The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) [2-Disc DVD Collector’s Set – Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (Extended English-language Version)
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, Aldo Giuffrè
screenplay by Age & Scarpelli & Luciano Vincenzoni & Sergio Leone
directed by Sergio Leone

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Perhaps it had been too long between screenings, or perhaps my mind had been playing tricks on me, but my most recent viewing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wasn't as good as the others. There was still much to admire: the wild structure, which doesn't properly introduce its MacGuffin until about half an hour in; the hilariously cavalier attitude towards human decency; the raw-meat attitude towards bodies and faces; and, of course, the idea of Eli Wallach playing a Mexican, which is always appealing. But all of this seems somehow only fitfully successful now, the film's conceptual high points surrounded by the same arid desert that nearly finishes off two out of three of the protagonists. Perhaps I should chalk it up to the distance of memory–even downgraded, the experience has something bizarre for just about everybody, whether their memories will be kind to it or not.

Still, the loss of a rating-star bothers me. This isn't some childhood favourite that maturity has cast aside, or some sniffy art masterwork whose thesis time and understanding has shown to be untenable–it's a juicy, infinitely inventive melange of leering close-ups and thrilling amorality that keeps coming up with image after zany image long after most other films have spent their limited imaginations. How could one not admire the "bad" Angel Eyes (Lee van Cleef), who kills two men who want each other dead purely out of professional considerations? Or not revel in the feral nature of "ugly" Tuco (Eli Wallach), a big-mouthed bandit who takes time out of eluding gunmen to hijack someone's bath water? Or not delight in the poise of the incomparable Clint Eastwood, as he assays his role as the just-barely "good" Man with No Name? Where do you get the right?

And how to look askance at the film's blasé attitude towards human life in general, so refreshing in a medium normally awash in bush-league moralism. It doesn't really matter that there's a Civil War happening and that people are dying for some noble cause or another: there's money to be made, and the niceties of politics are mere stumbling blocks on the road to outrageous wealth. You have to listen when a dying man named Bill Carson directs you to a massive stash of gold, and you have to cling parasitically to whatever enemy might have a piece of those directions; thus the Man and Tuco–whose bad history makes up the first part of the movie–must stick together as they make their way to monetary glory. The odd-couple pairing of Zen-calm Eastwood and frenzied Wallach makes for such bad behaviour and so much overacting that resistance should not only be futile but impossible.

The problem lies in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly's tendency towards random digression, at once its greatest strength and most maddening limitation. On the one hand, it serves as brilliant riposte to the sweeping master narratives that Sergio Leone lived to demolish: our anti-heroes scavenge at the edge of a fantasy West, immune to the American dream and taking what they can from whomever they can take it. (So, too, does Leone, whose tendency towards the grotesque steals from bystanders and ruins dignity as much as the protagonists do.) But while this allows for some magnificent plums, the pudding itself can run a little thin. There's a start/stop feeling to much of this movie, and a frantic sense of filmmakers wondering what to do next: a sense of arbitrariness takes over in sections, while some points are belaboured–and the 20 minutes of (largely expositional) footage that's been restored only adds to that sense. But who in their right mind would want to straighten out one of cinema's most deliciously crooked classics? How could you make a good citizen out of such a delicious delinquent? Am I crazy? Is there no pleasing me? Have I finally lost it?

The fans of this film are legion, and I recommend they seek out their chance to see this film as it is meant to be seen: in 'scope, on a big screen, with a rowdy audience. As for me, I'm off to have my head examined. If The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is wrong, nobody wants to be right–and neither do I.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers "My favorite movie!" declares a sticker on the shrinkwrap protecting MGM's new 2-Disc DVD Collector's Set of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The quote comes from one Quentin Tarantino, whose opinion I share more than Travis's where this film is concerned and whose comments I'd respect more than critic Richard Schickel's, which are once again slathered all over the extras of a Sergio Leone DVD like greasy fingerprints. (QT is AWOL outside the abovementioned endorsement.) While I recently enjoyed Schickel's joyous Charlie Chaplin documentary (prosaically titled "Charlie: The Life and Art of Charlie Chaplin"), he has betrayed none of the same infectious enthusiasm for Leone–certainly not in his disingenuous Once Upon a Time in America commentary, something I thought would preclude his getting this gig. Of Leone's penchant for alternating vistas and extreme close-ups, particularly in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Schickel offers, "It does give an operatic air to his movies." Consider my face melted.

Schickel is difficult to escape within the video-based supplements, but his contributions there are so fleeting as to be innocuous; what you can and should avoid is his feature-length yak-track. The quote-unquote "historian"'s idle chatter, less reliant on research than powers of deduction, supplements a crisp 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer–thanks to innovations in film processing, the film's preservationists were able to wrest more detail from the Techniscope elements than ever before. But there are consequences: grain is intensified, as are the scuffmarks inherent to optical effects, i.e. freeze frames and superimposed titles. (Note that the restorations proper–nowhere annotated on either disc–are seamlessly integrated from a qualitative standpoint.) For some reason I expected greens to look lusher–Leone was never one for verdancy, I guess. The accompanying Dolby Digital 5.1 remix inflates explosions but doesn't assault us with rear-channel cues, although the engineers arguably got carried away with emphasizing directionality through travelling voices. Ennio Morricone's score sounds tremendous–for comparison's sake, just click over to the brittle Italian mono track, presented for the first time on North American home video.

Overseen by Michael M. Arick, edited by Lion mainstay Glenn "DVD Savant" Erickson, and blessed with the cooperation of Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach, the second platter's featurettes launch with "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Leone's West" (20 mins.), a making-of that exposes the ricketiness of a Leone production, even one such as this with major-studio backing. Eastwood remembers having no backup wardrobe and thus being forced to take his costume back to the hotel with him at night, while Wallach ("Spaghetti western?… Sounds like Hawaiian pizza!") takes stock of the linguistic smorgasbord behind-the-scenes that was comprised of American actors working in Spain with an Italian crew. (It's one of the great punchlines that Wallach wound up communicating with Leone in French.) As Clint deadpans, "If you ordered a milkshake, you'd get potato salad." English translator/renaissance man Mickey Knox recaps a "eureka!" moment from the re-recording sessions that gives the DVD integrity, because it's common practice to leave the dubbing of Leone's pictures unacknowledged.

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Leone Style" (24 mins.) begins by timing two lengthy shots from the film and finds Eastwood somewhat and surprisingly critical of Leone's slow, indulgent editing rhythms. ("I think he wanted to be David Lean," Clint says with a touch of derision in his voice.) Another interesting revelation to emerge is that Once Upon a Time in the West's Henry Fonda was originally pursued for the Lee Van Cleef role–proving that Leone knew a subversive idea when he had one. As this piece makes clear, for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone drew from history (and Matthew Brady's Civil War photographs) to colour the narrative's background; Peter Spirer's "The Man Who Lost the Civil War" (14 mins.) goes into even greater detail on the event that shrouds the title trio's treasure hunt, the doomed, ahead-of-its-time "Sibley Campaign" that transformed parts of the American West into a POW camp. Excerpted from a longer documentary, "The Man Who Lost the Civil War" is, alas, kind of cheesy–it's hard to reconcile, for starters, why they strove for authenticity by digitally antiquing re-enactments when there were no cameras back then in the first place.

Arick and Erickson return for "Reconstructing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (11 mins.), a geek-centric look at the combined efforts of restoration house Triage and MGM's technical services rep John Kirk, the latter of whom took charge of not only beefing up the 161-minute English-language version of the film to meet the length of what's known as "The Italian Premiere Cut" (177 mins.), but also reinstating a heretofore-unseen grotto sequence that stops a long-irksome continuity gap. Problems with/defenses for remixing the sound in 5.1 are raised and sufficiently placating, since Leone films tend to defeat purists with their multiple valid incarnations. DAILY VARIETY's music critic John Burlingame is front and centre for "Il Maestro: Ennio Morricone and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (8 mins.), a brief overview of the composer's collaboration with Leone on this film especially that's injured by the absence of the still-breathing Morricone–I guess I was spoiled or teased by the new interviews with Eastwood and Wallach. After Burlingame's interview, viewers are bounced to an option to play "an in-depth analysis of the unforgettable score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" also courtesy of Burlingame. A dull background image remains on screen for the entirety of his 12-minute monologue, and I don't know if the promise of "in-depth analysis" strictly applies, but I did enjoy learning of some of the more contentious aspects of the composer-auteur relationship, forever strained as it was by Leone's tone-deafness. As well, Burlingame finally sets the record straight with regards to Hugo Montenegro's "homogenized" cover of the picture's famous, coyote-inspired anthem, a thunder I won't steal here.

A section of deleted material includes the "Extended Tuco Torture Scene" (7 mins. with text intro)–left out of the restoration because of neg damage but archived on DVD for posterity–and "The Sorocco Sequence: A Reconstruction" (3 mins.), an attempt to convey through production stills and precious clips from the film's French trailer (also on board) a famously missing love scene between Eastwood and Silvana Bacci that climaxed with Blondie cleverly eluding the nearby Tuco. A poster gallery (eight images strong), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly's original theatrical trailer (which gets "the bad" and "the ugly" mixed up!), and trailers for the Escape from New York: Collector's Edition and Windtalkers: Director's Edition round out the DVD. The two discs plus a collection of beautiful, postcard-sized reproductions of the film's international one-sheets, liner notes by Roger Ebert (technically his August 2003 review recycled), and an altogether useless track listing for the soundtrack CD arrive packaged in a prestigious but ergonomically clumsy box–the platters, for example, are fastened to the interiors of the top and bottom lids. Originally published: April 12, 2004.

THE BLU-RAY DISC
All of the extras from the 2004 SE are ported over intact, and MGM has even seen fit to FINALLY include the Sir Christopher Frayling commentary recorded for but dropped from their 2007 Sergio Leone box set. Functioning as an antidote to Richard Schickel's inane blather, Frayling's meticulously-researched yakker uses the film's original screenplay as a starting point for discussing the production in depth–references back to the material as written reveal how substantially the movie's canvas bloomed on set and in post, due not only to Leone's cinematic embellishments but also to the contributions of ambitious collaborators like Carlo Simi and Mickey Knox. I can't remember if Schickel actually knew Leone, but the seemingly indefatigable Frayling did, and he morsels out insights straight from the horse's mouth–for instance, that Leone saw "the good, the bad, and the ugly" as a prismatic view of his own personality, Tuco being the avatar of his default anarchist position.

As for the 2.35:1, 1080p transfer, it's a step up, obviously, from the standard-def alternative, though the Techniscope grain has been tamed a bit too much for my liking, with DVNR smoothing out a few too many pockmarked visages in the bargain. Colours look more authentically parched (while losing a sickly greenish cast I only noticed in an A/B comparison) and the absence of compression artifacts makes a more dramatic difference than I would've thought; the DVD really does show its limitations in retrospect. While the accompanying 5.1 DTS-HD MA audio isn't the radical upgrade some might presume, it surely offers the crispest reproduction of Ennio Morricone's score we are ever likely to hear. Crank it up. The Bad: Schickel. The Ugly: Did I mention they left the Schickel commentary on there?

178 minutes; R; DVD: 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced), BD: 2.35:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); DVD: English Dolby 5.1, Italian DD 2.0 (Mono), BD: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1, Portuguese DD 5.1, German DTS 5.1, Italian DD 2.0 (Mono); DVD: CC; DVD: English, French, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin subtitles, BD: English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Thai, Mandarin subtitles; DVD: DVD-9, BD: BD-50; DVD: Region One, BD: Region-free; MGM