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Join us at 3 p.m. Saturday, April 4th, for Sergio Leone’s 1966 Spaghetti Western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
This screening is part of a special Saturday series at the Cosford celebrating the work of visionary filmmaker Sergio Leone and his legendary “Dollars Trilogy” — “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).”
With these films, Leone reinvented the Western. Drawing inspiration from Hollywood traditions while sharply critiquing American mythology, the trilogy strips away the genre’s romantic heroism and replaces it with a stark, morally ambiguous world defined by greed, violence, and survival. The result helped launch the “Spaghetti Western” and forever changed the landscape of the genre.
This spring, experience the entire trilogy on the big screen as it was meant to be seen, presented in stunning 4K. This series is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Norton Herrick Center for Motion Picture Studies at the University of Miami.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY | 1966 | DIRECTOR: Sergio Leone | WITH:Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach | RATED R for violence | RUNNING TIME: 2H 58M | 4K RESTORATION
By far the most ambitious, unflinchingly graphic and stylistically influential western ever made, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is a classic actioner shot through with a volatile mix of myth and realism. Screen legend Clint Eastwood (“A Fistful of Dollars”) returns as “The Man with No Name,” this time teaming with two gunslingers to pursue a cache of $200,000 and letting no one, not even warring factions in a civil war, stand in their way. From sun-drenched panoramas to bold hard close-ups, exceptional camerawork captures the beauty and cruelty of the barren landscape and the hardened characters who stride unwaveringly through it.
Hailed as “the best directed movie of all time” by Quentin Tarantino, this epic masterpiece was directed by the great Sergio Leone and co-stars Lee Van Cleef (“For a Few Dollars More”) as Angel Eyes and Eli Wallach (“The Magnificent Seven”) in the role of Tuco. Music by legendary composer Ennio Morricone.
Admission is FREE, but registration is required at the link above. The screening will include a brief introduction by Cosford Cinema Co-Manger Katlyn Aviles, Ph.D.
“Perhaps it is the subtly foreign flavor of the spaghetti trilogy, and especially the masterpiece “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” that suggests the films come from a different universe than traditional Westerns. Instead of tame Hollywood extras from central casting, we get locals who must have been hired near the Spanish locations–men who look long-weathered by work and the sun. Consider the legless beggar who uses his arms to propel himself into a saloon, shouting, “Hand me down a whiskey!”
John Ford made Monument Valley the home turf of his Western characters, and he made great films there, but there is something new and strange about Leone’s menacing Spanish vistas. We haven’t seen these deserts before. John Wayne has never been here. Leone’s stories are a heightened dream in which everything is bigger, starker, more brutal, more dramatic, than life.
Leone tells the story more with pictures than words. Examine the masterful scene in the cemetery. A fortune in gold is said to be buried in one of the graves, and three men have assembled, all hoping to get it. The actors are Clint Eastwood (the Good), Lee Van Cleef (the Bad), and Eli Wallach (the Ugly). Each man points a pistol at the other. If one shoots, they all shoot, and all die. Unless two decide to shoot the third man before he can shoot either one of them. But which two, and which third?
Leone draws this scene out beyond all reason, beginning in long shot and working in to closeups of firearms, faces, eyes, and lots of sweat and flies. He seems to be testing himself, to see how long he can maintain the suspense. Or is it even suspense, really? It may be entirely an exercise in style, a deliberate manipulation by the director, intended to draw attention to itself. If you savor the boldness with which Leone flirts with parody, you understand his method. This is not a story, but a celebration of bold gestures.” – Roger Ebert
