Movie Review: ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’ Is Sergio Leon’s Fistful of Opera

The most reprehensibly violent movie ever made came to America at the end of 1967: “must be the most expensive, pious, and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre,” wrote New York Times critic Renata Adler. “If 42d Street is lined with little pushcarts of sadism, this film . . . is an entire supermarket.” One character, Adler informed us, is “throttled three times, sunscorched, and once so severely beaten . . . that anyone who would voluntarily remain in the theater beyond this scene . . . is not someone I should care to meet, in any capacity, ever.”

Adler was writing about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which she rechristened The Burn, the Gouge and the Mangle in a review that was more or less solely a complaint about its violence and about which she further harrumphed that though “the movie takes place in arid country, there are an awful lot of salads and vegetables.” Audiences declined to be upset about the surfeit of bloodshed, or vegetables, and in the U.S. the film grossed the equivalent of $185 million in today’s dollars. Adler wisely abandoned her film-critic post the following year and went on to other things.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

The most reprehensibly violent movie ever made came to America at the end of 1967: “must be the most expensive, pious, and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre,” wrote New York Times critic Renata Adler. “If 42d Street is lined with little pushcarts of sadism, this film . . . is an entire supermarket.” One character, Adler informed us, is “throttled three times, sunscorched, and once so severely beaten . . . that anyone who would voluntarily remain in the theater beyond this scene . . . is not someone I should care to meet, in any capacity, ever.”

Adler was writing about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which she rechristened The Burn, the Gouge and the Mangle in a review that was more or less solely a complaint about its violence and about which she further harrumphed that though “the movie takes place in arid country, there are an awful lot of salads and vegetables.” Audiences declined to be upset about the surfeit of bloodshed, or vegetables, and in the U.S. the film grossed the equivalent of $185 million in today’s dollars. Adler wisely abandoned her film-critic post the following year and went on to other things.