The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Italian: Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, literally "The good, the ugly, the bad") is a 1966 Italian epic spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood as "the Good", Lee Van Cleef as "the Bad", and Eli Wallach as "the Ugly". Its screenplay was written by Age & Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni, and Leone (with additional screenplay material and dialogue provided by an uncredited Sergio Donati), based on a story by Vincenzoni and Leone. Director of photography Tonino Delli Colli was responsible for the film's sweeping widescreen cinematography, and Ennio Morricone composed the film's score. It was an Italian-led production with co-producers in Spain, West Germany, and the United States. Most of the filming took place in Spain.

The film is known for Leone's use of long shots and close-up cinematography, as well as his distinctive use of violence, tension, and highly stylised gunfights. The plot revolves around three gunslingers competing to find a fortune in a buried cache of Confederate gold amid the violent chaos of the American Civil War (specifically the Battle of Glorieta Pass of the New Mexico Campaign in 1862) while participating in many battles, confrontations, and duels along the way. The film was the third collaboration between Leone and Eastwood, and the second of those with Van Cleef.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was marketed as the third and final installment in the Dollars Trilogy, following A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). The film was a financial success, grossing over $38 million at the worldwide box office, and is credited with having catapulted Eastwood into stardom. Due to general disapproval of the spaghetti Western genre at the time, critical reception of the film following its release was mixed, but it gained critical acclaim in later years, and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential westerns of all time.

In 1862, in the American Southwest during the American Civil War, three bounty-hunters ambush Mexican bandit Tuco Ramirez, who shoots them and escapes.

Elsewhere, mercenary "Angel Eyes" interrogates former Confederate soldier Stevens for the alias of Jackson, a soldier who stole a cache of Confederate gold. Stevens gives the name "Bill Carson", offers Angel Eyes a bribe and then draws his pistol. Angel Eyes kills him and, intrigued about the gold, kills his own employer.

Tuco is rescued from more bounty-hunters by an unnamed drifter whom he nicknames "Blondie". Blondie delivers Tuco to a sheriff and collects his $2,000 (equivalent to $60,000 in 2024) bounty. As Tuco is about to be hanged, Blondie severs the noose by shooting it and sets him free. The two escape and split the bounty. They repeat the process in other towns until Blondie grows weary of Tuco's complaints and leaves him stranded in the desert.

Bent on revenge, and after one failed attempt with his gang, Tuco catches up with Blondie and force-marches him across the desert until he collapses from dehydration. A runaway ambulance arrives with several dead Confederate soldiers and a near-death Bill Carson, who asks Tuco for help, offering $200,000 in gold (equivalent to $6,000,000 in 2024), buried in a grave in Sad Hill Cemetery. When Tuco returns with water, Carson has died. However, before dying, he reveals the name on the grave to Blondie. The two reluctantly set aside their grudge and work together, since Tuco only knows the name of the cemetery while Blondie knows which grave to dig.

Posing as a Confederate soldier, Tuco takes Blondie to a nearby mission to recover. There, Tuco reunites with his brother, Pablo, who left his family to become a priest when Tuco was a child. Their meeting does not go well and Tuco angrily leaves with Blondie.

On the way, Tuco yells pro-Confederate statements to approaching soldiers who turn out to be a Union patrol. The two are taken to a prison camp that Angel Eyes has infiltrated as a Union sergeant in his search for Bill Carson. Having posed as Carson, Tuco is taken away for questioning. Under torture, he reveals the name of the cemetery and is sent away to be hanged. Knowing Blondie would not reveal the name on the grave, Angel Eyes recruits him into his search. Tuco escapes hanging by killing a henchman working for Angel Eyes, then goes to an evacuated town where Blondie, Angel Eyes and his gang have arrived.

Blondie finds Tuco and together they kill the gang, but Angel Eyes escapes. En route to the cemetery, the duo find themselves in a skirmish over a strategic bridge. Blondie decides to destroy the bridge to disperse the armies and clear their path. As they wire the bridge with explosives, Tuco suggests they exchange their secrets in case either is killed. Tuco reveals the cemetery name, and Blondie says "Arch Stanton" is the name on the grave.

After the bridge is demolished, Tuco steals a horse and rides to Sad Hill to claim the gold for himself. Blondie catches up to him as he digs up the grave, and Angel Eyes arrives soon after. When no gold is found in the grave, Blondie admits lying about the name. He then places a rock in the middle of the cemetery's pavement on which he says the true name is written. The other two men accept his challenge and back away with pistols ready.

The men stand around the pavement in a Mexican standoff waiting for one of them to draw. Angel Eyes draws first and Blondie kills him as Tuco discovers that his gun isn't loaded. Blondie reveals that he unloaded it the night before, and the gold is in the grave marked "Unknown" beside Stanton's.

Tuco digs up the grave and finds large bags of gold. However, Blondie orders him at gunpoint into a hangman's noose beneath a tree. With his hands bound, Tuco is forced to stand atop an unsteady grave marker while Blondie takes half of the gold and rides away. As Tuco screams for mercy, Blondie severs the rope with a rifle shot, dropping Tuco face-first onto the remaining gold. Tuco furiously curses Blondie, who disappears over the hills.

After the success of For a Few Dollars More, executives at United Artists approached the film's screenwriter, Luciano Vincenzoni, to sign a contract for the rights to the film and the next one. Producer Alberto Grimaldi, Sergio Leone and he had no plans, but with their blessing, Vincenzoni pitched an idea about "a film about three rogues who are looking for some treasure at the time of the American Civil War". The studio agreed but wanted to know the cost for this next film. At the same time, Grimaldi was trying to broker his own deal, but Vincenzoni's idea was more lucrative. The two men struck an agreement with UA for a million-dollar budget, with the studio advancing $500,000 upfront and 50% of the box-office takings outside of Italy. The total budget was eventually $1.2 million.

Leone built upon the screenwriter's original concept to "show the absurdity of war ... the Civil War, which the characters encounter. In my frame of reference, it is useless, stupid: it does not involve a 'good cause'." An avid history buff, Leone said, "I had read somewhere that 120,000 people died in Southern camps such as Andersonville. I was not ignorant of the fact that there were camps in the North. You always get to hear about the shameful behavior of the losers, never the winners." The Batterville Camp where Blondie and Tuco are imprisoned was based on steel engravings of Andersonville. Many shots in the film were influenced by archival photographs taken by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. As the film took place during the Civil War, it served as a prequel for the other two films in the trilogy, which took place after the war.

While Leone developed Vincenzoni's idea into a script, the screenwriter recommended the comedy-writing team of Agenore Incrucci and Furio Scarpelli to work on it with Leone and Sergio Donati. According to Leone, "I couldn't use a single thing they'd written. It was the grossest deception of my life." Donati agreed, saying, "There was next to nothing of them in the final script. They only wrote the first part. Just one line." Vincenzoni claims that he wrote the screenplay in eleven days, but he soon left the project after his relationship with Leone soured. The three main characters all contain autobiographical elements of Leone. In an interview he said, "[Sentenza] has no spirit, he's a professional in the banalest sense of the term. Like a robot. This isn't the case with the other two. On the methodical and careful side of my character, I'd be nearer il Biondo (Blondie), but my most profound sympathy always goes towards the Tuco side ... He can be touching with all that tenderness and all that wounded humanity." Film director Alex Cox suggests that the cemetery-buried gold hunted by the protagonists may have been inspired by rumours surrounding the anti-Communist Gladio organisation, who hid many of their 138 weapons caches in cemeteries.

Eastwood received a percentage-based salary, unlike in the first two films, from which he received a straight fee. When Lee Van Cleef was again cast for another Dollars film, he joked, "the only reason they brought me back was that they forgot to kill me off in For a Few Dollars More".

The film's working title was I due magnifici straccioni (The Two Magnificent Tramps). It was changed just before shooting began when Vincenzoni thought up Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Ugly, the Bad), which Leone loved. In the United States, United Artists considered using the original Italian translation, River of Dollars, or The Man With No Name, but decided on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Production began at the Cinecittà studio in Rome again in mid-May 1966, including the opening scene between Eastwood and Wallach when Blondie captures Tuco for the first time and sends him to jail. The production then moved on to Spain's plateau region near Burgos in the north, which doubled for the Southwestern United States, and again shot the western scenes in Almería in the south of Spain. This time, the production required more elaborate sets, including a town under cannon fire, an extensive prison camp, and an American Civil War battlefield; and for the climax, several hundred Spanish soldiers were employed to build a cemetery with several thousand gravestones and wooden crosses to resemble an ancient Roman circus. The scene where the bridge was blown up had to be filmed twice because all three cameras were destroyed in the first take by the explosion. Eastwood remembers, "They would care if you were doing a story about Spaniards and Spain. Then they'd scrutinize you very tough, but the fact that you're doing a Western that's supposed to be laid in Southwest America or Mexico, they couldn't care less what your story or subject is." Top Italian cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli was brought in to shoot the film and was prompted by Leone to pay more attention to light than in the previous two films; Ennio Morricone composed the score once again. Leone was instrumental in asking Morricone to compose a track for the final Mexican stand-off scene in the cemetery, asking him to compose what felt like "the corpses were laughing from inside their tombs", and asked Delli Colli to create a hypnotic whirling effect interspersed with dramatic extreme close-ups, to give the audience the impression of a visual ballet. Filming concluded in July 1966.