Before watching the movie:
The legendary Spaghetti Westerns have always been a group I’ve meant to get to on this blog, and as the music from this one has transcended it, it’s the obvious “have to pick one” choice.
I have no idea what this movie is about, but the title suggests it’s going to explore some archetypes of good and evil, and probably there will be one character of each type listed.
After watching the movie:
Out in the western frontier, Tuco Ramirez has a $2,000 bounty on his head, and sharpshooter “Blondie” partners with him to collect the bounty, shoot out the hangman’s rope and escape, split the money, and repeat. Meanwhile, hitman “Angel Eyes”, sent out to interrogate and kill a former Confederate soldier, learns not only the whereabouts of deserter Jackson (living under the name Carson), but that Jackson stole a cache of Confederate gold and buried it in a grave only he knows the location of. Angel Eyes then kills his employer on the suggestion that the last man he killed tried to pay him to kill the employer, and he never leaves a job unfinished. Tuco suggests to Blondie that he should get more than half the money because it’s his neck, but Blondie counters that his aim is at least as important. They do one more scam, where Blondie proves his point, then Blondie leaves Tuco in the desert, their partnership dissolved. Pursuing him for revenge, Tuco eventually gets the upper hand and force marches Blondie through the desert intending to continue until Blondie dies, but a stagecoach crosses their path and the deserter Jackson stumbles out, tells Tuco the name of the cemetery where he’s hidden hundreds of thousands of dollars of gold, and offers him the name on the grave in exchange for water. By the time Tuco gets water and returns, Jackson has died, but not before giving Blondie the name to look for. Now the pair each have half a secret and a fortune at stake in keeping the other alive. As they cross through a land ravaged by the Civil War, Angel Eyes is out there prepared to do anything to anyone standing between him and finding Jackson’s gold.
It’s evident there was a lot of effort and craft put into this film. There are no decisions in the assembly that seem anything other than deliberate. The camera work is often calling attention to itself in all the best ways, using contrasting shots to express space and tension and elevating every scene that isn’t heavy dialogue. I’m sure I’ve seen discourse about how Leone’s films take the tropes of the Hollywood Western and elevate them to the high art that nostalgia and time have polished their memory into, and I can see it for myself now. Nobody can do this again because this is what everything else will be compared to.
That said, the protagonist is more morally grey than you’d expect for a classic Western. Even though he’s directly labeled the Good (guy) and wears the white hat, he kills casually, lives outside the law, and plays with his deuteragonist’s life for revenge and amusement. He’ll go out of his way to do nice things for deserving people sometimes, but mostly he’s the good guy because he’s the least ruthless. This was positioned as the end of a trilogy with A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, and while it doesn’t seem to be much connected aside from having Clint Eastwood playing basically the same character, there’s room to read too much into the final movie about The Man With No Name ending with him holding all the cards at a nameless grave.
Blondie may be a mystery but I appreciated how this movie took the time to explore the rift between Tuco and his family, a point which is not at all plot relevant. The cool reunion between Tuco and his brother is like a separate vignette that humanizes and deepens his character and makes him more complicated than he needs to be to have a fraught partnership with Blondie.
Much writing has been done about the most famous pieces from the score, and the central theme is definitely a standout that sounds more like the West than like music. But also I noticed that after a kind of sleepy hymn is performed to cover a brutal interrogation, that hymn follows them through tired and desperate moments.
So much has been written about this movie that I’m always afraid to retread what’s been well discussed. But this is definitely a movie that deserves to be talked about.
Yesterday's Movies 