The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sergio Leone · a film · 1966 · about 161 minutes in its international version · written with Age and Scarpelli and Luciano Vincenzoni · as Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo
Mode
Italian western carried to epic length; picaresque, treasure hunt and war film in one, played as ironic grandeur
Mythos
A triad of moral types declared and undone; the descent among the dead to a treasure in a false grave; the nameless rider as angel of death; the trickster who survives
Phase
The Confederate campaign in New Mexico, 1862, from three introductions through a desert, a mission, a prison camp and a bridge to a circle of graves and a noose
Presentation
Feature film in colour, Techniscope at about 2.35:1, mono sound, about 161 minutes in the English-language release; an international cast post-synchronised; three freeze-frame captions; a score by Ennio Morricone
Register
Comic, cold and grand by turns: slapstick in a bath and a gun shop, a beating under an orchestra, a battle painting with sound, a duel held for minutes to music
Scale
Three men and the armies that cross their road; a desert, a mission, a camp, a river and a cemetery
Governing Proposition
Three men, a bounty swindler, a hired killer and a bandit, hunt two hundred thousand dollars in gold buried in a grave, and the secret of where it lies is split between two of them. The wager of the film is that a western can be carried to the length and weight of an epic, that a war killing thousands for a bridge can stand behind a treasure hunt and make it small, and that a fight between men lasts exactly as long as the looking before it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a face filling the frame against a landscape in the same shot. Distance and a face are held in one composition, and the waiting is made grand before anything has happened. The first of the three men is Tuco, played by Eli Wallach, a bandit with a price on his head. His introduction ends on a freeze frame and a caption that names him: “The Ugly”.
Two more introductions follow, each closed the same way. Angel Eyes, played by Lee Van Cleef, a killer working for pay who will hunt the same two hundred thousand dollars, is “The Bad”. Blondie, the nameless man in a poncho, played by Clint Eastwood, is “The Good”, and he is a bounty swindler. The title is stated three times as a thesis before the story has begun, and the rest of the film undoes it.
The film was made in 1966 by Sergio Leone, the third of his westerns with Eastwood, produced by Alberto Grimaldi for PEA, written by Age and Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni and Leone, photographed in Techniscope by Tonino Delli Colli, with music by Ennio Morricone. It was shot in Spain with an international cast and post-synchronised, and its English-language release, distributed by United Artists in the United States in December 1967, runs about 161 minutes. That version is judged here.
Movement II
The partnership is a swindle. Blondie hands Tuco in for the reward; at the hanging the rope is shot through from a distance, and the two ride off to split the money and work the next town. The scam is shown twice, and the second time Blondie ends it, leaving Tuco on foot in the desert. The good one of the title is a bounty swindler who abandons his partner, and the film says so without comment.
Tuco survives, and between the desert and his revenge comes the film’s comedy: in a gun shop he builds a revolver out of parts and robs the owner with it. When he finds Blondie again he walks him across the desert under a parasol, without water. The march is long and cruel and played half for laughs. Then a runaway coach comes across the sand, full of dead men.
One of them is dying. He is Bill Carson, and he knows where the gold is buried. Tuco learns the name of the cemetery, and Blondie the name on the grave. The secret is divided between two men who hate each other, and from that moment neither can kill the other. The plot is fastened in a dying man’s breath, and the cemetery it names is the place the whole film will reach.
Movement III
Tuco brings the half-dead Blondie to the mission of San Antonio, where his brother is a priest. The brother reproaches him with the life he leads and with their parents’ death. Tuco answers that where they were born a man became a priest or a bandit, and the meeting ends in a blow. Then he goes outside and tells Blondie that his brother loves him.
In two minutes the scene articulates poverty, choice and shame, and it is the film’s one interior moment, given to the man the title calls ugly. He has the film’s only family and its only confession, and the lie he tells afterwards is the most human thing he does. The comedy that has carried him so far does not leave him here; it simply stops working for a minute, and the film lets it stop.
The war is close by now, in a hospital of amputees and in the armies that decide every station of the road. The film’s two other men have no such scene. Blondie is a surface of squint and poncho, Angel Eyes a smile, and the film’s knowledge of their minds stops at their faces. That is its method, and it is the limit the scene with the brother makes visible.
Movement IV
The road takes Tuco and Blondie into a Union prison camp, where Angel Eyes is a sergeant and the commandant is dying of gangrene. There Tuco is beaten for his half of the secret, and outside a band of prisoners is ordered to play to cover the screams. The comic and the cruel obey the same physics here, and the music the film loves is put to the worst use it can find.
The next station is a ruined town: Tuco in his bath, a gunfight in the street, the genre’s set pieces played at full length. Then the road meets the war head on. A river crossing is held by two armies, and a drunken Union captain commands a bridge his superiors keep ordering taken and retaken, men dying on it every day. He longs to blow it up. Blondie, looking at the slaughter, says what the film has been showing: “so many men wasted”.
The bridge must fall before the cemetery can be reached, and it is blown. The explosion is a battle painting with sound, and the dying captain hears it. Later Blondie finds a young soldier dying, puts his coat over him and gives him a draw on his cigar. The treasure hunt has been set inside an industrial slaughter that makes three men’s greed look small and almost innocent, and the nameless man’s charity, real or not, is that of an angel of death.
Movement V
Sad Hill is a cemetery stretching across a plain. Tuco runs among the stones looking for the name, and Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold” rises as he runs, the camera turning with him until the graves blur into one field. Greed, at this moment, becomes transport. The grave he seeks is Arch Stanton’s, and Arch Stanton does not exist: the marker is a decoy, and the gold lies in the unmarked grave beside it.
At the centre of the cemetery is a circular arena of stones like a clock face, and the three men take their places at three points of the ring. The duel that follows holds for minutes before a shot is fired. The cuts move from landscape to faces, to eyes, to hands, to holsters, quickening with the score until each shot is barely a beat long. The title’s three types stand at the three points of judgment, and the circle is the form made literal: three points, no sides.
The coda returns to the rope where the partnership began. Tuco is left at a noose among the graves, and the nameless man rides off across the plain. The last sound is Tuco’s shout after him. Sixty years on, the stretched standoff timed to music has become a set form of action cinema and the score has passed into general culture, while the film still argues its first proposition: that the good, the bad and the ugly are names, and the war beyond them is the larger thing.
Act III · The Twelve
The design is picaresque, a road with stations, and the subtractive test finds give at several of them. The rope scam is shown twice where once would establish the bond and its betrayal; the desert torture of Blondie runs long; the Union camp, after the beating, is the slackest passage; the ruined town’s episode, Tuco in the bath and the gunfight in the street, answers the genre’s appetite more than the story’s. That the extended restoration could put back scenes that sit easily in the film says the same: the form tolerates addition. Against that, the spine is hard. The divided secret forces the partnership, Angel Eyes’ route through the camp forces the meeting, and the bridge must fall before the cemetery can be reached.
Score: 7.9 / 10
What the film brings into the open is a disproportion: three men hunting two hundred thousand dollars in a war that is killing thousands for a bridge. The drunken Union captain, longing to blow the bridge his superiors keep ordering taken and retaken, and Blondie’s words at it set the treasure hunt inside an industrial slaughter that makes the trio’s greed look small and almost innocent. The scene at the mission discloses more: poverty, choice and shame are articulated in two minutes between two brothers. The disclosure is intermittent. Much of the film’s power is mood, irony and attitude, and the war, though it discloses, is seen by men who use it. A meaning, held lightly, below the gate.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation comes often and from the first shot, a face filling the frame against a landscape, so that waiting itself is made grand. The desert under Tuco’s parasol rises to dread; the runaway coach of dead men arrives as a ghost image; the bridge charge and its explosion are a battle painting with sound. Above all Sad Hill: Tuco running among the graves to “The Ecstasy of Gold”, the camera turning with him until the stones blur, is pure transport, and the duel in the stone circle that follows, its cuts quickening from landscape to eyes to hands in time with the score, holds the height for minutes. The heights are cold, ironic rather than tragic, and some are earned by spectacle.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The title declares a triad of moral types and the film both enacts and mocks it: the good one is a bounty swindler who leaves a partner in the desert, the ugly one has the film’s only family and its only confession. The three are drawn to gold buried beside the grave of a man who does not exist, Arch Stanton’s marker the decoy and the treasure in the unmarked grave next to it, and the last act is a descent among the dead into a circular arena, three figures at three points of judgment. The nameless rider who gives a dying soldier his coat and his cigar is an angel of death as much as a gunman. Load-bearing, if lightly carried.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The turn from the American western, from its ellipsis of violence, its heroes with causes, its sound and its time, was made in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and pressed in For a Few Dollars More (1965). This film’s own departure is in scale and in the open entry of history: an Italian western carried to epic length, with the Civil War as its landscape, and the duel stretched into an operatic form in which music and cutting take over from speech. The stake was real, a far larger budget, three stars, a war staged with hundreds of extras and a bridge built and blown. But the wager was placed on the director’s own proven path, and most of the turn belongs to the two films before it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and much of what the film knows goes. Its knowledge is of time under threat: that a fight lasts the length of the looking before it, and that men are measured by how long they can hold a gaze. That is carried only by the dilation of duration, by the alternation of landscape and extreme close-up, and by a score composed to be played into the scenes, in whose main theme each of the three men has his own cry. The three freeze-frame captions make the film a demonstration of its title, and the circle at Sad Hill is the form made literal: three points, no sides. The middle episodes could be told in a conventional western’s grammar without loss: form as instrument in the great passages, container in the links.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Sixty years of return are evidence: viewing, criticism and imitation, with the final duel studied shot by shot in film schools and the score analysed apart from the film. Each return yields more of the design: the cemetery planted in a dying man’s breath, the mirrored betrayals, the way Tuco’s comedy shadows the war’s waste, the weight of the scene with his brother, the irony in Blondie’s charity at the bridge and to the dying boy. Semantic depth is shallower. The film’s ideas are clear on first viewing and do not much change, and critical return has worked mainly on style, on genre and on the politics of the Italian western. It yields on return in form, in feeling for Tuco and in the war; less in thought.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 1966, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is that the film carried the Italian western from a successful formula to an epic form with history in it, made the extended standoff timed to music a unit of film grammar, and made the score a lead instrument rather than a support. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the three-way standoff is a set form named and quoted across action cinema since, from Hong Kong to Tarantino; the main theme and “The Ecstasy of Gold” passed into general culture; the revisionist American western, Peckinpah’s and Eastwood’s own, drew on its cynicism and stretched violence. The reach is shared with the two films before it, and the film reorganised a genre and its techniques rather than what cinema could say. It meets the gate exactly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Sixty years since release, and presence of the widest kind: continuous exhibition, broadcast, home video in every format, and constant quotation of image and score. The form survives whole: the international cut exists complete. The charge is to surface and version. The extended restoration of 2003, with new English dubbing and a remixed track, became for some years the version most often seen, displacing the cut as released. The film was always a post-synchronised object, so this is the alteration of a surface already provisional, not the loss of the work, and it is charged lightly: a tenth below what the widest presence would carry, and well clear of the bar of 8.5.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The making is load-bearing at the summit passages. Tonino Delli Colli’s Techniscope frame holds a face and a distance in one composition; the camera at the bridge, the tracking with Tuco among the graves, and the cutting of the three-way duel, from wide to medium to eyes to hands, shortening to the beat of the score, are command of the medium of the first order. Morricone’s music, recorded in advance and played on set, is part of the cutting’s rhythm, not laid over it. The costs: post-synchronised dialogue that floats free of the mouths, the dubbed voices of the supporting cast, crash zooms of uneven tact, and the rope scam and camp passages directed with less exactness than the rest. The slack between the peaks counts.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Tuco’s slapstick, in the bath and in the gun shop where he builds a revolver from parts and robs the owner, and the war hospital of amputees and the dead at the bridge. One law governs both: an irony that sees every man, soldier or bandit, as a figure in a game of chance, rendered as a comic spectacle that turns grave without changing its manner. The beating in the camp, played under an orchestra of prisoners ordered to cover the screams, is the clearest proof that the comic and the cruel obey the same physics. Strain shows where cynicism and sudden pity meet without quite meeting, and the war’s scale sometimes outruns the fable that uses it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Held in one structure: the war as history and as an industry of death; three economies of greed; a family, two brothers, their parents’ death and the claim of blood; the Church as the poor man’s other exit; the land as desert and grave; the body under torture and in hunger. They are integrated through the road and the treasure, not listed, and the war is no backdrop, since its armies decide every station. What holds the axis lowest is consciousness, thin by design: the three men are surfaces, and the film’s knowledge of minds stops at faces, which is its method and its limit. The state is seen only as two uniforms and a commandant’s gangrene. Wide for a western, and well held.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Made at 8.8, then The Imperishable at 8.7. Elevation from the first shot to the circle at Sad Hill, where a run among graves and a duel held for minutes to music are moments of transport; a making in which frame, cutting and a score played into the scenes carry the summit passages; and sixty years of the widest presence, with the cut as released surviving complete.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: war, greed, family, Church, land and the body are held through the road and the treasure, but consciousness is thin by design and the state is two uniforms and a commandant’s gangrene. Just above it, The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 7.9: a picaresque whose stations include a repeated scam, a long march and slack passages in the camp and the ruined town, and a disclosure of war’s disproportion that comes intermittently and is seen by men who use it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5 and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.0 falls five tenths short and The Unconcealment at 7.9 six tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, unmet on The Unconcealment and The Swerve, and by its aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.9, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo) as first released, in its international version: the English-language release by United Artists in the United States in December 1967, about 161 minutes, from the first landscape to Tuco’s shout across the plain. Directed by Sergio Leone, produced by Alberto Grimaldi for PEA, written by Age and Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni and Leone from a story by Vincenzoni and Leone, photographed by Tonino Delli Colli in Techniscope, with music by Ennio Morricone; with Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach; shot in Spain. The film was shot with an international cast and post-synchronised, so the Italian dialogue is as much a dub as the English, and the English version is the one judged. The longer Italian premiere version of December 1966 and the extended restoration of 2003, with its new dubbing and remixed track, are not the object and are weighed only under The Imperishable. No print, script or recording was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and other lines are described. Details that could not be verified, among them the editors, the running time of the Italian premiere, which scenes the restoration put back, where in Spain the cemetery and the bridge were built, which instruments of the main theme belong to which man, later colour timings, and continuity slips, are not given.