The zenith of Italian Westerns, 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' portrays three gunmen in their hunt for a grave filled with gold. After a quite complicated start the three gunmen set out to find a fortune in gold hidden in a grave, each having necessary but insufficient information about the treasure. All three men are psychopaths by modern standards and their lack of trust in each other continously delays their search for the gold - but whatever social capital they lack they make up through their respective virtues: Blondie is smart, Angel Eyes is ruthless and Tuco is naïve but patient. In the end, the tree men face each other, each armed with his gun, and only one of them can win and get the gold.

That said, it should be noted that the plot itself is interesting only because it facilitates the meeting of these three men and their common travel across the war ridden Southern States. Through the film we follow them to observe their ways and the film is rather about these characters than about their treasure hunt: each scene portrays either one of the characters or an aspect of life in the Southern States of their time, but is related to the plot in some manner.

Some of the scenes are masterpieces of their own as well: the one in which Blondie and Tuco decide to blow up a bridge to facilitate a local cease fire remains, to me, perhaps the most outstanding of those. The less-than-sublte anti-war expression is both timely (in the mid-60's) and quite eloquent. Another outstanding scene is one which Tuco enters carrying and talking to a dead chicken: 'If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?' What we intitially percieve as delusions on Tuco's part is soon understood to be a clever plan rather than insanity: our perception of the scene and of the character at large is turned upside-down.

A last aspect of the film that should be mentioned is Morricone's brilliant score melody - it is played not only in the beginning and in the end, but also in fragments throughout the film: at times it is melodic, at times war-cry-like and aggressive and at times melancholic and relaxed - just like the film. And both the film and its music have quite deserveably become reputed classics; one of those films everybody should have seen with one of those scores everybody should know. Indeed, the only regret is that Leone's perfectionism reveals the imperfections of virtually every other Western.