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Sergio Leone's achievements - especially his westerns - have gone from pop obscurity to underground sensations to honest-to-goodness cinematic treasures over the last forty-some-odd years, and it's all due to the fact that the majority of the movie- going public (even in the '60s) assumed there should be a distinct division between fun, dumb action moves and films - objects of true and indelible art.

But if this is the one lesson Leone's devastatingly impressive canon can leave us with, it's more than enough: This epic 'spaghetti Western' may be poorly dubbed, chock-full of America-via-Italy cinematic cliche and more than a few gaffes (it only takes a few minutes for Clint Eastwood to ride off into the post- Civil War sunset - right between two power poles in the distance), but it's myopic dedication to bringing its narrative to fruition and its ability to be both triumphant storytelling and effortlessly involving shoot-em-up fare renders any kind of artistic standards set against it null and void.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly isn't a David Lean film - there aren't undercurrents of social imperatives and underlying human questions beneath the surface of this film - but this eschewing of symbolic depth leaves Leone and his film with free reign: This picture doesn't worry about what it represents, it just wants to have some fun. There's a silliness, an exuberantly over-the-top mentality to the wordplay and drama at the center of the film here, but God bless it - it never tries to be anything but what it is.

Some call it silly exploitation fare, some say it's the first brain dead action picture that proved to Hollywood that you don't even have to try for a full story with your Western fare. But now that the film has become a bit antiquated - and it's been almost completely restored to its original length, adding 17 minutes to the version most Americans are familiar with - its merits and charms shine through like the reflection of a noonday sun off a pistol's shaft.

Clint is great - he's able to do more with his super-tall, lanky stature than most dialogue-heavy actors are able to conjure with their fancy words, but most importantly: He's completely friggin' cool. The first two films in the "Man Without a Name" trilogy (yeah, he actually has names in all of them, but who really cares?) allowed him the chance to pout and frown with excellent results, but this final film in the pack is the one where his seemingly one-note caricature takes on a life of his own.

Check out the scene where Eli Wallach terrorizes him in the middle of the desert, forcing an almost- dehydrated Eastwood to drink the water he's just used to soak his gross feet: Clint's expressions aren't those of a hack by any stretch of the word - Eastwood knows enough about the rhetoric of Western acting to know that eloquent soliloquies just ain't gonna pop up for you in pictures like this: You have to take the opportunities you're given in a script and do what you can with them. And he does it well.

It is difficult to label The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as the best Western ever made (for some reason that just doesn't seem right). But there are few films on Earth that contain this much exuberant glee within the very fabric of its celluloid - regardless of genre.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Presented in a delicious 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly looks a lot better here than it did in its original DVD presentation. Still, sometimes things are a little dodgy - there's a hair in the transfer at the bottom of the screen around 00:44:00 (perhaps it was in the gate when the film was shot, perhaps it's a projection problem) - but overall, this DVD gives the film a regal treatment. Colors are soft and well-defined, black levels are pretty strong, and apparent detail (though hampered by the film's low budget) isn't too bad at all. Edge enhancement is also minimal. Pretty nice, if hardly flawless.

Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

Those hoping to escape the dubbing craziness of this film are bound to be disappointed: Though this DVD edition houses both a 5.1 English- language mix of the film and the picture's original Italian 2.0 mono mix, both offer the film as hastily-dubbed and decidedly out of sync with itself. But that's part of the fun, right?

Effects and atmospherics are given much greater placement and fidelity in the surround mix, and while even the re-recorded voices are sometimes too cracked and tinny to excuse, they're given the best technological treatment they could get. And the music is simply revelatory: In utilizing surround channels and an excellent sense of spatialization, Ennio Morricone's majestic score arguably becomes the shining star of the show.

Also included are English, French, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin subtitles, plus English Closed Captions.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

The original American version of the film is not included here - so where purists will be happy to see this original cut of the film, if you like your Good, the Bad and the Ugly the way you remember it in theatres, you might want to give this one a rental first. This writer finds the 17 extra minutes of material here to be out-of-this-world, though: It makes an already extraordinary film that much better. But see for yourself...

Historian Richard Schickel's screen-specific audio commentary is endemic of his other commentary tracks: The guy sure knows what he's talking about, even if he sometimes rambles on in his lazy monotone and alternately goes for long stretches without discussion at all. His zeal for the material here is infectious, though, and compared to other high-profile commentators like Leonard Maltin, he stands heads and shoulders above the crowd. Not too bad.

Then comes the second disc: The 20-minute featurette Leone's West takes a look at the history behind the European spaghetti Western and how Leone's work was some of the only films of this type to have an impact in the U.S. Schickel appears here, as does Alberto Grimaldi, the producer of the film. The Leone Style is an even more involving look at the Italian master at the methods he used to turn what could have been silly, stupid period pieces into some of the most striking movies of the century. Some of the greatest interview material in this extra comes from Eastwood himself: He takes some time to discuss Leone's style and how it both influenced and ended up being slightly different than the form he (successfully) created for himself.

Next is The Man Who Lost the Civil War, a more historically-oriented featurette: In this 15-minute piece, we get a look at the Sibley campaign in the Civil War, one of the more notorious failures of that conflict. The information here is great, but beware the cheesy recreations of historical events: They can draw you out of the story here. Reconstructing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly looks at the MGM team's attempts to recreate Leone's original 178- minute version from different sources. For film nerds and those curious as to how the technical aspects of the movie came together for this DVD edition, this extra is a highlight. And the 8-minute Il Maestro documentary allows viewers to take a walk through the cinema-music virtuoso's contribution both to this film and the cinematic world at large. Also included at the end of this extra is an audio-only analysis from film music historian Jon Burlingame about Morricone's score for this film - very cool.

Next up are three deleted scenes (although only two of them are actual cut scenes from the film). From the text introduction to the extended Tuco torture scene: "Because of negative damage, the full-length premiere version of this scene could not be restored to the film reconstruction of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. An archival print has been transferred for this special edition disc." The more extensive violence and grotesque contrast of lovely Civil War music and Eli Wallach's screams make this the full sequence one wishes could have been in the restored version. Then there's the "Socorro Sequence," the film's most notorious deleted scene, which is reconstructed in basic outline with additional text and various production stills and snippets from the film's French trailer that showcased the scene. It really would be great to have seen it actually put together, but, alas, this is as close as we're going to get. Finally, the French trailer for the film isn't a de facto "deleted scene," but it does offer some alternate angles and shots unused shots that weren't showcased in the final film.

Rounding out this set is a poster gallery, the film's original theatrical trailer (in 2.35:1 mono), and trailers for other great MGM releases: "MGM Means Great Movies" (a cursory look at MGM's DVD catalogue), plus Escape From New York and Windtalkers.

DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC?

There are no ROM extras on the disc.

Parting Thoughts