Audio Commentary with writer and critic Richard Schikel
Documentaries:
"Leone's West"
"The Leone Style"
"The Man Who Lost The Civil War"
"Restoring: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" Featurette
"The Socorro Sequence: A Reconstruction" Animated Gallery Of Missing Sequences
Extended Tuco Torture Scene
"Il Maestro" Featurette
"Il Maestro - Part 2" Audio Featurette
French Trailer
Poster Gallery
Languages:
English - German - French
Subtitles:
French , Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Czech, Slovenian, Croatian, Romanian
Great version. This DVD restores most of the cut scenes, and the colours and sound are just perfect...... unlike the 2020 'remastered' UK Blu-ray with it's shockingly bad saturated colours.
No worries MM,here's one for ya...
Clint Eastwood rides into town on Tuesday,stays at a hotel for three days (full board:),and leaves on Tuesday.
How does he do that?
I've decided to dress exclusively in poncho and hat from now on, as my daily attire, and with my stubby cigar poking from the corner of my mouth, I'll lurk in doorways that separate dark interiors from vast expansive plains and vistas.
Rated 10/10Watched this again last night... gets better every time you see it.
It's one of those films that is longer than you remember it being (Even before the added footage for this edition: this comes in at 2h:51m), but it doesn't feel long.
(Compare that with another epic like 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the reverse is true... it's a lot shorter than you think... just the subject, tone, and atmosphere makes it feel longer).
I'm really finding out which of my DVDs can make the jump to a larger screen without losing resolution. This one does it with ease, mainly due to the top job of remastering and restoring they did for this release... looks and sounds great.
The extra footage added is an extended Tuco torture scene, which is quite brutal, but contributes to reinforcing the idea of what a tough sod Tuco (Eli Wallach) is, and what a shit Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) is, and the feeling between them...
...also is a fairly brief exchange between Clint's: Blondie character, and Tuco, as they ride away from the monastery which, while consisting of only a few words, is a little jarring for the fact that their voices were added a good 30 years after they filmed the scene (A distinctive quality of Sergio Leone's films, is the "Looped" voice tracks (overdubbed at a later date)). With this scene being cut before they went to the sound studio, no original voice track existed for it in the first place, so they had to make one for the restoration. Eli Wallach had quite a gruff voice anyway, and the couple of words he speaks you don't really notice much... but Clint Eastwood's voice sounds very old, coming out of the mouth of his younger self. And I'm not sure this small scene adds anything to the film anyway... so a bit unnecessary, but doesn't disturb the film greatly.
It's clear that this film is all about Eli Wallach's character Tuco, being the most rounded character in the movie, and Clint, and Van Cleef's characters are actually paper thin... mere icons (the later is actually not so great a feature of the movie, particularly in the second half, and until the end), but both make such a strong impression that it's easy to overlook what Tuco is for this film, and how good Eli Wallach is at playing him.
Is this film in the Library of Congress?
....It bloody well ought to be!
If it were literature, it would undoubtedly be referred to as one of the Great American Novels, but it's certainly qualifies as being a Great American Movie.