Sergio Leone holds a prominent place among Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic preferences. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly helps to explain that affinity from the viewer’s perspective: waiting, looking at a face and listening to music can be as thrilling as watching a shoot-out.
A chosen film and a way of looking
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 subsequent comment by the American into a declaration of a single favourite director for all circumstances.
The interest of the choice becomes clear when you look at how the feature film works. There is a hunt for money, alliances that fall apart and three men whose aims converge in the same place. However, the story devotes a great deal of time to situations that could be summed up in a few sentences. The running time turns those actions into experiences: the wait allows the characters to be measured 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 leap between scales allows two dimensions of the western to coexist: the vastness of a territory and the extreme focus on a gesture. The film does not need to choose between them. Its showdowns are intense because a tiny decision can have irreversible consequences.
This is a reading of Leone’s mise-en-scène, not a transcription of an essay by Tarantino. The distinction makes it possible to appreciate his preference without inventing explanations for it. A viewer may recognise 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 the variations on a hero
A Fistful of Dollars organises its conflict around a gunman who takes advantage of the clash between two groups. His ability to observe and calculate matters as much as his quick draw. The protagonist knows more than those who try to use him, and the audience enjoys following that 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 interest towards a pair of bounty hunters. Competition and cooperation are mixed together; each man must discover what the other is really after. The motif of revenge 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 between three figures makes any agreement unstable. Tuco brings a verbal and physical energy different from the restraint of Clint Eastwood’s character. The coexistence of their temperaments allows danger to include humour, irritation and dependence. The characters may 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 usually grouped as the Dollar Trilogy. There is no need, in order to watch them, to impose a perfectly continuous biography on Eastwood’s gunman. It is more revealing 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 lengthy explanations of the past.
The duel as a spectacle of duration and sound
The cemetery confrontation 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 of rhythm. Before the shot arrives, the editing has already produced a sequence of possible decisions. The audience takes part by trying to anticipate who will react first.
Ennio Morricone’s music gives that wait a dimension that ambient sound would not provide in the same way. It can sustain an emotion above words and make the space seem like a ceremonial stage. The result is not realistic in the sense of reproducing the everyday length of a fight. Its force comes from constructing a cinematic time that we feel as necessary.
Humour stops that solemnity from becoming uniform. Tuco can be in a grand situation and react with an immediate need, a protest or a mean sort of cunning. The coexistence of those emotional scales keeps the characters close to the viewer. The film allows for epic scope without scrubbing away the pettiness of those who inhabit it.
The cemetery also adds spatial irony: the treasure 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 though the protagonists continue to focus on their own gain.
Looking at Leone through Tarantino’s cinephilia means recognising the pleasure those decisions offer before searching for concrete borrowings. Costume, close-ups or a melody may reappear in other films; what is difficult to reproduce is the relationship between all of them. The documented admiration leads to a film that deserves to be watched in full, with its delays, its comic detours and the progression that gives meaning to the final confrontation.
See the selection of filmmakers and actors admired by Tarantino.