The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Who are you calling ugly? This week, Chris and Lizzie defend Eli Wallach's looks, Sergio Leone's directing style (to a point...), Clint Eastwood's acting chops and screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni's decision to pitch a sequel to For a Few Dollars More without his director's input. Plus, why you should always let the Italian stunt men do their job, never trust the Spanish army with a detonation, and how the ecstasy of success can lead to decades of resentment. This episode is brought to you by Brami. Shop Brami at enjoybrami.com https://enjoybrami.com or your nearest retailer, and find their newest shape Cubetti exclusively at Whole Foods. Plus, we're giving away exclusive What Went Wrong x Brami kits! Enter at whatwentbrami.com https://whatwentbrami.com for your chance to win. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  And action.

• 0:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one of the most influential westerns of all time that just so happens to be made by an Italian. We have a lot to get into today, but first, this episode is, very appropriately, brought to you by Braemi, protein pasta made in Italy from only two old world ingredients, Italian wheat and lupini super beans. No fillers, no shortcuts, real pasta that actually tastes like pasta with more protein and fiber built right in. Now, if you listen to Friday's primer, you're welcome, Chris, you know Sergio Leone was a man obsessed with westerns who dared to ask, why don't we do this the Italian way?

• 1:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Braemi saw the other protein pastas on the market and said, why don't we do this the Italian way? Strip it down to two ingredients, let the quality speak for itself, and throw in an anti-hero. Okay, maybe not that last part, but they nailed the quality. We were big fans of Braemi long before they sponsored this podcast. And more from Braemi at the end of the episode, including something new they're launching this summer. But in the meantime, let's dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly, led by Chris. Chris?

• 1:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie.

• 1:32Lizzie Bassett?

  What do you have for us today?

• 1:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I got the good, I got some bad, and it's gonna get ugly. But before we dive into that, I have to ask you, what were your thoughts about the good, the bad, and the ugly upon watching or re-watching it for il podcast?

• 1:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, I'm embarrassed to say I'd never seen this movie before we were doing this episode. And part of that is sheer stubbornness, because when I worked at IMDb every year, the founder and then CEO of IMDb, Colin Needham, would host a dinner. And part of that dinner would be that you would have to go around the table and everyone had to answer each question individually, a single-threaded conversation, if you will. It was actually pretty fun. And all of the questions were, of course, movie-related and one that he asked every single year, and somehow, I always got seated at his table, he would ask me every year, what's the first movie on the IMDb Top 250 list that you have never seen before?

• 2:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 2:28Lizzie Bassett?

  And the answer, if you look at the list, number 10 is The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which is the first one on the list that I had never seen. And every year, I would say, I haven't seen it. And he would say, well, that's your homework for next year. You have to watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. And it turns out, Lizzie Bassett doesn't like homework, because I just never watch it. And every year, I would think, well, certainly, they won't seat me at the CEO's table again. And then they did. And every year, I'd have to tell him, I did not do my homework, and I didn't watch this movie. And you know what? I was dumb. He was right. I should have just watched this movie, because it's fantastic. I absolutely loved it. It is three hours long, which is, you know, always a daunting task when we're going to cover a long movie on this podcast.

• 3:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Although I will say, almost all of the super-long movies we've covered have actually been some of my favorites. And I very much appreciate that, especially with this one, you cannot be on your phone, not that I'm ever on my phone watching movies for this podcast, but like, it requires a different level of attention that I think modern movies do. If you haven't listened to Chris Primmer on Friday, there's a lot of discussion about how Dashiell Hammett was an inspiration, a direct inspiration, for The Fistful of Dollars trilogy. And you can really see that here. It's very complex. The character dynamics are very complex. If you're not paying attention, you're not gonna know who these people are, or what is going on, or who they're hunting, or why, or why does that man have an eye patch now? You just aren't gonna know. You gotta pay attention.

• 3:57Lizzie Bassett?

  My first thought when watching this movie was, oh, Quentin Tarantino saw this and said, I could do that. The influence is so much stronger than I ever realized. Obviously, I knew it was a big inspiration. I mean, you can hear it, and Glorious Bastards is probably the most direct one. But I don't think I realized how heavily he is pulling from this movie in particular, even in something like Pulp Fiction. It's so very much ingrained in the DNA. So that was really cool to see. And I just thought it was so surprisingly funny, which I was not expecting. It is very violent, although not gratuitously so, I don't think. I loved Clint Eastwood in this, but I loved Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef so, so much.

• 4:42Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, we also talked about this a bit in Friday's episode, which go back and listen if you haven't, but the way that the two of them moved, the way that their faces work in this, especially Lee Van Cleef, it's almost like a mask. And it really did remind me a lot of Commedia dell'arte, which, you know, if you're not familiar, is an Italian theatrical comedy format that is extremely physical and involves masks. And I just thought that what he did, the stillness that Lee Van Cleef has in this movie is so spooky and awesome. And I just, he's got the best look ever. Visually, it is so sumptuous, in a genre that I feel like usually, at least before this, could look very flat, just because the American West is kind of brown, it's dry, famously.

• 5:25Lizzie Bassett?

  And yet Sergio Leone really brought it to life in this movie. Of course, which is not shot in the American West, I am aware. But all to say, I loved it. It made me laugh. It held my attention, no problem, for three hours. You know, say what you will about Clint Eastwood, he's very clearly a movie star. But I think for me, the person that I came away loving the most in this movie was Eli Wallach. In a weird way, he's the heart of it, even though he's not a particularly good person or a trustworthy one. None of them are. That's my only qualm with this movie. I think it's very rude to call Eli Wallach the ugly, because he's not ugly, he's actually a very handsome man. And second of all, how is Clint Eastwood, how is Blondie good in this movie? He's just blonde. He's just hot. He's just Clint Eastwood. Anyway.

• 6:11Chris Winterbauer?

  As we'll get to, I think that's part of the point of the movie is, the cosmic joke is, none of these people are actually the thing that they say they are.

• 6:16Lizzie Bassett?

  None of them.

• 6:17Chris Winterbauer?

  They're all just shades of gray.

• 6:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's so good.

• 6:19Chris Winterbauer?

  I do agree. I think it's rude to call Eli Wallach ugly. However, by the standards set by Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood, sorry, Eli.

• 6:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 6:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I would say the good, the bad, the mid would be the, perhaps, it's a better way to put it.

• 6:30Lizzie Bassett?

  The good, the bad, the, he is attractive.

• 6:33Chris Winterbauer?

  The good, the bad, the Kansas City Seven. But the, uh...

• 6:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris coming in with the hot takes.

• 6:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Cut that.

• 6:40Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 6:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I say that as a Seattle Five. So I agree with everything you said. I had seen The Dollars Trilogy when I was young. I was not into westerns growing up. I was more into science fiction. I was into, I mean, Star Wars obviously took a lot of elements from westerns, and then I liked more modern action movies, which, I mean, again, so many action movies, especially of the 80s, pull from these movies in so many ways.

• 7:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, big time.

• 7:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Edgar Wright is another director who I think is so deeply influenced, especially by A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, the way that he integrates music into the movements of his actors and timing with his edits, especially in the Cornetto Trilogy, more than his later work. And obviously, as you mentioned, Quentin Tarantino. What Tarantino did, in my opinion, he cribbed Leone's style and then added this kind of punk American dialogue on top of it that's missing, you know, from Leone's films, which are much more visual. And so Tarantino's like the Taki Leone in a way, in my mind.

• 7:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, but then, of course, he also goes and borrows from, like, Kurosawa and, I mean...

• 7:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course, yeah. I mean, you mentioned Yojimbo, which, obviously, A Fistful of Dollars is a remake of Yojimbo.

• 7:43Lizzie Bassett?

  It's all pastiche soup, you know?

• 7:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and then the moment you talked about in Kill Bill, where she spanks the Yakuza.

• 7:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, that's just lifted from Yojimbo. That is the final scene of Yojimbo. So, yeah, they're all pulling from each other. I think these movies are weirdly underrated, broadly speaking. I know that The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is number 10 on the IMDb Top 250, and yet I feel like in broader conversation, these movies are not given their due in terms of how influential they are.

• 8:08Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I think my reluctance to watch it speaks to that. That in my head, this was like, okay, yeah, it's a western. It's, sure, it might be the greatest western ever made. I don't know why I have this stuck in my head that I don't like the genre, because obviously I do.

• 8:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and I'm not a big western. I do like western, a lot of western films. However, it's not a genre that I'll go to to just watch, like, an okay example.

• 8:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, right.

• 8:31Chris Winterbauer?

  You mentioned you'll watch any vampire movie. I'm not gonna watch any western movie. So, although any vampire western movie, shout out Near Dark. But I think this is one of the best movies ever made.

• 8:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 8:40Chris Winterbauer?

  I love this movie. I watched The Dollars Trilogy in a row for this episode, so we just went three nights in a row, Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It's so fun. I highly recommend it. They were all released in the same year, as we'll get to. So you almost could have done it in the theaters in 1967, in the United States at least. If you like Lee Van Cleef, who I think is wonderful in this movie.

• 9:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 9:01Chris Winterbauer?

  For a Few Dollars More is an even better performance, in my opinion. He basically plays a good guy in that movie. I mean, if there is a good in any of these three movies, it's Lee Van Cleef's The Colonel in For a Few Dollars More. I also think the music that Morikane does is brilliant in this movie, and we'll talk more about it. The decision not to use Ecstasy of Gold until you're two hours and 40 minutes into the movie, that's the famous, da, da, da, da, da, da, when Eli Wallach is running through the cemetery. That's an incredible musical and directorial decision. That's one of the best pieces of music ever put to film.

• 9:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, that shot.

• 9:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And you know you have it.

• 9:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Chris Winterbauer?

  And the shot's amazing, the crane shot that booms up that reveals the scope of the cemetery. And you save it for that moment. It's a wordless three-minute scene of a selfish, as we know, rapist running through a cemetery.

• 9:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And yet, I'm like tearing up watching it. And yes, as you mentioned, I do think that Eli Wallach is the heart of this movie. He's such a good actor.

• 9:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he really is.

• 9:53Chris Winterbauer?

  He gives such a good performance. The scene with his brother at the monastery is surprisingly moving. I have a theory that, to me, that Eli... Eli Wallach is as close as we've gotten to Leone putting himself in one of these movies in a weird way. His manic energy, the way he shifts from humor to menace, et cetera. To me, he has qualities that evoke Leone, and I think Leone is a complicated person. He was a complicated person to work with, as we'll get to. Anyway, I think this movie's great. I can't wait to talk about it because, Lizzie, the story is pretty wild and pretty fun.

• 10:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. Let's get in.

• 10:22Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. So let's get into the details first.

• 10:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Saddle up.

• 10:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Saddle up. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is an epic spaghetti western film. I think anything over two hours and 30 minutes has to be by default called epic.

• 10:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 10:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Directed by Sergio Leone. It was written by Sergio Leone, Agnore Incroci, Furio Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzo, from a story by Sergio Leone and Luciano Vincenzo. I will do my best on the Italian name pronunciations today, guys, but apologies to anybody in Italy or our Italian-American friends. With dialogue by Mickey Knox, an American. We'll get to him. Produced by Alberto Grimaldi, it stars, of course, Clint Eastwood as Blondi, or Il Buono.

• 11:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Or light brown-haired man. Anyway, continue.

• 11:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Light brown-haired man. Blondi by Italian standards, I suppose. El Buono, the good. Eli Wallach as Tuco, or Il Bruto, the ugly. And Lee Van Cleef as Angel Eyes, or Il Cattivo, the bad. It was released in Italy on December 23rd, 1966, and in the United States, one year later, on December 29th, 1967, by United Artists. The IMDb logline reads, "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. I think this is a terrible logline, and I would like to propose an alternative, Lizzie."

• 11:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 11:44Chris Winterbauer?

  "A fraudulent bounty hunter and his duplicitous partner in crime race a deadly, dastardly gunslinger across the Civil War-scarred American Southwest to find a fortune in gold."

• 11:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Perfect. Nailed it.

• 11:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Take that, IMDb. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Sergio Leone, Something to Do with Death by Christopher Frayling, The Good, the Bad and Me, In My Anecdotage by Eli Wallach, who's very funny, Clint, The Life and Legend by Patrick McGilligan, Clint, The Man in the Movies by Sean Levy, and many, many more documentaries, articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the making of the film. Now, Lizzie, as you mentioned, we did a primer, an antipasto of sorts, on spaghetti westerns on Friday in the episode prior to this one in our feed. I highly recommend you guys listen to it. We try to make these episodes standalone. However, I do think listening to that will really enhance your experience listening to this episode, but it's not necessary.

• 12:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And so, Lizzie, let's begin. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly begins and ends with Blondi and Tuco splitting their plunder. Four for you, four for me. And you might think that Sergio Leone would be doing the same thing with the producers of A Fistful of Dollars after its release. As we discussed, it was made for only $200,000. It had initially received negative reviews from Italian critics, and it was kind of left for dead in a late summer release. But like the man with no name, this no-name director, Sergio Leone, credited as Bob Robertson on that movie, had a remarkable eye for violence. A Fistful of Dollars grossed over $4 million in Italy. It sold millions of tickets across France

• 13:23Chris Winterbauer?

  and Spain, and it eventually would clean up in North America. And yet, Sergio Leone, at least he says, was not seeing much by way of profits. In fact, he believed that the Italian production company behind the movie, Jolly Film, was withholding his fair share. So he sued them to break his contract. According to Leone, "A Fistful of Dollars is the only one of my westerns which earned me nothing."

• 13:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 13:47Chris Winterbauer?

  In the end, according to Leone, he received, quote, "The Mexican rights. The one place the film has never done well because the Mexicans are the bad guys," end quote. It was a classic double-cross, and Leone wasn't going to let it happen again. Meanwhile, back in the United States, Clint Eastwood also wasn't exactly enjoying the fruits of his labor. A Fistful of Dollars was tied up in litigation with Akira Kurosawa because Leone had pretty much copied Yojimbo for that movie, and it had not been released in the United States. As Eastwood later put it, "Not only was there a movie prejudice against television actors," he was one of the stars of Rawhide, "but there was a feeling that an American actor making an Italian movie was sort of taking a step backward."

• 14:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Very true. Ratings for his TV show Rawhide had continued to plummet, but luckily Leone had another project for him. He teamed up with a new producer, Alberto Grimaldi, who founded the PEA Film Company, which is the European Production Associate Film Company. I'm gonna skip the pronunciation on that one. Can't do it. The follow-up to A Fistful of Dollars was going to have nearly double the budget, Lizzie, $350,000, and Leone was getting a 60% stake in the profits.

• 14:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 14:56Chris Winterbauer?

  He also hired a new writer, Luciano Vincenzo. They'd worked together on La Grande Guerra, which is The Great War, with Vincenzo as a writer and Leone as an assistant director. Vincenzo wrote the script for For a Few Dollars More in nine days. They brought back Eastwood's mysterious stranger, created a new villain for actor Jean-Maria Volonté, Indio. He's a great villain. He also plays the villain in A Fistful of Dollars, and added a more sophisticated bounty hunter, the Colonel, aiming for Lee Marvin.

• 15:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 15:28Chris Winterbauer?

  But eventually, they landed on the more affordable Lee Van Cleef. More on that in a moment. For a Few Dollars More was released in Italy in late 1965 to even greater success than A Fistful of Dollars, and the spaghetti western revival was ratcheting up. Nearly 500 of these movies would be made across the 60s and 70s in Italy, but Leone's work had yet to be released in the United States. So producer Alberto Grimaldi got to work trying to sell For a Few Dollars More in the US and Canada, but it was actually screenwriter Vincenzo who eventually made a deal. He spoke English. This is very important to our story. He was friends with an executive at United Artists, a man named Ilya Lopert. Sometime

• 16:08Chris Winterbauer?

  in early 1966, Vincenzo convinces Lopert to gather up some of his United Artists executives in Rome and bring them to a screening of For a Few Dollars More at a super cinema. Also in attendance, Sergio Leone and Alberto Grimaldi. According to Vincenzo, "Inside, it was an orgy of laughing, screaming and yelling. When the United Artists people came out, they said, 'How much?'"

• 16:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, yeah.

• 16:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And Vincenzo said, "A million dollars?" And they said, "Done, plus 50% of the profits outside of France, Germany and Spain." Plus, Vincenzo was gonna get a percentage for himself. Apparently, this was three times the payday that Alberto Grimaldi had been hoping for.

• 16:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 16:47Chris Winterbauer?

  So contracts are signed, and the inevitable next question is asked, "What's next?" They had no idea. So Vincenzo made one up. It's a film about three rogues who are looking for some treasure at the time of the American Civil War, in the same kind of spirit as La Grande Guerra, which you just distributed in America. And then the poster just appeared in his mind, "Il Buono, Il Bruto, Il Cattivo," which is actually The Good, the Ugly and the Bad, and we'll get to the ordering later.

• 17:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I figured, because that's the order in the movie, and you're kind of like, "Oh."

• 17:22Chris Winterbauer?

  As he later put it, "There was no book. There was no screenplay. Just those three words." And UA had five words in response. "How much does it cost?" Now, Lizzie, as the story goes, this conversation has been happening entirely in English.

• 17:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh-oh.

• 17:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So Vincenzo turns to Leone and says, in Italian, "How much?" And Leone says, "How much for what?" And Vincenzo says, "How much for the movie I just sold them?" And then he pitches the movie in Italian to Leone and says, "Give me a number." And Grimaldi says, "800,000?" And Vincenzo turns to UA and says, "A million dollars."

• 17:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 17:59Chris Winterbauer?

  UA agrees.

• 18:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 18:01Chris Winterbauer?

  "A million dollars." And if this story is to believe, on the one hand, they just secured three times the budget of their last film. However, UA just secured a $1 million western at a time when these movies are starting to balloon in the United States.

• 18:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 18:17Chris Winterbauer?

  How the West Was Won, for example, which was an epic, was made for $14 million.

• 18:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, 1 million is not very much.

• 18:25Chris Winterbauer?

  It might have been a win on both sides, for all we know. Okay, that is an incredible story, and I had to share it, but it may have been a bit more complicated than that. Sergio Donati, an uncredited writer on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, said that there were a few more steps in between. He said that, for example, Grimaldi might have actually been in New York trying to sell the North American rights when he learned about Vincenzo's discussions with United Artists, and Leone says that he was the one who came up with the idea for the third movie. He said that it has its roots in an old Roman poem, "A cardinal is dead, who did good and bad things, the bad he did well, and the good he did badly." Leone claims that he was reflecting on the story for A Few Dollars More and what made it work when he found the center of the third film. The good, the bad and the

• 19:06Chris Winterbauer?

  violent did not exist in any absolute sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a western.

• 19:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 19:13Chris Winterbauer?

  As we'll get to, there's a lot of disagreement over where credit is due on this movie. However it came to be, Leone, Vincenzo and Grimaldi are on the hook for a third movie. They have $1 million to make it, five times the budget of A Fistful of Dollars, and they get a $500,000 advance from United Artists. Plus, they're gonna be getting 50% of the box office receipts outside of Italy. The only problem is, Lizzie, they don't have a star. So let's talk about Clint the Squint Eastwood.

• 19:41Chris Winterbauer?

  When he had first come to Rome to shoot The Magnificent Stranger, which was renamed A Fistful of Dollars, he really was the man with no name. Nobody in Italy knew who he was. When he came back a year later to shoot For a Few Dollars More, he was mobbed. Quote, "I'd walk down the Via Veneto and people would come up and ask for my autograph. I was wined and dined and treated like a king." At the Paris premiere for A Few Dollars More, Italian director Vittorio De Sica introduced him as the new Gary Cooper. This is a stark contrast to his status in the United States.

• 20:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Where nobody knows who he is.

• 20:15Chris Winterbauer?

  As a TV actor on a currently being canceled Western TV show.

• 20:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Chris Winterbauer?

  In fact, the first Western that Clint Eastwood had acted in, 1958's Ambush at Cimarron Pass, was the low point of his career. When he saw the movie, he thought it was so bad, he nearly quit acting. But then he landed the role of Rowdy Yates on CBS's Rawhide. He broke through at nearly 30 years old. But Rawhide, as we discussed on Friday, Lizzie, was a bit of a cage. The scripts got stale, the characters got old, and the producers wouldn't even let him direct an episode. In Italy, though, his star wasn't just rising, it was exploding. Which is why he might have bristled a bit when Leone explained that, for the third film, he'd need Eastwood to share the screen even more than he had in the second. So, Lizzie, how much screen time would you say Eastwood has in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly?

• 21:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you think it's more than his co-stars or roughly equal?

• 21:07Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he's a little bit more, I think, than Lee Van Cleef, but he's less than Eli Wallach, for sure.

• 21:13Chris Winterbauer?

  That's exactly, exactly what I thought. Wallach almost feels like the main character to me.

• 21:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he is.

• 21:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently, after reading the script, Eastwood said to Leone, "In the first film, I was alone, in the second, we were two. Here we are three. If it goes on this way, in the next one, I'll be starring with the American cavalry." It sounds like he was starting to think, "This town ain't big enough for the two of us." Had to do it. But it wasn't the bad that was bothering Eastwood. To your point, Lizzie, it was the ugly. He may have felt threatened by Tuco. Leone told him, "Look, this movie is much longer than the other two, so you can't be alone, and Tuco's necessary to the story." Quote, "You must understand that he is your water carrier, and the moment you appear, it is the star who is making his entrance."

• 21:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, that's a complete lie.

• 21:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Eastwood was not convinced.

• 21:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Chris Winterbauer?

  The negotiation stalled out. So Leone and his wife, Carla, fly to LA. I believe that Carla is acting as his interpreter. I don't know that, but I believe she is. They met up with Eastwood and his then-wife Maggie in person. According to Carla, eventually in the discussion, Sergio says, "If he plays the part, I'm very glad about it. But if he doesn't, well, since I invented him, I'll just have to invent another one like him tomorrow."

• 22:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh-oh.

• 22:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Such tactics always seem to work with Americans, eye to eye, like a matador with a bull. And this may not have been entirely bravado. Vincenzo says that Leone told him, "Don't worry, I have Charles Bronson in my mind, and I don't want to have Clint Eastwood again." He also said that Leone was considering Steve McQueen.

• 22:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, that would have worked too. Although Clint Eastwood does have a particular something within this genre that works very well.

• 22:47Chris Winterbauer?

  A couple of days later, Eastwood signs on. Now, it's possible that Leone's tactic worked.

• 22:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, so you can neg Clint Eastwood into a movie.

• 22:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Or it's possible he changed his mind because his longtime publicist, Ruth Marsh, was telling him, "Hey, you should really do this movie." Now, Marsh had been a huge advocate of Eastwood's for years, before he was ever a huge name. And in fact, Lizzie, if you remember on Friday, we mentioned that a reel of Rawhide was sent to the William Morris Agency in Rome. We discussed this in our primer. And that led to him getting the role in A Fistful of Dollars. Marsh claims that it was her and Clint Eastwood's wife that sent it there and got Eastwood's name into consideration for that movie, which would land him the role that would change his career. So maybe Eastwood took Marsh's advice.

• 23:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Chris Winterbauer?

  What we do know is that he then fired her.

• 23:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 23:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently, the agents over at William Morris, along with Eastwood's business manager, Irving Leonard, pressured him to let Marsh go. They felt threatened by the amount of influence she had on him. But perhaps the only reason we got this version of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is due to that influence.

• 23:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 23:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, I believe that Eastwood and Leone needed one another. And Eastwood would be getting a much more fair share of the loot this time. $250,000, 10% of the backend from the Western Hemisphere distribution, and a Ferrari.

• 24:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, yeah.

• 24:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Eastwood was in.

• 24:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's a really good deal. How much money was $250,000 in 1965?

• 24:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's 10 to 15x that to now, so somewhere around.

• 24:18Lizzie Bassett?

  That's a lot.

• 24:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, two and a half, $4 million.

• 24:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 24:19Chris Winterbauer?

  I need to do the math. According to Donati and Vincenzo, though, Leone was not happy. Eastwood cost them 25% of their budget, and they still needed the bad and the ugly. First on the list, Lizzie, Charles Bronson. Now, if you guys remember back when he was making A Fistful of Dollars, Bronson had been at the top of the list for the lead role, but he turned it down because he thought the script was terrible. Now, he later said he realized the script didn't matter, Leone's direction did, and he wasn't going to make the same mistake twice. He was in, but he had a conflict. He just signed his contract to make The Dirty Dozen.

• 24:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 24:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And the dates conflicted, so Bronson was out. And Leone went with another American TV actor-turned-Italian superstar, Eastwood's co-star on For a Few Dollars More, Lee Van Cleef.

• 25:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, so Bronson would have been the bad.

• 25:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Bronson would have been the bad.

• 25:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting, okay.

• 25:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you know anything about Lee Van Cleef, Lizzie?

• 25:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, only because I looked up a little bit. I don't want to step on your toes, but I-

• 25:20Chris Winterbauer?

  You're not gonna step on my toes, go ahead.

• 25:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I believe he was, well, he's American, obviously, of, I think, Dutch heritage. And he was an actor who was maybe doing sort of smaller parts on TV, and then got into an accident that caused a lot of scarring, thought his career was over, and then was offered the role by Sergio Leone that would change his life.

• 25:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I'll fill in some of the details, but that is the general trajectory. So he was in the Navy.

• 25:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's right. He was an awarded, like, war hero in World War II.

• 25:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Minesweeper, I believe. He landed a small, non-speaking role as a villain in High Noon, opposite Gary Cooper. Actually, according to one of his biographers, he'd been up for the role of Deputy Marshal Harvey Pell, which would have been a bigger role, a speaking role. But when producer Stanley Kramer asked if he'd be willing to, quote, "fix his nose," he has a very distinct hawk-like nose.

• 26:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't you dare, he has such a good face.

• 26:09Chris Winterbauer?

  He told him to go screw himself in a slightly more direct manner.

• 26:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Good.

• 26:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He still got the role of Jack Colby, a member of the Frank Miller gang. And then he was in 50 movies, 150 episodes of TV. A lot of them were Westerns. He often played the villain. He has great, as I mentioned, hawk-like features. He self-described, you know, his, quote, "beady eyes." I don't think that's a fair description, but that was what he said. As you mentioned, though, his career really plateaued. And then it nearly ended in the late 50s. He was in a car accident, coming back from set, I believe. He shattered his left kneecap, and he had a compound fracture in his left arm. He actually had to have a steel rod put in his arm that I believe was there for the rest of his life. There were rumors that he'd never ride a horse again, that he'd never run again. I do think those may have been overblown, but it's clear, based on his biography, that he was in pain.

• 26:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Walking caused him pain for the rest of his life. You know, he was in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in 1962, for example. And the role he plays in that movie is almost identical to the role he played in High Noon, basically 10 years earlier. So he had made almost no progress. He actually called the era from, like, 1958 to 64 as, you know, his, quote, "lean times." And he said that the offer to do For a Few Dollars More came at a, quote, "low period in his life where he really needed a job." And the added bonus, Lizzie, was that he would not be playing a villain. So in For a Few Dollars More, he plays a good guy. He couldn't believe it. Quote, "People were actually going to like me, and no one was going to spit on me and kick me into the dust." And there's a great story that I have to share, because according to Vincenzo, casting Van Cleef was like a scene out of a spaghetti Western.

• 27:37Chris Winterbauer?

  They were five days out from the start of production on that second film. They'd come to LA to recruit a different actor, Robert Ryan, I'd read, for the role. Leone goes to a bar for a coffee with his production manager, Otavio Alpo, who speaks English, he's acting as his translator. And in stumbles this tall man in a black raincoat and a black hat, completely drunk. And Leone recognizes him, it's Lee Van Cleef. And Leone tries to talk to him, but he doesn't really speak English. And Van Cleef thinks that Leone's teasing him, grabbing him by his jacket. And so Van Cleef grabs him, and then the bartender intervenes and says, "Hey, no, no, I know this guy, he's an Italian film director, maybe there's a job for you." So then they call Van Cleef's agent from the bar. The agent comes to the bar, and they sign a deal for nine weeks' work

• 28:21Chris Winterbauer?

  on For a Few Dollars More at $1,000 per week.

• 28:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 28:25Chris Winterbauer?

  The next day, Van Cleef and Leone are on a plane together to go to Rome.

• 28:28Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing.

• 28:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a great story. Also, there's another version of the story that Leone says they met at the bar through Van Cleef's agent, and it was an arranged meeting. But I do believe it was a last-minute hire, and it changed the trajectory of Lee Van Cleef's career. Now, Van Cleef would be returning to his roots as the bad in this movie. All that's left is the ugly. Enter Eli Wallach. Sorry, Eli, you're not ugly.

• 28:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you.

• 28:55Chris Winterbauer?

  But you're the ugly in this movie.

• 28:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 28:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Leone had apparently considered casting Gian Maria Volante, I believe, who plays the bads in both A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. He's great. According to some sources, he actually turned down the role. According to others, Leone decided not to hire him because he wanted someone who could really do comedy.

• 29:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And I do think his strength as an actor is giving a very somber weight and almost a sadness to truly sadistic characters. There's not really a lightness to it. I also read that he was very difficult for Leone to work with, and that Leone did not want to repeat that experience. Meanwhile, Wallach, on the other hand, is a veteran actor of the stage and screen. He's in his early 50s. He'd done Westerns, including The Magnificent Seven. But what sealed the deal for Leone was a small scene in How the West Was Won. And I watched this, and it is this epic Western. I actually really liked it, directed primarily by Henry Hathaway. It's five different chapters. Henry Hathaway does three of them, John Ford does one, George Marshall does one. It's long, it's nearly three hours long, $14 million budget. It's got everybody. Everybody's in this movie. It's the crazy, Gregory Peck, everybody's in this movie.

• 29:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Made $50 million at the box office, gets nominated for eight Oscars, wins three. It's got fantastic cinematography. I really feel like, for example, the cinematography of, I know this is TV, but Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, for example, I was really influenced by this movie. There's a train heist sequence towards the end of the film that I feel like George Miller pulls so much from in Mad Max, for example.

• 30:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And Wallach in this movie plays Charlie Gant. He's the head of an outlaw gang. And he's trying to pull off a gold heist on this moving train at the end. But there's this small moment before the heist, when Wallach is meeting with his gang, and he catches sight of your favorite actor, Lizzie. Who's your favorite actor from Breakfast Tiffany's?

• 30:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Mickey Rooney.

• 30:36Chris Winterbauer?

  No, your other favorite actor.

• 30:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, uh, gosh, George Pappard.

• 30:42Chris Winterbauer?

  George Pappard. So George Pappard plays Zeb Rawling. So at this point in the story, is an Arizona marshal. And these two have history. And so as Eli Wallach, you know, he kind of goes up to Pappard. He threatens him a little bit. And as he's walking away, he looks over at Pappard's two sons, his young sons. And he makes finger guns and like pretends to shoot them. And then he does one at Pappard for good measure. And it's so off the cuff and it's so funny, but it's also so menacing at the same time.

• 31:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It's perfect. You can just see, oh, man, why this guy would be so good as Tuco.

• 31:14Lizzie Bassett?

  And of course, as we learned on Breakfast at Tiffany's, nobody can suck the comedy out of a room like George Pappard.

• 31:19Chris Winterbauer?

  He's actually, he's the perfect straight man.

• 31:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's a good combo.

• 31:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Opposite Eli Wallach in this movie. They have a great dynamic. So Wallach says yes to the role of Tuco very quickly. And then just as quickly, he may have started to regret it. So Wallach, Leone and an interpreter met up in LA at Paramount. And before they discussed the script, Leone made Wallach watch the opening credit sequence for, for a few dollars more, which Lizzie, if you haven't seen it, it's this wide shot of a plateau. It's actually, they use this like exact location and almost this exact shot in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly during the sequence where Tuco is leading Clint Eastwood's Blondie through the desert.

• 31:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Just this wide shot, a man is approaching us on a horse. He's tiny in the frame. A gun goes off, the man falls off his horse, dies, the horse runs off, and then the credits run over this unmoving wide of just this man dead in the desert. It's really cool. It's very iconic. And Wallach asks the interpreter, where and when does he need me? And before the interpreter can answer the question, Leone says, aroma. And then Wallach goes back to his hotel room. He cracks open the script for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And he's like, oh, I don't really like this title. And then he starts reading it and he starts to question himself. And I wonder again, if the translated versions of these scripts are just not the best. He's like, why did I want to do this? Why does Leone want me for Tuco? I'm playing a Mexican outlaw. What am I doing here? One of the reasons, though, that he was so taken by the credit sequence is that it seemed to imply something admirable about Leone's personality.

• 32:37Chris Winterbauer?

  So in the credit sequence, you see Leone's name appear and then it's followed by gunshots and the letters get shot down. The name history gets shot down. And Wallach later said, I thought that's very interesting. It shows that he has an ego, but he's willing to be shot down. I'm guessing Leone just thought it looked cool.

• 32:51Lizzie Bassett?

  It does look cool.

• 32:53Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks super cool. But as the people who worked with him knew, Sergio Leone did not like getting shot down.

• 33:00Chris Winterbauer?

  The credited writers on this movie are Leone, Vincenzo尼 and a writing duo who went by, I believe the name is Ajay and Scarpelli. And that's Ajinori, Incroci and Furio. And I loved the name Furio because of The Sopranos, Scarpelli. And the writing process was simple, Lizzie. They'd all chat, then Vincenzo尼 would do all the work and write, and then Leone would read it, ask for changes and repeat. It really reminds me of the Kurosawa stories of writing Seven Samurai, for example. Apparently very little of what Ajay and Scarpelli wrote actually made it into the movie. Leone later said, quote, "There were jokes and nothing else. It was the grossest deception of my life. I had to take up the script again with some ghost writers," end quote.

• 33:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 33:37Chris Winterbauer?

  It's all very dramatic.

• 33:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 33:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So let's talk about the main ghost writer on this movie, Sergio Donati. He was a law student turned novelist turned screenwriter. And Leone had tried to hire him as ghostwriter on A Fistful of Dollars. Leone had called him up and said, go see Yojimbo. We're making it into a Western.

• 33:52Lizzie Bassett?

  But also we're not because we don't have the rights. It's something else. It's an Italian novel.

• 33:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And Donati was like, this, this guy's crazy. And he actually told his wife, if a man named Leone calls, tell him I'm not home. At this point, he actually didn't want to write for the movies at all. Quote, "It was a period when Italian film was in the midst of a crisis. I didn't get paid all the time. I was rather disgusted by the film industry, so I decided to move to Milano, I believe, instead of Rome, where all the movies were getting made. I started a career in advertising. For five years, I didn't even think about films. But Leone kept calling." Finally, Donati goes back to Rome to work on rewriting for a few dollars more. After that, Donati said, "Leone kept insisting that I write more for him. He kept calling me his writer. To be clear, his uncredited writer."

• 34:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 34:34Chris Winterbauer?

  So Donati says he worked on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for about eight months, including all the way through the editing process. And we'll talk about, he was involved in the dubbing of the English version as well.

• 34:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that is one thing with this movie. You can tell, I assumed that all of the incredibly handsome Italian men were speaking Italian, which makes sense. But then I was like, well, why are the-

• 34:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Some of them are, and some of them are kind of phonetically speaking English. And some of them are saying completely different things entirely, as we'll get to.

• 35:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's what I was gonna say, is you can tell that with the people who it looks like are speaking English, that sometimes they are not speaking the English words that are coming out of their mouth, including the American actors. I'm very curious about that.

• 35:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's get back to Vincenzo尼 and Leone and the writing process for a moment. So Leone claims that he discovered that there had been a battle in Texas during the Civil War fought over gold mines. And he has a very long-winded quote that I'm gonna paraphrase. He claims that he went to the Library of Congress, goes up to the librarian and says, "I want everything you have on this battle over gold mines in Texas during the Civil War." And the librarian says, "I'm sorry, sir. You must be mistaken. There were no battles over gold mines and the war didn't reach Texas. There were only a couple of land battles in Texas. Most of the battles in Texas were, I believe, around Galveston and they were naval battles around ports." Leone assures him, "Sir, there was a battle." And he returns two or three days later and the librarian looks at him like he's seen a ghost.

• 35:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And he says, "I have eight books that reference this incident. I am stunned that a man who can only read Italian could discover this." Quote, "Now I understand why you Italians make such extraordinary films. Twenty years I've been here and not a single American director has ever bothered to inform himself about the history of the West," end quote.

• 36:14Lizzie Bassett?

  My grandfather, on my mother's side, by marriage, not by blood, I'm not Italian, was first generation American. His parents were Italian. His name was Alfredo Rosie. Shout out Grandpa Fred. This reminds me so much of the way that he would tell every single story where it's grand, it's epic somehow. They had never even seen someone like me until I had walked into the room. I love it.

• 36:38Chris Winterbauer?

  There's only one problem with this story. There were no Civil War battles over gold mines in Texas.

• 36:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say, it didn't happen.

• 36:46Chris Winterbauer?

  The incident I believe Leone is referring to, and that the movie is very loosely incorporating is-

• 36:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Is The Mask of Zorro.

• 36:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's the Battle of Glorieta Pass in New Mexico.

• 36:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 36:58Chris Winterbauer?

  So this was the culmination, and we're gonna go deep into the Civil War history here, because my understanding, generally speaking, is great movie, not great history. With The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, we'll talk about some anachronisms later. This was the culmination of the Confederate New Mexico campaign. They wanted to control this kind of choke point at the base of the Rocky Mountains, you know, to control mines and railroads and a few towns, et cetera. They were commanded by Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Silby, who is name checked in the movie. And Glorieta and Santa Fe, all these names are in the movie. So it's clear he's referencing, I believe, this event and campaign.

• 37:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the confusion stems from the fact that apparently his brigade consisted of regiments from Texas. The 4th, 5th and 7th Regiment's Texas Mounted Rifles.

• 37:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 37:40Chris Winterbauer?

  That's my guess. It's also possible that the confusion is Vincenzo尼 was actually doing the research. He claims that Leone was with him when he was at the Library of Congress, but that Leone mainly stayed in the hotel while Vincenzo尼 was at the library working. And what's funny is the story keeps changing. So in interviews over the years, Leone has also said that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was inspired by the Charlie Chaplin movie, Monsieur Verdure, a dark comedy about a man who supports his wife and kids by marrying and killing wealthy women. Wait for it. It was supposed to be a social commentary. There's a scene in which the man defends himself by saying, "As for being a mass killer, does the world not encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing?" Which Leone compared to his film later, in which, quote, "We find two killers who are

• 38:24Chris Winterbauer?

  confronted by the horror of an entire war. And one of them says, I've never seen so many men wasted so badly." It just feels like he's making the connections after the fact. To me, personally, it's possible. Again, Vincenzo尼 said, "I wrote The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 11 days. I have too much respect for Charlie Chaplin to involve him with Sergio Leone Westerns."

• 38:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, okay.

• 38:45Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also possible, Lizzie, that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was inspired by Leone's favorite book. It was called Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Celine, published in 1932. It follows the life of a World War I veteran from Europe to Africa to the US. And things are just terrible everywhere. It's a dark comedy that critiques war and colonialism. The only problem, Lizzie, is it doesn't seem like it was actually Leone's favorite book. It seems like it was actually Vincenzo尼's favorite book.

• 39:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm noticing a pattern here.

• 39:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Donatini later said that Vincent Zoni knew the book by heart and would read excerpts to Sergio, who quote, "never read a word of it." According to Donatini, when Leone was later quote, "treated by cineastes in France as if he had an honorary doctorate of letters," they would ask him what his bedside reading is, and he would say, "Soline, Journey to the End of the Night." And Vincent Zoni later said, "Sergio never read a book in his life. He never even read his own ID, but he had a great sense of and passion for the movies."

• 39:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Here's the thing, he's got a style.

• 39:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He's got a style, and he'd need passion to get through this one. So, Lizzie, let's talk a little bit about the scope of the good, the bad, the ugly. It's huge. This movie is massive. Every time we get to our next Civil War set piece, the camera booms up and we just see more and more, more and more soldiers.

• 40:01Lizzie Bassett?

  They're going gone with the wind with it. And also, there's one sequence which was funny by the end of it, but the number of cannons that are going off is insane. They fire one cannon, you're like, whoa, they're really firing that cannon. They fire another one, and you're like, damn, they're really blowing up those trees. And then it just goes like, a boom, a boom, a boom, a boom. And it's like, close up on the cannon, close up on this cannon. It's insane.

• 40:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, those cannons were stockpiled from the nearby Museo de Ejército in Madrid, also the guns in the movie. And yes, a lot of the weapons in the movie, including, I believe, one of the Gatling guns and also dynamite, were not yet invented at the time of the Civil War.

• 40:43Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, I don't care.

• 40:44Chris Winterbauer?

  All due respect, though, to our Civil War devotees.

• 40:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 40:47Chris Winterbauer?

  The Spanish army helped build the sets, and Leone claims 250 soldiers built the cemetery complete with 10,000 graves.

• 40:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 40:56Chris Winterbauer?

  The sad hill cemetery at the climax of the film.

• 40:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, though, to Leone's exaggerations, other sources say it was 5,000 graves.

• 41:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's still a lot of graves.

• 41:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, Leone, just say 5,000.

• 41:06Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's a 10,000.

• 41:07Chris Winterbauer?

  They spent a month building the bridge that features towards the end of the film.

• 41:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, indeed, that busted, janky-ass bridge that they blow up. You could have taken that thing out with golf clubs, but sure, go ahead.

• 41:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, we're gonna get to that explosion in a moment. They added a dam to add more depth to the stream beneath it. Eli Wallach said he hated guns, and he didn't know his way around them. And there's a pretty funny story about Leone's style of direction. As we mentioned, Lizzie, he would physically act out how he wanted things done. So he said he had very specific direction for how Tuco should wear his gun. Tuco's not gonna use a holster. He's gonna have the gun dangling on a rope at the end of his neck.

• 41:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's a purse. He got a little gun purse.

• 41:45Chris Winterbauer?

  But it was gonna be no purse. It was just gonna be attached to a rope around his neck.

• 41:48Lizzie Bassett?

  No, no, the gun is the purse, Chris.

• 41:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah. And then Wallach says, "So the gun dangles between my legs." And Leone says, "We." They spoke in like, broken French, these two. "You twist your shoulders hard, I cut to your hand, there's the gun." The idea is like, he flips the gun into his hand from, just by shaking his shoulders. And Wallach says, "I, can you show me? I don't know how that's gonna work." And Leone picks up the gun, puts it over his head, whips his shoulders around, and according to Wallach, the gun hits him straight in the balls. Leone catches his breath, hands the gun to Wallach and says, "Just keep it in your pocket." So, shooting begins in mid-April of 1966, and it goes through mid-July, so shooting in the middle of the summer. It was a much longer shoot than the previous two movies, but much shorter than American counterparts, April to July.

• 42:35Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a pretty tight shoot, considering

• 42:37Lizzie Bassett?

  The scope of it, yeah.

• 42:38Chris Winterbauer?

  The amount of scope that they have in this movie. They're using a lot of the same locations from "For a Few Dollars More" and "A Fistful of Dollars," including where they started, Cinecita Studios in Rome. Now, there was an interpreter on set who helped Leone communicate with the three American stars. Wallach, as I mentioned, said that he primarily communicated with Leone via broken French. And he also claims that Leone knew more English than he let on, but not everybody agreed. Cinematographer Tonino Delicoli said, "Sergio was incapable of uttering a single word in English. He pretended. He could read it, but he was never able to speak it." He said that Leone got by because he was a good mimic. Quote, "If the other guy smiled, he would smile. If the other guy looked sad, he would look sad, to make the other guy think he understood, but he understood nothing."

• 43:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He's basically Leonard Shelby in Memento.

• 43:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Just like, faking his way through every conversation.

• 43:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I love him.

• 43:30Chris Winterbauer?

  If we've learned anything on this podcast, and we like to think that we have, it's that when you're making a movie, you need to know your audience, but you also have to stay true to your roots. I'll give you the perfect example. Spaghetti westerns. It's kind of the most American genre, but with a delicious Italian twist. Brami took pasta, one of Italy's greatest exports, and adapted it for an American audience. Brami is a new kind of protein pasta made from only two old-world ingredients, Italian wheat and lupini super beans. More protein, more fiber, same Italian roots and obsession with flavor. The number one best thing about this pasta, my kids like it. My daughter in particular has gotten so picky that dinner is my least favorite part of the day. Every night is basically a showdown to get her to try something western-style, but not with Brami. She loves the shapes, she loves the taste, and she actually finishes most of it before asking for dessert.

• 44:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And this summer, Brami is introducing their newest pasta shape exclusively at Whole Foods called Cubetti, which is normally really hard to find in the US, and it's delicious. Brami makes pasta that's worth slowing down for, so take your time, turn on a spaghetti western, and enjoy. Visit enjoybrami.com and find Brami at your nearest retailer, and make sure you try all-new Cubetti exclusively at your nearest Whole Foods. Brami, Pasta Perfetta. In addition to English, Italian, and French, there were cast and crew speaking Greek and German. It was a multilingual set, and it was very loud, because they were gonna dub everybody's voices anyway. Wallach said they didn't stop for anything. They didn't stop for planes, they didn't stop for wind, they didn't stop for a crew

• 44:59Chris Winterbauer?

  member cursing somebody out, which is actually probably one of the reasons they were able to move so quickly.

• 45:04Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say, yeah, if you're not having to do anything with production sound, that saves an enormous amount of time.

• 45:09Chris Winterbauer?

  God, if you're shooting a movie in LA, hold for plane is just, it's a nightmare.

• 45:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a nightmare.

• 45:15Lizzie Bassett?

  You cannot get away from airplanes in LA.

• 45:16Chris Winterbauer?

  There were stagehands arguing about football scores, and there were crew members off-camera feeding lines to the less experienced actors. And sometimes Leone wouldn't even have the actors recite their actual lines.

• 45:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Chris Winterbauer?

  To your point, Lizzie. So, there's one scene in particular where this is really noticeable. Wallach recounted it later. There's an Italian man who's playing a minor role as a soldier. He actually was not an actor. He was a World War II veteran, and he got visibly angry while shooting a scene, saying he didn't like Americans because he'd lost his arm in the war. It's possible to me that this is the scene, if you remember, when Corporal Wallace is taking him to the train, and they're on the platform, they walk past a soldier, and Tuco actually lifts the soldier's sleeve up to show that he only has one arm. I think it's probably that actor, but I couldn't confirm it. So, instead of reciting his lines, Leone told the man to count to 10 in Italian, and that's what you end up seeing, and they dubbed over that. And this may have happened more than once.

• 46:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm so sorry, you're too angry. You're just gonna have to count to 10.

• 46:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, which I cannot do in Italian.

• 46:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Nope.

• 46:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Leone also was blasting Morricone's music on set.

• 46:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool.

• 46:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Morricone actually wrote some of the music before, he wrote a lot of the music afterwards, but he wrote some of the music before production began, and Leone would play it on set. And my understanding is he would actually like, stage camera movements and action based on the music, which I think is really cool, but not everybody appreciated on set. For example, cinematographer Tonino Delicoli did not like this, because it was so loud, he actually couldn't communicate effectively with his electricians. But Leone liked to create an atmosphere, Lizzie. He wanted to give it a feeling.

• 46:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Chris Winterbauer?

  He was a little eccentric.

• 46:49Lizzie Bassett?

  He's about the vibe.

• 46:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Clint Eastwood was also a little eccentric. He was getting more comfortable shooting spaghetti westerns, so we don't think he was verbally abusing the camera anymore. Lizzie, have you ever heard about how Clint Eastwood got himself calmed down before shooting?

• 47:01Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 47:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently, he used to go up to the camera when no one else was around and call it a dirty son of a bitch, and all sorts of names. To dominate it, he would nag the camera.

• 47:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 47:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he'd be like, "Okay, I'm good." And he wasn't intimidated by it anymore. And then he'd walk away, and he'd be ready to shoot.

• 47:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Is this the inspiration for the empty chair speech later on?

• 47:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, maybe, yeah.

• 47:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It's possible. So, he got used to working with the camera, but he never got used to working with a cigar. According to Wallach, after two or three takes, he would say to Leone, "You better get it this time, because I'm going to throw up." He hated the cigar.

• 47:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know how he did this. Like, there is basically not a shot in this movie that he doesn't have that cigar in the left side of his mouth.

• 47:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I would have such a headache, and I would vomit.

• 47:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I've smoked a cigar once in my life, and I genuinely thought I was gonna throw up.

• 47:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, a couple times.

• 47:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know how you do this.

• 47:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think if you're not used to it, it made me very lightheaded. I was surprised at the effect.

• 47:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 47:55Chris Winterbauer?

  You know?

• 47:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's strong.

• 47:56Chris Winterbauer?

  My understanding is that Lee Van Cleef smoked a pipe religiously, so ironically, he's not really smoking much on camera.

• 48:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 48:03Chris Winterbauer?

  He's the one who can handle it, Eastwood's not. In fact, actually, Leone says that when he offered Eastwood for a few dollars more, Eastwood said he would only do it if he didn't have to smoke a cigar. According to Leone, he said, "Clint, we can't possibly leave the cigar behind, it's playing the lead." Just always nag him. According to Wallach, though, at this point, Eastwood was actually openly talking about this being his last spaghetti western. And so, on the production of this movie, he said that he wanted to form his own production company and get into directing.

• 48:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 48:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And Wallach apparently remembers thinking, "Oh, sure, that'll be the day." More on that later. So, once filming wrapped in Rome, they moved to the location shooting, which was in, mostly in Almeria, Spain, which is where they shot some of Lawrence of Arabia, as we discussed.

• 48:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, which sort of was the jumping off point for that area becoming kind of a Hollywood destination. Yeah.

• 48:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And on this drive, Clint and Wallach are driving together to go to the location. Clint fills Wallach in on the lowdown on how spaghetti westerns are made. "No unions. You shoot sunrise to sunset, six days a week. Don't eat the food, or you'll fall asleep by mid-afternoon. Spaghetti." "Don't volunteer to do any dangerous stunts. Let the stuntmen do the tricks." And Wallach said, "Hey, I've made westerns before."

• 49:16Lizzie Bassett?

  No, listen to Clint.

• 49:17Chris Winterbauer?

  He'd made more western movies than Clint, technically, at least American ones. "I know how to do this." And Eastwood said, "No, you've never made a western like this."

• 49:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh-oh.

• 49:25Chris Winterbauer?

  "Don't show off." So comes the scene where Tuco is on a horse and set to hang. You remember this, Lizzie?

• 49:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 49:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Eastwood's supposed to shoot the noose. Wallach was nervous, maybe not because of the horse, maybe because the dynamite on the noose.

• 49:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 49:42Chris Winterbauer?

  The plan is for Eastwood to pretend to shoot the noose, then a special effects technician is gonna press a button, trigger the dynamite, which is gonna snap the rope. Apparently Wallach told Leoni, "Hey, you should put cotton in the horse's ears because that's what everybody in Hollywood does to keep the horses calm when there's a loud noise."

• 49:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh no.

• 49:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Wallach actually later said that he made that up, but it sounded good, and it actually is a real practice today. Leoni brushed him off, though, and they go ahead with the scene. Lizzie, can you guess what happened next?

• 50:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, the horse ran out from under him before the rope snapped.

• 50:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It actually didn't, but pretty close. The dynamite exploded, then rope snapped, the horse took off like a bat out of hell while my hands were tied behind me. I kept yelling at the horse to stop, using my knees to try to control him, but it was no use. It took about a mile before the horse stopped.

• 50:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I can't believe he was able to stay on it.

• 50:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I can't believe it either, with no hands.

• 50:33Lizzie Bassett?

  That is crazy.

• 50:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Hands tied behind his back.

• 50:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 50:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Leoni said, "Let's do it again!"

• 50:39Lizzie Bassett?

  No! Oh my god.

• 50:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Wallach said Leoni was always asking him to do it again. Wallach went back to his room that night, pulled out the script, and goes, "God damn it!", because he realizes there are three more hanging scenes in the movie.

• 50:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh god.

• 50:53Chris Winterbauer?

  But those were not the only dangerous bits. So apparently, Wallach used to complain to Leoni that he couldn't focus on his acting because Leoni, I think he had ADD or something, he was always fidgeting off-camera. He was like opening and closing his hands and ripping up little bits of paper. And then Leoni surprises Wallach in one scene by releasing a trained dog on him when they were filming to break the dramatic tension and capture his real surprise. And then William Friedkin was like, "I got you beat, let me get a shotgun."

• 51:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I guess I'll take the dog over the shotgun. Actually, I don't know!

• 51:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know, trained dog is scary.

• 51:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 51:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So, let's talk about, actually, I think, one of the most impressive stunts in the movie, and then the following shot. So, Lizzie, the scene where Tuco, handcuffed, jumps off the train, pulling Corporal Wallace with him.

• 51:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 51:35Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a real stunt, done at real speed.

• 51:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh yeah, yeah, you can tell.

• 51:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Onto a rocky slope. I believe that that stunt double is jumping off the train, but in the following shot, or the following beat, Tuco hears another train coming. He lays Corporal Wallace, played by Mario Brega, on the track. Oh, and Mario Brega's in For a Few Dollars More, I can't remember if he's in A Fistful of Dollars, great character actor.

• 51:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's awesome.

• 51:58Chris Winterbauer?

  He lays him on the track with the handcuffs across the rail, so the train's gonna cut the handcuffs. They made these like soft stunt handcuffs, they really do this, it's amazing. They really run a train over the dummy body with Eli Wallach lying in the dirt next to the train tracks.

• 52:13Lizzie Bassett?

  He's like a foot away from the train track.

• 52:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Because Leoni wants him to turn toward the camera during the stunt, so the audience knows it's him.

• 52:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Sir!

• 52:22Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a funny story also from Hot Fuzz. I don't know if you remember that movie, Lizzie, that Edgar Wright film?

• 52:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Dangly.

• 52:27Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a scene where Simon Pegg's character is jumping over fences.

• 52:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, yes.

• 52:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Nick Frost follows him and like topples the first fence, and he gets up and he looks back at the fence as he's going. And when they were doing the scene, Edgar Wright said, "Make sure you look back at the first fence after it falls." And he goes, "Why should I look back?" And he goes, "I want people to know you did the stunt." And this is

• 52:46Lizzie Bassett?

  The same thing.

• 52:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Not dissimilar. Except they shoot the scene, and Wallach realizes that each train car has a small iron step on the side.

• 52:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh!

• 52:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And if he raised his head just a few inches too high, he would have been decapitated. So Leoni says, "Let's do it again!"

• 53:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-mm, mm-mm.

• 53:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And Wallach says, "No." And Leoni keeps pushing. And Wallach says, "Fine, but only if you dig a deeper ditch for me to lie in. I don't want my head that close to the iron steps." So they dig the ditch and they start filming again. Then Leoni and Dele Colli start arguing again in Italian. And finally, Leoni goes up to Wallach and he says, "Look, your head's too low."

• 53:22Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 53:22Chris Winterbauer?

  "He can't see you in the shot, you gotta do it again." And Wallach just said, "No."

• 53:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Just refused.

• 53:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And that was it.

• 53:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Good.

• 53:29Chris Winterbauer?

  You have what you have, and that's it, and that's what's in the movie. And Dele Colli said that this perfectionism at all costs is really what made Leoni hard to work with, and probably a little unsafe to work with.

• 53:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, that shot was crazy. We were watching this, and our whole family is here with us, and our nieces kept running into the room, and they're very little, and you know, we were like, we kept trying to stop the movie, start the movie, stop the movie. And of course, we restart it as he's about to run over a body on the train tracks, and both nieces run in, and we were like, "Ooh!" Because it's a very upsetting scene.

• 54:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I mean, it's

• 54:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It's crazy.

• 54:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't condone the lack of safety.

• 54:04Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 54:05Chris Winterbauer?

  But it's an amazing sequence.

• 54:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh yeah.

• 54:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Leoni apparently would not leave set until he had completely finished what he was doing. In America, that would mean extra hours, which would mean overtime on a paid union shoot.

• 54:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Not in Italy.

• 54:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Not in Italy, or Spain in this instance. This was often unpaid work. And because it was summer, Lizzie, there was light, they would continue to shoot extreme close-ups, right, that they could light without, you know, seeing the sun down in the background. And so you have from dawn, right, until, so 7:30 in the morning till 9:30 at night, for example, that's 14 hours that he's forcing you to shoot six days a week.

• 54:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Aye.

• 54:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And Leoni himself has said it took an entire day to shoot the first three close-ups you see in the final showdown between Angel Eyes Blondie and Tuco. And, I mean, it looks amazing.

• 54:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It does.

• 54:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, we have to talk about the story, perhaps most told about this production, which is when Tuco and Blondie blow up the popsicle stick bridge.

• 54:55Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a popsicle stick bridge.

• 54:57Chris Winterbauer?

  They're fighting over. So as they're preparing the scene, Eastwood asks Leoni, "Where do you want Eli and me to be when you blow up the bridge?" And according to Wallach, Leoni points to a small ditch about 10 yards from the dam. And then Eastwood says to Leoni, "Where will you be?" And Leoni turns and points at a hill 200 yards away, where he's gonna shoot the scene with a long lens. There's a long pause, and then Eastwood says, "I think Eli and I will be standing right at the top of that hill with you. We wanna see the dam blow up, too." And Leoni starts staring, but, but, and he tries to explain, "I wanna pan down the hill, show you guys lying in the ditch, then pan back up to the bridge as it explodes." And Eastwood says, "No, Sergio, we will stand right up here by you."

• 55:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:36Chris Winterbauer?

  That's it. And it's a good thing that he did, because this was not an airtight operation, Lizzie.

• 55:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I could tell that by the large chunks of debris that fly directly at the camera, yeah.

• 55:46Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get there. So when it's time to detonate the dynamite, which I have read, one source said 400 kilograms of dynamite, I don't know if that's accurate, however, that explosion is enormous.

• 55:56Lizzie Bassett?

  It's big.

• 55:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It is one of the most impressive on-screen. I mean, it honestly makes the Bridge on the River Qui explosion not look that big in comparison, which is crazy. The special effects technician turns to the Spanish army captain, who's helped set everything up, and says, "Why don't you do the honors? I believe the Spanish army guys are the ones that built the bridge." So he's saying, you know, "Your team built the bridge, why don't you do the honors? You can push the button to detonate it." And the captain defers, says, "No, no, it's all you." And the technician says, "No, I insist, look, it's easy. All you have to do is press the button when I say 'via'." I've also heard some people say 'via via', which would be Italian, but I think because it's a Spanish, 'via' would mean go in Spanish, so I think it's 'via', anyway, unimportant. According to Wallach, down below, one of the crew members asked if he should turn the slow-motion camera on.

• 56:40Chris Winterbauer?

  CC, the special effects man, said, other sources claim the man says, "Yes, via, fine. What matters is, something comes through the radio, and the captain thinks he hears

• 56:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh no!

• 56:52Chris Winterbauer?

  'via.' So he pushes the button, and the bridge explodes without cameras rolling. According to Wallach, the special effects technician jumped into his Jeep and headed straight for the airport, as Leoni cursed him out in Italian with his megaphone. The Spanish captain then walked over to Leoni and fessed up, told him what happened. He says, "Look, me and my soldiers, we will rebuild the bridge for you in three days, so you can get your explosion, only if you bring the special effects technician back and give him his job back."

• 57:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 57:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And Leoni agreed, both men kept their words. Three days later, the bridge is back up, the technician's back in, the scene goes off without a hitch, except, Lizzie, as you mentioned.

• 57:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh-huh.

• 57:33Chris Winterbauer?

  In the final shot over the shoulders of, and I believe that's Wallach and Eastwood's stunt doubles, they cut from them returning to close-ups, and then they reverse. I don't think it's them.

• 57:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Clint Eastwood, the shape of the shoulders didn't look right when they dive over the thing.

• 57:45Chris Winterbauer?

  There is a very large rock or piece of debris

• 57:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Chris Winterbauer?

  that hits a sandbag two feet from Eastwood's stunt double with enough force, that is at least a 20-pound, if not a 40-pound sandbag, it lifts it off the ground.

• 58:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that could have killed somebody.

• 58:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, at minimum, concussion.

• 58:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh yeah, a serious injury, for sure.

• 58:05Chris Winterbauer?

  If not, like, cave in your skull.

• 58:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Chris Winterbauer?

  If you guys haven't seen it, I will post the clip at the time on our Patreon that you can watch, you can also just Google "good, bad, and the ugly" bridge explosion. It was a very close call.

• 58:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also an amazing shot, a very close call, clearly unsafe at some level.

• 58:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 58:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Filming wrapped in mid-July 1966, the movie's scheduled to hit theaters in less than six months.

• 58:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, good thing Ennio Morricone, as we mentioned, had started before filming began. Tarantino would later claim, as I mentioned, that Leone was, in a sense, treating Morricone's music like needle drops. And there's not a ton about this score available online. As we'll get to later, Morricone doesn't really like talking about these movies. And we'll talk about why later.

• 58:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Can I ask you one question?

• 58:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Please.

• 58:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Is the wah wah wah, is that just a person?

• 58:56Chris Winterbauer?

  The wahs are a person, but there are three versions of the fifth interval.

• 59:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Chris Winterbauer?

  So we'll talk about that right now. Let's talk about it right now. So shout out, the iconic whistling was performed by the guitarist from Morricone's band, Alessandro Alessandroni. And then the soprano vocals that I just love, especially in Ecstasy of Gold, those are Era del Orso. And again, for my money, Ecstasy of Gold is maybe the greatest piece of music ever put to film. I think it's perfect. I think that scene is incredible, the arpeggiated piano that he lays in earlier in the movie. And you kind of, I kept thinking, oh, he's gonna play Ecstasy of Gold here, here. And then you realize he doesn't actually use it until the end of the film. And it's, the restraint that that requires is amazing. But the main theme that you're talking about, that dun dun dun dun, that was inspired by the howl of a coyote, that kind of psychedelic.

• 59:43Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what David said when we were watching it, yeah.

• 59:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's like a psychedelic yodeling is what one reviewer said, you know? And woo hoo hoo, the wah wah wah, there's a version.

• 59:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a person.

• 59:55Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a person. There's also versions that are like distorted electric guitars that are run through all this processing and stuff. So there's a number of versions. The dun that you hear at the beginning, though, in the credits, there are three versions that happen back to back over three silhouettes for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, presumably like the three men. And according to one article I read, and I do believe this, it's kind of, there are three instruments representative of each character. So there's the flute rendition for Blondie. Then there's a human voices version for Tuco. That's two men, one singing the A, one singing the E. And then there's an Ocarina version for Angel Eyes.

• 1:00:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 1:00:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And then you hear those, like that leitmotif throughout the movie.

• 1:00:36Lizzie Bassett?

  What made me think of it was because it sounded sort of busted on Tuco's, like it sounded like people, which made me kind of laugh.

• 1:00:42Chris Winterbauer?

  And then I. Tuco's is like, it's like wah wah wah wah wah. Yeah, that's intentional.

• 1:00:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 1:00:47Chris Winterbauer?

  That's like for the ugly.

• 1:00:47Lizzie Bassett?

  But it's so funny, because when that happened, I was like, wait a minute now. And then you don't hear that again for the rest of the movie. So I was like, I must have been hearing things.

• 1:00:54Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, you heard it correctly. I think that's very intentional. Now, the movie was edited by Eugenio Alaviso, who had helped edit for A Few Dollars More, and Nino Baragli, hope that I got that pronunciation right. Nino called Leone the pulverizer, because he reduced you to a pulp when the editing begins.

• 1:01:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool.

• 1:01:12Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Nino, Leone shoots a lot of footage for two main reasons. Number one, he wants to get the most out of his actors. And number two, he wants to cover his ass. So there are a lot of ways to edit his movies. Vincenzo said that he used to drop into the editing room, too, and each frame was a fight. In fact, it was during editing that he and Leone had their first major blow up. I think tension had been building between these two since Vincenzo pitched the movie to United Artists without any input from Leone.

• 1:01:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Chris Winterbauer?

  And now the issue was the length of the movie. So the problem is, United Artists, at least for the US distribution, or the portions of the distribution that they control, they don't want anything longer than two hours.

• 1:01:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, this is the classic. This happens every single time anybody wants to push the length of it. It's because, it's happened with Titanic, it's happened with, you know, something like Avatar, everything. They don't want to exceed, they don't want to exceed that runtime, because if you do, it reduces the number of screenings you can pack into a theater during a day, which then, in theory, reduces ticket sales. Of course, we've seen for things like Titanic, that wasn't actually the case, but.

• 1:02:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So apparently, the first fight was basically, Vincenzo sees a cut of the movie, and it sounds like maybe he's acting as UA's advocate in here, but appeasing UA would require cutting 45 minutes from the movie version that he saw. And so they have this big fight. They also have uncredited screenwriter Sergio Donati there, and he's trying to help make a shorter version of the movie make sense. He said that Leone would prefer to, quote, "take out entire chunks of story rather than abbreviate sequences or alter the rhythm." And then he would create scenes that would be like the necessary link to bridge the broken portions of the story. Like in another interview, he says, "They cut more than half an hour of film, and I wrote a scene covering everything that was missing in those 30 minutes, and we dubbed it into a shorter scene."

• 1:03:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Donati said that in the end, he felt that Leone was, quote, "not living up to his own reputation. In his heart of hearts, he was aware of his limitations, and he was continually plagued by self-doubt." He also claims that Leone tried to delay the release. So what's really interesting is, so this movie released on December 23rd, and that on basically that night, like they'd finished the last mix right before this movie released. There was champagne brought in to celebrate, everybody's emotional, and Sergio just says, "Okay, good night," and he leaves. And that's it, doesn't even celebrate it. And in fact, they actually premiered eight days before he finished the final film. So they premiered in Rome on the 15th of December, and he kept working until the 23rd, basically.

• 1:03:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So the Italian release clocked in at just under 180 minutes.

• 1:03:49Lizzie Bassett?

  That's, must be what I watched.

• 1:03:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not exactly, it is very close.

• 1:03:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:03:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe the Italian release is now referred to as the international cut. What we've watched is called the extended cut, and the difference is mostly in the way it's dubbed, and we'll talk about it in a moment. So for the US release at the time, Leone says, quote, "They took away 20 minutes to make people go and buy popcorn." The actual difference, I think, is roughly 16 minutes, 177 in Italy is what I read, and 161 in the US. We'll talk about the scenes that were added back in later, that you saw, Lizzie, and I'm curious your thoughts about them, but let's put a pin on that to talk about dubbing this movie. So the movie opens in Italy, they have not done an English language version of it yet. So this movie's been released.

• 1:04:29Lizzie Bassett?

  But they have dubbed Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, and Clint Eastwood in Italian, I would imagine.

• 1:04:34Chris Winterbauer?

  They've dubbed them in Italian.

• 1:04:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:04:36Chris Winterbauer?

  For the Italian release.

• 1:04:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, right.

• 1:04:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So they then are dubbing Fistful of Dollars for A Few Dollars More across 1966, 1967, basically. And it's not until the fall of 1967 in New York, under the supervision of American actor Mickey Knox, that they are gonna dub The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Knox was also responsible for writing the script that the actors were going to use in their dubbing sessions. And here's how Knox put it. "Sergio had a very poor translation from the Italian, and in most cases, the American actors changed the dialogue when they were doing it, meaning on set."

• 1:05:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So what this means is, they did not record sync sound. So he did not have reference sound from the set, so he's just reading their lips.

• 1:05:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:05:17Chris Winterbauer?

  And sometimes what they're saying isn't matching what's in the English-translated script he's been given. Quote, "I knew what they were supposed to be saying, because I had the Italian script, but I had to find out the right dialogue, not only in terms of moving the story along, but also to fit the lips. It's not an easy thing to do. As a matter of fact, it took me six weeks to write what they call the lip sync script." So he's not only reverse-engineering the dialogue, he's creating new dialogue, effectively, to both, again, move the story forward and fit their lips. Eastwood was working on another movie, so he couldn't come to the dubbing sessions as scheduled. Sergio didn't want to pay for Knox to wait around for Eastwood, so Mickey Knox apparently left. And then Sergio Donati, who is still there, runs the sessions with Eastwood.

• 1:06:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Eastwood comes in with the original English translation of the script that he had from the shoot. He starts reading from that and says, "I don't want to use this new dubbed version. These are the lines I said on set, I'm gonna say these ones," which then wouldn't match Wallach and Van Cleef.

• 1:06:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:06:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Who are working off of the new version. So apparently, one of the United Artists executives had to step in and threaten him into reading the new dubbed version. Basically, if you don't cooperate, you're not gonna make another movie in the United States. Apparently, things between Leone and Eastwood had just reached a real low point by this point in time.

• 1:06:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I can see these two not getting along, especially knowing that Clint Eastwood is going to become an extremely accomplished director in his own right later in his career.

• 1:06:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And how would you describe Clint Eastwood's directorial style?

• 1:06:42Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very staid. I mean, it's, it's very controlled and.

• 1:06:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Efficient.

• 1:06:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Efficient, yes, yeah.

• 1:06:47Chris Winterbauer?

  The one-take-wonder.

• 1:06:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:06:48Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, I mean, it's the opposite of Leone in so many ways.

• 1:06:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I do, I mean, I want to shout out Mickey Knox for the script that he wrote here, because I have to say, like, I actually think a lot of the dialogue in this movie is very good and feels very natural and American, which I was wondering about when you're watching it, because clearly, these are not, mostly not Americans saying this stuff. So I actually think he did a pretty incredible job.

• 1:07:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. So it's important to note that Eastwood, Van Cleef, and Wallach only dubbed their scenes for the US release cut.

• 1:07:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:07:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So for the 161-minute version, we'll come back to that. So United Artists handles the marketing in the United States. They intentionally packaged the first three spaghetti westerns, right, the Dollars trilogy, similar to how they packaged the Bond franchise. And all three movies, as we mentioned, are released in the US in 1967, which is actually a great opportunity to really hit the market hard. So Fistful of Dollars comes out in January for A Few Dollars More in May, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in December. And a United Artists spokesperson told the press that Leone's movies were supported by, quote, "an ad budget several times more than anyone expected us to spend on a foreign-made western. But there was a glaring mistake in the US trailer for the movie, a translation error." So, Lizzie, as we mentioned, the movie in Italian is El Buono, Il Bruto, Il Cattivo,

• 1:08:08Chris Winterbauer?

  The Good, The Ugly, The Bad. In the trailer, when the narrator says "The Bad," Wallach's face is shown, and when he says "The Ugly," Van Cleef's face is shown. Apparently because of this, Van Cleef was coined Mr. Ugly in future ad campaigns for his Italian movies.

• 1:08:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:08:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And I have one right here for the big gun down. It says, "Mr. Ugly hits town."

• 1:08:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Mr. Ugly hits down.

• 1:08:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So in the US, Fistful of Dollars grosses roughly $3.5 million against a $200,000 budget. For a Few Dollars More does $5 million against $350,000 budget. And these movies have already made as much in Italy, to be clear, and they've done well in Europe. And The Good, The Bad and The Ugly did roughly $6 million against its $1 million budget. For reference, the 10th highest grossing film in the US box office in 1967 was Hombre, a revisionist western starring Paul Newman, who was nearly a decade into his stardom, and it only made $6.5 million.

• 1:09:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:09:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So these movies were very financially successful. They were a hit, but the reviews were surprisingly mixed. The New York Times called The Good, The Bad and The Ugly "the burn, the gouge and the mangle." They said, "It, quote, 'must be the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre.' Near the end of the movie, the writers and the director, Sergio Leone, hoped that it might pass for anti-war. Never so many men who were wasted so badly, Eastwood says. And there is a completely meaningless sequence with a bridge as though it might pass for San Luis Rey or Qui, meaning Bridge on the River Qui. Sometimes it all tries to pass for funny."

• 1:09:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Why is the New York Times wrong so frequently?

• 1:09:46Chris Winterbauer?

  So frequently.

• 1:09:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Like, almost always when we read their reviews.

• 1:09:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Except when they reviewed Moonshot, which they gave a good review.

• 1:09:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Which they were very correct about.

• 1:09:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. They also said, "Eastwood's face and voice are expressionless throughout. A word that came up in a lot of reviews was sadistic. Several critics found it technically impressive, but too violent, or too long, or too boring. Eli Wallach's acting was generally praised, sometimes Van Cleef, but the critics were kind of unimpressed with Eastwood."

• 1:10:14Lizzie Bassett?

  That's crazy.

• 1:10:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And Lizzie, a few reviews ragged on Morricone's score.

• 1:10:20Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:10:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "A bizarre score. Unsparring photography accentuate the film's brutality. Ennio Morricone's musical background, compounded largely of musical shrieks and screams, is poor."

• 1:10:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Sit down.

• 1:10:33Chris Winterbauer?

  A review from a paper in Ohio wrote, "If this is the alternative to American westerns, let's make more American westerns."

• 1:10:40Lizzie Bassett?

  No, please don't. I had to watch a bunch of them when I was little.

• 1:10:43Chris Winterbauer?

  But Roger Ebert was on the right side of history. "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is probably 30 minutes too long, but it's filled with good stuff like that for those who treasure westerns." He gave it three out of four stars and wrote that "all three of Leone's movies had been tremendously popular, and curiously enough, all three have been pretty good." I think one thing that's interesting to note is that the film was more positively reviewed outside of the United States. Although also outside of Italy, most of these movies were pretty poorly reviewed by Italian critics, who were like, "These are trashy imitations of Hollywood movies."

• 1:11:12Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes sense on a certain level, because I am sure that there was more sensitivity then than there would be now with something like this, where you are taking, you know, the most American genre, and you're doing something people had not seen before. And of course, they know this is an Italian and, you know, Spanish production of this. So I understand that Americans might not be as welcoming towards this, particularly American film critics. Now, are they wrong? Yes.

• 1:11:38Chris Winterbauer?

  One English paper argued, "Certain kinds of screen violence, like certain kinds of sick jokes, have a thoroughly therapeutic effect. If we have to live in a world of menace and social taboos, we might just as well lay the ghosts once in a while by turning around, staring them straight in the face, and having a nervous kind of giggle. And I can't help feeling that Sergio Leone's brand of cynical violence falls into the same category. Frankly, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly must rank as the nastiest, gory-ous and fragrantly brutal of the three produced to date. Yet what a superb piece of film."

• 1:12:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Chris Winterbauer?

  A Toronto newspaper, this is actually about Fistful of Dollars, wrote, "Leave it to a European filmmaker to strip away all the moral window dressing, which usually disguises the western hero, to stress the capacity for violence, which ultimately is the hallmark of that hero." And I completely agree with that.

• 1:12:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:12:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Leone told journalists he was done with westerns, but that's the only kind of movie producers wanted him to make. His next movie was actually supposed to be Once Upon a Time in America, based on The Hoods by Harry Gray. But it would become Once Upon a Time in the West. He was stuck with westerns for now. He actually tried to bring Clint Eastwood back into that film. Quote, "I wanted to say farewell to the three characters from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and to do so in style. I wanted to say farewell to them and the rules of the game which I had imposed. So I hoped that the three pistolari, who are killed by Charles Bronson at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West, would be Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach.

• 1:13:05Chris Winterbauer?

  The other two agreed, meaning Ben Cleef and Wallach, but Clint was the only one who didn't want to do it. So there wasn't any point in using Ben Cleef and Eli Wallach. It wasn't a question of expense, he just couldn't see the funny side of it." I think this quote's really important, because I've seen a lot of speculation online that Leone offered Eastwood the Charles Bronson role, harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West. I do not think that's true.

• 1:13:25Lizzie Bassett?

  No, seems like he was interested in working with Charles Bronson for years before Clint Eastwood.

• 1:13:30Chris Winterbauer?

  He'd offered him the lead role in Fistful of Dollars before Eastwood.

• 1:13:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I think these men were kind of done with each other. I do think he wanted to say goodbye to the character. I think Eastwood had no interest in returning. I also read speculation that the reason that Eastwood didn't do it was budgetary concerns, that he was going to be too expensive. But Leone says, in this quote, "It wasn't a question of expense. Eastwood just didn't want to come back." And Eastwood never made, you know, he did not continue with Spaghetti Westerns. He came back to America after this. So I believe this quote entirely from Leone.

• 1:13:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I do too.

• 1:13:57Chris Winterbauer?

  So Eastwood, for his part, did not experience as much of an immediate boost as you might think. I think a lot of people assume he became the star we know him as now immediately after the Spaghetti Westerns. I actually think that didn't fully happen until we get to Dirty Harry in the 70s.

• 1:14:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what I thought, was that Dirty Harry was the big break.

• 1:14:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I think so. This was a big break, but Dirty Harry, I think, was more the big break. But this did lead to a really important transformation in his career. So his next movie was called Hangham High, released in 1968. And I believe that his agents actually wanted him to do a different western. I'm forgetting the name right now, but it had bigger names involved, and they thought it would be more prestigious. But Hangham High, he would get a salary bump on it. He'd still have to smoke a cigar, which sucks, but he'd get more points on the back end, he'd get a salary bump. He'd be the lead. And the other perk is that it was going to be the first joint production between United Artists and the Malpasso Company, which was named after Malpasso Creek, which flowed through Eastwood's property in Monterey County.

• 1:14:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:14:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So using the money from the Dollars trilogy, he and his business partner set up his production company that he had told Eli Wallach about while making The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. And he made his directorial debut three years later with Play Misty for Me in 1971. His 40th movie, Juror Number Two, as a director, was released in 2024. So Lee Van Cleef, in stark contrast to Clint Eastwood, stayed in Europe.

• 1:15:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he was a spaghetti western king.

• 1:15:17Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a spaghetti western king. The Big Gun Down in 1966, Day of Anger 67, Death Rides a Horse, Beyond the Law. He was in dozens of these movies, oftentimes playing the good guy, all the way into the mid 70s. But by then, you know, his career was in decline, at least in part because spaghetti westerns were in decline. This genre really died out and he was tied to them. He said in an interview in 1979, "I am an actor. I enjoy what I'm doing and want to continue doing it. I'll never quit until I'm dead." Now, Lee Van Cleef had a lot of health problems. I have read, there's a lot of speculation that he had a drinking problem, that he did suffer from alcoholism. He died of a heart attack in 1989. He continued working, you know, almost until this point. He was only 64 years old.

• 1:16:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Aye.

• 1:16:01Chris Winterbauer?

  He is actually only five years older than Clint Eastwood. So if you were to watch For a Few Dollars More, they kind of dye his hair gray. And because he's balding, they present him as the old man relative to Eastwood's young buck. They're only five years apart.

• 1:16:14Lizzie Bassett?

  That's not so surprising, having watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

• 1:16:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, he looks younger in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly than he does in For a Few Dollars More.

• 1:16:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and Clint Eastwood is mature. Like, it is interesting when I try to think of like, oh, what did a young Clint Eastwood look like? Honestly, I see his son, because, who by the way, looks exactly like Clint Eastwood. Which is crazy. But he was, I mean, he was very clearly in his 30s and was a mature-looking, you know, third, obviously extremely handsome. But like, yeah, they don't look too far apart. They're very physically different, but age-wise.

• 1:16:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think if you were to watch For a Few Dollars More, you would see a bigger gap.

• 1:16:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Chris Winterbauer?

  But I agree. You know, I read that one of Van Cleef's, I believe, agents or managers lamented that he stayed in Europe after making this movie.

• 1:16:58Lizzie Bassett?

  It seems like he loved it, though.

• 1:17:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He did, but he said, you know, he really felt this rep that if he'd come back after The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, he could have been as big a star as Eastwood. He really felt like he was that talented and charismatic, and he could have made it in Hollywood. And who knows if that's true, but what I will say is, I love Lee Van Cleef in these movies.

• 1:17:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he is so unbel, I mean, he's so handsome. He's got such a unique look, and he's so charismatic.

• 1:17:25Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the thing. I actually don't think you can equate him to Clint Eastwood, because the look.

• 1:17:29Chris Winterbauer?

  No, they're very different. I'm, I think the rep is just saying.

• 1:17:32Lizzie Bassett?

  From the looks, they're so different that, you know, could Lee Van Cleef have come back and had some kind of career in the US? Especially in the 70s, when you're looking at like the Scorsese's and people, the auteurs that start to rise? Yes, I think definitely he could have. But would he have had as much fun? I don't know.

• 1:17:49Chris Winterbauer?

  We don't know. Ennio Morricone, of course, continued to work with Leone. But over the years, he would get very annoyed when journalists would only want to talk about his work on spaghetti westerns. As he later said, "Only 8% of my film scores were for westerns. Most people only remember me for those films, so sometimes I'm quite disappointed, because I've written for so many other types of films." As recently as 2015, he relayed the story to a journalist of how he still regretted not getting to score Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. So as the story goes, he just finished working on a Leone film. I'm assuming Duck You Sucker, because that was the same year as Clockwork Orange, but it's possible it was Once Upon a Time in the West. Kubrick apparently called up Leone and said, "Look, is Ennio available?" And Kubrick, my understanding is he was trying to be polite.

• 1:18:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He wanted to, you know, reach out director to director first, so he wasn't stepping on his toes. And Ennio was. His part was done. Leone was in the mix at this point. But Leone told Kubrick that Morricone was busy with his movie, and Kubrick never called back.

• 1:18:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:18:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Vincenzo had his own gripes with Leone. He said that there was a different Good, The Bad and The Ugly sequel that Leone refused to make, quote, "Mainly because he was angry with me. The producer offered him $1 million only to put his name as Sergio Leone presents. He didn't want me to make money, so he refused." Now Leone only directed three more films. Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck You Sucker, which he actually had not intended to direct. I think they were 10 days into shooting when he got pulled into directing that movie. We'll talk about that in its own episode. And then after over a decade hiatus and false starts on other projects, Once Upon a Time in America. And of course, he didn't pass up the opportunity to insult Clint Eastwood while working with Robert De Niro, calling Eastwood by contrast "a block of marble."

• 1:19:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I have read that the two had dinner in Rome at some point in the late 80s, but it's unclear where they left things. Clint Eastwood did meet Akira Kurosawa, I believe, in the early 1990s, late 1980s, and they both had a good laugh over A Fistful of Dollars being a direct ripoff of Yoshimbo and starting his career. Leone passed away from a heart attack in 1989, the same year that Lee Van Cleef died. Vincenzo尼 passed away in 2013. A year later, we lost Eli Wallach, who of course did star in

• 1:19:59Lizzie Bassett?

  The Holiday.

• 1:20:00Chris Winterbauer?

  The most important role in The Holiday.

• 1:20:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he does.

• 1:20:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Ennio Morricone died in 2020. But Lizzie, let's talk a little bit about the version of the movie that you watched.

• 1:20:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:20:09Chris Winterbauer?

  The extended cut, which is what you'll watch if you rent this on pretty much any platform.

• 1:20:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:20:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So it does restore scenes deleted from the international cut, and it was assembled in, I believe, around 2003. But there was a problem. They didn't have the English dubbing for deleted scenes. So they brought Wallach and Eastwood in for these sessions. But Eastwood was in his 70s.

• 1:20:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And Wallach was in his 80s, and Van Cleef had passed away. So they actually hired a voice actor to replace Van Cleef.

• 1:20:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, I wondered, because there are some lines that don't sound quite right.

• 1:20:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It's Simon Prescott. I actually think he does a really admirable job.

• 1:20:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 1:20:42Chris Winterbauer?

  But it's still noticeable.

• 1:20:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43Chris Winterbauer?

  So the scenes in particular, and I'm curious if you had any reaction to these scenes. The one, it's called Il Grotto. It's the grotto scene. It's basically when Tuco has a duck, or the, the white chicken, and he walks in to the well, or the cooking area, and he's plucking the duck, and he's saying, "Oh, if I could find this man, I'll have $4,000." And his buddies come down from, they rappel down from the ceiling, basically. And he recruits them. That's one.

• 1:21:08Lizzie Bassett?

  So he's the least, I think, noticeable, Eli Wallach. The only thing is you can tell that the mouths don't match. So yes, I did notice that in there, but in terms of his voice, it didn't sound wrong.

• 1:21:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Then the fort scene. This is when Van Cleef's Angel Eyes visits the blown up fort where the Confederate hospital is set up.

• 1:21:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So that's all Simon Prescott.

• 1:21:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:21:27Chris Winterbauer?

  That's not Van Cleef. The sunbath scene, which is Tuco is torturing Blondie. So this is like Eastwood and Wallach. And then there's a number of other scenes just with Tuco and Eastwood. They're mostly interstitial scenes, connecting certain moments, like going to the monastery, et cetera. You know, there are a lot of people online who feel that the additions are unnecessary and diminish the quality of the cut since the dubbing is different. I disagree. I actually am glad that we have them in there.

• 1:21:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I do, too. Everything you just mentioned, I think you need in the movie.

• 1:21:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so for example, like the fort scene, I think gives wonderful context to the Civil War elements of the movie.

• 1:22:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Big time.

• 1:22:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, I think it would be confusing if, as it was in the US cut, Angel Eyes just shows up as an army captain, you know, miraculously at this next location.

• 1:22:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:22:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I think those are important scenes.

• 1:22:15Lizzie Bassett?

  They are, and also what I'll say about the dubbing is that I think, honestly, because in the cut that we both watched, it happens early and often that the lips don't match.

• 1:22:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:22:26Lizzie Bassett?

  You just kind of give over to it pretty quickly.

• 1:22:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It takes about 10 minutes for me.

• 1:22:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:22:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And then all of a sudden, I'm locked in, and it doesn't bother me anymore.

• 1:22:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 1:22:34Chris Winterbauer?

  But it's always noticeable when you start the movie.

• 1:22:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And then you kind of, you lock in. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, as I said up top, begins and ends with Tuco and Blondie divvying up the loot. Four for you, four for me. And I think for a number of people on this movie, they feel like they got their fair share. I think Van Cleef got the second act he was yearning for. Eli Wallach got a chance to do some crazy shit in Europe. Clint Eastwood got the money to fund his production company. But for Leone and so many of the Italian folks behind the camera on this movie, I just have this feeling that they all somehow felt like they were stiffed, or at least a lot of them felt stiffed by Leone. But I want to end with a quote relayed through Chris Frailing, who has written several books

• 1:23:22Chris Winterbauer?

  about Leone and his work. He said that the last time he spoke with Vincenzo尼, Vincenzo尼 said he wished he'd made peace with Leone before he died. In fact, Frailing says that Vincenzo尼 cried on this call and said something along the lines of, "I just wish I had shaken Leone's hand before he died, because there was bad blood between us. We both behaved like idiots. As the more cultured man, I should have known better." And that brings us to the end of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Lizzie. So I gotta ask you, what went right?

• 1:23:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Great job, this episode. Very fun, very entertaining. Before I say what went right, I do, I do want to say one thing about the anti-war elements of this. I think it's interesting that he chose the Civil War as a war to demonstrate sort of the pointlessness of fighting, because that actually feels to me like one of the least American things about this movie. Of the many wars that the US has engaged in, I think if you grew up in America, depending, I suppose, on which side of the Mason Dixon line, but the Civil War most certainly was not fighting for nothing. So that was one thing that struck me about this movie as interesting. Obviously, I understand the point being like, the lives lost, it's never worth the lives being lost.

• 1:24:38Lizzie Bassett?

  But then I kind of caught myself feeling like, well, if there was one war where it maybe was worth the lives being lost, it was probably this one. And so I did think that was interesting, and that, to me, was one of the few things that took me out of this a little bit. But that being said, I think what went right here, even though perhaps the ghost of Sergio Leone will haunt me for this, is the collaboration. It is the number of people that had to come together on this, whether it's his poor, uncredited ghostwriter, or, you know, the cinematographer, Ennio Morricone. It just, the number of people that worked on this movie is stunning. And, you know, no one can ever take sole credit for it.

• 1:25:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Obviously, you had Sergio Leone at the helm of this with his vision, which is uncompromised, for better and for worse. But as we always say here on the podcast, filmmaking is one of, if not the most collaborative art you can possibly have. And so I will just say, yeah, it's the collaboration.

• 1:25:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's great. On the one hand, Eli Wallach, I think, is fantastic in this movie.

• 1:25:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:25:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I wish I had more Lee Van Cleef in my life. I want to give mine to Ennio Morricone. I, I just, I just think, his music across all three of these movies, and yes, I know, Beyond These Movies, The Mission, another great one, for example, is wonderful. But I think what he does in these movies in particular is so ahead of its time. And the composer who came to mind, listening to it this time, is Cristobal Tapia de Vire.

• 1:26:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04Chris Winterbauer?

  He does White Lotus, and I feel like

• 1:26:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Did the White Lotus.

• 1:26:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Did the White Lotus, also The Girl with All the Gifts, and a lot of other great stuff. And his use of vocalizations feels so inspired by Morricone. And Morricone was just, nobody was doing, to my knowledge, no one was really doing anything quite like this at the time.

• 1:26:20Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:26:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's so wonderful. And yet, it played with elements that already existed in westerns, but he made it so his own. So I'll give it to him.

• 1:26:27Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, well, a huge thank you to Bra Mi for sponsoring today's episode. If The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly taught us anything, it's that the right two ingredients, Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, among many others, can go a long way toward making something incredible. And that's exactly what Bra Mi is about. Protein pasta made in Italy from only two world ingredients with zero trade-offs on taste. Pasta perfetta. And if you haven't tried it yet, this summer, Bra Mi is launching Cubetti, their newest pasta-shaped, tiny hollow cubes, perfect for soups, salads, and easy weeknight dinners. Find Cubetti exclusively at Whole Foods and shop the full Bra Mi lineup at enjoybra mi.com. That's enjoybra mi.com. Bra Mi, eat well, live well. And Chris, if folks are enjoying this podcast as much as they perhaps are enjoying Bra Mi's Cubetti, and they would like to support us, how can they do that?

• 1:27:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Just a few easy ways. Tell a family member or friend, check out What Went Wrong, they just did some spaghetti westerns. Leave us a rating and review on whatever podcast you're listening to us on that helps us with discoverability. You can follow us on social media, on Instagram, for example. Or if you'd like even more from this podcast, you can get bonus episodes. You can sign up through Spotify or through Apple for our special features, or you can go to Patreon. It's $5 a month on whatever platform you sign up for. And for $50 a month, you can get a spaghetti western-style dub to shout out, just like one of these. Shout him out, shout him out, full stop, full stop. Shout him out, shout him out, full stop, full stop. Once there was a man by the name of Sergio. Went and saw a Kurosawa film called Yoshimbo.

• 1:27:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Said his wife caught a thing, "I'll go and make my own." Blaguerized the whole damn thing, but somehow he struck gold.

• 1:28:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Kurosawa sued his ass from here to Timbuktu. Clint, the squint, walked off and said, "As financing fell through." Paul Wild Morricone wrote the tunes to make it fly. Then Sergio told Stanley Kubrick, "Back off, and yo's mine."

• 1:28:36Chris Winterbauer?

  The whole thing's ugly, it all went bad. For Lee Van Cleef, it's the best he ever had. Eli Wallach doubted Eastwood's dreams. But I'll enjoy the ecstasy of all the good they put on screen. Shout him out, shout him out, full stop, full stop. Shout him out. Oh, it's me, Clint Eastwood, here for my dub session, and I'm going off my script. Adrian Pan Correa, Alex Barrett, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Gallagher,

• 1:29:16Chris Winterbauer?

  the second G is silent, Chris Liel, David Friskalanti, Darren and Dale Conklin, Don Shybel, Emzodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Film It Yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, The Cast and Crew, Win a Trip to Brown Town, Half Grey Hound, I Have the Biggest Man Crush on Chris Winterbauer, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, John D. Wilchire, Jory Hillpiper, Jose Emiliano Salto del Giorgio, Karina Konaba, Kate Elrington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Olga Shager McCoy, Lena LJ, Lousy Susan, Lydia House, Mark Bertha, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate Ashley, Nate the Knife, Rosemary

• 1:29:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Southward, Rural Juror, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshida, Somon Chinani, Kovadiner, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost Family, where the O's sound like O's. I know what you're thinking, that don't sound quite like Clint. Well, don't forget, he's old as shit, that for sure was the squint. Okay, you caught me, I was dubbing Eastwood's lines. But that's the way we do it when we're on spaghetti western time. Shout him out, shout him out, full stop, full stop. Shout him out, shout him out, full stop, full stop.

• 1:30:36Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie, what do we have next week for the fine folks listening at home?

• 1:30:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Rollin', rollin', rollin', keep them doggies rollin'. We have not Rawhide, but we have one of my favorite movies, directed by, as we have learned, a complicated man, starring two complicated men. We have Jake and Elwood, The Blues Brothers.

• 1:30:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Can't wait. A long-requested title that we've put off until now.

• 1:31:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Very excited.

• 1:31:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Can only do so much John Landis a year.

• 1:31:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:05Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you guys in a week for Blues Brothers. We hope you're having a great summer.

• 1:31:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.