The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

I needed Italians to make me a fan of the American west.

Until college, I'd really never watched an Italian western. I saw The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly for the first time in my film genres course when I was doing my undergrad at Ball State. My prof articulated how the Italians interpreted the American west — more cynical, more violent, more style.

When I was growing up, my dad and granddad often watched westerns on television, but usually these were John Wayne's pictures or Clint Eastwood's American work — rarely an Italian western. I always thought John Wayne films were boring and corny, and Clint Eastwood's American work left me wanting something — I'm not sure what.

Dad called the Italian efforts "spaghetti westerns," which I found out later was a common term for the Italians' attempts to emulate this distinctly American genre. Dad generally never liked "dubbers" (foreign films dubbed in English) and to this day he doesn't really like these "spaghetti westerns."

That didn't stop me from going out one year and buying Dad a copy of this film on glorious VHS, replete with sterling 4:3 full-screen aspect ratio and muddy, warbling 2.0 stereo sound. I'm not sure he ever watched that tape. I never bought him a copy on DVD.

This gets at the question of owning a copy of a film on disc (or any other format). Dad is 63 years old, and he's as healthy as 63 gets in Indiana. I hope he has plenty of time left, but realistically, how many more times will a 63 year old man watch a 3-hour western that's partially dubbed?

For that matter, how many more times will I watch this? Assuming I don't skip around my DVD collection and watch all of them straight through, I might not get back to this one until 2014 sometime. By then, we'll be looking at a new media format for home video. For ten years, I built this library of DVDs that soon will be obsolete. So much for the idea of a library, you know? I don't really like thinking about that.

My wife spent a summer working in Santa Fe a few years before we got married. Around that same time, I picked up The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly on DVD, and noticed the special features explored the Civil War-era west, much of which took place in New Mexico. Although she and I were separated by hundreds of miles, watching this film and the enclosed special features made me feel closer to her in a way.

My dad simply prefers other westerns — The Outlaw Josey Wales is his favorite — and many of my friends prefer other Leone films — Once Upon a Time in the West, For A Few Dollars More, The Colossus of Rhodes (kidding) — but The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is my favorite. This was the one that opened the door and instilled in me an appreciation of the American western, whether filmed here, in English, or otherwise.

Although I don't often agree with people about The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the point is not necessarily which film we prefer, but that despite our differences, we appreciate the American western and the idea of the west. That's just one example of all the connections we can have through film, and the sort of thing that made me want to own all these DVDs in the first place.