Day 247 - 9/4/09 - Movie #243
BEFORE: Or to be precise, "Il buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo"... Aw, yeah, do Italians make the best cowboy movies or what? I suppose it's a little like saying that the Koreans make the best cars...
THE PLOT: A bounty hunting scam joins two men in an uneasy alliance against a third in a race to find a fortune in gold buried in a remote cemetery.
AFTER: I didn't realize the title would be so literal - the 3 concepts are personified by Eastwood (The Good), Lee Van Cleef (The Bad) and Eli Wallach, who must have showed up last for the cast reading and got last pick. Eastwood's character, called "Blondie" in this film, is running a con where he turns in the wanted Tuco (Wallach) for the bounty, then shoots the rope to rescue him from the noose - nice scam. Yet Blondie is still considered "good" - so I guess it's all relative.
Blondie wants to dissolve the partnership, Tuco (apparently the world's first Jewish Mexican) wants revenge, and things spiral out of control from there. What follows is not so much of an epic narrative, but more like a series of linked vignettes, like a Western "Pulp Fiction".
Van Cleef plays a Union commander named Sentenza, so I don't think he's the same character that Van Cleef played in the previous film - there are no direct references to prior events, so it's hard to be sure...
And all three are after this stash of Civil War gold, so there's a lot of uneasy alliances made (and un-made) as they travel across the land to the location, where each may or may not have a piece of the puzzle. Each time there's a change in someone's fortune, or someone gets the upper hand on someone else, we hear that very famous recurring musical theme - even if you've never seen the film, I'm sure you know it...the combination of whistling and muted trumpet...
"Woo WOO-ey woo woo.... Waah WAAH Waah..."
Which I now regard as the musical equivalent of "Neener, neener, neener!" or perhaps the "Sad Trombone" music made famous on game shows...
It's a Western film, a war film, a quest film, and a heist/scam film, all rolled into one. And at the end, there's the ultimate technical expression of a "Mexican Standoff" - which IMDB compared to "Reservoir Dogs", so I think I'm spot-on with the Tarantino comparison...
That's it for my Eastwood chain - but obviously I'm on a Western theme now. I've got about a week's worth of Westerns coming up - I'd like to hit them all so I don't have to circle back this way again...TCM has been very helpful by running "Shane" last week, plus I picked up "The Wild Bunch" (director's cut) at the $5 DVD store. Fortunately it's a holiday weekend coming up, so maybe I can watch two a day and catch up a little.
RATING: 7 out of 10 wooden crosses
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