Review: Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on Kino Lorber 4K

It seems inconceivable now that spaghetti westerns, specifically those served up by Sergio Leone, were once considered to be somehow less faithful to the western tradition than Hollywood’s crippled efforts of the same time period (look no further than Paint Your Wagon, the musical that Clint Eastwood made a few years down the road). The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, shorn of nearly 20 minutes for its original American release, is surely one of the most compelling validations of the western genre’s most elemental touchstones: the quiet stoicism of men who were islands unto themselves, the necessity of according respect to that unforgiving bitch that is the Land, and the malleable but unquestionably unbreakable divisions between good and evil.

The Man with No Name (Eastwood) might have a latently (postmodern) unscrupulous streak in his race against Lee Van Cleef’s “bad” Angel Eyes and Eli Wallach’s “ugly” Tuco to find $200,000 worth of buried gold, but the scene where Eastwood’s character covers a dying Civil War soldier with his trench coat confirms that there’s really nowhere near as much room for debating his moral alignment as there was even in the later work of John Ford. Perhaps audiences viewing the film during its original release were looking for that moral clarity that characterizes “respectable” westerns and were thrown off by Leone’s unbridled cinematic flamboyance. The director’s uniquely impassioned and architectural Italian sensibilities turned the American Southwest—or, rather, whatever portion of Spain his producers decided would suffice as a substitute for the real deal—into a dreamlike terrain of bombed-out ghost towns that still invariably host cathartic shoot-outs, amphitheater-shaped graveyards that seem nearly a mile in diameter, and wide vistas that alternate with extreme close-ups without nary a medium-shot-as-buffer in sight.

And, of course, those alternately lush or obtuse snatches of Ennio Morricone music that you’re never quite sure are merely musical accompaniment and not possibly emanating from the action on the screen—as when a Confederate P.O.W. band plays accompaniment to a prolonged beating or when desert birds seem to be whistling along to the signature fourth-inversion riff. He sometimes sacrifices lucidity for effect (as when Wallach’s motormouth inexplicably goes all tacitly Van Cleef for one compelling scene as he “shops” for a new gun), but Leone’s cinema, now fully embraced by cinephiles and fanboys alike, is practically a genre unto itself. The filmmaker’s synchronicity with Eastwood’s protagonist—and, thereby, the cowboy mythos in toto—as a rogue, conflicted iconoclast casts him in the same rarified echelon of directors who, like John Ford and John Huston, clearly attempted to live out their own legends.

Image/Sound

Though this disc doesn’t allow for HDR optimization or provide added information for HDR10 or Dolby Vision, the transfer is a vast improvement over prior home-video releases, including Kino’s own 2017 Blu-ray. That release overcorrected for the aggressively “yellow” color timing on MGM’s 2008 disc, leaving the blue tinting intact and yielding a cooler image. This transfer splits the difference and as such should satisfy purists. Detail is improved, especially in close-ups that reveal the dirt and sweat clinging to the actors’ severely chapped, sunburned skin. Grain is thick but evenly distributed, while darker scenes show off deep black levels. Included on the disc are the same DTS-HD MA 5.1 and DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono tracks that were issued with the 2017 disc. True to the film’s original mixing, both tracks are punchy and front-loaded, with the sound effects and dubbed dialogue sounding explosive throughout and never lost to distortion. The 5.1 remix mostly benefits the distribution of Ennio Morricone’s legendary score across the channels, but the 2.0 mono is ultimately more natural-sounding.

Extras

The only new feature spread out across this set is a commentary track by film historian Tim Lucas, included on the UHD disc, for the original U.S. theatrical cut of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The accompanying Blu-ray, which also includes the film’s extended cut, contains the majority of the features from Kino’s 2017 release, from making-of documentaries to a two-part featurette on Morricone’s music. For such a landmark film in the history of the spaghetti western and the western writ large, these featurettes are frustratingly slight, and fans of the extended cut will no doubt be disappointed by the absence of critic Richard Schickel’s commentary track. Nonetheless, Lucas’s informative, revealing, and engaging commentary track is a great substitute, and while the extended cut isn’t presented in 4K, the deleted scenes used to assemble it are on display here with the same color grading as the new transfer (which makes the decision not to include the extended cut in 4K all the stranger). There are also image galleries, as well as a brief video on the reconstruction of the film’s extended cut.

Overall

Sergio Leone truly came into his own with the capper to his Man with No Name trilogy, and it now looks better than ever home video, though completionists, if not purists, may object to the extended cut of the film not getting the 4K treatment.