233. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966)

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef

Director: Sergio Leone

Running Time: 161 mins

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is an Italian film about three men who hear of a fortune of gold hidden in a graveyard, and they all do everything they can to outdo their competitors to take the money for themselves.

This is probably one of the ultimate spaghetti westerns, and it was definitely a fascinating story, with great twists and turns throughout, finishing with a tense race to capture the gold, and a subsequent Mexican standoff that was really exciting.

The one criticism I would give of this film is that it was WAY TOO LONG. There were some elongated scenes of Tuco and Blondie walking through the desert, or some people having a very slow conversation. Annoyingly for me, I realised that I only have the extended edition at home, so I ended up watching it for a whole 177 minutes, which did become extremely boring for me.

However, the film was still intriguing, and it had a clever plot line, especially the way that Tuco and Blondie were keeping each other alive until they got to the end, even though they were great adversaries, so overall, I’ll give this a 7.9, but it could have been better if it were a little bit shorter.