The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Collector's
Edition
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Collector's Edition
on DVD |
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is
one of those films you've either never dreamed of seeing or that you've seen a million
times. If you belong to the first group, this superlative two-disc set offers you a chance
to abandon any lingering prejudices you might have concerning "spaghetti
Westerns" and see the movie for the bold artistic statement it really was.
And if you've seen it a million times? Well, this is your
chance to see it as though you've never seen it before -- because you probably haven't.
Not really, at least not in anamorphic 2.35:1 aspect ratio and with its
"original" 179-minute running time.
I've seen the movie on television so many times I had
forgotten how effectively Sergio Leone had used his wide cinematic canvas to convey the
barren landscape that dominated his overreaching characters. I saw the movie upon its 1967
release, but I don't remember understanding why Leone composed his shots with so much real
estate and so few people.
The director also uses the camera's field of view as a
crucial plot point: If the camera doesn't "see" something, neither do the film's
characters. It's a gimmick that can be perplexing when characters (or armies) just
suddenly appear out of nowhere, but he establishes the device early on in the film and he
sticks to it, so I reckon it's fair.
What it is, really, is the mark of a director with a
personal relationship with the camera and his audience. That's good news, because what TGTB&TU
doesn't have is a lot of plot. In fact, for a three-hour film, it hardly has any.
Here's the setup: Three men seek a hidden cache of Civil
War gold. Each one knows only one detail about its location, so all three must team up to
find it -- but in Leone's amoral universe, you know that once they find it, it will be
every man for himself.
What makes TGTB&TU so powerful is the bravura
way Leone takes his time to get to that inevitable denouement -- and how, once having
gotten there, he spins it out for an eternity of squinting, grimacing, and various other
facial tics that reach an elegiac apotheosis.
One of the many reasons Leone's vision requires a
widescreen transfer such as this collector's edition is that he almost completely eschews
the "middle shot" so beloved by film (and TV) directors. He either frames his
characters within a vast landscape or closes up on their faces -- usually one after the
other in fairly rapid succession. Some people find this jumpy, but once you surrender to
Leone's rhythm, it's quite effective.
Many people have speculated that the title The Good, The
Bad, and The Ugly refers to the three protagonists of the film, played by Clint
Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef. However, Leone created a trickily shifting moral
landscape that didn't actually give anyone a chance to stand out as "good." I
suspect that the title refers to the qualities that exist in us all -- at least, it shows
us that each of these men has at least a little of all three.
Ennio Morricone's score is now acknowledged as one of the
all-time greats, with its haunting whistles and primal howls, but when the film first came
out, it baffled many viewers. (And many of us pulled the soundtrack out every time we
stuffed a towel under the door of our dorm rooms and turned off the lights.) It has
clearly stood the test of time, however, and much of TGTB&TU's power surely
comes from the way Morricone echoed and deepened what was on the screen in his
accompaniment.
There's no labeling that identifies this as an anamorphic
transfer, but it has to be, given the clarity and sharpness of the image. Colors are
fantastic, although there's a trace of graininess. The sound is quite good in terms of
dynamics, although it does sound a tad sharp, which is not unexpected in a film dating
back to the mid '60s. The original mono soundtrack has been remastered to Dolby Digital
5.1 with excellent front lateral spread -- too lateral a spread in a few cases where
voices don't seem to come from where they ought to. But, overall, the sound is impressive.
There's not a lot in the surround channels, but what is there sounds natural.
It's a two-disc set, so it's packed with extras, including
a fine audio commentary with Richard Schickel; a not-at-all lame 19-minute
"making-of" feature, "Leone's West"; and interviews with
film-historian Schickel, producer Alberto Grimaldi, Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach, among
others. There are also a plethora of featurettes on the second disc, including a 23-minute
documentary, "The Leone Style"; a 14-minute feature, "The Man Who Lost the
Civil War," about the real-life Confederate General Sibley, who waged the Western
war; an 11-minute audio-only description of the remastering of the soundtrack music,
narrated by film-music authority John Burlingame; not to mention another Burlingame
featurette on Morricone, "Il Maestro: Ennio Morricone and The Good, The Bad, and
The Ugly." There are also deleted and extended scenes, as well as vintage English
and French trailers
The box includes a pack of international theatrical
mini-posters and an eight-page insert.
You get a lot of movie with The Good, The Bad, and The
Ugly -- and a lot more than just the movie. I guess that could be considered either a
good thing or a bad thing, but sometimes too much is barely enough. This time, it seems
exactly right.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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