The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - análise da cena inicial

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primeiro trabalho escrito para a Middlesex University.




‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’’s opening scene is one of the best examples of how a director’s view effectively changes the tone of even the most conventional of stories. Sergio Leone directs a western, a genre which lives and breathes by a code of restricted filmmaking rules, self-consciously making use of its icons and strategies to talk about themselves; it is a kind of metacognitive filmmaking.

Being a genre that had been mostly produced in America, westerns that subsequently came from Europe were regarded with distrust and disdain by critics and Leone’s work was only recognized to have some artistic relevance a decade after they were released. The Dollars trilogy had been a great box-office success but hadn’t found much support in the critics, who argued Leone was subverting and mocking the very essence of the western, with ridiculous characters and settings and extremely violent sequences.

To ascertain these claims, let’s analyse the opening scene of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the last film of the Dollars trilogy. It begins with a wide shot of an arid, mountainous landscape that is quickly transformed into a close up of an ugly, weather-beaten bounty hunter’s face. It would be acceptable, in American westerns, to have a character come out from the desert as he is first introduced to the audience, probably with a low-angle American shot and a quick intervention by the character on whatever the situation is to establish themselves as the main ‘doer’ in the picture. In Leone’s picture the character is so much more than that. The bounty hunter’s kind of face, with all the desert’s hardships marked on it, is exhibited as the only kind of face that one can find in the Wild West; it is stamped over the landscape as if he himself could be it. Leone sees the icon and uses it without scruples - in fact, he celebrates it.

As the scene continues, we are slowly introduced to two other cautious bounty hunters, each as ugly and hardened as the first one. We are lead into this moment as if one could only find this kind of situations in the West. The set is nothing more than could be expected – a rundown wooden building, a couple of shacks attached, a few scattered carriages and many fabrics being blown by the wind, everything coloured with a palette of dirty dark and light browns and ochres. As Leone films a reverse shot of what the first bounty hunter is looking at, the audience as well expects something to arrive – and then arrive the two other bounty hunters on horseback. Leone takes his time, as do the characters. They do not come quickly to meet the first bounty hunter and immediately kill Tuco – these characters are more than characters, they are icons of that space, they control it and therefore Leone let’s them slowly walk to one another, filling up the space with their vicious intents, tough life experiences and apprehensions. Their faces are a strong element to convey this message and therefore extremely important to Leone – he often cuts from long or wide shots of different points of view, even crossing the axis of action at some point, to close-ups of the characters’ faces. It is easier to be impressed by a huge murderous look after one has seen its owner walking decisively towards something, however, it is my opinion that Leone puts up all this just so that the audience cannot disassociate the place and time to the character. In a way, I think he is most interested in celebrating the western and its mythology than to tell any particular story.

It is not by accident that the score in the first scene features nothing more than the faintest diegetic sounds but for a select feature of the theme song at a particular moment – the audience is not to be distracted from the pageant that these three men are performing in. We hear some gusts of wind, the sounds of the horses’ feet, the men’s boots and not much more. The space is filled with things unsaid but it’s all part of Leone’s view of the west – there is not much this kind of men need to say (which becomes evident later on once we become acquainted with Blondie, Clint Eastwood’s character), their harsh and circumspect faces let the audience know there will be a showdown and the silence intensifies the suspense of how it will unfold. Let us not forget that at this point the audience does not know who it is supposed to root for and therefore expects to make that decision with the conclusion of this first confrontation (and indeed the purpose of this whole scene is to introduce Eli Wallach’s character, Tuco).

So, it might come as a contradiction that in this first scene the leading up to the confrontation is done in near silence and the final showdown between Tuco, Blondie and Angel Eyes is shown with a beautifully orchestrated tune that not only intensifies but glorifies the whole scene. As I said, at the point when the film begins it would not be very sensible to have such an elaborate score. Firstly, because we are not even looking at the main characters yet and an epic score would elude the audience -that had to be kept for the most important and expected scene. Secondly, it is not necessary to have it to build up the intensity of the scene. In fact, the small quantity of sound effects resonates the few that exist and, again, the faces do that job perfectly. Thirdly, it is also a good way to make the desert more present physically in the audience’s mind and also bring about its mythic loneliness and hardships.

However, the theme song does appear in this scene, at the very moment we first see Tuco. As if it is not enough to have such a build-up in one scene to present only one character, Leone actually freezes the frame as Tuco is completely visible, has red lettering labeling him as ‘the Ugly’ and plays a musical sentence of the theme song, the famous cry-like sound. Tuco escapes his hunters by breaking through the window, creating ruckus and disorder in a previously very quiet series of shots. It is somehow a way of letting the audience know subconsciously that Tuco is the explosive character, the one who will start brawling everytime things do not go his way. In the freeze-frame he wears a fierce expression to go with the ‘Ugly’ label, but all the more because we find out as he rides off that he has dispatched the three frightening, tough characters we had been watching. Leone brilliantly composes this discovery, having the first bounty hunter come out trying to shoot Tuco as he flees, but being clearly wounded he rolls back into the building (which we assume is some kind of saloon because of Tuco’s holding of what seems to be a roasted turkey leg) and as he falls, reveals his two other companions shot dead on the ground.

The audience is, in this way, given a hero through violence. It is supposed to be impressed and perhaps disgusted at his skill with the gun – Leone was very much criticized by how cruel and violent his characters were, but as has already been said, this film is a celebration of the myth of the West and that is the only character, in the Leone’s eyes, that is to be found there. Even Eastwood’s character, labeled ‘the Good’, is merciless at times, though considerably more just than most of the characters.

It is interesting to notice that in this scene, the three bounty hunters can also be thought of as a good one, a bad one and an ugly one, if by nothing more at least by their colour scheme and faces (which, as we have seen, is not little to say in regard to Leone’s filmmaking). While there is a big colour contrast between the second and third bounty hunters which makes us naturally decide the one with the lighter colours must not be as bad as the one in dark colours, there is also the question of the latter being always shown a little more sideways than the former. Also, as he appears first, we tend to assume that this whole confrontation has been orchestrated by the first bounty hunter and therefore, as Tuco is presented as our hero, we might look back at him and remember him as ‘the bad one’. With all this, I just mean to point out that even in the choosing and characterisation of the unimportant characters, Leone is giving us hints to the film’s structure and that is, undoubtedly, the mark of a dedicated and passionate director.

In conclusion, Leone’s direction of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ is a very deliberate one, with intentions of celebration and not ridicularisation. Perhaps the skepticism on the part of American critics towards Leone’s work is due to the fact that he has, from a distance both in time and space, actually made incredibly self-conscious western films that pinpoint cinematic strategies that Hollywood frowns at being publicized.