American Civil War: How 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' Can Teach You Something About the Civil War

My all-time-favorite movie, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, is settled in the time of the American Civil War. However, the war itself is not the center of attention in the storyline. But the protagonists take advantage of certain situations relating to the war by pretending to belong to one party. The first time they do that is when they put on uniforms of dead soldiers to get treated in a nearby military sanatorium after having suffered wounds during another story. After their recovery, they head to a cemetery in which a treasure is supposed to be buried. However, on their way, they come across other soldiers:

Until this scene, I hadn't realized that each side of the Civil War had different colored uniforms and what these colors meant. So for the rest of the movie, there were only the "blue ones" and the "grey ones" for me. I looked them up: the two sides are the Confederate soldiers and the Union soldiers, as we know from the chapter War of Northern Aggression. If I understood it correctly (it seems there were various uniforms in various colors), the Confederate soldiers are those in the gray uniforms, thus soldiers of the Confederate States from the South. The Union soldiers are those in the blue uniforms from the North, who are taking Tuco and Blondie as prisoners of war.

In this movie, before having been taken prisoner, Tuco (the one with the fake eye-patch) says three things that should prove the soldiers that he is a true Confederate soldier. The first is "To hell with General Grant!" that refers to the most successful Union general Ulysses S. Grant. He continues, with a bit of help from Blondie, "Hurrah for General Lee!" that refers to Commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virgina Robert E. Lee. The third claim to make the approaching soldiers believe that he is a Confederate soldier, is the sentence "God is with us because he hates the Yanks too!" -- Yanks (the singular form is Yankee) is, according to Wikipedia, an informal term for the Union soldiers or Northern Americans in general. So basically, Tuco did everything right, except that his audience was the wrong one.

As you can see, there is not only superb storytelling and tough gunslinger-action, but also historical accurateness in "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly". But I had expected nothing less from director Sergio Leone. Did I already mention that this is my all-time-favorite movie? If not, now I have.

How Spaghetti Westerns turned me into a Movie Addict

I never was a big fan of watching movies. I knew that fantastic stories would be told by them, but I never had the patience to sit through a whole movie without thinking "why am I staring at a screen without doing anything?" at one point. It's not like I didn't like storytelling at all - I love going to the theater and getting sucked into a certain atmosphere. Unfortunately, a film never had managed to do this before. But then I started forcing myself to watch the big classics during the summer and I finally came to realize that it was not my lack of patience - I was just watching the wrong kind of movies all the time.

In yesterday's class, when we were introducing ourselves to our fellow students, I had mentioned the biggest trigger to my sudden love for movies: spaghetti westerns. Basically, these are westerns by Italian directors, most famously by Sergio Leone who is actually the iconic director in that department. There are quite a few differences between American and Italian westerns, most importantly in the way of storytelling. There is a very nice interview with the the iconic actor of the spaghetti westerns Clint Eastwood, in which the basic differences are explained briefly. (And Clint Eastwood mocking John Wayne's - the American icon of westerns - way of speaking is priceless!)

The first western I watched was the first part of the most famous trilogy in the world of spaghetti westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964). In my opinion, it is not the best part of the "Man with no Name"-trilogy, but as an entrance to the world of spaghetti westerns, it caused me to have a culture shock: The looks were different from anything else I had ever seen before in a movie. There is a perfect harmony between the landscapes and the interactions of the actors. Every scene seems to be a perfectly composed painting. Everything was done in a very minimalist way, like the dialogues were kept very short and the expressions (or the lack of expressions) of the characters told so much more than words could have. All these things made the storytelling straightforward and clear in a very unique way. This added a beautiful kind of tension to the climax and also the rest of the film. There was nothing too much or too less of.

But a Fistful of Dollars was only a mild introduction in comparison of what was about to come: the following two parts of the trilogy, namely For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), were even more mind-blowing. They were also composed perfectly, but you could also really see that they had learned from their experiences. Also, the soundtrack by the musical genius Ennio Morricone finally caught more attention, and became part of the director's way of composing a picture of every scene. For example, here is the scene before the climax (which is, by the way, even more dramatic) of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which is still to this day considered one of the best movie scenes and music ever made.

In my opinion, it is safe to say that no other westerns - nor Italian nor American nor Spanish or whatever ones - ever reached the quality of the "Man with no Name"-Trilogy. Certainly, there still were some good ones, like Two Mules for Sister Sara or The Big Gundown, but, in my opinion, it never managed to establish the atmosphere the trilogy has. Surprisingly, also the newer westerns from nowadays could copy it. It seems it not about to the new technical equipment, but the establishment of a certain atmosphere. It just isn't the same. And this results in me watching these three movies over and over again, and never getting tired of it.

Spaghetti westerns not only waked my interest in watching movies, but also on how films are composed and what emotions can be triggered by the way a scene is built. I hope that I keep my motivation up to look deeper into the science of movies. The following might sound cheesy, but I am incredibly happy that westerns came into my life. And thus, it is proven that I was not joking when I told you all that I was obsessed with westerns. It is truly deep love.