The Ugly
by David Pascal
And the end of all our exploring? It will be, wrote Eliot, "to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."
Eliot loved saying stuff like that. It gave the past, which he revered, a certain grand mystical frisson, always a plus for reactionaries. But looking back isn't invariably a rich experience. Not that subsequent judgments have to be harsh. But they can be. And sometimes should be. At least if one has grown during the interim.
Case in point: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly -- recently remastered to include twenty minutes of never-before-seen lost footage. Footage well lost: with only one exception (a Hamlet-like vignette in which Eli Wallach addresses the Yorick of a dead chicken), the added snippets were to this reviewer unnoticeable, and did little beyond taking an already three-hour film over three hours. Always something of a risk, given that the art of cinema limited by the artlessness of the bladder.
But length is not the problem with The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. Rather, and fatally, content is. All right, all right, I confess -- I saw The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly when a brat, and loved it. In many ways it's a brat's film par excellence: the stark, virtually Martian, desert sandscapes; the angular snaking matador flamenco; Wallach's overacted Tuco, hammy enough to sustain the Pork Industry; most of all, the sheer squalid Elizabethan excess, vileness piled on grotesquerie. What kid would not love it?
Is there something genuinely liberating as well as infantile in such maximal crassness? Maybe. The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly's protagonists -- only a Nazi could call them 'heroes' -- seem merry enough, wandering cowpoke Nietzcheans gone amuck, brunette beasts roving as far beyond good and evil as beyond soap, water, and Charmin. They filch, slaughter, brutalize, spit and piss with a deadpan abandon that puts dainty earlier Capones like Cagney or Raft in the shade.
But it's an abandon that backfires. The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is not really a 'classic Western' -- the actual West was populated by Christians and Victorians, those leprous personae non grata of modernity. GBU is as post-Christian and post-Victorian as its landscapes are post-nuclear.
I sometimes think the turning point of the Western, the cliff's edge over which later Gadarene swine like GBU director Sergio Leone careened, was John Ford's Liberty Valance. There John Wayne, America's 'perfect gentle knight', made all things well by shooting the villain in the back, from the dark; and James Stewart, upright keeper of laws, garnered fame, wealth, political stature, and the girl too, by conniving with the adroit lying PR that concealed it all. It was a prophetic foretaste of the US to come, covert agencies funding foreign assassinations as spin doctors engineered public torpor and consent.
Ford was properly elegaic over this glum situation, but, like the good Roman gladiatorial it is, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly shrugs off any such reticence. Greed is absolute here, torture just fine, blood-letting universal, and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly's feral protagonists simply love it, wallowing in it like the pigs that they are. Hypocrisy may be the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but vice is too insensate to pay any such tribute here. The strong take from the weak and give the weak an additional kick or bullet for a chuckle. Brutish activity? Sure. But that's the thing about The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. It doesn't lament this. It celebrates it, in one long paean to the brutes.
The plot of The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is, like its leads, not clean but simple. The Civil War is raging. Confederate gold is hidden in a grave, and sharp-shooting con artist Clint Eastwood, thief and rapist Eli Wallach, and professional killer Lee Van Cleef go in search of it, slaughtering competitors like flies all the way to the big shoot-out, where the hero emerges triumphant. It's mannequin Clint, of course, though nearly effeminate by comparison with the looming arachnids he's blown away by this point.
The trio amble through a Civil War that is, inaccurately, set in the far desert West, and is, not inaccurately, presented as a moronic exercise in sadism. Senseless military objectives, shellings of civilian towns, torture camps abound. Idealism dies almost more rapidly in wars than soldiers, but the troops here seem embarked on mass suicide for its own sake. The abolition of slavery? State's rights? This was a mark of old wars, when men fought wars for forgotten things like reasons. War has no rationale here, except as a social projection of the paranoiac inner landscapes of the protagonists: All Against One and One Against All.
Of the trio, Lee Van Cleef is the closest to being admirable, because he's the closest to being rational. Nay, even social -- he fits into Army administration without a blink. Cleef doesn't hesitate to beat the tar out of a woman or a bound POW, but he ends it promptly when he gets the information he's seeking. Human stupidity seems rather to amuse him, but sadism for its own sake -- no.
Tuco, the real star of The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, is long past that proto-civilized mark. Tuco tortures Eastwood in a desert trek with real glee, lets a stranger hang from sheer whim, has a record of rape, theft, desecration that clearly loses him no sleep.
And this is really the core of The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: because Tuco's the hero, the most lively, funny, sympathetic character of the film.
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly stacks the deck. What we might regard as virtuous characters -- a prison camp commander determined to stop the theft and torture of his wards, a Civil War captain appalled at the pointless deaths of his men, a priest running a makeshift hospital -- are without exception marginalized, presented as weaklings, drunkards, hypocrites. The brave, the exciting characters, the stars, are the killers. Horsemen, yes, but of the Apocalypse.
And are their apocalyptic antics fun for kids nonetheless? Oh yeah. It's Clint, after all. But we're not all kids, and the world of The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, the world of civil war and POW camps, social collapse and random bombings, is not pretense but our daily cancer on CNN. A reality to be fought, not celebrated. Some activities -- the commander's, the captain's, the priest's -- do fight it, are behaviors that build civilizations, not tear them down. But GBU stands squarely in the latter camp, with the barbarians.
Give The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly some credit: it doesn't completely romanticize its butchery. But it does romanticize its butchers, and richly smears those offering alternatives. And to that extent that it does so, it deceives. What elevates the barbarous cultivates barbarism; and cultivating barbarism's a shabby pastime and a poor category of art. Which is why, as art, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is merely, thoroughly, ugly.
Overkill? After all, this is cowboy cinema, not Socratic discourse. Why not take a moral vacation, have fun, escape?
I'm not deaf to this argument. I enjoyed watching The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly as a boy. Hey, part of me still does. All those wide-screen Winchesters thundering bang bang bang! Cool! But the part of me that likes that is not a part in which I take much pride. Sure, as a break from the Prozac torpors of la vie suburbienne, GBU has irresistable vividness. As opposed to lives increasingly regulated by cataracts of laws and lawyers and Patriot Act provisions, GBU's mad-dog anarchy can feel a welcome relief.
But what feels liberating need not be liberating. It can be imprisoning. Escape is attractive, and escapism, its corrosive counterfeit, seems like the real thing. Only it's not. Escapism makes you feel free. But leaves you less so.
There are Westerns that portray life with both thoughtfulness and accuracy -- nearly all John Ford's, for instance. The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is not on that sublime plane. Rather, on the arid and empty plains framing its murderous wanderers. This is not a classic western; only a classic distraction, like the video games of which is surely an ancestor. Bang pow; splat splat; another fifty cents, please. What fun! What laughs!
What horror.
