The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966): The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach respectively. Although they're all kind of ugly, and all pretty bad. Eastwood we're told is "the Good" right after he leaves his partner tied up in the middle of a scorching desert to die. But later he gives a dying soldier a puff on his cheroot, so maybe he ain't so bad after all. Van Cleef is definitely the Bad--he kills gleefully whether or not money's involved, and he fights for the Union (and we know how evil the Unionists always are in these Westerns).

The irony for such a bunch of grizzled, unshaven men is their names: Van Cleef is Angel Eyes, Eastwood they call "Blondie", and Wallach plays Tuco, which I think is Spanish for "Fuzzy Bunny Rabbit". But don't be fooled--this rabbit can bite.

And don't be fooled by Clint Eastwood's top billing, either. This is Tuco's movie all the way. The first scene is his: we open on an impossibly wide shot of the Western landscape (actually, Italy, but I won't tell if you don't), and suddenly a man enters the frame in an impossibly tight close-up. He's a gunslinger, and at the end of a long dusty road are other gunslingers. The men approach each other slowly, guns at the ready, and director Sergio Leone takes his time letting suspense build up . . . what will happen when these three men meet at the center? The answer is that they aren't gunning for each other, they're working together, and they all three enter a saloon, guns drawn.

After much blasting, Tuco emerges chomping a lamb shank and leaving the three men dead or mostly dead. Tuco's an outlaw with a bounty on his head, and Eastwood is his partner. The two go from town to town with Tuco in shackles, where Eastwood collects the bounty and then saves Tuco before he can hang. Then on to the next town.

This is a shaky partnership, however, and soon the two men are at odds. Meanwhile, Van Cleef's Angel Eyes has a line on $200,000 in stolen gold. When Tuco and Eastwood find out where the gold is hidden--Tuco knows only the name of the graveyard, and Eastwood knows only the name on the grave--all three men head towards inevitable conflict.

But even before they can get to the conflict, they've got to get through the Civil War--a big deal to the armies fighting it, but mostly an inconvenience to Eastwood and Tuco. The pair don gray coats or blue--whichever will get them where they need to go quickest. They blow up a bridge just so the armies fighting over the bridge will go the heck away.

Finally, the men meet in the graveyard, and . . . Man, I love Sergio Leone's style. He's not afraid to take his time with something--when the three men stand face to face for a showdown, time stretches on forever . . . and it's a great reminder that the engine of a film can really shoot forward if you take a couple of key moments to rev it up.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly rocks. See it in widescreen.