbed (although it is originally in English) and the less spoken words you have the easier it is to replace the dialogue. However, it is obvious that Leone’s Western world is one of mostly silence and it is a place where the guns speak louder than the men. This lack of exposition forces the film to rely on the actors face to convey the meaning of a scene, and thus makes the emotion subtle and easy to miss. It is there, but unlike previous Westerns, it is emotions that match the trapped and restrained nature of many of the characters.
It is fair to suggest that the style of the western had already changed when Sergio Leone released A Fistful of Dollars. However with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly comes a sense of confidence that allows the director not only to twist the conventions of the genre but of cinema itself. The first two films in the series are merely the foals and this final installment is the full grown stallion. There are so many flourishes in this film that it is no wonder that film makers like Quentin Tarantino have paid homage to him by aping his style.
