The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Saw The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It was a grizzly western. Unlike the romanticized wild west of John Wayne this film has the old west fetishized in a different direction, trading the fantasy of the noble cowboy for the fantasy of the wild outlaw. This at first seems more realistic, but when people start cleanly dying by clutching their stomachs and gracefully falling down, it becomes clear that we've only traded one dream for another.

The film stars a trio of baddies all after a pile of loot buried in a cemetery. They circle around and around each other, the "ugly" and the "good" guy mostly against the "bad" one. (I use quotes because this film engages heavily in the no-one's-right morality of a lot of action films. The "good" guy is called so not because he is actually good, but merely because he is less bad.) The plot twists and turns and it is left ambiguous almost until the very end who will come out on top. The shoot-outs are tense and the nods at characterization are well done. There's a scene where the "ugly" meets his brother that's revealing and good.

However, the film takes place during the American civil war and has a lot of creepy sympathy for the soldiers of the confederacy. The only time union soldiers are shown, they are cruelly exploiting their prisoners of war (at the protest of a (literally) lame captain who is openly sneered at and made to seem hopelessly naive, but then we are supposed to hate the union. I guess.) or, later on, drunkenly proclaiming that the side with the most booze wins a war (which is something that sounds funny and true late at night in a bar, but doesn't really hold up to any scrutiny.) The confederates are always tearful and noble and beautifully, pathetically dying. I understand that for the most part the confederate soldiers were small people at the mercy of forces beyond their control, but the focus on the nobility of the confederates smacks of lazily rooting for the underdog for the sake of rooting for the underdog, never mind their stance regarding slavery.

Anyway, the film is pretty grizzly and bad-ass and quite respectable but is therefore, unfortunately, not really something I'd dig. I need to see more shitty films, so I can appreciate a movie like this.