65 - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

    Set against the Civil war, The Man with No Name (here, nicknamed Blondie) competes with two other men to find a stash of $200,000 in gold that has been buried.
    I was hesitant to start this one up, since I saw the running time reaching a shade under three hours.  While I've enjoyed For a Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, the pacing on those was a little hard to take.  But I came out of this much more pleased than I expected.  I would easily consider this the best of the three.
    The plot is better arranged than the other movies.  It moves forward at all points, and there are some great setbacks that leave the outcome hanging.  Even though it runs longer, the filmmaking seems a little less indulgent than the other pictures.  There's one major standoff, with lots of closeups switching between characters, but it works better than the other ones.  It's a three-way standoff, and the tension is great.  In most standoffs, it's clear how things will play out.  In this case, we have no idea what's going to happen.
    The relationships between the characters - particularly between Tuzo (the Ugly) and Blondie (the Good) are much more interesting than the other movies.
    Beyond these aspects, I was pleased that there was a stronger subtext to this one.  None of the characters are particularly interested in the war that's going on.  They're all motivated by the big payoff.  There are no idealists.  Even when we meet a captain that's stuck fighting to prevent the confederates from taking a bridge, he seems to be sick of the conflict.  In fact, Blondie seems to express that he thinks that they aren't dying for anything useful.  That might seem like a shortsighted perspective, but it seems more appropriate in the context of the movie.