The opening scene consists of this aging hired gun slowly riding into an almost empty town, slowly getting off his horse, he sees some other unsavoury types slowly arriving in town. They slowly approach each other and the camera follows them slowly walking through the dusty street. A dog runs across the road. It all happens slowly, silently but for some heavy footsteps clumsily dubbed on. They all slowly stare at each other as the point of view changes from close-ups to wide shots. Slowly, you understand. What are they meeting for? Are they all about to shoot each other? Are they all about to sit down to a nice game of backgammon?

They meet at the door of a building, all pull their pistols and suddenly dash through the door. Suddenly you hear a volley of pistol fire cranked up full volume on the soundtrack and suddenly a figure with a napkin around his neck, a half-eaten lamb joint in one hand and a gun in the other bursts through a window. This is Tuco, the “Ugly” of the title. The contrast between the suddenness of this action and the slow build up to it is dramatic and stylised.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is very much about style in this sense. Other scenes include a long sequence where Tuco is riding through a desert holding a dilapidated parasol where each shot is framed like an oil painting; or when Angel Eyes (the “Bad” played by Lee Van Cleef — who is awesomely cool in this movie) menaces some retired soldier by staring at him and eating soup; the final showdown between the three main characters is a brilliant sequence consisting of what is essentially three dudes just staring at each other for four minutes while Ennio Morricone's deliciously good soundtrack bangs from the speakers. These scenes and others are deliberately slowed down — a conscious extension of time for the purpose solely of style.

The story of the three main characters takes place through the American civil war. Almost from the start to the very end the actions of the war affect the plot of the small group of money-grabbing gun-slingers. They get caught in artillery from time to time; they steal some uniforms and get captured and stuck in prisoner camps; they converse with soldiers with arms or legs missing; they move through towns abandoned by the locals and taken over by soldiers; even the final showdown takes place in a war cemetary. If the movie has anything to say about that is that neither the North nor the South is any better than the other: the whole war was a catastrophe. All the soldiers just seem to stroll about shooting each other.

The film is not so much about this kind of message, though. Certainly not one about plot (a bunch of guys take it in turns to gang up with each other and then betray each other in the hunt for a case of coins) or about character (Tuco is pretty much the only person in the movie to have one) but it is a string of great scenes, humour and action. Sort of like Princess Bride except with rather more murders than romance.

There are just cool bits throughout like where a pistol barrel is pointed right at the camera which becomes a mortar that destroys a building; a mammoth set-piece showing a battle over a bridge of which Blondie says “I've never seen so many men wasted so badly” (one of a very small number of examples of him earning the “Good” name — he's good only in comparison to the other two); the scene where Tuco searches Sad Hill Cemetary for Arch Stanton's grave — it is just two and a half minutes of Eli Wallach running in a circle to another Morricone masterpiece and it is utterly superb.

I don't suggest that some of the crappier bits couldn't have been cut out but it remains one of my favourite movies.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly airs at 11:30 Friday night on Channel 7.

¶ 3:40 pm