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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: All of My Thoughts

This is an extensive meta-commentary on Sergio Leone's seminal 1966 Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, taking the form of scene-by-scene bullet points commenting on the film. Much of it is character and narrative analysis, though there's also lighter commentary.

Tuco’s introduction

The opening scene sure is a microcosm of Sergio Leone’s directorial style. Slow, silent close-ups, wide shots, unclear exactly where the scene is going initially, these unnamed characters eventually converge on a saloon – and then instead of following them inside, Tuco comes crashing through the window and we freeze-frame. It’s very drawn out (I had a bit of an “Is the whole movie going to be like this” moment watching it for the first time), but the comic timing of Tuco and the freeze-frame is great; instantly we go from this super slow, dramatic buildup to this fun, humorous subversion that really sets a tone. All that buildup was actually for introducing this guy.
In the process, we learn that 1) Tuco is someone at least three different people want to kill, 2) he’s someone skilled and resourceful enough to manage to shoot them first and then make his escape through the window even after being caught unawares during a meal by three people working together, and 3) even in the process of doing that he brings his food with him – probably actually pretty revealing about his background of poverty, not wanting to waste food when he has it. We’ll of course see him introduced further a little later, but this really says a lot for only actually containing about ten silent seconds of him, and also benefits from being funny.
It’s kind of amusing how bloodless most gun deaths are in this movie, considering it doesn’t shy away from blood in other parts. The surviving bounty hunter does have some blood on his hand as he tries to shoot after Tuco, probably to convey that he’s injured despite still being alive, but the others are just cleanly lying there with no signs of damage. Maybe it’s paying homage to what other Westerns looked like – the actual cowboy gunslinging specifically is very idealized, sanitized and almost cartoonish, compared to a lot of the other violence in the film. I remember being a kid and hearing about the trope of people in old Westerns getting shot and dramatically going flying as a result, despite that normal bullets are far too small for their momentum to send a person flying anywhere – you don’t actually see too much of that in modern movies, where everything tends to look much more realistic, but this movie definitely has a lot of very dramatic flailing and spinning around when people get shot in a way that looks pretty distinctly silly and cartoony today. Ultimately it meshes pretty well with the overall tone of the film, though; this movie is gritty in many respects, but it does not aspire to realism.

Angel Eyes’ introduction

The way Angel Eyes just silently waltzes into Stevens’ home and helps himself to some of his food while maintaining eye contact the whole time is so weird and uncomfortable, it’s delightful. What an entrance.
Stevens has a limp. People who have fought in the war tend to be visibly scarred by it in this movie – truly something that just permeates every background detail, that you don’t really think about on a first viewing when you think the Civil War is just a setting backdrop.
There is zero dialogue in this film until more than ten and a half minutes in (though the first three minutes of that are the opening credits, so it’s seven and a half minutes of actual movie with no dialogue). I think this is a very fun choice which contributes to the viewer really feeling how unbearable the silence is for Stevens by the time he starts asking Angel Eyes if Baker sent him - half of that silence wasn’t even technically part of this scene, but it really intensifies it by making the silence here feel even longer than it is.
When Stevens says, “I know nothing at all about that case of coins!”, Angel Eyes looks up with interest from where he’d been casually looking at his food. Evidently he had had no idea there was any case of coins involved, only that he was meant to collect a name, but once Stevens mentions it, his interest is piqued.
Angel Eyes casually offers, “Well, Jackson was here, or Baker’s got it all wrong,” while cutting off and eating a piece of bread with a large knife, sort of implicitly daring Stevens to try to say Baker’s got it all wrong and see what happens. When he’s got Tuco captured later, Angel Eyes does a similar thing of staying friendly-threatening as he casually asks questions, but once Tuco actually refuses to talk of his own accord, out come the claws. This time, though, Stevens does not take the bait, probably sensing that that would lead nowhere good for him.
He says, “Maybe Baker would like to know just what you and Jackson had to say about the cash box” – this isn’t the info he came for, but maybe Baker would be interested. Really it’s Angel Eyes himself who is intrigued – he’ll go on to tell Baker that that’s my bit. But he doesn’t really bother pushing Stevens for it, instead moving on to admitting he’s being paid for the name specifically. Probably he figures once he gets the name, he’ll have all the info he needs to track him down anyway by his usual means (which it turns out he does).
The casual, grinning confidence of Angel Eyes’ assertion that if Jackson weren’t going by an alias he would’ve found him already, “That’s why they pay me,” really makes you believe it, doesn’t it. It’s exposition about what Angel Eyes does, but is also executed to work as a nice character-establishing moment about his competence.
Christopher Frayling’s otherwise fun and informative commentary on the film talked about how Angel Eyes’ missing fingertip was provided by a hand double in the final truel – but you can see in this scene that Lee van Cleef’s own right hand is definitely missing that fingertip (though I did not notice it at all until I thought to specifically look for it). Very curious where the notion of a hand double came from – he even named a specific guy.
Angel Eyes casually announces that when he’s paid, he always sees the job through, even though that’s just going to make Stevens desperate – Angel Eyes knows he can shoot first, no big deal.
He shoots Stevens through the table and the food, even. How does he aim.
Angel Eyes grabs his gun and turns around to shoot Stevens’ son before he actually comes into view (specifically, we see him start to react to something about ten frames before we can first see the tip of the son’s rifle). Presumably, in-universe, he heard him coming, but we don’t hear him coming at all over the blaring background chord, so it feels like Angel Eyes just knows he’s coming by some sixth sense. Very effective at making him seem even more threatening, especially since there’s also generally a conscious decision in this movie to act as if the characters can’t see anything that’s out of frame for the viewer – Blondie and Tuco get caught out by that rule a couple of times in amusing ways, but Angel Eyes actively defies the auditory equivalent.
(It’s neat how the family photo, used for Angel Eyes obliquely threatening Stevens’ family, also serves as foreshadowing for the fact he also has this second, older son we hadn’t seen yet at that point.)
The fact Angel Eyes sneaks into Baker’s bedroom when he’s sleeping to report back is so extra. A normal person would just arrange to meet him the next morning, but no, Angel Eyes does the creepy stalker thing. Probably makes the murdering him in his bed bit a little easier, though, which also suggests he was definitely intending on that bit the whole time and didn’t just “almost forget”.
Baker’s brow furrows and his eyes shift uncomfortably when Angel Eyes mentions the cash box; clearly he was hoping Angel Eyes would never find out about that bit (very reasonably, given what happens next).
All in all, Angel Eyes’ introduction is super striking. The casual veneer and smug grins painted over a deeply tense sense of threat; the absolute deadly confidence; the fact he shoots Stevens’ son too so easily and presciently, almost as a footnote to it all; casually walking out with the money that Stevens offered him for sparing his life; and then, on the ostensible basis that when he’s paid he always sees the job through, casually killing Baker too.
Although he explains the murder of Baker as simply seeing the job through, though, Stevens didn’t actually ask him to kill Baker; all he ever suggested he wanted was to be left alone, and all he said about the money was that it’s a thousand dollars, after asking what Angel Eyes was being paid for murdering him. I expect Angel Eyes simply chooses to take it as payment for the ‘job’ of killing Baker for motivated reasons; that way, he can act as if the money is still 'payment’ for him even though he rejected Stevens’ attempt to bribe him, and it’s much easier to go after the cash box himself if Baker’s out of the picture, after all.
This creates an interesting ironic sense that while Angel Eyes effectively presents his own introduction as being all about his unassailable professional principles about always performing the job he’s been paid for, and I took him at his word on my first viewing, he’s not really all about those principles at all – and as the movie goes on, indeed, he’s simply pursuing the cash box for his own reasons rather than because anyone’s paying him for it. His 'professional principles’ don’t come up again, because that’s not really what this intro was telling us at all.
Which isn’t to say he doesn’t always see a job through after being paid (I can definitely believe that; if he has a reputation for getting the job done no matter what, that makes people more likely to pay him in the future, and he sure has no qualms about completing any job), just that that’s not at all the main thing driving his character, as you might initially assume. The thing his intro is really telling us about him is that he’s ruthless, terrifying, extremely competent, very interested in this cash box, and has absolutely no trouble casually murdering whoever might be standing in the way of accomplishing what he wants. And I think it’s very effective at showing that.

Blondie’s introduction

This scene opens with Tuco on a galloping horse in a way that naturally invites the viewer to assume this is following directly from when he flees from the saloon in his intro, and that’s what I assumed on my first viewing – but nah, not only does he not have the food and drink, he’s wearing different clothing. Given the surviving bounty hunter from the intro will be appearing later and indicating that was eight months ago, and this is decidedly the most obvious place for the bulk of the timeskip to be happening, probably this is actually several months later. This film is not at all big on time indicators – for the most part, we have no idea how much time is passing, everything feels like it’s happening pretty much in sequence, and we can only vaguely infer that there must be longer gaps between particular events.
The straight-up photograph on Tuco’s wanted poster is pretty hilarious. There’s even a scene later with a little gag about the long exposure times for photographs at the time. Probably this is just a funny prop for two scenes to make it very obvious to the viewer that it is absolutely him on the wanted poster even as he adamantly denies it, but it’s also very funny to imagine Tuco patiently posing for his own wanted poster.
Framing through it, all three of the bounty hunters surrounding Tuco when Blondie comes along are in fact going for their guns when Blondie shoots them, which makes sense – for all that Blondie is not much of a noble hero, he generally does not tend to shoot people until they’re at least starting to draw on him. (There’s one notable exception, which will come up in part two.)
I enjoy Tuco’s weird little nervous, disbelieving grin as he realizes this stranger just shot the bounty hunters but is sparing him. Tuco’s own worldview, as shaped by his background, is dominated by self-interest; it’s every man for himself, and it’s up to him to do whatever it takes, tell whatever lies, betray whoever he has to, to get ahead. And yet, there’s this endearing naïveté to him, where he’s not really suspicious of other people’s motives accordingly – he’s surprised Blondie would save him, but his brain doesn’t immediately go to this guy just wants to be the one to collect my bounty. We see this a lot throughout the film.
We cut (with great comic timing) from Blondie sticking a cigar in Tuco’s mouth to Tuco spitting out a cigar while tied up on his horse as Blondie takes him into town – an edit that suggests continuity, like only a short time has passed and it’s the same cigar that he just hadn’t had the chance to spit out yet (sort of dubious if you really think about it, since surely it would’ve taken a bit for Blondie to tie him up and get him onto his horse). This reinforces our initial assumptions about what’s happening, where Blondie would just have tied him up before riding straight into town, but given the con they turn out to be running, there must have actually been an offscreen conversation about it and the cigar is there as a bit of cheeky misdirection for the audience.
(It probably makes sense that when Blondie put the cigar in his mouth, he was actually about to propose they run this bounty scheme together – as the movie proceeds, we see that Blondie generally shares cigars in more of a friendly sort of way, after all.)
“I hope you end up in a graveyard!” yells Tuco. They sure do all end up in a graveyard! This is some very cheeky foreshadowing and I love it.
Tuco yelling ineffectual threats about how Blondie can still save himself by letting him go, while actually tied up and completely at his mercy, is just extremely Tuco.
Then he shifts tack very abruptly to saying he feels sick and needs water, only to then spit in Blondie’s face. Later he furiously calls the deputy a bastard just for walking out of a building, only to then immediately shift to saying he’s just an honest farmer who didn’t do anything wrong. Tuco often does this, shifting from one approach to the next in a way that makes it really obvious he’s bullshitting, but he keeps doing this, just throwing shit at the wall to see if anything sticks, even when this is counterproductive to the whole effort. He is presumably playing it up a bit here, but it’s still in its own way pretty representative of who he is and what he’s actually like. He’s so characterful.
“Who says so? You can’t even read!” says Tuco about whether it’s him on the wanted poster, which is some delightful nonsense hypocrisy/projection given we will later see that Tuco himself can only barely read. I love him. (And why would reading even have anything to do with it; he’s obviously looking at the plain actual photograph of him right there. Love Tuco’s absolute nonsense.)
Another absurd change of tactics: “Hey, everybody, look, look! He’s giving him the filthy money!” - as if he’s going to rally onlookers against the sheriff and Blondie somehow on the basis that money is exchanging hands, isn’t that suspicious.
Tuco calls Blondie Judas for accepting the money (referencing the thirty pieces of silver, of course), which will get a fun echo later.
“You’re the son of a thousand fathers, all bastards like you!” I love that Tuco has invented compounding recursive bastardry just for Blondie. Not only is he a bastard, all one thousand men his mother slept with were also bastards. Glorious. (You can see Blondie’s amused by this one; he actually smiles a little bit before throwing a match at him.)
I wonder if Blondie actively encouraged him to go quite this hard on the insults, to make them look less associated, or if he just did this. One would think it would be risky, on Tuco’s end, to be this over the top in literally spitting in the face of the guy who could just let him hang if he happened to change his mind – but then again, Tuco genuinely doesn’t expect Blondie to double-cross him.
Tuco’s crimes, as of this first hanging, are: murder; armed robbery of citizens, state banks and post offices; the theft of sacred objects; arson in a state prison; perjury; bigamy; deserting his wife and children; inciting prostitution; kidnapping; extortion; receiving stolen goods; selling stolen goods; passing counterfeit money; and, contrary to the laws of this state, the condemned is guilty of using marked cards and loaded dice! All this paints a picture of a pretty colorful backstory, but most of it is relatively petty; other than the murder (possibly of people like the bounty hunters we saw him dispose of in the opening), we can gather he’s been scrounging up money through anything from cheating at cards up to armed robbery and kidnapping, he lied under oath (checks out), he set a prison on fire (presumably to escape), he ran off from his wife and kids and then married someone else he presumably also ran off from, and then there’s “inciting prostitution” which I’m guessing means offering someone not previously engaged in sex work money for sex.
It obviously checks out that he’d do anything for money, and bigamy and deserting his wife and children rhyme with his off-hand mention at the monastery later that he’s had lots of wives here and there; in general, it tracks that he would make big commitments and then just break them. So all in all, these seem like probably a bunch of genuine crimes that he actually committed. (He also nods somewhat smugly at the marked cards and loaded dice bit.)
Blondie’s MO seems to be to first shoot the whip out of the hand of the guy who’s meant to be setting the horse off and then shoot the actual rope (and then random attendees’ hats, for good measure). Better hope that first shot doesn’t spook the horse.
It really is very reasonable of Tuco to want a bigger cut for being the one running the risks; you wouldn’t generally want to do a job with a significant chance of getting you killed without being very well compensated for that. Unfortunately, Blondie doing the cutting means he’s the one with all the power here – if he’s dissatisfied with his share, he can just pocket all the money and let Tuco die – which puts him at the advantage in the negotiation, and he knows it.
I enjoy how in the middle of “If we cut down my percentage, it’s liable to interfere with my aim,” Blondie offers Tuco a cigar, this casual friendly move in the middle of what is effectively a threat.
Tuco does a little understated, “Hmm,” of acknowledgement that makes it feel like this was genuinely unexpected. But then he just returns the threat: “But if you miss, you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco.” Which sets up his quest for revenge on Blondie after the double-cross, obviously, but is also fun to recall during the final scene: Tuco actively advised Blondie not to leave him alive if he was going to double-cross him.
Tuco why are you eating the cigar
Next time he’s in the noose, it’s for a whole new list of crimes that ends with, “For all these crimes, the accused has made a full, spontaneous confession.” Yeah, he probably just went off spewing confessions to a string of colorful invented offenses as Blondie brought him in, didn’t he, maybe hoping it would raise the bounty. (At the cinematic screening where I saw it for the first time, I missed the spontaneous confession thing due to no subtitles and spent half the movie experiencing some jarring mental dissonance over Tuco’s growing goofy likability versus the offhandedly having been convicted of multiple rapes near the start thing. But it’s actually pretty strongly telegraphed that the new crimes here are simply bullshit; a spontaneous confession to a variety of new things that were decidedly not on the earlier list, that he could not possibly have done in the implied presumably not very long timespan between the first and second hanging, mostly distinctly more dramatic crimes than the original set, all sounds strongly like a Tuco throwing shit at the wall thing.)
Tuco looks a lot more restless during the second hanging, where for the first one he was pretty calm – probably a little bit nervous about Blondie’s “liable to interfere with my aim” remark, even though they’d presumably come to an agreement to stick with the 50/50 split.
He notices a woman being scandalized, seems sort of put out for a second, but then growls at her to scare her more. What a Tuco.
Another minor character presumably disabled in the war: Angel Eyes’ incidentally legless informant. (Whom he calls Shorty, like the guy Blondie teams up with later, who is definitely a different guy because that guy has legs – sort of a funny aversion of the usual one Steve limit. Genuinely a bit puzzled by why they did that – is it like that in the Italian version or just the English dub?) I wonder if the bit where he moves around by holding a couple of bricks and using them to walk on is something inspired by a real person or people at the time.
Calling him a 'half-soldier’ is pretty rude, Angel Eyes.
Look, I’ll accept that we’re calling Blondie Blondie, sounds like that’s what you’d call him in Italy, but there’s really no excuse for “A golden-haired angel watches over him.” The man’s hair is brown. It’s not even a light brown. What are you talking about, Angel Eyes.
But to not get too distracted by that part of the line: Angel Eyes obviously recognizes the con they’re running. I think that’s probably because he knows of Blondie and that this is a thing he does (he’s presumably done it with others before), so when he notices Blondie’s around at a hanging, he’s like ah, yes, there’s him doing his thing, guess he’s running with Tuco now. My own feeling is Blondie and Angel Eyes basically only know of each other, though – no direct evidence they’re not more familiar or anything, but they don’t really act like they have a personal history, I think, compared to Tuco and Angel Eyes who obviously do.
After the threat about a pay cut being liable to interfere with his aim, I originally figured Blondie missing the rope (or rather, it seems to have grazed but not severed it) might have been deliberate, meant to scare Tuco a bit and make him think twice about proposing that again. But ultimately, on a closer look, I’m pretty sure he really did just miss, both because his expressions and body language feel more in line with that and because Tuco’s rant after they escape indicates that Blondie’s explanation to him was that anyone can miss a shot – if it was meant as a warning, probably he wouldn’t then go on to actively make it sound like he’d just happened to miss.
(That line also indicates it probably wasn’t that he did hit it dead-on but the rope was just sturdier than expected – if Blondie said anyone can miss a shot, that sounds like he at least believes it’s because he missed, and I don’t see any sensible reason he would lie about that here.)
That said, I think it’s fun to imagine that the reason for the miss was that that discussion really did interfere with his aim – that little bit of tension with Tuco led to him being a little careless this time, even though he didn’t mean to miss and thought he had it.
The thing that actually prompts Blondie to stop and leave Tuco is Tuco’s rant about how nobody misses when I’m at the end of the rope and When that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the devil bite your ass. For all that he explains it as being about how there’s no future in this with a guy who’ll never be worth more than $3000, there’s a specific point where he stops his horse and decides to ditch him, and it’s when Tuco’s complaining turns into guilting him about missing and the experience of being on the other end. Blondie will not be guilted and does not want or need this; just going to ditch him and wash his hands of him and find somebody else. I get the sense that Blondie doesn’t really want to think about that miss too hard, at this point, and Tuco won’t leave him alone about it, and so he leaves him.
More echoes in Blondie and Tuco’s relationship: Blondie specifically says, “Adios,” when leaving Tuco in the desert, which Tuco will say back to him at the inn.
Tuco’s reaction, once again throwing shit at the wall, goes from insults to angrily ordering him to cut the rope off and get off the horse (as if he has any power to make him do anything, standing there unarmed with his hands tied), to a series of hilariously off-the-wall threats (“I’ll hang you up by your thumbs!”), to disbelief/desperation: “Wait a minute, this is only a trick! You wouldn’t leave me here! Come back! Wait! Blondie! Listen, Blondie!” before the final ¡Hijo de una gran putaaaa! The last couple stages once again get echoed in the final scene. I enjoy the “You wouldn’t” - Blondie’s supposed to be better than this, even after he’d threatened his aim might suffer if he got less money. They were supposed to be friends, damn it! (Tuco really wants to believe that people actually like him, and often chooses to live in the world in which they do.)
I truly love the fact Blondie gets the freeze-frame and onscreen caption of “the good” just after ironically admonishing Tuco for his ingratitude after Blondie has double-crossed him, taken the money they were going to split, and left him in the desert with this hands tied. As I wrote in the post with my initial impressions on the movie, this is the most uncalled for, mean-spirited thing he does in the entire movie, and getting the caption right here makes it really drip with irony, which is exactly the right thing to do with it, compared to if they’d put it earlier when it might have looked like it was meant to be played straight. There’s no gallant hero here, only this guy, who is kind of a bastard. Blondie genuinely grows to deserve the title more as we go on, and that’s one of the fun things about the movie, but we have established that the base point is low.
Blondie’s intro tells us a number of things: he’s a very good shot, casually confident, silent and stoic and unruffled by most anything, happy to be a conman ripping off bounties by bringing in criminals and then freeing them again to repeat the same scheme elsewhere, willing to make oblique threats to get his way and to shoot first when anyone seems about to pull a gun on him, and enough of a bastard to leave Tuco behind in the desert. But he’s definitely the most enigmatic of the three main characters; he doesn’t talk or emote much, leaving exactly what’s going on in his head pretty vague and open to interpretation, even as some of his actions are pretty striking and interesting. This has nerdsniped me, because I enjoy thinking about what’s going on in characters’ heads; please be prepared for an excessive amount of analysis of what might be going through his mind in almost every scene he’s in.

Angel Eyes and Maria

The choice to open this scene with Maria getting thrown off a carriage with a bunch of drunk Confederates and the choked-up yell of “You filthy rats!” after them is probably largely just to get across the suggestion that she’s a prostitute, making it easier to connect that she’s the one Angel Eyes’ informant told him about. But I appreciate that it gives her a little bit of a tragic existence outside the confines of the plot and makes her sympathetic even before Angel Eyes starts beating on her. (A secondary purpose for this is also probably to show some Confederate soldiers just being assholes; the film makes a point of featuring both sympathetic and asshole moments from both sides of the Civil War.)
Like with Stevens, while Angel Eyes makes his presence very threatening, he starts off nonviolently (well, relatively; the way he pulls her inside is not exactly gentle), just telling her to go on talking about Bill Carson – but when she refuses to volunteer any information and just says she doesn’t know him, the claws come out instantly. There’s none of the veneer of casual friendliness he had with Stevens, though, just an intensely scary stare and threatening demands. (The scare chord playing in the background doesn’t help.) All in all, Angel Eyes was already terrifying but he is even more so in this scene.
I do also appreciate that while the interrogation is brutal and deeply uncomfortable and thick with the danger of sexual violence, it does not go there – he’s physically but not sexually violent, he’s only interested in the information, and once he has it, we see him just leave. This is a completely sexless film, and I think we’re all very lucky for that; it’s one reason The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has aged relatively well, compared to for instance some of Sergio Leone’s other films. (That’s not to say I have anything against portrayals of sexuality or even sexual violence in media in principle, but I’ve gotten the sense that back in the sixties, media that did portray it tended to be profoundly weird about it.)

Tuco returns to town

We don’t get to see Tuco suffering in the desert, only making his way across the rope bridge and then stumbling toward the well and finally indulging, but I think it does get across that this was an ordeal for him, and that becomes easier to appreciate on a rewatch, after seeing Blondie go through it later. Tuco’s skin has fared a lot better than Blondie’s, but his lips are pretty cracked.
The gun seller looks so proud of his little selection of revolvers and is so eager to please him by showing him more. It’s painful how long he keeps trying to be helpful in selling him a gun even when Tuco just grabs the bottle of wine out of his hands and dismantles half of his guns to put together a custom revolver. And then Tuco just uses the gun, with a cartridge the owner gave him, to rob him of the money he has in the till, oof.
Man, those targets just casually in the shape of Native Americans.
Sergio Leone just has a thing for characters shoving something in somebody else’s mouth unbidden, doesn’t he. Blondie sticks his cigar in Tuco’s mouth during his intro, then Tuco puts the sign in the shopkeeper’s mouth, and then it happens very memorably in Once Upon a Time in the West as well. I forget if it’s in A Fistful of Dollars or For a Few Dollars More, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised.
The gun store scene is theoretically skippable (Christopher Frayling’s commentary indicated it was cut in British prints of the film, though I gather it survived in the US cut), but it’s pretty fun in its audacity, and is also doing some good setup work for Tuco’s character. So far, apart from his intro suggesting some degree of scrappy ability to shoot before he gets shot, he’s been shown in a pretty ineffectual light, getting ambushed and captured and raging helplessly with his hands tied. But here we get to see that Tuco really knows his way around guns and has implausible trick-shooting skills to rival Blondie’s – and, of course, that he really is an unrepentant bandit who thinks nothing of doing this when he wants a gun and some money, lest we were left too sympathetic to him when Blondie left him.

The cave

Tuco presumably bought the chicken with some of the $200 he robbed from the gun store; he presents it like having a single chicken by itself is amazing riches. Does say a lot.
I enjoy his very blatant talking to himself about how oh, he’s so lonely, but he’s rich, wonder where his friends are now. He clearly figures that Pedro/Chico/Ramon are there listening and just avoiding him. He talks like they were such great friends, but somehow the fact they don’t come out until he starts loudly talking about how if only they were there he’d give them $1000 each doesn’t make it seem like they ever had a relationship that went much beyond assisting each other in committing crimes to their mutual advantage – and Tuco clearly in fact knows this, since he knows exactly what line to go for to lure them out. (But no, Tuco definitely has great friends, because he is a cool and well-liked dude who has definitely made good choices in life.)
I’ve seen people online suggesting that Blondie and Tuco ran their scam a lot more often than the two times we actually see, but this scene seems to make it explicit that they only did it exactly those two times: Tuco specifically indicates Blondie has $4000, which is simply equal to half of the first $2000 bounty that they split plus the entire $3000 bounty for the second time that he kept for himself.
This is one of the scenes added in the Extended Cut, despite having been cut even from the Italian version of the movie after its original Rome premiere. The primary ostensible purpose of it is just to establish where Pedro/Chico/Ramon came from (the featurette on the restoration makes it explicit that the guy overseeing the Extended Cut, John Kirk, just thought it was a plot hole and decided to reinsert the scene when he discovered it existed because of that, despite Sergio Leone himself having decided to cut it for pacing reasons). It is true I think I would probably ask myself some questions about Tuco’s buddies if I’d seen a cut without it; Tuco’s seemed like a lone wolf so far, and without it there’s no indication at all of who these guys are or why they’re working for/with him for this.
On the other hand, the scene kind of sets them up as if they’re a lot more important than they are, and its internal coherence feels a little off: them only coming out when Tuco tempts them with money, despite that Tuco’s been there for a bit talking at them about what good friends they were, actively suggests they don’t actually like or trust him (which makes good sense!), but then it also has this dialogue about how they thought he’d been killed, which feels as if it’s randomly offering up an unnecessary and somewhat contradictory second explanation for why we haven’t seen them with him up to this point. The bit about them thinking he was dead doesn’t actually connect to anything and seems to give undue weight and improperly conserved detail to Tuco’s relationship with these guys, who are ultimately just some throwaway goons that exist in one scene before dying and never being mentioned again. I think probably the movie is actually better off without this scene, as Sergio Leone apparently concluded himself.

The inn

More of the war in the background – this time with the innkeeper privately opining about how those rebels are cowards and it’ll be better when the Yankees have beaten them as the Confederate army retreats out of the town, only to then yell “Hurray for Dixie!” as they’re passing by. Not the only character in this movie who just pretends to support whichever army he’s currently looking at. (We see more injured soldiers in the background here.)
Love the tension of the buildup here. Blondie’s gun lying dismantled on the table at the start, the brothers approaching in the midst of all the noise, the close-up of Blondie’s hand freezing and eyes narrowing at the clink in the sudden silence, straining to hear as there’s nothing (the fact it stopped when the army did actively suggests someone’s trying to be sneaky), then frantically loading the revolver with a second-third-fourth bullet as the background noise restarts and then juuuust managing to finish and shoot the three of them in rapid succession as they burst in. These silent close-up shots of his hands and eyes also deliver a rare moment of tangible alarm from Blondie; he’s legitimately scared for a bit there and you can feel it, which is greatly appreciated from a character who spends most of the movie being stoic and enigmatic.
Enjoy Blondie choosing to explain how he knew they were coming by going, “Your spurs,” just before firing the final shot (just giving this guy a little tip about where he messed up before killing him, as you do), but also I deeply enjoy that him firing that last smug bullet, which he probably didn’t really need to when the guy was collapsing anyway, leaves him defenseless when Tuco draws attention to himself at the window. Blondie is very smart and competent, we’ve just watched him survive three people sneaking up on him while he’s cleaning his gun because he managed to notice the tiny sound of a clinking spur and put together what it meant and load his gun in time, but then he makes this near-fatal mistake by getting a little too cocky about it, and that’s definitely tastier than if he’d obviously needed all his bullets there.
I have seen it suggested that Tuco intentionally used the brothers as cannon fodder here, but I’m not sure the movie necessarily suggests that; presumably the idea was for them to successfully sneak up on Blondie and catch him completely unawares without the unexpected silence exposing the rogue spur clink, which wouldn’t have had to involve any of them getting killed (heck, if they’d happened to be just a little earlier, Blondie would’ve still been in the middle of cleaning his gun). Tuco and the others had clearly talked about their approach ahead of time, so they were perfectly aware that they’d be going up there by the door and Tuco would be coming in by the window and presumably thought that sounded like a good plan. And we have no idea exactly at what point Tuco managed to make his way in, so we don’t have any indication either way on whether he theoretically could have intervened to save them in some manner – my first assumption would be he got in after Blondie had stood up, which is after he shot them. Sneaking up on him from two different directions makes sense either way. I wouldn’t necessarily put it past Tuco to figure the brothers will probably get killed and do it anyway, but I don’t think we can say that for sure.
Either way, I enjoy Tuco doing his quick little sign of the cross when he says “Those that come in by the door.” He did in fact just get them killed by bringing them here, and while he’s not going to say anything about that to Blondie, it shows him acknowledging it in a small way. Tuco’s religiosity is a great little character trait that has no impact on the plot but just adds more color and dimension to him as a character – it adds a really fun bit of visual irony to punctuate some of his various decidedly un-Christian actions, and it has a rich sense of being rooted in his background given his family was presumably religious.
Blondie’s shrugging, “It’s empty,” feels like he’s initially kind of expecting them to just talk: he takes Tuco wanting him to remove the pistol belt as a practical thing, just telling him to remove his weapon so he can put his away, and so Blondie removes it but tells him that’s not really necessary because he can’t shoot him anyway. Tuco could have shot him already if he were here to kill him, right? He probably expects, initially, that Tuco is just here to get his half of the money, or possibly all of it.
Instead, Tuco responds with, “Mine isn’t” – he’s deadly serious and he’s not putting his gun away at all.
“Even when Judas hanged himself there was a storm, too.” There’s Judas again! Tuco originally called Blondie that while playing it up for the scam, but as far as he’s concerned now, it’s true actually. Love the furious energy of him sitting there having found this Biblical parallel and decided this is the specific revenge he wants on this guy and bringing a noose to arrange that. Blondie’s never had a rope around his neck, never felt the devil bite his ass? Well, now he will. And he’ll make him do it himself, because Judas hanged himself.
Blondie warily (and correctly) suggests the 'storm’ is actually cannon fire – because he decidedly does not want to be anywhere near the war, and by the time cannons are getting fired in the vicinity, he thinks they should probably be getting the hell out of there, and if Tuco agrees, then perhaps pointing that out is a ticket out of this pretty alarming situation he has found himself in. But Tuco, of course, is not really interested in entertaining that just when he has Blondie right where he wants him. He’s going to hang him right here if it’s the last thing he does.
Blondie goes along with it, slowly, silently, looking kind of wary and skeptical more than anything. When I was first watching this movie, I kept expecting him to do something, to distract him in some clever way and then lunge at him to disarm him or something, like you’d usually expect the main character to do in an action movie. But the thing is that’s just not how Blondie operates. He doesn’t do bold risky action-hero feats. He can absolutely shoot a gun with the best of them, but he has no particular physical skills, never even throws a punch in this whole movie unless you count the backhand slap on the tied-up Tuco earlier; when unarmed, all he’s really got is his brains. Blondie gets by on being smart and careful and analytical. When Blondie finds a gun pointed at him, and has no leverage over the other guy, he will do what he’s told, make no sudden movements, and wait until he sees some kind of actual opening, because otherwise he’s just going to get shot. He buys what little time he can going along with the hanging while his brain silently whirs away evaluating his options for how he can get out of this, and that’s about it for what he can do.
What are his options? He doesn’t have a lot. Tuco is standing too far away to reach before he shoots but too close to realistically miss, never takes his eyes off him for more than a second, keeps his gun pointed squarely at him. It wouldn’t be hard for him to get out of the noose – it’s a big noose, he’s barely in it, his hands are free. But if he did, Tuco would presumably just shoot him instead. Probably his best chance, once Tuco says he’s going to shoot the legs off the stool, is to try to make a move just when he fires, slip out of the noose and then probably make some kind of last-ditch attempt to overpower him before he’s ready to shoot again, and I imagine Blondie was getting ready to attempt just that before they were interrupted. But even then, it’s very questionable whether he could have actually escaped like that. All in all, things are looing pretty dicey for him by the time the rogue cannonball comes to his rescue – but once it does, he’s out of there fast, grabbing his chance now he’s got it.
Either way, as little as he gives away as it’s happening, Blondie’s genuinely staring death in the face here for this whole sequence, and this experience clearly left enough of an impression on him for him to make a point of turning this specifically back on Tuco in the final scene, even though Tuco’s going to torment him in a much more extended and agonizing way in the desert, so I’m enjoying the quiet implication there.
The cannonball is kind of interesting because this is absolutely a textbook deus ex machina. Usually I like the rule that a contrived coincidence can get the characters into a situation but ideally not out of it. This is definitely getting Blondie out of a situation, and definitely has that sense of being a little unsatisfying as the answer to how’s he going to get out of this one. And yet, the fact Blondie really was helpless to do much about it is kind of the point here. If Blondie had actually won out in this encounter, it wouldn’t have nearly the same meaning when he finally ends up turning the situation around in the desert, nor when he tells Tuco to get in the noose at the end – narratively, we need this to be an instance of Tuco beating out Blondie and then toying with him for it to have the right impact, and hence, since he can’t actually die here, he needs to get out without winning.
(It does also help a bit that the ongoing cannon fire was already set up and established, even if it just happening to hit the building is purely coincidental.)
Being saved by a cannonball, of course, is again the constant insistent presence of the war in the background, now coming into the characters’ lives just a bit more directly.
Meanwhile, Tuco in this scene, man. He is finally the one in the position of power, just relishing having control and being able to order Blondie to do things and have him actually do them and the grim sense of justice in seeing him be the one in a noose for once. Cheerful lines like, “It’s too big for your neck, huh? We fix that right away.” Grinning as he explains that he’ll shoot the legs off the stool. But then when it comes to actually doing it… he takes an extra breath, with this kind of hesitant expression on his face, before echoing Blondie’s “Adios.” As he points the gun, it’s shaking a bit. Tuco doesn’t feel totally right here and I love it a lot.
Tuco does absolutely want to see Blondie suffer right now – we’re about to see him chase him down again so he can torture him in an even more drawn-out and awful way, after all. But once he actually kills him it’ll all be over, and he just goes back to his usual shitty bandit life, one more person that he’d once thought was a friend gone. This has been a couple of minutes of mildly satisfying catharsis, but not totally satisfying, too brief, too easy – and there’s probably some basic squirm of empathy there, when he’s been in that position, can vividly remember the squeeze of the rope – but the bastard deserves this for betraying him, so he’s doing it anyway.
All in all, this is possibly the scene I have rewatched the most. This is significantly because I happen to have a big dopamine whump button in my brain labeled 'HANGINGS’, but it’s also just a sequence of masterful tension leading up to this delightfully twisted, tense and thoroughly loaded character interaction following on the previous scenes between Tuco and Blondie in fun specific ways that build up to even more fun things later. What a character dynamic.

The fort

I don’t have too much to say about this one. It’s a very impressive set, the war is brutal, the sarcasm of the Confederate captain Angel Eyes talks to and the ease of bribing him with some booze is nice foreshadowing and a parallel for the poor Union captain Blondie and Tuco will meet, but ultimately this scene is mostly about filling in how Angel Eyes learns about Batterville. (Or is it Betterville? The subtitles say Batterville and that’s what it sounds like everyone’s saying, but Christopher Frayling and the subtitles on him say Betterville.) This is a restored scene in the Extended Cut, which exists in the Italian version but was cut from the International Cut.
Angel Eyes pauses and swallows looking at the injured soldiers and later lets the captain keep the booze he brought, vaguely suggesting a glimmer of sympathy for their plight, which is sort of interesting but also a little divorced from the rest of the movie. Villains having different sides to them is neat, but I don’t think we get a great sense of why Angel Eyes would be sympathetic to these men but also treat the prisoners at Batterville – who are soldiers from the Confederate army just like these ones – how he does later with zero remorse, so I’m not sure this is actually doing much for the movie on a character level in the end, and if anything may be a little counterproductive to the kind of extremely cold-blooded villain that Angel Eyes is otherwise set up to be.
I suppose the idea might be that Angel Eyes is theoretically capable of sympathy, but also capable of simply discarding it the moment it’s useful to him. Alternatively, the idea could be that at the moment he feels in some sense that if the war catches up with him he could be in these soldiers’ place, but then he goes on to enlist with the Union army to get into Batterville, at which point he’s on the winning side so who cares. Angel Eyes does display nerves later at the truel, once he’s in a situation he’s not in control of where he might very well die, so maybe it checks out that while he feels not totally secure in not winding up like these men himself, their grim conditions get to him a bit.
I do think it is kind of nice to have this scene in terms of keeping Angel Eyes’ storyline going and maintaining the sense that he’s still out there looking for Carson, even aside from the added plot clarity; without it, he’d just kind of not exist for a very significant chunk of the film.
I’ve also seen it argued that it brings out the horrors of the war too early, given the film’s slow progression from the war as simply backdrop for the plot to eventually spending the leadup to the climax with it in stark focus. I think that’s a legitimately interesting point, but also that it didn’t stop me absorbing that progression just fine when first seeing the film as the Extended Cut – soldiers are injured here, yes, but they aren’t truly lingered on, and all in all it felt mostly just like a logical part of the established war-as-backdrop at this stage.
All in all, I have some mixed feelings on this scene and what it contributes, but I’m tempted to conclude the film might be better without it overall.

The desert

Tuco tracking down Blondie by finding his cigars at every campfire is pretty hilarious. Imagine what Blondie could have avoided if he just stopped smoking like a chimney.
(It’s sort of surprising Blondie got so far ahead of Tuco to begin with – he wouldn’t have had long to get downstairs and to his horse while Tuco was recovering from the fall and getting out of the rubble, so one would’ve thought Tuco could’ve been basically right on his heels. I guess Tuco went in the wrong direction initially and had to catch up.)
Tuco forbidding Blondie to shoot down Shorty, oof. Once again Tuco is fundamentally out for himself, and right now he wants to deny Blondie this more than to let this stranger live, so down he goes. (Nonetheless, he flinches watching it, again bit of instinctive empathy despite that he mostly suppresses it – it hits pretty close to home.)
Blondie continues to comply with the orders of the guy who’s pointing a gun at him, but he clearly doesn’t feel great about this, apologizing, gaze lingering on Shorty even as he’s preparing to stand up. Clearly his moral line lies somewhere between leaving Tuco to fend for himself (where he might die, but sometime later in the desert where Blondie would never know) and letting Shorty hang, dying right in front of him when he was expecting a rescue. Perhaps Blondie didn’t even know he had this line until now.
A moment of silence for Blondie’s original horse, whom he probably rode out here, but who is presumably just left behind as Tuco takes him away and never seen again. This movie does not really give a damn about individual horses – the characters’ horses repeatedly disappear and go unmentioned only for them to later manage to get a different horse somewhere without comment – but as a former horse girl this is the sort of thing I notice and wonder about.
Blondie presumably initially figures Tuco’s just taking him somewhere a short distance away to try to make him hang himself again or something. But then Tuco shoots the canteen out of his hands, and the hat off his head for good measure (love Tuco casually replicating Blondie’s little hat-shooting trick just to rub it in), and it starts to sink in that no, that’s not it, is it. Where are they going? On a nice walk of a hundred miles through desert. “What was it you told me the last time? Ah, 'If you save your breath, I feel a man like you would manage it.’” Tuco’s not taking him anywhere; this is just torture, once again a very specific torture. Blondie made Tuco walk seventy miles through the desert? Tuco’ll make him walk a hundred miles, or however long it takes before he dies a slow and agonizing death, and that’ll show him. I deeply enjoy how in this movie, between the two of them, it’s never just generic revenge, but always this hyperspecific replication of the other’s previous cruelties.
Tuco’s cute pink parasol is such a choice.
He’s so utterly gleeful watching Blondie helplessly stumbling until he faceplants in the sand. Tuco relishes power and control when he can get it, not only for the Blondie-specific reasons (Blondie had all the power from beginning to end in their bounty scheme, and exercised it to leave Tuco helpless) but probably also because of his background – poverty sure is a way to feel perpetually helpless and subject to external whims, and escaping it through banditry probably represented a sense of freedom from all that, where he can just go out and take what he wants and other people can be subject to his whims for once.
In the sequence added in the Extended Cut, the collapsed and dehydrated Blondie looks at Tuco’s boot right beside his face, swallows, tenses for a heave of effort – and then grabs the boot, only for it to just be the empty boot, Tuco cheerfully bathing his feet a short distance away. (Blondie is definitely suffering from the “characters can’t see anything out of frame” thing here, but I kind of enjoy the literal implication that his eyes can just barely even focus and the boot manages to be all he can make out in his field of vision, even if it stretches plausibility a bit.) I do quite like this bit, not least because this is the one time we actually properly see Blondie attempting resistance. He silently went along with the hanging and he silently goes along with the desert walk, too – which makes sense, because he’s being ordered to at gunpoint, and as I went into earlier, he doesn’t have action hero armor that’d let him do much to fight back in these situations without just getting shot, and he’s generally too careful to try under the circumstances. But it means that he feels very passive in these sequences, and seeing this moment where he finally does think he has a chance to strike back, and the hate in his eyes and how painstakingly he gathers all of the energy he can muster to grab it, helps a lot to contextualize the rest and make him more tangibly an active character who cares what’s happening to him for this. With this bit, it’s easy to extrapolate that he has been waiting for any chance to take him down this whole time, and this is the one time he (seemingly) finds one. Without it, his character just has no sense of agency at all the entire time he’s being tortured, which would mute the whole thing a bit.
(Well, okay: a little before this, there is this wide shot, where we can see Tuco stationary on his horse and Blondie walking towards him – then stopping, extending his foot a little further forward and sort of pathetically lunging for that last step, at which point Tuco’s horse just moves further away, and Tuco laughs. This might be, and is on closer examination probably meant to be, Blondie making some form of stumbling attempt to sneak up on him. But it’s a wide shot so you can barely see him, it goes by in seconds, and it’s hard to tell what he’s actually doing – he could just be trying to catch up to Tuco, which is how I think I’d mostly been taking it before I started squinting at this – which makes it not really serve the same purpose.)
(I gather the script had a bit, which was filmed and possibly in a version of the Italian release in 1966 but lost today apart from a small fragment, where Blondie slides down a hill into an animal skeleton lying there and grabs a bone that he could use as a weapon, but Tuco shoots it out of his hand and warns him not to try that again. That would have also provided that bit of agency, but given that was cut, the boot scene was all that was left, and I do maintain that cutting that too is bad for the movie.)
After he realizes it’s just the boot, and of course Tuco’s not letting him get close, and he has no hope of getting one over on Tuco at this point, Blondie sort of slumps in defeat for a moment, and then looks up, and then starts to crawl towards the water. It’s pretty painful to watch; the utter helpless humiliation of being so thirsty and drained of defiance that he would drink the water Tuco just washed his feet in is its own grotesque flavor of torture, and then Tuco won’t even let him have that.
After that, Blondie manages to push himself onto all fours, looks at Tuco for a moment – probably realizing that even if he tried to rush him right now it would accomplish absolutely nothing other than entertaining Tuco more – and then just crawls away, finally going somewhere of his own volition. He’s not going to make it far at this point, and if it looked like he might Tuco would just shoot him, but maybe he can at least die somewhere a bit further away from him.
Tuco stands up and initially reaches for his gun as Blondie crawls off, but then he just laughs, seeing that there’s absolutely no danger of Blondie making it very far or shaking him off – he can just casually pack up his stuff and then follow him at a leisurely pace.
In the Italian/Extended Cut, Blondie rolling down the hill is continuing from this, whereas in the International Cut, Tuco had just gotten off his horse to approach him after he initially collapsed, suggesting that collapse wasn’t quite as bad and that he was just sort of continuing but on all fours – gives it a little bit of a different air.
I do appreciate just how pathetic Blondie’s crawl/roll down the hill is. He sort of picks himself up again after the initial stumble but then just collapses on his back, admitting defeat. He’s going to die here and he doesn’t have the energy to do anything about it. Tuco lets that bottle roll down and come to a stop by his head and he doesn’t even react.
Tuco spends a moment just looking at him down there before bringing out his gun to put him out of his misery. Probably less out of desire to actually put him out of his misery and more out of seeing he’s not going to be able to make Blondie walk anywhere further right now, and he’s not going to sit around waiting, and definitely not leaving him alive.
Blondie barely moves as Tuco points the gun at him, just closing his eyes again and swallowing and accepting that this is it. At the inn he had a chance but this time is a full-on definitely thought he was going to die here and was powerless to stop it, and this is also something that Blondie turns back on Tuco at the end.
(And yet Tuco keeps pointing his gun to kill him and taking a while to actually fire it, doesn’t he. Part of this is just the movie doing dramatic timing but part of it is a genuine slight hesitation on his part, as shown more obviously at the inn.)
But then comes runaway carriage ex machina, just in time! Tuco not just shooting him first before checking on it is another notable moment of hesitation on his part. Once again, we actually need a deus ex machina, because Blondie needs to have been totally helpless here or it would completely change the implications for what’s being set up.
This is another good scene that I enjoy a lot, particularly Blondie getting ready to grab the boot, although I’m also just a big fan of exhausted, dehydrated men stumbling around deserts. It’s very merciless and ugly (gotta love the energy of getting Clint Eastwood at his handsomest for your movie and then absolutely screwing up his face with the gnarliest-looking sunburn makeup), really thoroughly parses as torture where the hanging scene was more quiet buildup, and Tuco’s absolute cruelty here versus Blondie’s exhausted helplessness is very important in viscerally setting up why Blondie does what he does at the end. But I also enjoy how strongly Tuco’s actions here are still rooted in the specifics of how Blondie treated him. I just really love the twisted, messed-up way the whole chain of revenge is built up between the two of them, and how interestingly their relationship then develops with all that hanging over it.

The carriage

I appreciate that we see Blondie juuust prop himself up to look as Tuco goes to intercept it – he goes on to discreetly crawl all the way to it during the sequence that follows while we’re focused on Tuco, and briefly seeing that he takes an interest and has mustered a tiny bit of energy again helps set that up.
More of Tuco’s religiosity as he does the sign of the cross multiple times over the corpse of the soldier who initially falls out… and then immediately loots the corpse. Oh, Tuco.
I remembered the amputee informant’s description of how Bill Carson was missing an eye, so as soon as we saw one of the apparently-dead soldiers in the carriage wearing an eyepatch I was like ohhhhh!! The storylines are connecting!! (And we’re more than an hour into the Extended Cut when it happens. This movie very slow-paced compared to a modern film and yet so thoroughly enjoyable.)
You can juuust see Carson starting to blink a bit as Tuco searches him.
Tuco standing there glancing to the right out of the corner of his eye when he hears a noise from the wagon, while by the rules of the movie he can’t actually see anything over there, is very funny. He even waits a bit before turning around to point his gun, as if knowing whoever is there can’t see him either until he turns.
Tuco interrogating Carson about the $200,000 while the latter begs for water is another truly painful scene; Tuco’s only invested in the dollars and anti-invested in saving Carson’s life (“Don’t die until later!”), straining to get him to talk first for as long as he possibly can, until he figures the guy is going to straight-up croak before talking, at which point of course he switches tack. Presumably he thinks if he actually gives him water Carson’s liable to change his mind about telling him anything, so he has to get it out of him first if at all possible.
I also enjoy his annoyance with Carson telling him about his name and having been Jackson before but now Carson; the audience needs him to say his name, and it’s probably also helpful to mention he used to be Jackson, but to Tuco it’s just a waste of time. “Carson, Carson, yeah, yeah. Glad to meet you, Carson. I’m Lincoln’s grandfather. What was that you said about the dollars?”
Tuco repeats the name of the cemetery near the very end of the exchange with Carson: “Sad Hill Cemetery, okay. In the grave, okay. But it must have a name or a number on it, huh? There must be a thousand, five thousand!” - which means that, since Blondie doesn’t know the name of the cemetery (unless Blondie did know it the whole time and just pretended not to, which I guess we can’t really rule out), he can’t have been listening in by this point. Directly after this, Tuco tells Carson not to die and goes to get water. So Blondie pretty much can’t have caught any of the stuff about the cash when Carson said it originally, and can’t have known the full strategic significance of talking to him beforehand.
Instead, Blondie probably quietly crawled after Tuco with the aim of maybe being able to get the jump on him while he’s distracted with whatever this is, and he only got close enough just at the end to see Tuco talking to Carson and telling him to not die. Then, as Tuco ran off for the water, Blondie obviously could not follow him back there, but instead crawled the rest of the way to the back of the wagon to see who Tuco’s so desperate to keep alive, where Carson managed to gasp out something about a grave marked 'Unknown’, next to Arch Stanton, and that it had money in it (Blondie does definitely learn there’s money, since he then knows to use that as leverage). This is supported by how Blondie just refers very nonspecifically to having been told a name on a grave. He’s really pulling a bit of a bluff here since he doesn’t (presumably) know what cemetery this grave is in, so if Tuco hadn’t happened to have learned that bit (which Blondie can’t know), this information would not actually be that useful to either of them. But so long as he can make it sound like he can lead Tuco to riches right now, he has an actual shot at surviving.
I enjoy the way Blondie manages the tiniest wisp of a victorious smile to Tuco’s “What name?!” just before passing out. The moment he sees Tuco’s furious desperation to learn the name he’s talking about, he knows he’s won and that Tuco’s going to do whatever he can to ensure his survival. He can pass out in peace.
Tuco’s shifty eyes and expressions as he has to reevaluate everything are great. Eli Wallach really, really just makes this movie with his performance. I love Blondie and all, and Clint Eastwood in his thirties is very attractive, but I think it’s criminal that I had heard about this movie and about Clint Eastwood being in it but had never heard Eli Wallach’s name. He’s so good and singlehandedly makes Tuco the best thing about it. I love him.
And there comes the Tuco tack-switch! He’s not just invested in keeping Blondie alive for the money; he’s his friend! As if this is somehow going to be persuasive to the man he’s just spent hours torturing and toying with.
I love this absolutely bonkers goddamn character dynamic. First Blondie saves Tuco from the bounty hunters, then he apparently turns him in for the bounty, then you learn actually they’re running a scam together, then Blondie screws over Tuco in a way that makes you kind of root for Tuco to get back at him, then Tuco painstakingly, cruelly labors to punish him for it in the most specific twisted ways until you’re anxious for how Blondie’s going to get out of this, then this happens… and because Tuco is the character he is, of course it works. He is already the guy who switches tack on a dime when it seems to serve him in the moment. We’ve just spent this whole carriage scene building up how singlemindedly fixated he is on this money once he hears about it. There are already so many striking layers going on in the interplay between these two guys and it makes it delicious to realize we’ve just added yet another layer and the rest of the movie is going to involve them having to work together after all this. And because it’s the cash box from the Angel Eyes storyline, we’re following up on that too in the process, with the also-delicious implicit promise that that’s how they’re going to bump into him. This is just such a gleefully fun and satisfying moment where everything comes together and I love it.

The checkpoint

Another Extended Cut scene. Sad Hill Media’s blog post on the Extended Cut scenes suggests the only conceivable purpose of this scene is to establish Tuco wants to go to the San Antonio monastery and that it’s entirely needless because we can just figure he knew it was nearby. I do think there’s a little more to it than that: this checkpoint is presumably why Tuco and Blondie actually dress up in Confederate uniforms, which is otherwise a pretty random thing for them to do (and is an important plot point a couple scenes later); it’s where Tuco presumably gets the idea of actually pretending to be Bill Carson (without this scene, he’s just using Carson’s eyepatch randomly when they get to the monastery for unclear reasons); and more specifically it establishes that Tuco knew the monastery existed but was kind of surprised to learn they were in the vicinity of it, which adds some context to why Tuco hasn’t visited his brother before in those nine years – he hasn’t been in the area before, just vaguely knew of it being near Apache Canyon. But it is undeniably a very functional sort of scene with not a lot else going on, other than Tuco’s amusing assertion that “If I were a Yankee you wouldn’t have time to ask me that!” to a whole encampment of Confederate soldiers, as if he’d have just taken them all out single-handedly.
Speaking of dressing up in Confederate uniforms, either Blondie was conscious enough at some point to change into the uniform or Tuco dressed his unconscious self in it to sell that he’s a dying soldier to these guys. I suspect the latter.

The monastery

Tuco asks for his brother right at the start, but unknown to Tuco he’s already gone to visit their dying father. Big, painful dramatic irony there on a rewatch.
Once again, we have wounded soldiers, many with lost limbs, filling up the monastery – and once again it is a mere backdrop to our protagonists.
Tuco of course acts like Blondie is a very dear friend, like a brother to him, specifically when the monks are within earshot and then immediately drops it when they aren’t. What a guy.
(He asks frantically if Blondie has said anything – mainly thinking of if he said anything about the name on the grave, of course, but also, Blondie could theoretically tell them any number of things about Tuco that might get him kicked out of there.)
Meanwhile, even though nobody’s looking (he checks!), Tuco gets down on his knees to pray. Totally sincere in his religion, praying that God will let this man live so Tuco can have his $200,000. I love this fascinating plot-irrelevant character trait.
Once the priest has told him Blondie will recover, he’s thinking for a bit about next steps before he goes into the room. Everything would be easiest if he could just get Blondie to tell him what the name on the grave was, and then he can just kill him, or at least ditch him – he’s not too keen on actually having to haul Blondie around to find the treasure, after all.
Tuco starts off by telling Blondie, “The old father tells me you’ll be up and around in a few days!” and then this hilarious thing of “You were very lucky to have me so close when it happened!” Ah, yes, when “it happened”, this mysterious thing that caused Blondie to nearly die in the desert, how lucky that Tuco just happened to be there. Clearly this is going to work on Blondie himself. (Maybe Tuco could be banking on the possibility Blondie might not have a clear memory of the whole thing, but honestly it’s perfectly in character to do this nonsense either way, because Tuco is Tuco.)
He goes on with this approach about how they’re all alone in the world and have only got each other, suggesting he doesn’t have any family. This is of course a blatant lie, as we’ll learn in a bit – Tuco believes he still has both parents and a brother, even if he hasn’t seen them in a long time – but right now it seems convenient to pretend he has absolutely nothing and no one, in case it will help him earn Blondie’s sympathy and trust, so all alone in the world it is.
But then he changes tack again! Come to think of it, maybe it’d be easier to convince him to tell if he thought he was dying. So nah, now he’s sad, devastated, that Blondie’s dying and it’s all his fault. :’((( (He looks around first to make sure none of the monks are around to contradict this, but he already contradicted it when he himself told Blondie just earlier that he’d be up and around in a few days. Tuco just does not keep track of his lies, at all.)
Love the shot where he’s looking through his fingers, trying to gauge if this is working at all, and then turns it into wiping the definitely real tears from his eyes. He’s trying so hard.
In Blondie’s place, he would tell about the gold! (He would not tell about the gold.)
If he gets his hands on the $200,000, he’ll always honor Blondie’s memory! (He will not.)
Oh, Tuco, totally buying it when Blondie beckons him closer only to get coffee in his face because of course. The combination of absolute unrepentant lying and swindling and naïveté is so endearing, in a terrible way.
Blondie is so smug about “I’ll sleep better knowing my good friend is by my side to protect me” while Tuco is pointing a gun at him (upside-down) and it’s great. Tuco having him at gunpoint is simply not a threat anymore, because Tuco now wants him to live more than anything! He will protect him! Just in his best interests that Blondie survives!
(And the funny thing is Blondie can probably entirely legitimately sleep a little better with someone else actively invested in his survival than he normally does as a lone wolf drifter, even though the guy actively invested in his survival now also happens to hate his guts. We see him later being a very light sleeper who keeps his hand on his gun, suggesting he’s kind of used to expecting someone might attempt to kill him in his sleep; Tuco would never let anyone kill him in his sleep, not while he’s the only one who knows the name on the grave.)
Notably, Blondie isn’t angry in this scene, as much as he has every right to be when Tuco’s being an absolutely shameless little shit about trying to manipulate him, after a lengthy bout of straight-up torture. Instead, Blondie seems more amused by his utter ridiculousness, now that Tuco is harmless and in fact warpedly helpful to him. He’s enjoying every minute of the reversal of fortunes here, and in the process Tuco’s Tuco-ness has just become kind of entertaining. This is an important little development for how their relationship evolves from here.
After the non-obvious timeskip, Tuco’s fetching water for Blondie, grumbling all the while about if I get that name from you I’ll give you water, and calls him a dirty skunk, kicking his foot – notably, not keeping up the pretense of being his friend even a little bit unless the monks are around anymore. Presumably, in the time we skipped over, they’ve had some talks about how they’ll proceed – Blondie naturally not even considering telling Tuco the name but agreeing to accompany him so they can find the treasure together, Tuco reluctantly figuring yeah, fine, they’ll do that, but he doesn’t have to be happy about it. He feels free to be an ass to Blondie, even though he can’t lose him, because Blondie also needs him to get the money, and at least to Tuco it’s unthinkable he would just skip out on $200,000, so it probably has not crossed his mind at all that Blondie could just decide once again to ditch him if he got fed up with him.
Most of the analyses I’ve read on this movie emphasize that all three main characters are motivated by greed in their pursuit of the gold. But Blondie has never actually felt all that invested in the gold per se to me. Throughout the movie he’s mostly being pulled along on this treasure quest by either Tuco or Angel Eyes; I don’t think he ever even mentions the gold in any context that’s not about how it’s something the others desire, and he doesn’t take much of any active action to facilitate finding it, other than being along for the ride as the quiet inevitable kingmaker. Instead, whenever it’s actually Blondie’s choices driving what’s happening (which isn’t too often, mind; he spends a lot of time quietly going along with the others and biding his time), his motivations are distinctly about something else, as far as I can tell. My overall read on him is that his chief priority is his own survival, and while the treasure hunt has his interest piqued it’s almost more for the interesting puzzle of how he’s going to come out on top at the end of this than out of desire for the money, though the money certainly doesn’t hurt. I think I read something somewhere about the never-produced sequel proposal involving Blondie having given his share of the gold to the monastery, and honestly, I don’t know if that’s true or if I’m remembering right what I read, but that checks out to me.
At any rate, what I’m saying is I think Blondie is not so invested in the gold that he has to stick with Tuco for it, the way Tuco has to stick with Blondie; Blondie has all the leverage and is enjoying it, and he almost certainly did give some thought to whether he should just try to get out of there if he gets the chance. But ditching Tuco would inevitably mean Tuco just comes to track him back down again, even more fiercely, after already finding him once – and Blondie is almost certainly already sketching out a plan for when they’ve reached the cemetery. Tuco is probably planning to try to kill him as soon as he shows him the grave, after all, and Blondie is going to have to make sure he’s fully in control of the situation before he reveals anything. And then he’s going to make Tuco put his head in a noose.
Tuco mentions the wounded are just pouring into the monastery so they’d better get the hell out of here – that war sure is still intensifying in the background, and the main characters still want no part of it!
Blondie silently hands Tuco his still-lit cigar here just as Tuco’s been insulting him; Tuco just drops it on the floor and steps on it, not keen on sharing. Again, we see how Blondie, when he has this leverage, is completely unruffled by Tuco’s toothless hostility, and in fact is just having fun being friendly in an ironic sort of way in return, knowing this annoys Tuco. This is a very fun little contrast to a little later, when Blondie gives him a cigar with a more genuine sense of sympathy, and Tuco actually accepts it. I didn’t actually even notice this bit for the longest time, but yes, good.
When Tuco learns Pablo is back, he just tells Blondie that This is something I have to look into, not wanting to tell him anything about his family – though of course, it wouldn’t be hard to guess that “Father Ramirez” is related to Tuco Ramirez. And while Blondie probably does muse on how he could just go out and grab the wagon that’s already ready to go (though he would probably ultimately dismiss that either way as discussed above), he must be curious – and also realize that understanding more about how Tuco ticks might be useful later.
This whole sequence is quite funny, showing off a lot of Tuco being Tuco, while we get a good look at the fundamentally changed dynamic between Tuco and Blondie now that Tuco needs Blondie alive. So far, it looks like Blondie having great fun rubbing in the leverage that he has, completely and unshakably confident that Tuco won’t touch him now, while once Tuco understands he’s not about to convince Blondie to give up the name, he’s nakedly hostile – but Blondie just finds his hostility amusing now that it doesn’t actually represent a threat. We don’t spend a whole lot of time on this stage of the dynamic, but it’s still pretty important that this is where it has resolved to at this point.

Tuco and Pablo

Tuco is initially obviously wary and nervous about approaching Pablo but then puts on a cheerful smile before he says anything. He probably knows Pablo might not be super happy to see him, but he’s going to live in his best world and doggedly pretend this is a normal cheerful family reunion.
Initially the smile falters when Pablo turns around without acknowledging him, but he forces it back up again. “Don’t you recognize me? It’s me, Tuco!” Surely it’s just because he didn’t recognize him with the eyepatch, right?
He goes in for a hug. Pablo folds his arms. Tuco decides this is totally just because maybe that’s not appropriate with a monk - “I don’t know the right thing!” he says before getting down on his knees and kissing the knot of his rope instead. It is Definitely Not that Pablo just does not want to hug him, nope.
Pablo’s fed-up eyeroll on “I wonder if my brother remembers his brother” is very good. I can’t believe these actors were each speaking a language the other didn’t understand and just waiting for the other to pause to say their next line (Eli Wallach brings this up specifically as a really tough scene because of this). Talk about acting with a handicap. I take every hat off for how well they absolutely pulled it off – this is honestly one of the best scenes in the movie.
“Did I do wrong?” he asks, like he’s almost considering whether maybe Pablo thinks it was wrong of him to come here, but then nah, it doesn’t matter! He’s very happy!
“You have seen me, Tuco.” Ouch. Implied, so goodbye. Tuco chooses not to take it that way!
All in all, Tuco’s face for this whole thing is great, the genuine awkward reactions always dissolving into undaunted cheerful smiles as he keeps going, insistently trying to make this interaction normal. Eli Wallach is so good.
Pablo just stares him up and down after “I’m very glad I came!” “Oh, my uniform! It’s a long story!” Yup, definitely just wondering about the uniform.
Tuco’s trying so, so hard to bring back some long-lost brotherly dynamic that they used to have, sometime. “Let’s talk about you, it’s more important! You look well! A little thin, perhaps, but you were always thin, eh, Pablito?”
And then he asks about their parents. “Only now do you think of them.” Pablo’s so cold about it – even though really Tuco hasn’t mentioned them until now because he’s been trying so hard to connect with Pablo! This is probably part of why Pablo’s been so cold for this whole conversation; it’s got to sting extra hard for him that Tuco’s there playing up this cheerfulness when both their parents are now dead and he wasn’t there.
Tuco is still trying hard to salvage this and be cheerful about it after Pablo tells him it’s been nine years and it aches. Nine years! How time flies, ha-ha!
Instead Pablo tells him their mother’s been dead for a long time, and also Tuco only just missed the death of his father, who had specifically asked for him. I’m pretty sure the implication is they’ve been at the monastery longer than the few days since his father’s death, so theoretically he could probably have made it, if he’d known. Instead he’s been here, grumbling about having to fetch things for Blondie. Oof.
Finally Tuco’s resolve to be cheerful and normal about this is broken. I like how we don’t really see him cry, just him turning away at the wall and the slight movement of his shoulder and tensing in his neck and the sound of his breathing. Any open display of emotion from Tuco would come across as pretty suspect, but it’s precisely the fact he’s hiding his reaction that drives home that it’s 100% real.
When he finally turns away from the wall, it’s to tell Pablo, voice cracking, that he didn’t just have one wife, he had lots. He can find them wherever! He’s doing great! (Normal people who are doing great definitely have lots of different wives they’ve run off from.)
He dares Pablo to preach him a sermon about it, but Pablo doesn’t take the bait. Tuco wants to hear him do his usual thing of judging and condemning him so he can throw it back in his face right now.
Instead, Pablo goes, “The Lord have mercy on your soul,” and Tuco responds that while he’s waiting for the Lord to remember him he’ll tell him something. Another great little bit that’s effective because we’ve seen him being sincerely religious in his own Tuco sort of way, but of course really this extremely down-on-his-luck bandit feels pretty forgotten by God, even if he’s only properly voicing it when he’s just learned both his parents died in his absence.
In response to being judged and disdained for his (genuinely bad) choices all the time, Tuco has built up this whole defensive self-image of how really he took the harder path and Pablo’s just a coward, and I love that a lot.
Pablo left to become a priest, while ten-or-twelve-year-old Tuco was left alone with his parents; the way he emphasizes that he stayed suggests that he felt he was there for them where Pablo had simply abandoned them. And yet, “I tried, but it was no good.” The banditry probably originated out of desperation as a way to earn money to support his parents, or at least support himself without burdening them. And yet he ended up alienated from all of them as a result (of course he did, he’s a wanted criminal). Oof.
Kind of fun how these two brothers hitting each other in the heat of the moment are actually possibly the most convincing physical strikes in the movie.
We only see Blondie watching now; we don’t know exactly how long he was watching or how much he saw, whether he heard Tuco’s whole backstory. But he definitely saw them come to blows, which is the really important bit about him watching.
The way Tuco helps Pablo up and then immediately turns away before Pablo can say anything more or make eye contact is a really good, painful acting choice.
Pablo saying his name, and Tuco stopping for a moment, starting to turn around, and then tossing his hand behind him and leaving anyway is also a really good, painful choice. They almost got to have what might have been a more reconciliatory conversation (Pablo says, “Please forgive me, brother,” after he’s gone), but Tuco was just expecting more judgement and hostility and decided not to bother.
This scene is so good. Tuco was already the most colorful character in this movie, but there’s a huge amount of depth added via this conversation with Pablo – not just some token effort in the form of the fact his parents are dead and he’s sad about it, or the explicit exposition about him growing up in poverty and becoming a bandit because the only ways out were banditry or the priesthood, but all the little nuances and implications and Eli Wallach’s performance of it all. Tuco’s insistent way of looking for alternative explanations for Pablo’s coldness at the start; his dogged, desperate efforts to lighten the mood; the particular genuineness of his reaction to the news about his parents and the way he then deflects all those feelings into anger at Pablo and at God; the painful, painful way that they part. It’s such excellent character work, and it makes Tuco really, properly sympathetic, where he’s been serving a pretty villainous role so far.

Nothing like a good cigar

Tuco silently joins Blondie on the wagon, obviously in a pretty sour mood, and Blondie doesn’t say anything either as they set off. I expect at this point Blondie is fully intending to just not comment on what he saw. (Tuco, of course, doesn’t realize he saw anything at all.)
But after a moment, Tuco decides to live in his best world. His brother is so great! He was just having soup with him! He never wants Tuco to leave when he visits! Earlier he expressly didn’t want to let Blondie know he was going to see his brother, but now he says casually that oh yeah, his brother’s the one in charge there, like he just sort of happened not to mention it before. His brother’s very important and also crazy about him, and the great thing about having him is he’ll always be there for him to give him a bowl of soup if he needs it. This is definitely what actually happened and not a bald-faced lie-slash-fantasy in which Tuco’s fine and loved and appreciated and has a robust support network. (This lie, of course, very directly contradicts Tuco’s previous lie to Blondie about how he’s all alone in this world. He’s so consistently shameless about not being remotely consistent with his own lies.)
(And, notably, the way Tuco’s treating Blondie has abruptly shifted, too, even though no one’s watching – he’s just having a casual chat, smiling, lightly bumping his shoulder at “Bring your friend, too!” Tuco is feeling shunned and rejected and needs a friend right now, and Blondie’s the one guy he’s got, who has been acting basically friendly to him, not returning his hostility – so Tuco’s just choosing to at least for a moment live in the world where yeah, sure, they’re the best of friends and always have been.)
We may not know exactly how much Blondie heard, but he knows at minimum that actually they were not having soup, that Tuco’s brother slapped him, and that he punched him in return. So he knows exactly how bullshit all of this is. And yet, he actually has a little smile at it and chooses not to contradict him, but instead to actively play along with the lie by telling him, “Well, after a meal, there’s nothing like a good cigar.” (There was no meal, after all, and Blondie knows it; he could have offered him a cigar without actively playing along with that bit, but he specifically chooses to do so.) In spite of all Tuco has done, Blondie hears his pathetic bullshitting about his brother and it actually endears him to him, makes him human.
It’s very possible he heard more of Tuco’s backstory, too, and perhaps developed some sympathy for him based on that, the way we have – but the particular reaction he’s having right now, the smile and the cigar, is a reaction to Tuco telling him this. It’s such a blatant, pointless, specific lie, delivered with such a bizarre change of attitude, and all by itself it says so much about Tuco: that he craves positive relationships he doesn’t have, that he was hurt enough by this encounter he doesn’t want to admit or sit with how it really went, that he uses lying as a coping mechanism, that he lies to himself too, that ultimately he loves his brother and would rather talk him up and lie that they’re tight than just complain about him, that he really needs a friend right now and Blondie is all he’s got so he’s just discarding the hostility to do this. It’s pretty sad, and it really is very endearing. Look at this miserable little man and his pathetic, absurd ways of coping.
And the reason this works is Blondie was already honestly a little endeared to Tuco, in a strange way. Tuco had stopped representing a threat, and his Tuco-ness had become entertaining – initially because Blondie was just having fun rubbing it in and watching him flail in his unique way. But it’s not that far from there to seeing his humanity, and this bit of more obviously desperate Tuco-ness will do it. Tuco still tortured him, and Blondie has not and cannot forget that – but alongside it he’s starting to get him, a little bit, and it makes him sympathize with him.
(Blondie doesn’t look at him while offering the cigar, though. Not getting too sentimental about it.)
Tuco looks at him for a long moment after taking the cigar, perhaps realizing Blondie might have seen or heard something (even Tuco suspects it’s not that he just genuinely bought all that and wants to give him his cigar because it’s good after a meal; this looks suspiciously like a gesture of sympathy). But then he just puts it in his mouth, and shares another brief look with Blondie, and then we can see this great progression on his face as he actively psyches himself up into one of his normal grins (love Eli Wallach so much, what a great actor who makes this film), just as we shift from the somber Father Ramirez music back to the upbeat main theme. Tuco is fine! Blondie is living in Tuco’s best world where they’re friends too! Everything is great!
This is another great, fascinating little character interaction. Tuco has a great need to create his own reality and act fine at all times (unless acting otherwise serves some other goal he has, of course), because actually his life kind of sucks, and lying and pretending, to himself and others, is just how he copes with everything. He didn’t need to say anything to Blondie at all – he didn’t ask what Tuco was up to in there and wouldn’t have asked – but it just makes himself feel better about it to go rewrite reality into what he wants it to be and then affirm it by telling somebody else about it and acting like they’re totally friends. And out of it comes this weirdly cute little bonding moment where Blondie’s beginning to understand Tuco, and feel kind of sorry for him, despite everything. I love them.

The map

One more brief Italian/Extended Cut bit. Tuco’s reading the map, looking at where they’re going; Blondie asks about where they’re headed, and Tuco catches himself and tells him he’ll tell him when they get there. Dead soldiers are lying around; Blondie notes they’re not worried about anything anymore and asks again about where they’re going because they might get caught up in the war as they go on. Tuco, defensive, says they’re going towards $200,000.
This mostly serves as the first ambiguous sign that Blondie has some sympathy for the dying soldiers, even though he’s mentioning them briefly in the service of making a different point, while showing Tuco’s still wary of telling Blondie anything that would render him unnecessary, afraid that then Blondie would just kill or ditch him and go for the gold himself. It’s not a very important moment and the film wouldn’t lose much without it, though I don’t think I agree with the idea that Blondie’s expressed sympathy for the soldiers here is too much for where we’re at – it’s not exactly an outpouring of sentiment, just an observation about why the situation is dangerous that happens to involve him noticing the dead soldiers, and it certainly worked as a part of his character progression for me, though I also think it would work without it, with the prison camp being the first thing to spark his sympathy.
The one thing Blondie does do in the movie that sort of seems like he’s invested in claiming the gold for himself is these intermittent moments where he asks Tuco about where they’re going. But I’m not sure that’s actually what’s going on in these moments either. They’re very casual and understated and, especially as the movie goes on, grow to feel more like he’s trying to catch him out for his own amusement than any serious hope that it will work. And in the end, when Tuco does tell him the name of the cemetery, Blondie then does not in fact ditch or kill him to get the gold first, even though he easily could have. So all in all, it doesn’t actually sound like he really hoped to learn the name of the cemetery so he could go find the gold himself without Tuco, even though Tuco obviously fears that.
So I think his stated reason for asking at this point is basically genuine. He’s agreed to accompany Tuco, but they could be about to get themselves into danger, and it really might be less dangerous if they both know where they’re headed. It’s very understandable why Tuco won’t, though – Blondie’s not telling Tuco anything for the same reason, after all – so ultimately he can’t insist too hard.

How do you do fellow Confederates

When Tuco spots troops he wakes up Blondie and is preparing to just take off his uniform immediately – it’s Blondie who asks if they’re blue or gray (Tuco looks at his own uniform for a moment like he needs to double-check which arbitrary uniforms they have again before he looks off at the soldiers, enjoy that), and that’s when Tuco figures well, okay, they’re gray so I guess we don’t need to. In other words, this is actually Blondie’s fault, inadvertently; Tuco by default would have played it safe and gone with being civilians. (Though obviously Tuco’s ridiculous over-the-top yelling did not help.)
“God’s not on our side, ‘cause he hates idiots also.” Blondie is calling them collectively idiots. Blondie is a very smart guy but I enjoy how willing he is to include himself in that.
All in all, this silly scene is great because it’s hilarious, but also just very fun about how utterly arbitrary the Civil War is to the main characters. It’s just blue versus gray, yell out support for whichever color they’re looking at while unclear on what the generals’ names even are, whatever. Tuco obviously doesn’t really know or care what the whole thing is about at all. Blondie is probably a little more familiar – at least he knows what the generals are called – but still only really invested in keeping himself out of it.
Of course, they sure do get caught up in it anyway. Off to prison camp!

Batterville

Time for the war to start to get a lot more prominent!
The wide shot of the camp as they’re marched in shows gallows in the background, just where the framing draws the eye, with a man still hanging from a noose. We don’t see any executions happening at the camp but we’re sure incidentally shown that those also happen.
Love that moment of Wallace reading out “Bill Carson” and Angel Eyes turning around to reveal his face. We had no idea he’d be here, but the moment he shows up, it’s what we’ve been waiting for all this time, and then he goes on to deliver by being magnificently striking in the whole camp sequence. Angel Eyes is somewhat underused in the movie overall, in terms of screentime and development, but half of the bits he does feature in just go so hard.
Kind of insane that he’s a Union sergeant now; presumably he got promoted quickly for being amazingly competent, I guess (and I suppose once again it’s very hard to actually get a grasp on the timespans involved).
Tuco, again, clearly has a bit of ambiguous history with Angel Eyes, compared to how Blondie and Angel Eyes are only really indicated to know of each other. I kind of enjoy that the movie doesn’t get into exactly how any of these guys know each other at all and just leaves it up to implication and the viewer’s imagination.
Tuco doesn’t seem to have noticed and pointed out Angel Eyes until after he’s turned around, so they probably have no reason to think Angel Eyes knows anything about Bill Carson. So when Blondie then suggests Tuco be Bill Carson, I think what he’s thinking is that the guards are trying to identify who the prisoners are for purposes of arranging prisoner exchanges later, and that their best shot at getting out of here is to be identified as actual soldiers that might be exchanged – obviously the Confederacy is hardly going to actually choose to exchange prisoners for people who were not actually soldiers. Bill Carson is the one name they know that’s definitely not going to turn out to be somebody else present (and Tuco’s already wearing his eyepatch while Blondie could never pass for him if there were any kind of physical description involved), so Tuco had better pretend to be him, and Blondie will cross his fingers for a different name coming up on the manifest later that no one else responds to that he can assume.
The other possibility for what’s going on here, though, is that they do catch Angel Eyes reacting to Bill Carson specifically, and Blondie is gambling that Angel Eyes taking an interest could be a ticket out of here for both of them. That’s a very interesting possibility, but I can’t get it to make quite as much sense – surely, if Blondie knows anything about Angel Eyes, he would probably know that being somebody Angel Eyes is looking for is probably a bad thing, and if he and Tuco know each other, then Angel Eyes presumably knows Tuco is not actually the Bill Carson he’s looking for, so pretending to be Bill Carson doesn’t seem like a super productive idea in that case. I can still see it being the intended reading, though – notably, Blondie doesn’t actually suggest Tuco be Bill Carson until after Tuco points out Angel Eyes even though Wallace had read out the name several times, which is the main evidence in favor of this, but that could also just be due to taking a moment to think and evaluate.
Either way, we cut briefly to Angel Eyes smirking at Wallace punching Tuco in the stomach for not saying “Present.” Whatever sympathy he might have had for the soldiers back at the fort, it definitely does not extend to Tuco even a little bit. I think their ambiguous history might have something to do with that smirk.
On the other hand, he does then tell Wallace that that’s enough when he’s getting ready to beat on Tuco some more; probably he wants to save it for the actual interrogation. Angel Eyes enjoys violence but only really employs it in the service of his agenda, rather than pointlessly for the hell of it, as the plainly sadistic Wallace does.
(Blondie looks rankled at Wallace’s abusiveness, and smiles a little as Tuco fires back at him.)
Tuco sounding earnestly excited about Angel Eyes saying they should get “good treatment” is painful. Blondie is decidedly less excited about it, and when Tuco sees that his expression changes as well – enjoy him taking that cue from Blondie.
Angel Eyes justifies his treatment of the prisoners to the commandant first by saying there are too many prisoners and he needs to have respect and then by saying well, our men aren’t treated well at Andersonville camp. I doubt either of these things actually has much to do with it; really he’s probably torturing prisoners mostly because he wants info on Bill Carson and the treasure, and is obviously robbing them simply for monetary gain, but to his superiors he’ll coolly rationalize all this with something that sounds less self-serving. I went down a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole about Civil War prison camps, and it sounds like “Confederate prison camps keep prisoners in terrible conditions, so we should be equally cruel” was genuinely an argument used to push for abusive treatment of PoWs in the North.
The poor gangrenous Union commandant is such a good, decent guy, bless him – “I don’t give a God damn what they do in Andersonville.” Most genuinely moral person in the movie, probably. Unfortunately, though, although he is nominally in a position of power, he’s basically confined to his room, and all he can really do about the malicious takeover of the camp by Angel Eyes and his abusive cronies is giving him stern talks that he blithely ignores.
When he says the prisoners are not to be tortured or cheated or murdered, Angel Eyes just says, “That an accusation?” Obviously he’s been doing all that, but he knows the commandant can’t prove it. Technically he just takes prisoners into his cabin while the band plays some lovely music! Maybe the injuries they walk out with are because they just happened to have a fall.
“But as long as I’m the commandant I won’t permit any such trickery. Am I clear?” “Yes, sir. Just as long as you’re the commandant.” A lot of people seem to interpret this as Angel Eyes planning to kill him, but the way I read it is that he’s making an oblique reference to how the commandant is not really commanding anything at this point; Angel Eyes is already, for all intents and purposes, running things. He doesn’t need to kill him. I think that aligns with the fact we then see Angel Eyes just wish him luck on proving his abuses (God, he’s such a smug bastard), leave, and then tell his men to lay low for a few days – just don’t give the commandant the chance to find the evidence he’s hoping for, the gangrene will take him eventually anyway, and then probably Angel Eyes might get to officially take over after him, without all the potential complications of actually murdering him.
Angel Eyes truly marks his return to the story in style. Him being effectively in charge of the camp, and thus having absolute power over our now-imprisoned protagonists, while Tuco’s blissfully impersonating the very man Angel Eyes has been after, is just such a delicious, exhilarating development and creates an enormous amount of dread and tension for this whole sequence.

Tuco’s interrogation

Tuco’s clearly nervous being brought in to Angel Eyes’ cabin. Then Angel Eyes is being friendly, just offers him food – so he excitedly sits down and brings a spoonful to his mouth, only to stop, suddenly worried that it’s poisoned. So Angel Eyes spoons some off his plate and eats it himself, and Tuco smiles and laughs, going, “I knew it! I knew it!” We may never learn exactly in what capacity the two of them knew each other, but this progression tells a lot, delightfully: Tuco thinks Angel Eyes is somebody who might poison his food, but also goes “I knew it!” when he’s shown he didn’t, as if he’d never had any doubts. Odds are Tuco does have good reason to be distrustful of Angel Eyes, but once again he likes to live in his best world where people actually like him, so if Angel Eyes is acting friendly, and hasn’t poisoned his food, then sure, Tuco will act as if they are the best of friends and he trusted him completely all along. Enjoy this being established implicitly via Tuco’s reactions, without having to exposit anything.
The minute he saw him, he said to himself that Angel Eyes never forgets a friend! (He plainly did not say this to himself the minute he saw him.)
“It’s good to see old friends again. Especially when they’ve come from so far away and have so much to talk about. And you do have a lot to talk about, haven’t you?” I love the way Angel Eyes does these pre-interrogations, so surface-level friendly yet distinctly threatening. Tuco has a lot to talk about, doesn’t he? If he talks enough, Angel Eyes might even not torture him. (But he’d probably still send him to be executed. No reason not to claim that $3000 bounty!)
Tuco smiles and chuckles about how hard it was crossing the desert, especially with nothing to drink. It sure was a hard time for somebody but it wasn’t you, Tuco.
Tuco deflects the question about why he’s using the name Bill Carson into simply a general rule of not using your own name, which is funny when Tuco is the one main character here who does explicitly go by his actual legal name and also routinely refers to himself in third person.
Enjoy Angel Eyes clapping his back just a bit too hard, as the tiniest taste of what is to come. At this point Tuco’s definitely starting to have some creeping doubts about where this is going; we see his eyes flick to the side at it.
Tuco’s eyes also shift distinctly back and forth after saying music’s very good for the digestion. Definitely catching on that Angel Eyes is driving at something very different and trying to work out what, for all that he answers in a friendly and cheerful way. (Tuco started to question this a little bit when Angel Eyes asked why he’s using the name Bill Carson, then a bit more so at the back-clap, then this.)
Once again, once Tuco starts actively refusing to answer Angel Eyes’ questions, that’s when he casually shifts into torture-mode, stands up to signal for the music to start, and then offers him tobacco only to clamp down on his fingers. The very smooth shift, without much of a real change in demeanor, is part of what makes Angel Eyes so striking as a villain. What a memorably messed-up guy.
Tuco tries admirably to fight back against Wallace at the start, even with the disadvantage of being handcuffed to a chair the whole time. When Blondie was being tortured he was very calculated about quietly going along and taking it until he believed he had an opportunity; Tuco being tortured is so much messier, full of screaming and struggling, though as it goes on he becomes less able to fight back.
I love the buildup of this scene: the timing of the music swelling before Tuco’s first scream; the way you gather the music is to drown out the noise, but the distraught looks of the musicians gain new meaning when the old man tells Blondie how so many of them have had a session in there; the violin player on the verge of tears suddenly cutting out and looking away and being snapped at to continue; all intercut with the movie’s bloodiest scene. And, of course, the dissonance of the song they’re singing itself, which sounds almost like a lullaby (only if you actually read the mostly-unintelligible lyrics, it’s actually about war and all the pointless death involved: Loud roar the cannons till ruin remains / Blue grass and cotton burnt and forgotten / All hope seems gone, so soldier, march on to die; There in the distance a flag I can see / Scorched and in ribbons, but whose can it be? / How ends the story, whose is the glory? / Ask if we dare our comrades out there who sleep). This whole scene is so striking and so good; lots of movies have torture scenes, but the way the band is used makes this one so much more memorable.
(Blondie is silent as ever, but doesn’t seem super comfortable there lined up on the other side of the walls staring over towards the cabins, gathering Tuco is probably being tortured in there, that other prisoners already have been, that he might be next.)
Angel Eyes smiling and leaning in as Wallace puts his thumbs on Tuco’s eyes is such a touch of sadistic bastardry. (Interestingly, this footage is apparently not in the Italian version, and we instead cut back to Tuco there and actually watch him with Wallace’s thumbs on his eyes screaming that he’ll talk – it was reedited to be slightly less violent for the international market, and the Extended Cut kept the international theatrical version of this scene because the only available Italian prints had weird abrupt cuts in the music that presumably resulted from the original version of the scene there getting cut down post-music placement. I do always enjoy more torture, and it’s a shame they felt the need to censor it, but I think this shot of how much Angel Eyes is enjoying this is actually very good and effective.)
The two instances of Angel Eyes torturing people for information (first Maria and now Tuco) both end with them giving truthful information, though in neither case is it obviously a violation of the character’s deeply held principles or anything (we don’t really know much about Maria or her relationship with Bill, but as much as Tuco wants the money, he has every legitimate reason to be more invested in keeping his eyeballs). On the other hand, in order to facilitate this, Angel Eyes kind of just magically knows exactly when they’ve told all they know and their “I don’t know” has become genuine (we can see on his face that he can tell immediately that Tuco means it this time). In real life, torturers generally have no actual idea when their victims are lying even if they think they do, which is one of the several reasons torture is a terrible way to obtain information. But I suppose I will file this with other instances of Angel Eyes being implausibly competent to make him scarier.
Tuco keeps muttering Blondie’s name in a bit of a choked-up way after giving him up, which gives the sense that he feels a bit guilty at this point for condemning Blondie to what he assumes is the same fate – though he’s not going to show it later, of course, filing it away where he probably locks all other times he might have felt kind of bad for a thing.
All in all, what a good, brutal, memorable torture scene, A+. The whump as whump is one thing and not necessarily my favorite whump ever or anything (many of the strikes here don’t look super convincing, for instance), but as a scene it’s just such effective filmmaking, and the particular bloody brutality of it compared to all the sanitized gunshots we’ve had is such a stark and evocative contrast.

The war is over for you

I love the cut to Blondie being shoved in there just after Tuco has given him up (though alas, he will not be tortured this time), and then the bundle of clothes getting thrown at him from offscreen. The old prisoner told Blondie what goes on in the shack, so as he was sent in there he was fully expecting to be about to get beaten bloody for several minutes. Instead he's… being told to put on some clothes? Huh.
Blondie is amused when Angel Eyes announces he knows the name of the cemetery now and Blondie knows the name of the grave. Here we go again! I think initially he assumes maybe Tuco had just freely told him after all, looped him in on the treasure in exchange for letting them go. After all, Angel Eyes does not seem inclined to torture him at all, they couldn’t hear much of anything over the band, and it gets implied later that at some point Tuco told Blondie he and Angel Eyes were old friends, which Blondie obviously would not have put any stock in initially but might seem to check out now…
…But then, as he’s taken his hat off, getting ready to just shrug and comply, he eyes the blood on the floor, verifies with his foot that it’s still fresh. An uncomfortable confirmation that no, Tuco did not in fact just casually spill the beans.
He asks, “You’re not gonna give me the same treatment?”, because that seems genuinely odd. If Angel Eyes did get the cemetery out of Tuco by force, why isn’t he trying to get the grave out of Blondie? But he’s noticeably feeling a bit for Tuco and what he implicitly suffered here; the lingering on the blood on the floor and his expression are pretty telling.
Angel Eyes notes that he figured Blondie wouldn’t talk, not because he’s tougher than Tuco but because he’s smart enough to know that talking won’t save him. Very true – Blondie’s calculated enough to figure once he gives up the information he’s given up his only leverage, and by that point Angel Eyes would have zero reason to keep him alive anyway. Tuco, though, isn’t quite as stupid as Angel Eyes thinks – he does in fact end up both living and keeping his eyes, simply because talking when he did ultimately paid off by buying him time and opportunity to get free and kill Wallace later (though at the ostensible cost of giving up the money and probably getting Blondie tortured too, of course). Tuco couldn’t have known that was likely to work out for him, but while he’s there in agony and Wallace is threatening to put his eyes out, he’ll take that chance, play it by ear and see what happens. That’s not really how Blondie operates: he figures the information is the one thing what makes him valuable and if he wants to survive he needs to safeguard it at absolutely any cost. Angel Eyes understands that, and so he doesn’t bother with trying to beat it out of him and just skips straight to the taking him along – once again, his violence is in the service of his agenda, so if it wouldn’t accomplish anything, why try?
(Of course, Blondie being smart enough to know talking won’t save him is also why Blondie’s smart enough not to lead them to the correct grave later. Foreshadowing!)
Blondie asks if Tuco’s dead, hesitant, stopping before the last word. Perhaps this is the moment he realizes he actually hopes he’s not.
Angel Eyes is in friendly mode with Blondie. It’ll be easier with two of them! Even gives him back his gun – Angel Eyes presumably figures he’s not in danger from Blondie because, with Tuco gone, Blondie needs Angel Eyes to get the money, and obviously he wouldn’t just squander that opportunity for no reason, right? Even so, when Blondie unholsters his gun, Angel Eyes slows down as he’s putting on his jacket, watching him, probably prepared to react if Blondie were to point it anywhere unexpected.
But he doesn’t, of course. Blondie is always one to wait for the best possible chance; if he were to shoot Angel Eyes in the middle of the prison camp he runs, it’d just alert the guards and get him killed. And of course, usually he wouldn’t do it until such a time as Angel Eyes is getting ready to shoot him.
(Angel Eyes insists he’s not greedy and only taking half, as an incentive for Blondie to actually come along and guide him to the correct grave, but once they do get to the grave, he of course just pulls a gun on Blondie – he never actually intended to keep that promise.)
When someone at the train station (another injured soldier, missing an arm) asks where Wallace is taking Tuco, and Wallace says to Hell with a rope around his neck and a price on his head, Tuco adds, “Yeah. $3000, friend! That’s a lot of money for a head. I bet they didn’t even pay you a penny for your arm.” It’s extremely Tuco that as he’s being taken to be hanged, with no Blondie to shoot him down, he’s choosing to live in the world where this just makes him impressive and important.
Man, Wallace is so pointlessly violent with Tuco even when he’s not even being ordered to torture him specifically. Very understandable how much utter loathing Tuco has for him in particular.
Wallace calls Tuco lucky compared to the Confederate spy who has been tied to the front of a train, because at least he’s going to go relatively quickly. Jeez. Striking background elements.
Wallace also makes a quip about how there isn’t any partner this time to shoot Tuco down – he must’ve heard about the con he ran with Blondie from Angel Eyes, who witnessed them doing it together that one time during the second hanging.
All in all, we’ve just had yet another shift in the situation! Angel Eyes is now taking Blondie along with him towards the cemetery, while Tuco has been sent off to be executed. We’ve still got two guys who each know half of the secret – but at this point, we’re all rooting for Tuco to escape, aren’t we. We’ve also got some very important signals here about Blondie’s growing empathy for Tuco: the lingering look at the blood on the floor, how he hesitates asking if Tuco’s dead. One way or another, he’s grown to care for the guy, in spite of everything.

The perfect number

Blondie sleeps with his hand by his pistol, of course he does.
We see his eyes flick open briefly at the sound of footsteps, then he closes them again, and then a few seconds later after the camera has panned back to his hand, when the footsteps have already gone quiet, he suddenly grabs the gun and shoots. This suggests he wakes up at the noise but only decides to fire a bit later, after pretending he’s still asleep for a bit. Initially I took it he’d just shot basically on reflex after hearing something in his sleep and then put together that it’s someone Angel Eyes instructed to follow them, but on a closer look it doesn’t actually look like that’s what’s going on. Instead, presumably Angel Eyes had told his guys to stay hidden, and this guy only stepped out into the open because Blondie was asleep – only Blondie is a light sleeper, noticed, took a moment to think, and then decided to go for it.
I think his thought process must be essentially this: first he deduces this guy must be working for Angel Eyes – either recognizing him from Batterville or just noting that he seems totally unsurprised to see him and Angel Eyes sleeping there. And while traveling to the cemetery along with one guy gives Blondie a pretty good chance of making it out of this alive, Angel Eyes having hidden cronies following them in the shadows is plainly designed to stack the deck hopelessly against him. Blondie is never going to survive this if there’s going to be a hidden assassin or more lying in wait (obviously he’s not buying that Angel Eyes is doing this just to fairly split the gold with Blondie and then let him go). So he makes a snap judgement to take down at least this one and call Angel Eyes out, knowing once again that because he knows the grave he’s too valuable to kill right now.
(This is definitely the most unprompted murder Blondie does in the movie, though – this guy definitely wasn’t drawing his gun, just existing as a future threat to Blondie. RIP.)
Either way, “If your friends stay out in the damp, they’re liable to catch a cold, aren’t they? …Or a bullet,” is a fun one-liner. Blondie shooting them is just something unfortunate that might happen, the way catching a cold happens. (But really, he’s warning Angel Eyes that he’s on to him with the hidden assassins and he will shoot if he catches any more sneaking around.)
Angel Eyes just looks amused and impressed that Blondie just killed one of his men. Normal reactions that normal people have.
Presumably Angel Eyes tells his men to come out because Blondie just threatened to kill them if they stay hidden, hoping to pacify him. But Blondie still has his leverage, so he just as good as announces airily that he’s still planning to kill them all. Angel Eyes may laugh, and be willing to call his bluff as far as his own self is concerned due to the Blondie also can’t get the money without him thing, but his poor lackeys must be sweating – Blondie is running around with a gun, he’s just promised to kill them all, and Angel Eyes almost certainly wants the money, and thus Blondie alive, more than he cares about the lives of any of them.
I guess the lackeys aren’t too keen on their prospects if they were to attempt to disarm Blondie right now, and if anyone actually dared to shoot him before Angel Eyes’ say-so, they could expect his wrath. It’s sort of surprising none of them attempt to just get the hell out of there at this point, though – everyone just shrugging after this while Blondie is there with his gun and a designated bullet for each of them sure is something.
Blondie may in fact have been going for trying to scare off the lackeys. He does not actually think he has much of a chance alone against six men – hence why he doesn’t in fact make a move until he manages to team back up with Tuco later.
He does also say, “Since we’re all going in the same direction, might as well go together,” which vaguely suggests he’s not planning to murder them all right now or anything – which gives them a bit of time to desert Angel Eyes, if they’re going to.
Sometimes the phrasing of lines in the English dub is kind of funny or off, and I just write it off because it’s a live-action dub trying its best to vaguely match the lip flaps (sometimes pretty successfully, sometimes a lot less so). But Blondie explicitly spelling out that six is the perfect number because it’s the number of bullets in his gun is one instance where I feel like the writing itself is legitimately just kind of clunky in a distracting way. The line about six being the perfect number is good and fun, if the audience is trusted to infer what he means; the spelling-out is unnecessary and exacerbates the sense that Angel Eyes and his men are kind of idiot balling here (you mean to tell me that Angel Eyes, the picture of hypercompetence and master of threatening insinuations, heard him go, “Six. Perfect number :)))”, just after shooting one guy and then reloading his revolver with another bullet, and couldn’t tell what he meant?).
(Also, why does Blondie say he has six more bullets in his gun. That would imply it’s six in addition to the one he’s just fired, but no, the one he fired left him with five and that’s why he just had to replace that one. Surely the sensible line would be to just say he has six bullets in his gun, no more.)
Incidentally, six really is what is called a perfect number in mathematics (it equals the sum of its integer divisors). Obviously this is not what either Blondie or Angel Eyes is talking about. It might have made at least somewhat more sense if Angel Eyes had said something about the actual concept called a perfect number of which six is genuinely an example (it would still be implying Angel Eyes is somehow enough of a nerd about math, and thinks Blondie is enough of a nerd about math, to think of that first, but at least it would be an explanation for him taking it to be anything other than a reference to the number of bullets in a revolver), but no, saying three is the perfect number rules out that Angel Eyes knows about perfect numbers, because three is not a perfect number. Terrible.
All in all, “Isn’t three the perfect number?” “Yeah. But I got six more bullets in my gun,” is definitively by far the worst bit of dialogue in this movie on several different levels, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
This one’s another Italian/Extended Cut scene, and while it has a couple of fun lines, and fun implications about Blondie’s normal paranoid existence, I think it kind of raises more questions than it answers. I suppose the reason it’s there originally is that without it, Angel Eyes explicitly says to Blondie that there’s going to be two of them at Batterville only to have five additional guys there next time we see them with no comment; we can pretty easily infer that these are the same crooks he was working with for the smuggling operation at the camp either way (that bit isn’t even mentioned in this scene anyway!), but the explicit presentation of it initially as a two-person operation becomes a little strange if a bunch more people then appear for it with no explanation at all. That’s a valid concern, I suppose, but meanwhile this scene has that straight-up bad bit of dialogue, and while its implications for the metaphorical chess match between Blondie and Angel Eyes and his men are interesting (I kind of enjoy how confidently both Blondie and Angel Eyes call each other’s bluffs here), they’re a little nuts, and the movie is probably more coherent if we skip this scene and are left to assume Blondie’s simply biding his time and Angel Eyes and his men fully assumed he was willingly cooperating and on board with accompanying them all to the cemetery, even if Blondie’s initial reaction to Angel Eyes going, “Oh, by the way, these five guys are coming along too,” somewhere offscreen is left to the imagination.

Tuco escapes

This is another bit of Tuco being very resourceful and thinking on his feet. Originally he was trying to reach for the gun in Wallace’s holster, but when Wallace catches him he immediately comes up with wanting to take a leak. Gun doesn’t work to shoot the chain? Try using it as a hammer, and then a different rock, and then try using a train as a bolt cutter, and then jump onto the train while he’s at it.
Wallace already looks unconscious by the time they’ve rolled down the hill away from the train – Tuco’s just making sure he’s very, very dead. The smashing his head into a visibly pointed rock several times is very brutal and also kind of drives home all that Wallace has done to him, which is clearly fueling Tuco in his fervor here.
I enjoy that Tuco briefly looks at the blood on his hand after doing it and then just dries it in the sand. I wonder if he’s killed anyone quite so directly with his own two hands before. Either way, though, he is not one to linger on it.
“You made a lot of noise, my friend, huh?” he says, calling back to his little seething remark from the first scene where Wallace beat on him about liking how big, fat men like him make more noise when they fall and sometimes they never stand up – another little bit tying it more directly back to Wallace’s abuse.
I enjoy how Tuco is tangibly pretty scared to be up there so close to the moving train, but he sure is still doing it.
Most brutal fate in this movie is definitely Wallace. Pulled out of a moving train, head bashed several times into a pointy rock, then laid down on a train track where he gets dragged along the track for a bit. Eeesh. Certainly a very conscious choice that he’s the most violently sadistic character here; Angel Eyes, again, may be an evil bastard, but all of his violence is serving some purpose for him, whereas Wallace has constantly been pointlessly violent just to be cruel.

The ghost town

This movie being very striking even in an incidental scene: the guy made to carry his own coffin to his execution. His crime is explicitly, according to the sign he’s also been made to carry, just that he’s a thief. What a horrid, awful little background event.
(In this movie, there are six different scenes involving executions or something resembling them in some form, legal or extrajudicial: Tuco’s two hangings, Tuco trying to hang Blondie, Shorty’s hanging, this guy being executed by firing squad, and Blondie hanging Tuco at the end. In addition to all this, there’s how Tuco is going to be hanged when he escapes, and then there’s the background gallows at the prison camp. As someone with a thing for executions in fiction, I am truly, shamelessly feasting here. There are many, many other reasons I enjoy this movie, 30k+ words’ worth as I am currently demonstrating, but “several hangings and a firing squad” definitely does not hurt.)
Tuco has new clothes here, so clearly we’ve had some time in between where he managed to get new ones – he didn’t just step off that train he caught or anything. Very reasonably, I assume he ditched the Confederate uniform as soon as possible after what that got them into.
Man, this town really is shot to hell and back. Very tangible sense of how the war has just utterly destroyed it. And yet, once again it’s not the main characters’ biggest concern, really. It’s just a place they’re passing through.
Tuco, choosing to just casually use someone else’s abandoned bathwater and pour the entire contents of several jars of different bath salts into it. Likewise with the multiple times he licks soap. What a madman.
I love that the purpose of the one-armed bounty hunter is just to be somebody for Tuco to shoot in this town so that Blondie can recognize the sound of his gun and come find him. That’s literally all this means for the plot, but they just make a hilarious little sequence and continuity gag out of it, with Tuco being his delightful self with the “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk!” line, and that’s an iconic choice.
(Tuco, as ever, applies pretty different standards to himself – he sure could’ve just shot Blondie on multiple occasions if he really wanted to, but first wanted elaborate revenge, then hesitated, took the time to say goodbye, and then ultimately got interupted. But it’s all very personal with Blondie. Random bounty hunter #3? He’s just shooting. Bet it was very personal on random bounty hunter #3’s end too, though.)
Likewise, Blondie has befriended a tiny stray kitten, who probably just happened to wander into his hat, and calls the kitten 'large one’. It’s adorable, and instantly makes Blondie 500% more charming, and also its actual purpose is that there is no way Blondie would explain out loud for the benefit of the audience here why he’s standing up to find Tuco unless he had someone to say it to who isn’t Angel Eyes’ men. Solution? He says it to a random kitten who’s there now. A completely shameless approach that totally serves its purpose and adds to the characterization in the process: like Tuco’s religiosity, it doesn’t mean anything for the plot per se that Blondie is somebody who would see a stray kitten climbing into his hat, gently lift it and pet the kitten and address it by a cute ironic moniker and tell it what he’s thinking, but it just adds a little bit of charming extra dimension to him. (And it reinforces the capacity for empathy that he has but has been very quiet about showing so far.)
(Incidentally, even though he was genuinely speaking English on set, you can tell Clint Eastwood’s lips aren’t totally in sync here, and I gather the Italian line here is just something closer to, “Every gun makes its own sound, and I recognize that one.” Is “large one” a product of Mickey Knox doing a rewrite but trying to match it to the lip flaps of a line that originally ended in “that one”? If so, truly the best dubbing choice of all time. The kitten is already adorable, but Blondie calling them large one, my heart.)
That’s not to say they couldn’t possibly have conveyed that point in a different way, mind. We could see Blondie look up silently and walk away and then tell Tuco when he shows up that he followed the sound of his gun (definitely wouldn’t be unreasonable or out of character for Tuco to ask about that). It would have been a little awkward, though, since the actual trigger for him silently getting up would have been taking place a little before the cut to him doing so (and we can’t cut straight after the gunshots, because then we would lose “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk!”, which we definitely cannot). Instead, kitten. Excellent.
(On the other hand, I am very sad for this stray kitten wandering around a ghost town as all the people are leaving. Noooooo please tell me Large One is okay)
(If Tuco has the same gun as before, that must mean Wallace had and was carrying Tuco’s gun, and then he took it with him before catching the train, after initially throwing it away in frustration? I don’t know guns well enough to tell if it’s genuinely all the same gun.)
Angel Eyes sending only one guy after Blondie really makes considerably less sense with Blondie having explicitly threatened to kill all of them in the perfect number scene, doesn’t it. Without that scene, it checks out that Angel Eyes wants to keep an eye on Blondie but doesn’t immediately have any particular reason to think he’s about to betray them or liable to attack anyone; with it, it’s a wonder Clem doesn’t protest.
RIP Clem. Blondie may jump him when he turns a corner, but even he has his hand on his gun before Blondie actually shoots him, though he freezes and stops drawing it before Blondie actually shoots. (Would he have even gone on to actually shoot Blondie if he’d gotten the chance? Well, Angel Eyes still wants him alive… but perhaps Clem might have tried to shoot him somewhere debilitating but not fatal, which is a thing that generally never happens onscreen in this movie but is clearly something that hypothetically can happen, what with all the injured soldiers with lost limbs.)
Things were once again looking pretty bleak for Blondie here. It was always extremely unlikely he could take out six men on his own, even if he did threaten to do so. He could create an opportunity with Clem, because Angel Eyes sent one guy after him, but it’s doubtful he’d ever have been able to pull that more than once; all in all, all roads seem to lead to inescapably getting killed at the cemetery while outnumbered. But then he recognizes Tuco’s gun. And if there were two of them, maybe they would have a chance at whittling down Angel Eyes’ men. Regardless of anything else, he can easily assume that Tuco will agree to join him: that gets Tuco back in the race for the money.
So why was hearing Tuco’s gun perfect timing, anyway? I’m enjoying the thought that Blondie was actually starting to consider attempting something foolish on his own by the time those shots rang out. If what I think I read about the Italian line is accurate, perfect timing is an English dub only thing, but it does create some fun potential implications.

Reunion

Love Tuco playing with the bubbles in the bath; what a ridiculous lovable problem man. Sometimes he’s not only naïve but outright childlike.
“Just give me a little time to get dressed and I’ll open up!” says Tuco, presumably assuming it’s more people here to kill him and hoping he can get the jump on them if they think he’s oblivious and are expecting to wait. Instead, it’s Blondie on the other side of the room, pointing a gun at him, having distracted Tuco with the front door while coming in from the back – much like Tuco did to him back at the inn. Parallels!
Blondie opens by telling him to put his drawers on and take his gun off. Instead, Tuco takes his gun off but then gets distracted by wait, how is he here, so he just stands there stark naked for this whole bit and Blondie just takes it in stride without comment. Amazing.
Presumably, Tuco’s assumption here was that after Wallace took him away from Batterville, Angel Eyes would have had Blondie tortured as well, and then either killed him too or just kept him locked up. (Naturally, though he seemed to be feeling a bit of guilt about giving up Blondie in the wake of the torture, by now he has suppressed any sense of guilt or regret for this.) Blondie instead being seemingly alive and unscathed and out of there is suspicious.
Blondie says he’s here with “your old friend, Angel Eyes”. We didn’t actually see Tuco talk to Blondie about Angel Eyes on-screen, only “Hey, Blondie, isn’t that Angel Eyes?”, but it tracks that Tuco would have told him they were old friends, because of course he did because they were definitely friends, and of course Blondie makes a little ironic jab at it now, after Angel Eyes cold-bloodedly had Tuco tortured.
Tuco sounds legitimately angry at the thought that Blondie talked, despite that he himself talked, and gave up Blondie specifically. Very Tuco moment. As ever, he just applies very different standards to himself, who will just do whatever he needs to do, than to others. And I think he legitimately hadn’t expected Blondie to talk. How dare he give Angel Eyes the secret when he wouldn’t give it to him?!
Blondie could so easily make at least a bit of a jab at the fact Tuco not only talked but obviously gave up Blondie specifically, too. But instead he chooses to completely ignore that bit and just say nah, he didn’t talk, and I love that. Blondie does not want to get on his case for whatever he said under torture, and the blatant hypocrisy is just Tuco being Tuco, something that he understands and expects and tunes out by now.
Tuco is so happy when he realizes Blondie is the only one who knows his half of the secret and he’s choosing Tuco, and it kind of breaks my heart. In his naïve way, he just figures Blondie wanted to find the treasure with him rather than Angel Eyes, and he’s just over the moon about it – Blondie likes him! Actually went out of his way to come find him!
I love “I get dressed, I kill him, be right back.” Obviously if Blondie came here with Angel Eyes and then ditched him and came to Tuco instead, Angel Eyes has got to be seeing red and looking for Blondie right now, and he’s a loose end generally, and in Tuco’s elation about being Blondie’s preferred partner, going out and casually killing Angel Eyes just seems like a simple no-big-deal task! He’ll be right back!
When Blondie says there’s five of them, Tuco’s face falls, because oh, that’s not quite a simple no-big-deal task even in his current state of inflated confidence. And then, when Blondie confirms… his eyes narrow a bit. “So that’s why you came to Tuco.” In other words, not because he just likes Tuco better and wants to share the treasure with him instead, but because if Blondie tells them or shows them the correct grave, he is absolutely 100% dead if he’s up against five guys. It’s a practical calculus after all, when Tuco so plainly wanted it to be because Blondie just likes him better.
But then he just goes, “It doesn’t matter! I’ll kill them all!” He’s going to prove his worth to Blondie, by singlehandedly killing those five dudes, and thus render himself irreplaceable again. He can totally do that. Definitely.
This may be one of my favorite scenes? I love Tuco playing in the bath, Blondie sneaking up on him in the same way as Tuco snuck up on him at the inn, the way Tuco starts at the sound of his gun cocking, the delightful comic energy of Tuco forgetting that he’s still standing there naked for this whole conversation, Blondie quietly choosing to let “You traitor, you talked!” go, Tuco’s emotional progression and Eli Wallach just being an absolute joy in his portrayal of him as usual. It’s so revealing how thrilled Tuco is about thinking Blondie would just rather find the treasure with him and how he shifts when he realizes that’s not actually why – but Blondie genuinely does kind of like this ridiculous man in spite of himself, even though there are cold, practical reasons behind why teaming up with Tuco again is his best bet. I love this complicated, messed-up, utterly fascinating character dynamic and how we’re still adding more delightful layers to it two thirds in.

Two against five

Angel Eyes is still maintaining he wants Blondie alive to his men, but they’re free to kill Tuco.
Blondie lets Tuco go out there, determined to do this on his own, before actually joining him. When Tuco notices him, he’s watching him there and just smiling, marveling at this guy. Tuco really is fully planning to just go and singlehandedly confront Angel Eyes and four other men. Plainly something Blondie himself would have been too methodical and careful to even attempt under most any circumstances (which is indeed why he came to Tuco), and yet Tuco’s just unquestioningly doing it, choosing to live in the world where this isn’t almost certainly going to get him killed.
“Were you gonna die alone?” is just cute. Blondie really wasn’t expecting him to go do it alone – the whole point was they’d have a chance if it was the two of them together. It’s pretty likely that they’ll die anyway, but they really do have the best shot working in tandem.
I enjoy how you can see how it takes a moment for Tuco to even parse what he means, but then comes that cautious bit of a smile and the theme music kicks in, and awww yeah! Look at them, working together!
Tuco gets the first guy before Blondie notices him, and Blondie gives him this slightly impressed look, and Tuco crosses himself because of course he does and then moves on, and we see Blondie smile a little bit at that too before they continue. Just Tuco things. Blondie’s missed him a bit, hasn’t he.
I can’t believe the two guys who are behind them with a pretty clear line of sight but don’t shoot, and then a rogue cannonball kicks up dust so they can’t see and then Blondie and Tuco take them out in succession by drawing their attention and then shooting. I guess they were too distracted hearing the cannonball falling by the time the camera made them fully visible.
Tuco’s little wink after that one is a delight. He’s just having fun.
In terms of the actual action, this sequence isn’t that interesting – Angel Eyes’ men are not really characters and don’t feel very competent or threatening at all, there’s never a real sense that Blondie and Tuco are in serious danger, they barely even actually get shot at, and every time they shoot they just instantly kill the other guy, with not much real tension about it. But really it’s a sequence about Blondie and Tuco genuinely working well together. First Tuco kills one Blondie didn’t notice, then they each get one in a coordinated effort, then Blondie gets one Tuco didn’t notice. They make equal contributions, compensating for each other’s weaknesses, and it all works out smoothly, where they cover each other and enhance each other’s skills rather than getting in one another’s way.
Tuco says Angel Eyes is his and Blondie just says, “All right,” a little sign of respect. Angel Eyes did have Tuco tortured, so it seems only right. (Later, though, when it really matters, he will absolutely not leave Angel Eyes to Tuco – too careful.)
Love Tuco stumbling over reading the word “idiots”. He grew up in poverty and probably had zero formal education; he’s obviously learned the alphabet and can theoretically read, but for anything but the most common words it clearly takes him a bit of trying to sound things out. Another character trait that’s not necessary for anything but it’s just fun and adds even more flavor and texture to him, like his religiosity.
Blondie reading it for him and then going “It’s for you” and handing it to him is a great gag and also reads fully as good-natured ribbing at this point and it’s great – Tuco doesn’t even react to him making that joke, just tears up the piece of paper.
(On the other hand, the Doylist reason he doesn’t react is that, as Christopher Frayling’s commentary points out, you can tell from Clint Eastwood’s lips that on set he said, “It’s for us.” Again, I love “It’s for you”; it’s definitely a funnier line, and the comic timing with Blondie handing Tuco the paper is perfect, and the sense of friendly ribbing is great. But what I do enjoy about “It’s for us” is that it calls back to the other time Blondie called the two of them collectively idiots, namely, “God’s not on our side, 'cause he hates idiots also,” and I really do enjoy Blondie calling them both idiots as a pair being not just a somewhat ambiguous one-off thing but a habit. I will take on board the fun implications about his character while considering “It’s for you” canon.)
One sequence and the movie has successfully sold us on Blondie and Tuco collaborating in a perfectly genuine way. In the desert, we had this delightful moment where these two guys who hate each other are going to have to set it aside and work together anyway; by now, an hour later, I was sincerely rooting for them to both make it out of this alive and actually split the treasure together, and that’s a marvel after how the entire first half of this movie went. It’s just an all-around delight and their dynamic is so much fun. I love them.

The bridge

Blondie and Tuco are on horseback again; I’m guessing they took some of the horses Angel Eyes’ men had when they rode into town. It’s not totally clear why they get off the horses when they do, though; one would think it ought to be because the Union encampment is right there, but they specifically act like they have no idea that’s there because of the they-can’t-see-what’s-offscreen rule.
Blondie still keeps very casually asking Tuco about the cemetery as if to catch him slipping.
When Blondie wants to wait for nightfall, Tuco goes “Trust in me, Blondie!” and Blondie gives him a subtle side-eye that’s very funny. (Tuco’s acting like he knows exactly where they’re headed, of course, despite the encampment that he’s about to walk them into that he mysteriously can’t see.)
Blondie gives Tuco another look as they get ambushed and their guns taken away. Told you we should’ve waited for nightfall, goddamn it.
And here’s where we get the war proper coming into focus! We had the prison camp, but that’s a prison, soldiers but not active warfare. Here we’re finally seeing active soldiers prepared for battle, and it is about to be hammered in how brutally depressing this is in so many different ways. This sequence really caught me off guard first time watching; even though the war’s been omnipresent in the background, I was not anticipating how starkly this was about to turn into an anti-war movie.
When asked where they’re from, Blondie says, “Illinois,” which is probably just a spin the mental wheel, name the first Northern state that comes to mind, although of course Blondie’s background is a blank slate so who knows. Tuco goes with, “I… I’m with him,” which I find very funny – he’s Mexican, couldn’t really hide that if he tried (even if he could, I wouldn’t be surprised if Tuco couldn’t confidently name a random Northern state), but he just happens to be attached at the hip to this guy from Illinois and want to enlist in the Union army with him, sure.
Tuco blurting out that they want to enlist and saluting is very in line with his general tendency to just decide he’s totally on the side of whoever it would currently be useful to be friendly with and see what happens. Blondie gives him another look, understandably – we had this whole bit earlier where he was concerned about getting caught up in the war, and now, after escaping a PoW camp by a sheer stroke of fortune, Tuco’s getting them literally enlisted in the army just because it’s the first reason to be there that pops into his head. (Of course, Tuco’s probably planning to just desert anyway; he is he of making big commitments and then breaking them.)
The captain grins as he tells a soldier to go write his will because he might die today, and the guy just goes, “Yes, sir,” which implies this is basically a normal thing for him to say at this point. God. What a sad picture of the state of affairs (and of how the captain is not exactly doing a great job of keeping spirits up).
Tuco completely sincerely buys the idea that he’ll make colonel in the Union army just by drinking enough. I love him. (Meanwhile, Blondie is apparently not much of a drinker at all; he takes a small sip and that’s it.)
I enjoy the way the captain says “Volunteers.” The idea that anyone would volunteer for this is just depressing to him. But then he just grins and gestures for them to follow. Sure, let’s show them what they’ve volunteered for!
There’s a little bit here that was cut in the International Cut: the captain spells out a bit more that whoever has more liquor to get the soldiers drunk is the winner, that the only thing they have in common with the guys on the other side is that they all reek of alcohol, and then he asks Blondie and Tuco’s names and they go, “Uhhh,” until he laughs and says names don’t matter. We can definitely get the idea about the alcohol just fine without this bit, and it feels a little funny/surprising that Blondie and Tuco are at a loss when asked for their names, given Tuco already has “Bill Carson” as a handy fake name and Blondie already earlier in this same scene came up with a state off the top of his head on the fly without trouble. (To be fair, giving a fake name sure ended badly back at Batterville, so maybe they have some sense that giving the wrong name could cause problems.) What this bit does add, though, is the specific suggestion that the soldiers on the other side reek of alcohol too, and that the captain has noticed that; he knows the men they’re going off to slaughter every day are just as scared and traumatized and also get their fighting spirit from liquor (he has this great despairing expression on his face at All of us reek of alcohol), and that does add another layer to the sense of how awful this all is. While he says that’s the only thing they have in common, really it suggests they’re all a lot more alike.
Either way, I enjoy the captain a lot generally. He’s in pretty much the most war-is-hell possible situation – going out with the men under his command twice a day to die completely pointlessly over a bridge that’s been arbitrarily designated as important but is plainly just going to remain contested until they’re all dead. He deals with this, extremely healthily, by just keeping himself and the troops drunk enough to stop caring, all the while fantasizing wildly about just blowing up the bridge so they can stop all this and his men can stop dying – he’s got a full-on plan for how and everything. But he knows it’d be treason if he did, and at least in his already-hopeless state he doesn’t have the courage to go ahead and do it anyway even though he wants to, so drowning it all in booze it is, while uncomfortably aware that the men they’re killing on the other side are in exactly the same situation. I love this poor, scared, despairing man and his terrible, terrible coping mechanisms.
(Obviously, this situation is constructed specifically as the cruelest, most senseless possible distillation of war. The film makes reference to some genuine historical events – Sibley and Canby were real people – but for this sequence it is not interested in historical accuracy or any specifics of the Civil War at all, just the pure, abstract concept of sending a mass of human beings to maim and murder one another in the interest of advancing arbitrary strategic goals set by distant, faceless higher-ups.)
Blondie immediately asks why he doesn’t just blow up that bridge, once the captain’s explained the situation and that he’d like to blow it up; he sees the cruel pointlessness of it all, without the fear of going against orders and committing treason that’s holding back the captain. Tuco seems initially confused at Blondie’s suggestion but follows with, “Yeah, Captain, it’s nothing. Let’s scare the hell out of them!” – he clearly isn’t really seeing it in terms of breaking this awful, fatal stalemate these men are in, but goes along with Blondie’s suggestion more on the basis that sure, it might be a neat way to scare the Confederates.
Enjoy the explosions that go off as they’re talking and Blondie and Tuco flinching and ducking towards a wall while the captain just sort of briefly blinks and looks over there; he’s so used to this that it doesn’t even faze him anymore. The daily slaughter, right on time. Again, something that just really shows how normalized all this horror has become.
The captain grins up at the two of them as they watch from above and then turns back to call for the companies to report with this awful wince before going to his death. This man, coping.
Blondie shaking his head the tiniest bit and just straight-up saying he’s never seen so many men wasted so badly is such an oddly effective culmination of this extremely quiet, soft buildup of him taking notice of the suffering of the war – first the men that lay dying near the monastery, then the prisoners who are tortured at the camp, then this whole sequence learning about what’s going on here and asking why the captain doesn’t just actually blow up the bridge, then this. It’s all so understated, but the fact it’s getting to him enough to just bring it up, out loud, by itself, not in the service of any other point, is kind of monumental for such a quiet guy. I think it was Christopher Frayling’s commentary that mentioned people cheered hard at this line at the cinema back in 1967, in the middle of the Vietnam War.
When Tuco tells him the money’s on the other side and Blondie asks where again, and Tuco chuckles and says it’s on the other side and that’s enough, this has become basically a banter routine, none of the real suspicion and guarded hostility of the earliest times he asked. A fun evolution to follow.
Tuco says they can’t get across while those Confederates are there, and Blondie asks what if somebody were to blow up that bridge. That would be a way to let them to get across, sure – but Blondie already suggested blowing up the bridge earlier before Tuco had ever even indicated that getting across would be a problem for them, so it’s pretty plain that that’s not really why Blondie’s thinking about doing it. After listening to the captain explain what’s happening here, after seeing all these men fighting and falling and dying and knowing this is happening and will continue to happen twice a day for no purpose at all until they’re all dead, he already wants to grant the captain’s wish and blow up the bridge so that they can stop all this, and getting across the river in the process is a nice bonus.
As Blondie says that, he takes a match out of his pocket and lifts his fist up to light it. In response, Tuco grabs his wrist and sort of pulls it down and goes, “Yeah! Then these idiots will go somewhere else to fight!” – what he’s figuring will happen is the battle will just move somewhere else and these soldiers will continue to fight there, and Tuco’s perfectly content with that view on it, because he’s not one of those guys. At which Blondie pauses and says, “Maybe,” striking the match in that lower position and then looking down to light his cigar as Tuco lets go of him. He wants blowing up the bridge to actually do some good here, and Tuco’s just obliviously rained on his parade a bit with this cynical but probably true point that the soldiers will likely end up just being sent to fight elsewhere. Tuco probably doesn’t even pick up that Blondie had a nobler goal in mind when he suggested it. I enjoy the way that Blondie’s hand here sort of symbolizes his state of mind – first this high-minded idea that by blowing it up they’ll save these men, then Tuco drags him down with his oblivious cynicism and Blondie has to reluctantly concede that there’s a chance his act of heroism might be undermined by the ever-churning war machine. (But he’s still reluctant to concede it entirely – it’s a maybe.)
We have sure just taken a full-on dive into an anti-war parable, and I for one don’t mind in the slightest. After my first viewing, I felt like this had all been almost a funny little episodic tangent to make a side point, but really the war permeates this movie both before and after this, and this is just the bit that really highlights it in the foreground and brings out the thematic thesis of the film.
We’re also bringing into focus Blondie’s character development and why ultimately he gets to be the good: of the three main characters, he’s the one who sees senseless suffering going on and actually cares and wants to do something about it. Tuco is sympathetic, he’s lovable, I adore him, but empathizing with suffering strangers is something he’s long since had to suppress in order to get by as a bandit – and even if Angel Eyes did feel something on some level for the soldiers back at the Confederate fort, he was only there to get the information he wanted and thought nothing of abusing similar soldiers later when it served him. Blondie, though, just wants to help these men out of genuine empathy. He’s still a pretty morally questionable outlaw who kills more people onscreen than the other two combined, but he has enough of a conscience, at least at this point in the story, to be repulsed by this.
All in all, this is a movie about empathy and Blondie developing more of it in his quiet way, and empathy in the face of the senseless suffering of war specifically, and these are themes that speak to me.

Blowing it up

Convenient box of explosives, go! I enjoy Blondie taking the cigar out of his mouth and holding it further away once he sees the label on the box.
Really it’s amazing the captain hasn’t been mortally wounded before, if he was going out on the front lines twice a day. Perhaps he’d been lucky – or perhaps he was only relatively recently promoted to captain after whoever preceded him also died.
Blondie starts out trying to help by giving him more alcohol, but only tells him after a bit of a pause to keep his ears open with a wink, realizing the captain might not actually make it until the explosion but wanting him to at least be able to die knowing that it’s going to happen if so. I enjoy Blondie’s tiny little acts of caring in this last chunk of the movie; again, so understated but made a lot more meaningful coming from a guy who’s so quiet and unsentimental generally.
The worst thing Blondie and Tuco do in this movie is steal a stretcher carrying a wounded soldier. Jeez, guys, you could have at least just grabbed an empty stretcher. (I guess the stretcher is for passing as medics to the soldiers on the other side – though it’s a little silly that no one notices these two “medics” are carrying a big box prominently marked EXPLOSIVES on their stretcher.) Likewise, a little later they act like they’re picking up a guy and then just leave him when the actual medics stop looking – though at least that guy looks probably already dead.
The slow, mournful choir version of the theme that was cheerfully whistled when they entered the PoW camp plays as they make their way down to the bridge past so, so many dead bodies just lying around. Really drives home how oh, that war backdrop from an hour ago? Remember how ha ha, they got captured as prisoners of war after Tuco yelled pro-Confederate nonsense at the Union troops? Here’s the actual war, and it’s piles of bodies strewn along the ground in an endless cycle of pointless misery and death. There’s a humorous quality to the two of them there with the stretcher grabbing a dead soldier’s limbs and then letting them go when no one’s looking, keeping the overall tone from becoming too grim, but in a way, that just accentuates the gruesomeness of it all.
Tuco opens the talk at the bridge by saying they might be risking their lives, and Blondie preempts his thought process by saying, “Yeah, and if I get killed you’ll never get your hands on all that beautiful money,” immediately figuring that’s what’s on Tuco’s mind. Tuco reacts by stopping and turning his head with a “Huh?” – he thinks Blondie sounds like he’s leading up to telling him in order to prevent that outcome. But instead, Blondie just goes, “Yeah, Tuco. Sure would be a pity. :)” What a troll.
Tuco leaves his hat over the first bundle of dynamite he ties to the bridge – probably he meant to come back to retrieve it, but whoops, Blondie ends up lighting the fuse before he has the chance. RIP hat. The dollars trilogy keeps doing violence to hats.
The captain having the sense that he’s dying and asking the doctor to help him live a little longer just so he can actually hear the bridge explode first sure is grim, huh. I also enjoy the pained grunt he makes when the doctor changes the covering on his chest wound rather a lot. The way to my heart is dying depressed alcoholics making pain noises.
Also enjoy Blondie casually taking a coil of fuse that Tuco is carrying on his head. Working together!
Finally Tuco broaches the topic of sharing their respective secrets. Blondie deadpans, “Why don’t we?”; Tuco suggests he go first, Blondie says no, it’s better if Tuco starts. At this point I’m pretty sure Blondie assumes this is just a slightly altered flavor of the usual back-and-forth about where the cemetery is, that obviously neither of them is actually about to share his secret. He only turns his head when Tuco actually goes, “All right. The name of the cemetery is…”
Tuco is so hesitant about giving up his secret. A couple of times it looks like he’s about to lie, his lips clearly getting ready to say something entirely different – but in the end he does blurt out Sad Hill, trusting Blondie for real with the real name of the cemetery. Implicit in that choice is that he thinks, at this point, Blondie wouldn’t just kill or ditch him and go find the treasure on his own, even though now he could – and also that as much as he clearly considered it, he thinks lying to Blondie would not be worth it. Perhaps he thinks Blondie might be able to tell. Perhaps he just figures they’re probably going to be heading there together (the main reason they ultimately don’t is that Blondie stops to comfort a dying soldier just when there’s an irresistibly convenient horse right there), and then inevitably he would have to take them to the correct cemetery anyway, in which case all lying now would do is make Blondie trust him less.
Blondie also pauses. I expect he has a pretty strong hunch here that Tuco is in fact telling him the truth, unexpectedly, and he takes a moment to think about what to actually tell him, which he hadn’t had the chance to plan for because he didn’t think this would happen. Blondie’s calculating as ever, of course, simply working out how he can win and ensure his own survival at the end of all this. The fact he says anything at all shows that at this point, like Tuco, he does not think Tuco will simply murder him in his sleep in cold blood once he’s heard him say a name (a very real possibility at the start of this quest). But he’s still quite sure that if he tells the truth, then Tuco is very much liable to attempt to ditch him and get to the treasure first. And Blondie is certainly very conscious that Angel Eyes will probably show up at some unknown point as well, and by that point he would really like to still have leverage: if Tuco goes to the correct grave, and Angel Eyes arrives to find him there, he just shoots him and shoots Blondie too if he comes anywhere close. Blondie should tell Tuco something, though, and the only name he knows in that cemetery is Arch Stanton – and if he tells him Arch Stanton, then conveniently if Tuco ditches him he would probably find that particular grave for him, as a bonus.
Man, all the completely real debris raining down after that bridge explosion. Something hurtles hard into a sandbag like a meter away from Blondie (I do believe that’s a stunt double and not Clint Eastwood, though; some featurette talked about how he was adamant that he and Eli Wallach would be watching the explosion from wherever Sergio Leone himself was going to be watching it from and not one inch closer, having gotten to know the sometimes-questionable safety standards on Leone’s shoots). The stories of the making of this movie where Eli Wallach nearly died multiple times sound absolutely wild and kind of horrific.
(If you haven’t heard, they also had to blow up the bridge twice, because it got blown up by accident when no cameras were actually running.)
RIP captain. At least he looks pretty fulfilled in his final moments, with his one wish for no more of this particular hell finally coming true.
Of course both sides just go nuts firing at each other after the explosion, each thinking the other side blew up the bridge. So many more people must have died here. But maybe, hopefully, fewer than would have died in the endless cycle of skirmishes if it had stayed intact. Blondie at least hopes so.
The main narrative purpose of the bridge sequence for the plot per se is the bit where Blondie and Tuco share their secrets. Once again they’re working together, and doing it well and fluidly, and after all they’ve been through, Tuco struggles fiercely with it but nonetheless decides he genuinely trusts Blondie not to screw him over if he tells him the cemetery after all. After how hard he tried to torture and kill him in the first half of the movie after Blondie had betrayed him, the fact this happens and it completely tracks at this point is kind of amazing. This fascinating character dynamic never stops evolving in interesting ways.
We, the audience, know that Tuco’s telling the truth about Sad Hill. We don’t know if Blondie’s telling the truth about Arch Stanton, if he really trusts Tuco or not, which creates a fun sense of tension here. It turns out he did not trust him with the real grave (quite sensibly) – but he does trust that Tuco wouldn’t just kill him right now if he said a name, which also tracks perfectly. Tuco may be obsessed with money and liable to betray anyone when it suits him, but at this point, he wouldn’t jump at the chance to kill Blondie, and he knows it.

The aftermath

It is quite something that Blondie and Tuco just end up falling asleep in the open air in the middle of all that noise, and by the time they wake up the entire army is gone, and also Tuco was in this ridiculous pose the whole time. We are of course being somewhat misled here: it looks like they both just fell asleep right there, but in reality, Blondie stayed awake at least long enough to unload Tuco’s gun after Tuco’d fallen asleep. Tuco legitimately seems to have just fallen asleep like this, though.
With more time to think through what’s going to happen from here, Blondie has worked out that there’s a good chance of him, Tuco and Angel Eyes all winding up in the cemetery together, at the grave of Arch Stanton. He’ll still have the ace up his sleeve, the location where the money is really buried. He’ll be able to manipulate the situation into a standoff between the three of them. He’s probably pretty sure Tuco would join him in taking down Angel Eyes, in this situation. But he can’t fully trust that Tuco wouldn’t ultimately also try to shoot him, when the money is at stake, and trying to juggle watching out for both of them at the same time sounds pretty dicey. It’s safest by far if he just removes Tuco from the equation. Which he can, by quietly emptying his gun while he sleeps.
And probably a part of it is also that making sure Tuco can’t shoot him means that he won’t have to shoot Tuco. At this point, he doesn’t want to do that either.
(Noteworthy: Blondie could have easily gone on without Tuco here if he’d wanted to; he was both awake sometime in the night when Tuco was fast asleep enough to let him unload his gun, and then he wakes up ahead of him in the morning. But he didn’t; he fully intends to head to the cemetery with Tuco. There are many reasons for this, of course: trying to beat them to the gold is just needlessly risky; if he were to start digging at the correct grave he would have to worry about both Tuco and Angel Eyes catching up with him afterwards and he would have no leverage left and no reason for them not to just kill him; and all in all, he has a plan all laid out, and that plan involves getting both Tuco and Angel Eyes there at the wrong grave before he plays his trump card.)
I enjoy Blondie waking up Tuco by tipping him over with his foot and Tuco’s flailing start. What a pair.
When all the sound is added in post, a choice like the birdsong that they wake up to becomes very considered and symbolic, representing this fragile peace that’s descended over the area now that the armies are gone as nature takes its usual indifferent course after the horrors.
There are so many goddamn bodies. War is horrid. Both Blondie and Tuco look at the dead a bit as they walk onwards. Some of them are wearing extremely dusty Union uniforms, bringing back this funny gag from earlier in a more serious and somber way; the area’s not even that dusty, but here it becomes more of a symbolic thing, of how really, in death, these men all look the same.
Tuco looks inside the ruined chapel and just isn’t super interested, looks at Blondie whose gaze is lingering on the wounded soldier, and then walks towards the horse that happens to be tied nearby, probably already thinking about how if Blondie’s distracted, and he grabs the horse, then he can beat him to the cemetery and the grave, and then he can just get all the money, right…? (I think Tuco has sort of forgotten about Angel Eyes, as I think the viewer is probably also meant to; Blondie definitely has not.)
Meanwhile, Blondie goes to comfort a dying soldier, in whatever small way he can, the final escalation of his small acts of caring for the casualties of the war – there’s no additional motive for this one at all (and in fact it actively delays him in his goals), just a moment of pure, genuine sympathy for someone who’s suffering. The Blondie at the beginning of the movie would in all likelihood not have concerned himself with this at all; he just wanted to avoid the war and not get caught up in it. But as it is, over the course of the story he’s had to face his own mortality a few times, seen the suffering of the war over and over, been personally imprisoned in a PoW camp, and witnessed the endless senseless slaughter of the war machine from the midst of it, and at this point he can’t turn away and can’t help but just feel for this kid, on a basic human level.
Blondie hears the horse neighing (probably reacting to Tuco coming up to it) and looks away, causing him to miss the actual moment of the soldier’s death – I suspect Sergio Leone likes the idea of affording someone dignity by not having someone straight-up watch them die (which comes up in Once Upon a Time in the West as well), but here it’s portrayed as not a choice Blondie makes but as an accident that he feels kind of bad about if anything.
I like how Blondie’s about to take his jacket again but then changes his mind, just pats the dead soldier and picks up the nearby poncho instead. The soldier’s dead and will never know the difference, but he just can’t bring himself to take this back from him. (Instead, the outfit from A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More is finally complete.)
Meanwhile, Tuco has betrayed him. There was no way Tuco could not grab this chance, with a horse up for grabs and Blondie preoccupied. Blondie is completely unfazed, of course, because he pretty much predicted this.
Blondie doesn’t aim the cannon at all, not trying to actually hit Tuco, just scare him a bit and potentially slow him down. (It does mean it could have hit him if he’d happened to ride into the path of the cannonball, and in fact he came perilously close to doing just that – Blondie’s not going out of his way to make sure he doesn’t get hurt, not when Tuco’s in the process of trying to screw him over.) The poor horse is an innocent victim in all this, but we do at least seemingly see the horse standing up and okay in the shot where the second shot is fired.
This whole bit is pretty somber, though punctuated by a bit of humour – the aftermath of the battle, the culmination of Blondie’s character development, the dying soldier. We’re lingering on the effects of the war.
Tuco’s betrayal and Blondie shooting after him is a pretty noOOoooOOo moment when rooting for them to split the treasure – you were so close! Don’t do this, guys! But of course, we’re nowhere near done with them with this little breakdown of the fragile potential mutual trust we’d established; instead, this is more of a buildup moment to bring back the tension between them and make them more wary of each other for the finale in spite of the ways they’ve grown to like and almost trust each other. The film never stops being about the relationship between these two guys.

The cemetery

I enjoy how once Tuco realizes he’s at a cemetery he starts by crossing himself and then looks at the map to make sure before just throwing the map away. Tuco’s religiosity, genuinely important enough to him to come first here.
The sheer size of this cemetery, spreading almost endlessly out from the center, is so immense, and so drives home the scale of mass death that is happening – and Tuco’s running around in it for three and a half full minutes, all these graves just zooming past until they become a blur, and the only reason the film can actually get away with spending so much time on Tuco just running around in a cemetery is that “The Ecstasy of Gold” makes this scene in which nothing is technically happening absolutely exhilarating and thoroughly climactic. Ennio Morricone went so, so hard on this particular piece and it was exactly the right decision.
It’s also very symbolic how the graves all blur together. Tuco’s here for one particular grave; the others are background noise, like horrors always tend to become, just blending together into a mush. None of the actual characters visibly take in the scale of death that this cemetery represents (to be fair, they’re all pretty busy); the viewer just has to look at this sequence and absorb it from beyond the fourth wall.
Tuco’s a shaky reader, as we’ve established; he’s absolutely not reading all those names in full as he’s zooming by the graves. But he’s had a moment to piece together in his head how Arch Stanton’s name is probably written, so he’s probably going past all these graves mostly looking at the start of the name and whether it looks like ARCH.
The way Tuco hugs and caresses the Arch Stanton cross first thing and the excited breathing and grunts as he digs through to the coffin, man. He’s like a man possessed. This gold represents everything to him right now.
(Will getting a bunch of money actually make Tuco happy? I doubt it, but all he really understands and clings to is that money is how you improve your lot in life, so having this much money must solve all of his problems forever, right?)
All these crosses are so makeshift. Arch Stanton’s cross is made of misshapen pieces of wood that don’t even fit together. Really tangible sense with this production design of how hastily all these graves had to be dug, which also adds to the scale of horror silently conveyed with this cemetery.
When Blondie shows up, Tuco looks at him and veeery slowly drags his hand up to his pistol. If he can catch Blondie off guard, he can shoot him and keep all the treasure. At least back at the monastery, that was definitely his plan for when they found the grave, I expect. But at this point he seems decidedly hesitant even before he’s grabbed hold of his gun. He doesn’t really want to kill Blondie anymore at all.
Blondie is not caught off guard, of course, immediately notices, and just shakes his head and lifts his poncho to show his own gun: don’t even think about it. Tuco fiddles with his vest and plays it off with a little shrug like that’s all he was doing, and Blondie smiles just a little bit. So very Tuco – and confirmation that Tuco’s not actually particularly determined to kill him. Blondie knows Tuco has no bullets in his gun, of course, and is harmless to him regardless. But if Tuco had actually gone ahead and tried it, this might all have had to end a little differently – Tuco would have discovered early that his gun was empty, for one, which would have meant a confrontation with just him about that immediately.
I love how Tuco picks up the shovel and looks to Blondie for permission to keep digging. Even though Tuco thinks his gun is loaded, he’s basically just accepted Blondie’s in control here. Implicitly, he’s still expecting that what Blondie wants is to split the treasure (otherwise he’d hardly want to keep digging), and although he’d of course like to have all of it he’s basically made peace with that.
Both Blondie and Angel Eyes throw a shovel at Tuco, and both times it looks inches from hitting the real non-stunt-double Eli Wallach, first his hand and then his head. Did they practice shovel-throwing beforehand to be sure they wouldn’t actually hit him or what.
Blondie sure takes his time pulling out a match and lighting a cigar as Angel Eyes has arrived, even with a gun pointed at him. He probably figures Angel Eyes is already unlikely to actually shoot until he’s absolutely certain they are at the correct grave – after all, Angel Eyes is the one who, back at the camp, figured that Blondie was too smart to talk.
As Angel Eyes cocks his gun at Blondie, Tuco grabs the handle of the shovel, ready to act. Sort of fascinated he goes for the shovel rather than his gun – perhaps, if he went for the gun, that’d be the kind of escalation that’d give Angel Eyes cause to just shoot him immediately, but being ready with the shovel lets him prepare to go on the attack without prompting that.
When Blondie reveals the skeleton in the coffin, Tuco starts by reacting in disgust and crossing himself frantically… and only then realizes that wait. Blondie lied about Arch Stanton, to Tuco, when Tuco’d just told him the truth. Truly top ten anime betrayals. I love how Tuco will betray anyone and anything but that doesn’t stop him from feeling very, very betrayed when someone betrays him back. Of course Blondie couldn’t trust him – Tuco has already betrayed him! – but Tuco thought he did. (“You thought I’d trust you?”, indeed.)
Thanks to Blondie’s gambit, everything is going according to plan. Angel Eyes is here, but Blondie is still the only one who knows the real grave, giving him the leverage to make Angel Eyes put his gun away and set up the rigged Mexican standoff – the ‘truel’ – where he can kill Angel Eyes and test Tuco one last time. And if things should go wrong and Angel Eyes does manage to kill Blondie… there’s no name on the rock, and at least Blondie can die spitefully knowing they’ll be left with no idea where the gold is at all.
(I wonder what Blondie would have said to Tuco if Angel Eyes had taken more time to get there; he would have had to either stall somehow or just plain tell him he’s not saying anything until they know where Angel Eyes is. Theoretically he could have told him that from the start, of course, but Blondie isn’t huge on telling other people what he’s planning, and he probably wasn’t super keen on giving Angel Eyes the sense the two of them are working together against him from the start, either; that might have made him more trigger-happy on Tuco.)

The truel

Angel Eyes doesn’t turn his back on Tuco as he takes his position, instead turning with his back towards Blondie; he figures, probably correctly, that Tuco might be liable to shoot him in the back if he had the chance but Blondie probably wouldn’t.
(We briefly see Angel Eyes’ horse in the background in one of the shots here; eventually, Blondie’s going to ride that horse away from there. The horse that Tuco briefly stole should also be around here somewhere – we saw it standing and apparently okay after falling over during the cannon fire, so Tuco might be able to ride that horse back to town.)
The truel is a delightful masterclass in tension, buildup and visual storytelling – just a sequence of intense close-ups and music. It was the one bit of this film that I had seen before the screening we went to in September, in a film class about fifteen years ago. All I really remembered of it from there was that it had zero dialogue and a lot of close-ups; I don’t think it hits nearly as well when shown as a clip out of context, unfortunately, when you have no idea who these characters are or why they’re here or what has led up to this.
I will confess, though, that even first time watching it in context in the movie, I had some trouble following the flow of it. By the time we started just cutting between close-ups, I hadn’t quite made firm enough note of the characters’ positions relative to one another (and thus who they were looking at with each glance), or of whose gun was which – both things that in hindsight and on repeat viewings are extremely obvious but that I genuinely struggled with first time – such that I just didn’t have time to piece together exactly what a given shot was actually showing me before it cut to the next thing. I don’t know if this is a common experience for others on a first viewing. But the fun thing is it still works even if you can’t really follow the moment-to-moment flow, because it’s still effective buildup and tension. Even if all you’re getting out of the individual shots is the rough gist that they’re all reluctant to be the first to go for their gun while trying to watch for whether the others seem to be making a move (well, mostly Tuco and Angel Eyes; Blondie is stoic and inscrutable as ever, of course), the way that Ennio Morricone’s score builds and the cuts get quicker and the shots keep getting tighter until it’s just their eyes builds the tension perfectly toward a climax.
However, here’s the moment-to-moment flow laid out, for anyone else who had trouble with it: as they initially size each other up, Blondie raises his eyebrow at Angel Eyes, and Angel Eyes visibly tenses at that, sensing that Blondie wants to go for him and is the greater threat. Tuco starts out with his eyes flicking between the other two, starting to reach for his gun early, at which Angel Eyes looks at him with contempt; Tuco stops and hesitates. Blondie looks at Tuco, and Tuco looks back at him, then back at Angel Eyes, then at Blondie’s gun: Tuco’s wondering if, if he shoots Angel Eyes, Blondie’s going to shoot him. Tuco fidgets but doesn’t draw. Angel Eyes, meanwhile, swallows looking at Blondie, notices Tuco’s fidgeting, and then looks back at Blondie with a slight lick of his lips, hand moving towards his gun: he’s thinking about going for Blondie, now that he’s looking at Tuco rather than him. But once Blondie looks back towards him, his hand withdraws again, not wanting to attract a shot. Tuco’s still glancing back and forth, but as he’s looking at Blondie, Blondie looks back at him with the tiniest nod. Angel Eyes notices, looking nervously between the two of them, and then slowly goes for his gun again. Blondie keeps looking at Tuco, and Tuco keeps looking back at Blondie, eyes widening. Angel Eyes gives one more look back at Tuco, then stays on Blondie, hand still slowly approaching his gun, Blondie and Tuco fixed on each other all the while. Then, with the last few rapid cuts, Tuco’s eyes dart back to Angel Eyes just as Angel Eyes moves to grab his gun, Tuco immediately goes for his to try to shoot Angel Eyes first, and then Blondie’s shot rings out.
Angel Eyes had the advantage when he arrived on the scene in the graveyard, gun at the ready, but once Blondie has forced him into this truel setup, he’s out of his element, no longer in control: even though he’s a quick shot (as we saw at Stevens’ at the beginning), he’s still dead if the other guy then goes for him. And Blondie proceeds to psych him out by first indicating subtly that he’s going for him and then very deliberately shifting his focus to Tuco and nodding at him, to both make Angel Eyes more nervous (the nod suggests they’re together in this and will both shoot him) and bait him into shooting him (because Blondie doesn’t seem to be paying attention to Angel Eyes). All in all, Angel Eyes is tangibly nervous for this whole buildup, backed into a strange corner he didn’t expect, which is pretty interesting after he’s spent the whole movie up until now very confident and in control.
Blondie’s true attention for the truel was always going to be focused on Angel Eyes, of course: he shamelessly cheated at the Mexican standoff by emptying Tuco’s gun, so Tuco is harmless and ultimately irrelevant for all this. But in the process of this, and probably as a secondary purpose to drawing out the setup like this at all, he also gets to test Tuco a bit. Nodding to him suggests Let’s team up and get Angel Eyes, and he will get to see if Tuco actually does or not.
Tuco starts out very nervous, just off learning Blondie didn’t tell him the real name of the grave, and thinks that Blondie might shoot him – but Blondie gives that tiniest of nods to him, and when Angel Eyes is about to try to shoot Blondie, Tuco goes for his gun to try to shoot Angel Eyes first. Even after Blondie has shot him down, Tuco’s still trying to shoot Angel Eyes, not going for Blondie. We’ve come a long way from the first hour of the movie.
(It’s kind of hilarious to think about how realistically these guys are all standing way too far away from each other to actually be able to see these microexpressions on each other. But if the law of the movie is that the characters can only see is what’s in frame, perhaps they also get the benefits of intense close-ups.)
It’s all over so quickly. As has been noted often, Sergio Leone really likes to draw out the buildup to violence and then make the actual thing incredibly brief – the truel is almost five full minutes of buildup, and then it’s effectively concluded with one single bullet fired, with a second one merely added for good measure several seconds later. Blondie just shoots him; Angel Eyes never gets to shoot at all; Tuco attempts to but his gun is empty. No flashy action sequence here, just that rising tension ending in almost an anticlimax.
It’s a very considered anticlimax, of course: the real point of interest turns out to be not how Angel Eyes is defeated, but the revelation that Tuco’s gun is empty, was empty this whole time, and Blondie had carefully rigged this entire situation in his favor, because he is one very smart, devious man. The true finale is about Blondie and Tuco, as it always had to be, because most of the movie is about Blondie and Tuco.
(This does mean Angel Eyes feels a bit underutilized in the movie – how easily he ends up being dispatched here does feel like kind of a letdown, after all the time we spent building up how competent and terrifying he is. It might have been neat to see a bit more of him being tangibly competent and scary here towards the end, one way or another, even though Blondie ultimately has to end up outwitting him.)
Initially, Tuco just looks confused that his gun didn’t fire. Blondie cocks his gun again – and Tuco flinches, immediately, instinctively thinking it means Blondie’s going for him next. But no, he’s just going to shoot Angel Eyes again (though not until the moment Angel Eyes has managed to point his gun again – Blondie could have just shot him right at the start and been done with it, but he has his thing about generally not shooting until the other person starts to draw). Blondie’s sparing Tuco, like in his introduction – and like in his introduction, there’s a bit more to it than that.
It’s very funny how he shoots Angel Eyes right into a convenient open grave, and then casually shoots his hat and gun into the grave too. I enjoy that this film is stylized enough to get away with this kind of indulgent silliness. (The dollars trilogy continues to commit hat violence.)
Tuco continues to look so confused, until Blondie walks up to the stone and then just smiles at him, again pleased to see Tuco did not even try to shoot him. And Tuco gives kind of a hesitant smile back. So it’s the two of them? Blondie does want to share the gold with him after all? Blondie goes to pick up the stone, casually…
…and that’s when Tuco looks back at his gun and realizes. It’s not jammed, it’s empty. He knows he loaded it. The only way it can be empty right now is if Blondie did it, while they were together. It’s another betrayal.
I enjoy Tuco going “You wanted to get me killed!” specifically – emptying his gun and making him defenseless generally would be a recipe for getting him killed, and in his current state of betrayal, it’s reasonable to feel that way. But really, if anything, Blondie did this to not get Tuco killed – it meant he could afford not to shoot him, and to focus on baiting Angel Eyes’ shot.
“You see, in this world, there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.” Turning Tuco’s thing back on him sure is a thing that Blondie is very deliberately doing right now and is about to be doing more of. His plan worked, Angel Eyes is dead, and he’s left completely in control here with a helpless, unarmed Tuco – and now he can do whatever he wants. And one of the things he wants is to not have to do the grunt work here.
Tuco, bless him, does not even really consider the position he’s in right now, or the slightly malicious undertone to Blondie’s words – he just hears that apparently he can go dig up the treasure.
This is a magnificent scene, of course. The standoff itself is iconic, but the reveal of how Blondie cheated at the standoff – the three-way duel was really just a two-way duel after all that – is such a fun twist on it all. On a first viewing we really aren’t fully aware just how calculated Blondie is until we get here: we’ve just seen he’s very observant, smart enough to know talking won’t save him, and savvy enough not to trust Tuco with the real name on the grave. But no, this man is wickedly smart and he played them both and the audience to get the outcome he wanted, where he wins. Tuco is alive right now only because Blondie wanted him to be.

The finale

Blondie drops Tuco’s gun a short distance away from the grave, where Tuco will be able to get it once he’s down from the noose but no sooner.
Once again Tuco has trouble reading “Unknown”, and once again I love this little character trait. It really is a very counterintuitively spelled word; I can’t blame him.
Blondie reveals he wrote nothing at all on the stone, which also means that bringing the rock with him over here at all was pure showmanship. Tuco doesn’t even react to that at this point; of course Blondie orchestrated everything in his favor, but he’s a bit too preoccupied with the bit where this is the real grave with the real money.
Blondie smiles pretty genuinely as he tells Tuco to go ahead, even though the earlier ominous line about how you dig was more threatening. He knows how much Tuco wants to dig it up, in the end, so this is effectively an invitation rather than an order.
Tuco’s excited giggling as he unearths the bags of money and holds it in his hands is precious. He’s so utterly giddy about this.
“It’s all ours, Blondie!” he says, and that kinda breaks my heart. He’s totally accepted they’re sharing it, and is excited about it, and unthinkingly speaks of the whole cache as ours rather than as mine. That feels pretty monumental, from Tuco, and I think it’s completely genuine in this moment (much as he would probably be liable to betray him later). Only then he looks up to find a noose.
Blondie has probably been planning this since the monastery. He’d play the long game, he’d go along with Tuco to find this gold, and then, once they’d done that, he’d take his own revenge. As far as Tuco was concerned, both the hanging and the desert walk were about turning what Blondie did to him back on him – but Tuco went quite a bit further in both cases. Blondie may have left Tuco hanging for a couple of seconds, by accident, but the next shot got him down; Tuco tried to make him hang himself. Blondie may have left Tuco to fend for himself in the desert with nothing, but he was alone, able to rest when he wanted, and got back to town fine in the end; Tuco forced Blondie to walk on and on with no breaks until he collapsed, while actively tormenting and humiliating him. They were never even after all this, and beneath it all, even as he grew fond of Tuco in spite of himself – Blondie has spent this whole journey with the quiet, simmering urge to turn all that back on Tuco, at the end of it all. As I mentioned before, I particularly enjoy the unstated implication that the hanging must have left a pretty strong impression on him, even though he didn’t show it much at the time, because he specifically goes out of his way here to replicate that, by making Tuco get up on the cross and put his own head in the noose. But also, leaving Tuco staring at this money that he desires more than anything while unable to get it evokes the water in the desert. Rendering him completely helpless and letting him believe he’s going to die evokes both.
(There is, of course, also a practical reason Blondie would do this: given he wants to ride out of here with his share of the money without Tuco on his heels, it ensures he gets a good head start before Tuco could follow. But the details of it decidedly didn’t need to be like this. He could have skipped the bit about telling Tuco to get up on an unsteady cross and making it look like he was just leaving him there and specifically disappearing off behind a tree for a bit before returning. No, Blondie definitely wanted to make Tuco squirm, in specific and twisted ways, just like Tuco did to him.)
Originally, I suspect the plan would have ended with just leaving him there, and probably with Blondie taking all the money out from under his nose while he watches (which, after all, is an even better match for what Tuco did to him in the desert). But over the course of the film’s events, Blondie’s softened a little, and he really has grown fond of Tuco – not quite so fond he could just shrug and forgive him for the literal torture, but fond enough the plan has changed. He’ll let him squirm for a bit, let him fear, but then he’ll shoot him down one more time, for old times’ sake. And – perhaps cemented by the fact Tuco went for Angel Eyes during the truel despite everything – he’ll leave half the money for him, too. This is genuinely very soft for Blondie under the circumstances; last time he left Tuco behind with a rope around his neck, Blondie took all the money just because.
(Back at the beginning, Tuco told him, Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he knows nothing about Tuco. Blondie probably knows Tuco might come after him again for this. He chooses to leave him alive again anyway.)
(All in all, I think it’s pretty safe to assume both Blondie and Tuco had originally meant to kill the other at the cemetery, but ultimately abandon those plans before they ever come to fruition. Parallels!)
It kills me how disbelieving Tuco is, after all this. Blondie wouldn’t play a joke on him like that! Only he sure did, back when he left him in the desert at the start, didn’t he. But now?
I enjoy how Blondie’s putting his gun away even before Tuco actually gets in the noose. He could try something at this stage, but he still thinks Blondie’s not actually doing this, that sure, okay, he’ll just get in the rope quickly and then maybe Blondie’s going to say something about that time Tuco tried to hang him or whatever and then he’ll let him down. Right??
…only then Blondie just goes and silently ties his hands behind his back, tightly, and then pulls on the rope. I love the dawning fear on Tuco’s face, his eyes widening and shifting back and forth with the creeping feeling that Blondie could be serious about this.
Even then, Tuco remains there silently confused, waiting for Blondie to turn around and say just kidding, until Blondie’s loaded his half of the money onto Angel Eyes’ horse, and even then, he only speaks up with this little, hesitant, “Hey, Blon– Blond–?” (and of course trying to speak just puts him off balance, and Blondie ignores him completely to mount the horse and prepare to ride off). Truly so reluctant to believe this and it’s painful.
Blondie’s “Sorry, Tuco,” is definitely intentionally designed to evoke “Sorry, Shorty,” where Shorty did indeed get hanged. This is a cruel, cruel little bit. But lest we forget, Tuco was very, very cruel to Blondie. Their revenge on each other is always so specifically prompted.
Tuco watching Blondie ride off, yelling, repeatedly starting to lose his balance as the noose tightens, increasingly close to tears, is just a magnificent bit made for me and my buttons specifically. Thank you, Sergio Leone and Eli Wallach.
Once Blondie has reappeared and taken out his rifle, he really takes his time aiming carefully with the sight up. It’s a shot from much further away than usual, but I like to think it’s also a sign that he’s absolutely not planning to miss this time.
Tuco’s first thought when Blondie reappears is relief, but then as he aims, there’s this little moment of Tuco looking uncertain again – is he going to hit? Is he even going to free him, or is he aiming to shoot Tuco?
There’s this simple percussion rhythm that kicks in just as Blondie goes, “Well, now. Seems just like old times,” which sort of evokes a pounding heartbeat. It stops when Blondie disappears, comes in again when he reappears, then stops again once he’s aiming at the rope and Tuco has that moment of doubt, and then kicks in again after he makes the shot. I think it’s largely there for the impact of the bits where it falls silent, as if Tuco’s heart has gone still.
Tuco’s scream as he falls is probably both just the fact he’s suddenly falling with his hands tied (and he lands with his face on the money bags, ouch), the pent-up emotion of all of this, and the instinctive primal fear of having a gun pointed basically at you and then hearing a bang.
Blondie looks so pleased with himself after pulling that off. Tuco’s alive, has his gold, can’t follow. He made a pretty badass shot that definitely makes up for that one that missed. Tuco may be left with his hands tied and a rope around his neck, just like at the start, but this time he does get his fair share, and Blondie’s happy for him to have it. This bit of retribution was enough, and I think he and Tuco are now basically square as far as he sees it – if not, why leave the gold, after all.
Tuco… feels considerably less pleased about any of this, of course, yelling after him that he’s a dirty son of a bitch (or dirty son of a WAAEEAHEEAH, rather). Obviously this was a thoroughly harrowing experience on his end and it makes good sense he’s pretty mad about it (Blondie did betray him first!). But he’s fine and he has his money, and I definitely imagine he makes it back to town with it, especially with the second horse who’s hanging out there not too far away. From there, maybe he pursues Blondie again, hoping for another bout of extremely specific revenge; maybe after he’s recovered a little bit he manages to reluctantly let it go for now and enjoy being rich, for real. Which I’m not sure is actually all that enjoyable – being a wanted outlaw with obscene amounts of money in a society full of money-hungry bounty hunters sounds like a pretty stressful time, actually – but I’m sure Tuco will squeeze any enjoyment out of it that he can and insist that he’s doing great.
Really, though, I root for Blondie and Tuco to meet again one day in a capacity where they could actually just chill and be friends for real. The potential is so clearly there: Blondie obviously can’t help being fond of and entertained by Tuco’s Tuco-ness; Tuco so clearly really needs the company of someone who actually likes him, even if he thinks what he needs is money; they get along and work together so well when their goals aren’t in conflict. I can see Tuco coming after him for revenge and it ending with them coming to a funny mutual understanding instead. It could happen.
Blondie couldn’t just let the torture go, though. And I think that’s basically the thing that captivates me most about this movie – this extremely tangled dynamic and the wild extremes that it represents and the way it plays with the audience’s emotions. By this point, we don’t want Blondie to do this to Tuco – but it makes sense, doesn’t it, that he did not in fact just shrug off and forget about what Tuco did to him. The stoic, unruffled guy was actually silently ruffled enough, beneath it all, to be harboring this plan, and yet over the course of the story has developed enough affection for Tuco to ultimately execute it in this way that is cruel but still leaves Tuco unharmed and with half of the gold. The fact he is that fond of him but still could not find it in him to just ditch this plan entirely says a lot about how it must in fact have messed him up a fair bit. I’m just captivated by this man and the fact he would do this, in this exact particular manner.
(To be clear, my thesis here is that Blondie doing this is interesting and coherent, as a dark, twisted response to some very specific trauma, much like Tuco’s own actions were interesting and prompted by specific ways that Blondie had been cruel to him, not that it is justified. These are a couple of messed-up guys doing messed-up things to each other for interestingly messed-up reasons. Maybe, if they do meet again, they can actually talk about it on a slightly more even footing and deal with all this in a healthier way; I want that for them. In the movie itself, though, I’m just enjoying this twisted dance of hurt and revenge lovingly threaded through their genuine bonding.)
Meanwhile, we’ve grown to love Tuco over the course of all this, in spite of everything, and it’s an enormous relief when Blondie actually does come back and shoot him down. We’ve been following these two characters for three hours, we weren’t expecting Blondie to pull the rug out from under us like this now, but it makes a horrible amount of sense, and we’re rooting for them but there’s enough ambiguity and enough enormous baggage going on between them to genuinely worry he’s just going to leave him, which would be awful. There’s a very particular emotional progression for the audience going on here that I enjoy a lot (not that that’s going to be the exact progression for every member of the audience, because people are different and have different reactions to media, but you know).
All in all, this movie just really got into my head the more I thought about it, and I love it a lot. There’s a lot of specific me appeal (what an exquisite amount of executions), but it’s also just enormously engaging to my brain on about fifteen different levels. It has definitely taken a spot somewhere on my favorite movies list; I’m not unseating O Brother, Where Art Thou? for official #1 fave, but next time I try to make an ordered list I might put it at number two.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk

Page last modified April 1 2025 at 00:33 UTC

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