The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is arguably the purest expression of the Spaghetti Western aesthetic, and of a certain fundamental philosophical state, too. That gigantic pitiless landscape and those gigantic pitiless faces in severe close-up, those grey-and-greyer moralities in ever more complex conflict, and that endless trek through what the band Can might have called a soul desert—isn’t that all too recognizable? Aren’t we all beset by vigorously conniving false partners while in obsessive pursuit of gold and/or the grave? Aren’t we all some aspect of goodness, badness and ugliness? Don’t we all enter the screen from nowhere, and won’t we eventually depart (after a few bursts of ecstasy and agony) back to same? No? Just me? Well, trust me: Camus pulled The Stranger from a James M. Cain noir, and this Leone masterpiece delivers similar existential revelation, and with a better soundtrack, too!
Wed., March 30, 7:30 p.m., 2016
(Expired: 03/30/16)
