Sergio Leone holds a prominent place among Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic preferences. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly helps explain that affinity from the viewer’s point of view: waiting, looking at a face, and listening to music can be as thrilling as watching a gunfight.
A chosen film and a way of seeing
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly appears in the selection Tarantino contributed to the 2012 Sight and Sound poll, reproduced by Open Culture in August 2013. That choice documents his admiration for Leone’s film. It does not require turning every later comment by the American into a declaration of one single favorite director for all circumstances.
The interest of the choice becomes clear when you look at how the feature works. There is a search for money, alliances that fall apart, and three men whose goals converge in the same place. Even so, the story devotes a great deal of time to situations that could be summed up in a few sentences. The runtime turns those actions into experiences: waiting makes it possible to measure the characters before any of them reveals his intention.
In a close-up, a barely shifted glance can change the threat. In a wide shot, the same character is reduced against the landscape. The jump between scales makes two dimensions of the western coexist: the vastness of a territory and the extreme attention to a gesture. The film does not need to choose between them. Its duels are intense because a tiny decision can have irreversible consequences.
This is a reading of Leone’s staging, not a transcription of a Tarantino essay. The distinction makes it possible to appreciate his preference without inventing explanations for it. A viewer can recognize in his cinema a related taste for waiting and threat, but that resemblance does not turn every sustained shot into a direct quotation.
The Dollar Trilogy and variations on a hero
A Fistful of Dollars organizes its conflict around a gunman who takes advantage of the clash between two groups. His ability to observe and calculate matters as much as the speed of his weapon. The protagonist knows more than the people trying to use him, and the audience enjoys following that margin of advantage. The charisma comes from the economy of movement and the sense that he is always holding something back.
For a Few Dollars More shifts the focus to a pair of bounty hunters. Competition and cooperation are mixed together; each man must discover what the other is really after. The revenge motif introduces a difference between being paid for a death and needing a death to happen. That separation changes the emotional weight of the duel without abandoning the logic of popular spectacle.
In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the relationship among three figures makes any agreement unstable. Tuco brings a verbal and physical energy different from the reserve of Clint Eastwood’s character. The coexistence of their temperaments allows danger to include humor, irritation, and dependence. The characters can need one another while looking for the chance to betray each other, a condition far more productive than a fixed division between allies and enemies.
The three titles are often grouped as the Dollar Trilogy. To watch them, it is not necessary to impose a perfectly continuous biography on Eastwood’s gunman. It is more illuminating to attend to the variations of a cinematic figure: his entrance into a community, his negotiations, and the way he manages information. Leone builds recognition through gestures and presence, without requiring long explanations about the past.
The duel as a spectacle of duration and sound
The cemetery showdown in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly makes that method visible. The material action is simple: three men watch each other and calculate. The scene expands through positions, shot scales, and changes in rhythm. Before the shot arrives, the editing has already produced a sequence of possible decisions. The audience participates by trying to anticipate who will react first.
Ennio Morricone’s music gives that waiting a dimension that ambient sound would not provide in the same way. It can sustain an emotion above the words and make the space feel like a ceremonial stage. The result is not realistic in the sense of reproducing the everyday duration of a fight. Its force comes from constructing a cinematic time that we feel as necessary.
Humor keeps that solemnity from becoming uniform. Tuco can be inside a grand situation and react with an immediate need, a protest, or miserable cunning. The coexistence of those emotional scales keeps the characters close to the viewer. The film allows epic scale without cleaning the protagonists of pettiness.
The cemetery also adds a spatial irony: the reward is surrounded by graves. The individual search for wealth ends in a place that recalls the collective cost of war. That contrast remains visible even as the protagonists continue to focus on their own gain.
Looking at Leone through Tarantino’s cinephilia means recognizing the pleasure these decisions offer before searching for specific borrowings. Costume, close-ups, or a melody can reappear in other films; what is difficult to reproduce is the relationship among all of them. The documented admiration leads to a film that deserves to be watched all the way through, with its delays, its comic detours, and the progression that gives meaning to the final confrontation.
See the selection of directors and actors admired by Tarantino.