Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef chase a cache of gold in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I first saw Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Western” The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when it was broadcast by the ABC television network as a Sunday Night Movie feature back in the day when the home video revolution was still a decade away and the Big Three TV networks devoted some of their prime time schedule to air not-quite-new-but-not-quite-old theatrical movies. Because I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time and wasn’t educated about movies or the film industry, I was not aware that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was the third chapter of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” (which also included A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More ) or that it was originally an Italian-made flick (shot on locations in Spain and southern Italy) titled Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (literally, “The good, the ugly, the bad"). Of course, because I was so young I didn’t quite understand all the nuances – visual and thematic – of Leone’s epic story about three anti-heroic charact