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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Useless Dialogue Statistics

So, in November 2024, my brain randomly wanted to go collect all of Blondie’s actual dialogue in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, partly as a handy comprehensive overview of his character voice as established in the film as aid for writing some fanfiction, partly so I could do some pointless statistics because I am a nerd. A little later, I did the same for Tuco and Angel Eyes’ dialogue, too.

Methodology: I transcribed Blondie’s words myself because I figured he’s a man of few words, but because I would have gone insane if I had to manually transcribe every word any of the main characters say in this three-hour movie, I worked from an existing transcript I found online for the others; I made a number of corrections to it, but I can’t guarantee I didn’t miss an error somewhere that I didn’t end up double-checking. I used wordcounter.net for the actual word counting, which counts e.g. contractions as one word; in transcribing Blondie’s lines, and in my corrections, I tried to include any words that the character audibly says, with the contractions that they audibly use, but there would definitely be some fuzz here depending on precisely how you transcribe and count things.

For the purposes of this analysis, I split the movie into 45 scenes. The scene splits can be somewhat arbitrary.

All in all, Blondie is present in 30 scenes and says 721 words total in the Extended Cut. I also counted 86 lines total, where I defined a line as a single piece of dialogue with nothing distinctly else taking place in between, such as another character’s dialogue or a significant pause to show something else, but this is again a little fuzzy.

On the other hand, while in the thirty scenes Blondie says 721 words, Angel Eyes says 735 words in half as many scenes… and Tuco says more than twice as many words as both of them put together, with 2924 words by my count.

When counting by lines - and remember, the line splits are kind of arbitrary so these are a much more fuzzy statistic - Blondie does have more lines than Angel Eyes, or 86 compared to Angel Eyes’ 76. (This makes sense; Blondie is significantly more laconic than Angel Eyes, so his lines are on average shorter.) However, Tuco once again has more than both of them put together, or 210 lines all in all.

In the median scene where they appear, Blondie says 2.5 lines totaling fifteen words, Tuco says 57 words in four lines, and Angel Eyes says five lines totaling 34 words.

As you can see, and as we all knew, Tuco is very talkative compared to the other two, and when Angel Eyes is in a scene, he tends to have more substantial dialogue than Blondie does in his scenes.

Blondie is most talkative by far in the conversation where he ditches Tuco at the beginning, just prior to the “the good” caption, where his six lines total 96 words. The scene with the second largest Blondie word count is the finale scene (post-truel), with 88 words; however, this is split into pre-digging (four lines, 49 words) and post-digging (three lines, 39 words), so while I chose to consider it one scene, it would be a stretch to call it a single conversation. The second most words he has in something that could be considered a single conversation is his exchange with Angel Eyes and Tuco at the cemetery (assuming we count “It’ll be a lot easier with that” as part of it), where he has seven lines totaling 60 words. After that come four scenes with fifty-ish Blondie words: his reunion with Tuco in the ghost town (six lines, 52 words), the scene where they split the bounty for the first hanging and the “perfect number” scene (each of which gives him three lines totaling 51 words), and the scene where Blondie and Tuco rig up the bridge with explosives (six lines, 47 words). In all other scenes, Blondie speaks fewer than forty words; discounting the next four wordiest after that, in all remaining scenes he speaks fewer than twenty words.

The largest number of average words he says per line is in the Extended Cut scene where Blondie first asks Tuco about the map, where his two lines total 37 words for an average of 18.5 words per line. Meanwhile, he has some extra-laconic scenes: when Tuco catches up with him at Shorty’s hanging, his three lines (“And Shorty?” “No?” “Sorry, Shorty.”) total five words, and there are three scenes where each of his lines is an average of three words long: the inn hanging (three lines, 9 words), the desert walk (one line, 3 words), and the scene with Angel Eyes in the cabin (six lines, 18 words). It’s probably not a coincidence that in all four of these Blondie is in a threatening situation; he gets extra quiet under those circumstances.

Meanwhile, Tuco at his most talkative says 275 words (at Blondie’s bedside at the monastery), or 269 words (when Blondie’s first bringing him in for a bounty), or 245 words (when speaking with Pablo). Angel Eyes at his most talkative says 131 words (interrogating Tuco pre-torture), and has three other scenes exceeding Blondie’s maximum word count: the one with Stevens at the beginning (114 words), the one in the cabin with Blondie (101 words), and the conversation with Baker (99 words).

Tuco actually has a single scene where he’s even more laconic than Blondie at his most threatened: during the gun seller sequence, he says seventeen words in eleven lines, each line only one or two words. He’s just returned from nearly dying in the desert here, and while he certainly has a sense of humour in that scene, the distinct lack of his usual talkativeness may be an effect of being exhausted and dehydrated and half-dead, which is fun to bear in mind more for that scene.

In the vast majority of scenes, if Tuco is present at all, he has the most dialogue of the main characters. Where he doesn’t, he is generally in somewhat vulnerable situations where he is less sure of himself - being rescued from the bounty hunters by Blondie, having food with Angel Eyes, at the end.

Angel Eyes, meanwhile, grows quieter towards the end. In his scenes for most of the movie, where he’s fully confident, he tends to speak a decent amount. But starting at the “Perfect number” scene, where Blondie threatens him and his men, he becomes a lot less talkative, which can be taken as a fun sign of his confidence already beginning to erode a bit once he’s met his match. He laughs it off there, and continues to act pretty unfazed until the truel itself, but he never talks quite as much again.

Something else I noticed when putting this together: we all know how there’s no dialogue for the first chunk of the movie, with the first line being spoken at 10:38 in, though the first three minutes are the opening credits which doesn’t really count. What I didn’t properly notice was that there’s an even longer sequence of zero dialogue later, namely from Blondie’s “Yeah. Sure, I’m sure” at 2:29:09 and until “It’ll be a lot easier with that” at 2:40:59, for a whole eleven minutes and fifty seconds of only music, sound effects, and wordless grunts and such. This includes the bridge explosion, the crossfire between the two armies, Blondie and Tuco waking up and crossing the river, the chapel with the wounded soldier, Tuco’s betrayal and Blondie firing the cannon after him, the Ecstasy of Gold sequence, and Tuco’s digging at Arch Stanton’s grave until Blondie appears. We just don’t even notice just how long nobody’s saying anything because it’s riveting, while it’s super noticeable in the opening. In the graph, I lumped this whole sequence together as “Towards the cemetery” so as not to have several scenes with no words for any of them taking up space.

Page last modified April 1 2025 at 00:33 UTC

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