The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Three years ago, Clint Eastwood--an unshaven, slit-eyed refugee from television's Rawhide--was glad to get an invitation from Italian Director Sergio Leone to star in a hokey little quickie to be shot in Spain. It was called A Fistful of Dollars, and the title proved prophetic: the picture was a smash. Leone and Eastwood collaborated again on For a Few Dollars More. Now they are back with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly--a title that might serve as the film's own capsule review.

The good lies in Leone's camera work--expertly combining color and composition, with sharp attention to the details of shape and texture that are available when shooting on location rather than on studio sets. Bad is the word for the wooden acting, and Leone's addiction to the cramped values and stretched probabilities of the comic strip. And ugly is his insatiable appetite for beatings, disembowelings and mutilations, complete with closeups of mashed-in faces and death-rattle sound effects.

For his third western, Leone went out and hired his first big-time actor, Eli Wallach. He plays Tuco, a Mexican gunman with so many prices on his head that he cashes them in by traveling from town to town with his partner Joe (Eastwood), who turns him in for the bounty money, then springs him at the last moment by shooting the rope with which Tuco is being hanged. When Joe's aim begins to deteriorate, so does the partnership, but the two stick together long enough to set out in pursuit of $200,000 worth of stolen gold hidden in a desert cemetery. Also after the money is a thin-lipped sadist named Setenza (Lee Van Cleef).

After liters of fake blood have oozed. dripped, spilled and spouted over the landscape--all three arrive at the cache at the same time. Who gets it? Director Leone doesn't seem to care very much, and after 161 minutes of mayhem, audiences aren't likely to either.

The real man in the money these days, however, is Clinton Eastwood Jr., son of a California business executive, who went into television after an unsuccessful try at breaking into movies. Although his acting--so far--has been consistently awful, his European box-office success with the Dollar films jumped his price from $15,000 for Fistful to $250,000 for Ugly. He is riding even taller in the saddle now, as Hollywood studios seem to have decided that he is just right to play the kind of strong, silent, outdoor roles that once went to Gary Cooper. His next epic is MGM's Where Eagles Dare, in which he co-stars with Richard Burton and plays an officer of the U.S. Rangers (unshaven and slit-eyed, of course) fighting Nazis in the Alps. That film will make him $500,000 or so. After that, he will take home $600,000 from Alan Jay Lerner's western musical, Paint Your Wagon.

"The critics are mixed, but the public has gone for me," says Clint, adding prudently: "I will play almost anything except Henry V and that sort of stuff."

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