For: strong pervasive immorality, severe moral confusion, brief nudity, and languageThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a well-made but completely warped movie, confusing ugliness with outright wickedness, and goodness with an outright wickedness that occasionally offers a comrade a few puffs of its cigar, leaving the idea of badness drowning in relativity. The foremost of the spaghetti westerns, in fact the foremost western in movie history, its harsh, edgy uniqueness boils down merely to its entire lack of a good guy, despite the titles.
Strong Pervasive Immorality
The main characters, Tuco and Blondie, are serial criminals. Tuco is a rapist, a murderer, an extortionist, a kidnapper, a vandal, a robber, a perjurer, and a man who deserted his wives and children (wives, plural, because he’s also a serial bigamist). Blondie runs a scam operation collecting reward money for bringing Tuco and other wanted men in to the police and then snatching them away again before justice can be served, to repeat the scam with the same criminal in the next county. And Blondie is a murderer, too.
The movie is full of the two men’s constant double crosses, lying and threatening (or attempting) to kill one another.
Severe Moral Confusion
The movie begins and ends with title cards labeling Tuco as “The Ugly”, Angel-Eyes the villain as “The Bad”, and, most importantly, Blondie as “The Good”. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’s story presents Angel-Eyes as being worse than Tuco merely because of his sinister rather than stupid demeanor. Tuco and Angel-Eyes share the same tactics and the same evil motives, and are both guilty of heinous crimes (with Tuco possibly in the lead), but their lines and costumes create an artificial moral distinction between them. Calling Blondie “The Good” is just wicked. (See Strong Pervasive Immorality, above.)
It is wrongly made to look like justice when Blondie ambushes and murders a rival bandit just to avoid being followed. On the other hand, it is also wrongly (and contradictorily) made to look like justice when, in the end, Blondie doesn’t kill the double-crossing thief/murderer Tuco, but instead leaves him balancing on a grave marker with a noose around his neck for a few minutes, until Blondie cuts the rope with a shot just like in their scam and lets Tuco go free... with a reward of half the $200,000 cash box.
Gunfights to the death are portrayed as normal occurrences, not things to be avoided. And while it always looks like self-defense, Blondie in fact occasionally draws first.
Tuco is portrayed as having been forced into his life of crime and immorality by childhood poverty (despite his having split thousands of dollars of reward money with Blondie several times since then). His clean-slate brother even apologizes after Tuco accuses him of having taken the easier way and having become a priest merely because becoming a bandit required too much courage.
Brief Nudity
Tuco stands up from a bath, giving a full view of his body from behind.
Language
G-dd-mn
d-mn
h-ll
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h-ll
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h-ll
h-ll
h-ll
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b-tch
b-stard
b-stard
b-stard
b-stard
b-stard
b-stard
b-stard
b-stard
a--
p-ss
