The Good, the Bad and the Ugly/Headscratchers

• During the scene where Blondie and Tuco are watching the Union and Confederacy fight over the contested bridge, they are forced to duck away from incoming mortar fire. They take refuge behind what they quickly discover are crates full of dynamite. Not ten seconds after this revelation a wounded soldier is brought in five feet behind them and a doctor begins prepping for an operation. Uh, doc? Maybe you should move wounded men away from high explosives before trying to save their lives?
  • perhaps a bit too close yes.
  • To be fair, it's a primitive battlefield triage. They don't exactly have the luxury or picking and choosing where they're going to operate, since they can't move the patients very far very quickly without risking them dying in transit. It's a place behind cover making it difficult for anyone to see (and thus shoot) them, which automatically makes it better than out in the open, so needs must, really.
• But just remember, dynamite, wasn't invented yet, the boxes say explosives and they contain black powder sticks Also, One of the famous stylistic elements of this film is that nothing in its universe exists until Leone puts it in the frame. That convention begins with the opening scene when a empty ghost town is populated by a pan onto a man's face in closeup. The Union pickets didn't exist until they appeared on a previously empty road to capture Tuco and Blondie, who then step off the road and into the massive trenchworks which had not existed only moments before.
• Things appear when and where they are needed in order to advance the story. Those events create an otherworldly aura for the whole film, and personally I think the technique enhances the willing suspension of disbelief.
• How come Blondie hasn't been issued his own Wanted Poster, since he keeps helping Tuco escape? Or Angel Eyes, for that matter - leaving witnesses alive seems as if it would be pretty counterproductive for an assassin.
  • Perhaps Angel Eyes is able to protect himself with his apparently good standing with the military. Blondie is usually off in the distance during hangings, and his partners don't seem to make it out well sometimes, so they couldn't rat him out. As for the both of them, maybe they DO have wanted posters, and we just don't see them.
• At the end of the movie, they dig up the grave with the name Blondie gave, but it's empty. He tells them he'll write the real name under a rock. So wait a minute... Why did Angel Eyes and Tuco think that Blondie just happened to know the name of somebody else who was buried at that graveyard, so he could give an accurate fake name? Surely they would have known immediately that he was lying. After all, Blondie didn't even know which graveyard they were headed to.
  • I don't think Tuco was blessed with the abundance of brains to figure the ploy, so it would make sense that it would never occur to him. As for Angel-Eyes, he was never directly involved when the information was being parsed out, and therefore didn't have all the pieces to the puzzle to figure it out. Maybe.
  • It wasn't just anyone else. Blondie told Tuco the gold was in Arch Stanton's grave. In actuality, the dying soldier had told him it was next to Arch Stanton's grave, in a grave marked unknown. This way, even if Tuco begins digging in the false grave, Blondie would at least know he's in the right graveyard.
• This isn't a plot point, but it is something that has persistently bugged me about the movie. What exactly does it deconstruct about Western black-and-white morality? To put it in TV Tropes terms, I guess you could call it a subversion, but it doesn't poke any big holes in the genuinely honorable "white hat" hero; it just (as far as I can tell) has an amoral con artist where the hero would normally be while pitting him against even worse enemies. On the other hand, I seem to be in a small minority in not seeing it, so maybe someone can explain what I'm missing.
  • Well, there's a morally ambiguous "hero", an extremely unambiguous villain and a third character who isn't much better than the villain but more likeable than either of the others (and who is arguably the main protagonist). So at least it's more complex than Black and White Morality.
  • Italowesterns in general and the dollars trilogy in detail deconstruct the idea of a unreasonably good and fast gunslinger, which is almost impossible to kill or bring down. A guy that invincible has no one to answer to and can't be made responsible for anything. Therefore he can do whatever he likes, totally ignoring all limitations put on him by law enforcement. That's the reason why Blondie is "The Good" only through worse antagonists, and why he is short of a full blown sociopath (he shot some men in the beginning of A Handful of Dollars for insulting his mule).
    • Actually he demanded that they apologize (to the mule, so that the mule wouldn't kick their asses), and they stopped laughing and reached for their guns, so he killed them.
      • Wrong, wrong, wrong, he deliberately aggravated a group of men who wouldn't hesitate to shoot him, basically outright stated he was going to kill them before even approaching them ("Get three coffins ready"), and then proceeds to kill them, and all for a offhand comment about his mule.
        • No. The reason that the Man with No Name killed those men had nothing to do with them insulting his mule. He doesn't care. His goal was to gain favor with the Rojos, because he wanted to join them and try to turn the two families against each other and profit off of it. So, to prove his worth to the Rojos, he goes and shows them his incredible drawing and shooting ability by gunning down those men. Notice how only 3 men insulted him, but he kills four? And they never actually insulted his mule, they insulted him.
        • This could also be a case of Seinfeld Is Unfunny. The Good The Bad and the Ugly may not look like a deconstruction compared to say, Unforgiven, but when you compare it to the average American western circa 1966, the conduct of the protagonists looks considerably more morally ambiguous.
• If The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is meant to be a prequel to A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More — which can be inferred by the Civil War aspect of its story and the Man With No Name not having his famous poncho until the end of the movie — then why does Clint Eastwood's character still do bounty hunting? At the end of the movie Blondi (as Tuco calls him) walks off with 100,000 dollars, which if adjusted for inflation and interest would make him a multimillionaire in today's money, he should have been able to live a fairly easy life after that. He is shown to be an opportunist so I guess that much money wasn't enough for him?
  • In the comics, it's revealed that owning the gold was too much of a hassle for him, with agents coming after him to get it, so he gave it to the church that had helped him out earlier.
  • Maybe someone set upon him and took the money.
• Shouldn't Tuco have noticed his gun was empty? He took it out of its holster just before the big climax, and any experienced gunman knows the difference between the weight of an empty gun or a loaded gun. And don't just say it's because he's stupid, because he actually made that gun and he's a master when it comes to street smarts.
  • Technically, he doesn't take it, he has it tied on a rope. When he "takes" it, he actually grabs the rope and pulls it up. That could have tricked him about the weight difference.
    • On that note would Tuco have tried to shoot Blondie if his gun did have bullets or was he going for an Enemy Mine where he and Blondie would double team Angel Eyes? Tuco came off as having some what of a Fire-Forged Friends thing going on with Blondie near the end.
      • He aims at Angel Eyes. The only question is would he have shot Blondie afterwards?
• Is Tuco really guilty of the vast majority of the crimes he is accused of committing during each of the attempts to hang him? I'm not saying he isn't a criminal because he clearly is but morally speaking he doesn't seem all that different from Blondie's character and so I'm assuming he isn't necessarily all that bad a guy.