The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A western set during the American Civil War. There are three men and all three are after the same thing. A case of gold buried in a cemetery. The information is split. One knows the name of the cemetery, another the name on the grave; the third wants to kill them both. From there the film is a journey. A desert, a prison camp, the destruction of a town, a bridge and a monastery. The pairing keeps changing. Two men work together for a while, then one leaves the other in the desert, then they partner again. The war is not background. In the middle the film enters a front line and shows hundreds of soldiers dying over a bridge; the two characters find it senseless. What the narrative is interested in is not gold but time: the film is in no hurry at all, looks at faces at length, and builds tension by waiting. The finale takes place in a cemetery between three men. It runs several minutes, there is almost no speech, and the editing keeps accelerating. The music is by Ennio Morricone and was written before shooting; on some scenes it was played on set to give the actors a rhythm. The cemetery was built in Spain with the help of soldiers. Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef are in the cast. Sergio Leone directed. It is the last part of a trilogy and takes place chronologically before the others. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see the best of the genre. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the film runs close to three hours and is slow by design.