by Willa Ross
This post tackles the most important of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’s ongoing problems, the inferiority of the easily-available “Extended Cut” to the more evasive “International Cut” — only the latter of which was prepared and approved by director Sergio Leone himself. The Extended Cut runs about 16 minutes longer than the International Cut, and since its debut in 2003, it has been the only English-language version available on physical releases until 2017, is still the only one screened theatrically outside of special presentations of old prints, and remains the only version available to stream. Because I believe it creates far more flaws than it removes, the Extended Cut’s dominance in the market has made it difficult to give unreserved recommendations for one of my very favourite films.
Regardless of the Extended Cut's exclusion from the new release, which only features the International Cut, the distinctions between these cuts will still be relevant. The Extended Cut has been the primary means of viewing The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, be it at home or in theaters, since 2004, meaning that a generation’s worth of discoverers were first acquainted with the Extended Cut. So while the Extended Cut was not approved by Leone himself (it was, after all, created decades after his death), it’s become a significant part of the film’s history, and deserves some critical consideration. What's more, for some who buy the film on Kino’s upcoming UHD Blu-ray and see the International Cut for the first time, the absence of certain scenes may be surprising, even jarring. Hopefully this post offers those people an understandable explanation of why the International Cut is not only more historically important, but often considered the better version.
Addressing the effect of scenes’ absence or presence upon the film is my primary focus here, but first I’ll address the most notorious issue with the Extended Cut: the dubbing on the added scenes. The goal of the Extended Cut was to recreate, as closely as possible, the cut shown at the film’s premiere screening in Rome on December 15, 1966, after which Leone continued post-production on the Italian cut for another eight days. However, recreating the Rome premiere cut with only the original materials would mean including numerous scenes that had no English-language audio. It was common in Italian film productions at the time to not record any sound on set, instead doing so in a studio during post-production. This meant that any scenes that were filmed but not used in the International Cut did not receive an English-language recording back in the 60s.
Switching to Italian audio for the Extended Cut’s added scenes would be a distracting change, and using only Italian dialogue for the entire film would be a major blow to the Extended Cut’s marketability given the popularity of the three lead performances and the iconic English language dialogue. The added scenes were, therefore, redubbed, with Clint Eastwood (then in his 70s) and Eli Wallach (in his 80s) brought in for their scenes, and a vocal imitator hired for the scenes of the then-deceased Lee Van Cleef. The dubbing of these scenes is terribly distracting — Wallach and Eastwood sound very little like they did almost four decades earlier, and Lee Van Cleef’s imitator sounds just like that: an imitator. What's more, the quality of the three leads' lip sync tends to be far below the rest of the film.
The dubbing alone is enough to bring the Extended Cut’s artistic value into serious question, but even when that issue is ignored each and every one of the added scenes is deleterious to the film’s quality. What follows is my appraisal of all of the major added scenes, with all their merits and problems. I’ll ignore small additions or subtractions of a few seconds here and there — while I generally prefer the International Cut’s versions of these scenes, their effect on the film is smaller and there’s less to discuss.
Il Grotto
The Extended Cut’s first added scene is also its most notorious, the one that Leone himself excised after the Rome Premiere: “Il Grotto”. Tuco enters the hideout of three of his former partners in crime, seeking their help in vengeance against Blondie. He plucks a chicken as he announces his offer to an empty room, which prompts the three outlaws to reveal themselves and accept.
On the level of plot, the scene’s sole function is to illustrate how Tuco came into league with the outlaws who attempt (disastrously) to ambush Blondie while he cleans his pistol at an inn. Tuco’s dialogue emphasizes wealth and poverty as he persuades his comrades with the promise of $1,000 each: “If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working,” “You’ve gotta be pretty poor to eat potatoes,” and the risible bluff “I’m rich, but I’m lonely.”
Leone was right to cut this scene for the film’s wide releases. Tuco’s lack of means and down-on-his-luck position in life is clear from the first time we see him, crashing through a window with drumstick in hand. Without the scene, it only requires simple inference on the audience’s part to deduce that he’s recruited Blondie’s would-be killers off-screen. It’s also perhaps the least visually impressive scene in the film; outside of a lovely wide shot of Tuco entering the space, the blocking of the actors and the visual geometry of the scene are unusually flat, with little dynamism in its montage to enliven a straightforward plot point.
Il Grotto is an excellent example of why plotting isn’t everything when considering narrative structure. The scene that precedes it, where Tuco intimidates and robs the owner of a gun shop, could theoretically also be removed without creating plotholes. As soon as we see that Tuco has survived being stranded in the desert by finding a town with food and drink, we could conceivably cut straight to the attempted ambush at the inn. But the robbery scene is dynamic, original, entertaining, and besides that it at last establishes Tuco as a force to be reckoned with and a serious threat to Blondie after he mostly bumbles through the film’s first half hour. We understand Tuco differently at the end of the gun shop robbery, but the same cannot be said of Il Grotto.
The Fort
A short time later, the Extended Cut’s worst added scene is followed up by its best, and the one with the most complex effect on the film. While on his search for Bill Carson, Angel Eyes follows a tip from Carson’s girlfriend Maria to track down the 3rd Cavalry, one of the units led by General Sibley. Angel Eyes finds a makeshift army hospital housing Sibley’s men among a ruined fort. The hospital is full of wounded soldiers, but Angel Eyes finds a healthy man and asks him where Bill Carson might be. After the man scolds him for asking traumatized soldiers for help in his own pursuits, Angel Eyes offers him a drink. In turn the man reveals that the 3rd has already left to cross a desert, and that in the unlikely event any are still alive, they’re probably imprisoned at the Betterville POW camp. With that info, The Bad takes his leave.
On a purely visual level, the scene offers many grace notes. The set is wonderfully detailed, large, and convincing. After Angel Eyes enters, a 180-degree dolly fully reveals the exterior set before a series of wide shots that beautifully capture the grim spectacle, making evocative use of the wayward diagonals and clutter of the spaces.
The 180-degree dolly is oft-praised by admirers of the Extended Cut, and its circle around the brim of Lee Van Cleef’s hat has its conceptual appeal, but the following wide shots, with their gentle pans and tilts, are far more effective in setting the mood. Likewise, the exchange between Angel Eyes and the soldier is smartly-staged, especially memorable for the soldier messily tossing cobs of corn into a cauldron and letting the booze spill all over his face as he drinks it; the nihilism of his circumstance is palpable in these bits of business.
The scene also establishes some geographic proximity between Angel Eyes and the Blondie-Tuco chase that it interrupts. At the beginning of the attempted ambush sequence, the innkeeper watches retreating Confederate troops, many of whom are wounded, and points out Sibley himself, so seeing Angel Eyes connecting with one of the retreating units elevates the tantalizing prospect that he could meet up with Blondie and Tuco at any time — especially given that they find Carson himself in the desert that was mentioned to Angel Eyes. Besides the problematic dubbing, all these merits are more than enough for the scene to work well in a vacuum.
But the chief defense for including this scene is that it doesn’t only work on its own terms, it fills in a plothole. When this scene is taken out, Angel Eyes doesn’t appear at any time between leaving Maria and showing up when Blondie and Tuco arrive at Betterville — in the International Cut, it’s an almost 50-minute gap! If we disregard the army hospital scene, then why, exactly, did Angel Eyes go to a Union-controlled POW camp and take on a command post, if the last piece of information he received was to search for Union soldiers?
There is an answer, but it does require a hefty bit of inference. Maria tells Angel Eyes that Carson left with one of Sibley’s units, and shortly after we see Sibley and his men retreating in some apparent disarray. If Angel Eyes was unable to find Carson easily among this retreat, it makes some sense that he would take up shop in the nearest Union POW camp, where he might get lucky enough for Bill Carson to wind up — or, at worst, if the hunt for Carson winds up a wild goose chase, he can profit off a smuggling racket, which he does. That may seem like quite a lucky break, but bear in mind that both this explanation and the presence of the Extended Cut’s army hospital scene require him to get extremely lucky in Tuco showing up at the camp under the name “Bill Carson”. Regardless of how the scene is built up, it’s the biggest coincidence in the movie.
Regardless, as I said, the International Cut demands a lot of inferences from the audience, but it does follow a plausible chain of logic, and besides, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is filled with such indirect exposition regardless of which cut you watch. But the film doesn’t merely survive the scene’s removal, it actively benefits from it. If Angel Eyes is absent for 50 minutes before showing up at Betterville, then the reveal of him in an officer’s uniform truly comes as a shock — a most unwelcome one, given how our two heroes are already in a hell of a lot of trouble. His appearance in an officer’s position cements his unpredictability and hypercompetence, and is the sort of moment that helps the film achieve mythic heights. In the Extended Cut, the only surprise is that he’s scammed his way into an officer’s rank.
There’s an even more important reason to remove the scene. One of the most important conceits of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is that while its three lead characters are entirely focused on their own selfish pursuit of the gold, there are far bigger, more important things happening around them — namely the Civil War. The war interferes more and more often as the film progresses, with increasing emphasis on its calamitous results for the world beyond the trio and their treasure hunt. The Civil War’s prominence is carefully increased throughout the film, from the ghost towns of the early scenes to the gangrenous leg of the POW camp’s chief officer to the enormous waste of the battle at the bridge. Over time such scenes are presented less as nuisances or obstacles and more as their own tragedies. This arc mirrors Blondie’s own moral transformation, and is why the film ends with him sparing Tuco’s life and leaving him with half the money.
It’s all a careful balancing act, an attempt to bring the horror of the Civil War to the audience’s attention as gradually as it comes to Blondie’s, and the hospital scene with Angel Eyes undoes it all. The grand melancholy of the set and the situation and the scene’s evocation of waste and misery are too successful, as they signpost this theme’s culmination before its time has come.
All that, and it stops the momentum and excitement of the Tuco-Blondie chase absolutely dead in its tracks. It’s hard to overstate how much the cut from a closeup of an empty, swinging noose to an extreme wide of Tuco riding through the wilderness in pursuit of Blondie — along with the almost ritualistic percussion that plays to begin a rousing performance of the main theme — creates a sense of escalation and excitement. The Army Hospital certainly has its benefits, and more than any other added scene I can understand arguments for its inclusion, but ultimately I prize the film’s gradual unfurling of its anti-war sentiment too highly to think it’s better off with this moment.
Enjoy a Sun Bath
This scene extends Tuco’s desert torture of Blondie with an especially cruel piece of mockery. After Blondie collapses, instead of rolling down a hill straightaway, he instead looks up to see Tuco’s boot right in front of him. After hesitating, he grabs the boot, only to find that Tuco’s foot isn’t in it — it’s in a bucket full of water a few feet away, where Tuco is washing his foot as he eats and tells Blondie to “enjoy a sun bath.” Blondie crawls over to the bucket for a drink, only for Tuco to overturn it, pouring the water into the sand. Blondie crawls away and Tuco packs up to go end his rivalry with Blondie once and for all.
It all does little more than further exhibit Tuco’s sadism and offer a sort of “last straw” for Blondie before he crawls away in desperation, but its contributions are mighty slim. It certainly doesn’t reach the operatic despair of the preceding montage and the soaring Morricone music that accompanied it, making this new scene less emotionally persuasive as Blondie’s breaking point. And speaking of music, the beginning of the scene reuses the beginning of the music from that desert montage; the film has a few reused musical pieces, but restarting the previous musical cue immediately after it ends is a step too far. (In the Italian Cut, which also features this scene, the moment simply has a single sustained bass note over it; hardly brilliant scoring but a little less distracting than just looping back to the start of the piece that just ended.)
Adding to the scene’s sonic issues, the sound design for the moment is inappropriately barren, given that we can clearly see from the nearby bushes and Tuco’s umbrella that it’s very windy. The Italian Cut appropriately includes wind sounds to match, but in the Extended Cut, when the scene cuts to Blondie rolling down the hill, the wind sounds suddenly manifest out of nowhere, in the space of a frame, unintentionally and implausibly implying that a lot of time has passed.
Finally, the sequence, while nicely staged and cut (especially the depth of the shot where the bucket sits in front of Blondie), interrupts the incredible formal evocations of dizziness and desolation that precede and follow it, filled with both extreme wides that place Tuco and Blondie as dots in the desert, or compositions that push extreme depth, or whirling pans and shaky handheld camera movements, before climaxing with the sun-flared shot of Blondie rolling down a hill and Tuco approaching to finish him off. In the International Cut, it’s the arrival of Bill Carson and his carriage that formally stabilizes the film’s visuals, and with it, Blondie’s odds of survival. All that is undone by the inclusion of the “sun bath” scene.
Confederate Checkpoint
The least substantial added scene shows Tuco, posing as a soldier, arriving at a Confederate checkpoint and asking where they are, only to learn that they aren’t far from the San Antonio monastery where his brother cares for wounded soldiers. Tuco thanks the Sergeant for his help and drives off.
The scene is so needless that I’m surprised it was included in any cut of the film. Its only conceivable function is to establish that Tuco wants to go to this specific monastery, but there’s no reason to think he has a special attachment to the place. Without the scene, Tuco just shows up at the monastery and we can reasonably conclude that he already knew that it was nearby. The wides offer some interesting nighttime lighting from Tonino Delli Colli, and the Sergeant makes a mildly amusing crack about needing to become Yankee prisoners to get good treatment (which proves darkly ironic when they reach Betterville), but otherwise the scene is entirely dispensable.
Those Men Aren’t Worried Anymore
After Blondie and Tuco leave the mission and Blondie kindly offers Tuco a cigar, Tuco describes the next few steps of their journey to the cemetery, withholding the full details of the route. Blondie sees some dead soldiers along the road and says “Since I’m alive and I’ve noticed we’ll be crossing Yankee and Confederate lines a few times, I thought you might tell me where we’re going.” Tuco refuses.
This moment serves as a reminder that Tuco and Blondie are still suspicious rivals for the 200,000 in gold, and is the first overt acknowledgment of Blondie’s sympathy for the war’s combatants. But it’s too quick to undercut their first moment of bonding together, a moment that’s critical to preserving their relationship’s complexity and ambiguity throughout the rest of the film — right up until the climactic duel. And it’s far too hasty in spelling out Blondie’s anti-war sentiment, rather than allowing his conscience to develop more subtly over time. The scene, in short, doesn’t introduce anything new or useful on a character or plot level, only offering a morsel of conflict for interest.
Another issue in this Extended Cut scene is the music. In the Italian Cut, the scene is scored with a unique, subdued performance of Morricone’s “Carriage of the Spirits” theme, but at the time that the Extended Cut was assembled, the original, clean masters of Morricone’s full recordings had not yet been discovered, and so a far more operatic recording was used instead, complete with soaring vocals. It’s far too much for a scene that offers very little, and the music is cut off mid-scene by a clumsy edit.
The Perfect Number
After Angel Eyes takes Blondie as a “partner” in seeking the $200,000, the two are seemingly asleep by the river when Blondie shoots someone spying on them in the bushes. Blondie tells Angel Eyes to bring the rest of his henchman out, and they emerge. Blondie counts the goons and Angel Eyes together, and comments “Six. The perfect number.” When Angel Eyes replies “Isn’t three the perfect number?” Blondie explains: “I’ve got six bullets in my gun.”
Like Il Grotto, the moment introduces henchmen arrayed against Blondie. It also reinforces this new duo’s distrust of each other while offering up another fun counter-ambush. That said, beyond the momentary entertainment of the shooting, the scene is unnecessary — it doesn’t actually explain how Angel Eyes gathered his men (in either cut one has to infer they’re the same ones who smuggled goods in and out of Betterville for him), and it doesn’t tell us anything about the duo’s animosity that we didn’t already know beyond building up suspense for their inevitable falling out. The blitheness of the “six bullets” quip has its appeal, but the exchange feels contrived to arrive at that quip — the scene ought to have trusted the audience to get why Blondie felt that six was the perfect number.
It also makes it far more implausible when Blondie is allowed to go off on his own later on, with Angel Eyes only sending one man to follow him. Blondie has straight-up killed one of them in this scene, and followed it up with a threat; are we supposed to believe they wouldn’t have multiple goons watching him at every moment after that?
All of Us Reek of Alcohol
As the captain walks Blondie and Tuco through the hillside trenches, he elaborates on his earlier statement that alcohol is “the most potent weapon in war”, saying that it’s easier to send drunk men to be slaughtered, and that the soldiers on both sides of the river “reek of alcohol”. He then asks for his recruits’ names, but Tuco and Blondie only say “uhhhhh” before the captain observes that “names don’t matter”.
The scene puts a finer point on the ramshackle, alcohol-drenched despair of the bridge standoff — too fine a point, if you ask me, as it’s not hard to guess why the captain considers booze an asset. What’s more, Blondie and Tuco’s apparent loss for words when asked for their names seems out of character, especially for Blondie, who just finished deadpanning “Illinois” when asked where they were from. Surely he’d have no trouble inventing a name (perhaps “Joe” or “Manco”)? The scene at least offers a nice closeup of the captain with the bridge visible in the distant background — except that the riverbed is very obviously completely dry, visually negating the strategic importance of the bridge! Oops. They must’ve caught a tough break on that day of filming. I feel for them.
Once more the score is subject to unfortunate edits. Again, the clean master for the unique cue used in the Italian cut was unavailable; there, the scene begins the “Marcia” theme a moment before it transitions into the footage that’s present in all cuts. For the Extended Cut, a version of the “Marcia” theme is similarly started shortly before this added scene ends, but its melody is cut off and the cue is restarted when the next scene begins. There’s a reason why the International Cut doesn’t start this scene by cutting in while the music is already halfway through playing — Leone was meticulous about ensuring that any version he approved had a smooth, coherent use of music. (The 2009 Mondo blu-ray, while generally approximate to the Italian Cut, suffers from even worse music edits than the Extended Cut.)
Conclusion
That covers all the major additions to the Extended Cut. My flat rejection of all of them might seem unreasonably harsh, but if you’re not accounting for the problems with the new dubbing that was done for them, I think it’s fairly clear that only one or two could be argued to earn their keep. With the dub, it’s clear to me that none do. While he may have been prompted to create the International Cut by pressure to shorten the film’s runtime, Leone took full responsibility for any defects of both of the cuts he approved, and regardless, the result was a shorter film that lost very little and, by my estimation, gained very much. The International Cut of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is one of the fleetest, most thrilling, most economical films ever made with such detail and epic scale. The Extended Cut reintroduces the chaff to the wheat.
Other posts in this series: