The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is an Italian movie!!

This is shocking. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of my favourites. I first watched it a long long time ago when I was in school and my father brought home the cassette tape of one of his favourite english movies. Little did he know that it was actually an Italian movie dubbed in English. Its incredible!

After the first time I watched it again several times and finally owned a VCD of it. It was in that version that one of my undergrad college buddies noticed that there seemed to be something wrong with the order in the initial intro sequence of the lead characters. The scene showing Tuco is titled The Bad while the one showing Angel Eyes is The Ugly. This was the opposite of what we knew and we even had wagers about who was what. Now after more than 5 years I have found an explanation for it. It seems the title of the Italian version was Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo which translates to The Good, The Ugly, The Bad and the change in the ordering lead to a mistake when the international version was made.

I had noticed that there were a few lip sync issues in the movie, but I thought that it was because it is a pretty old movie. I knew that the director and music composer had Italian names. Even then I never guessed that it wasn't a hollywood movie because it had Clint Eastwood as the laconic, lone ranger kind of hero who was ironically called blondie. He with his cigar chewing and sharp shooting antics is the second most interesting attribute of the movie. The first is the enchanting sound track by Ennio Morricone. This is why these westerns are called spaghetti westerns. And I thought it was somehow related to people eating spaghetti while watching them.

I guess its the immense popularity of this movie that 'inspired' the creation of the hilarious Indian westerns. I have seen a few of the Tamil westerns and they put Quickgun Murugan to shame. I don't know what it is about watching pot-bellied actors riding horses in full western costume (like in a fancy dress competition) with background music that had people whistling and screaming trying to sound like an E. Morricone score, set in the incompatible landscape of the region that tickles my funny bone. I don't know if there are any Hindi movies like these, but considering how everything else is I am sure there are a few. Sholay is in fact in this category but I wont make fun of that movie. There is a very serious Malayalam movie called Thazvaram, by the master-director Bharathan, which has the feel of a western but without any horses. I wish there was a real western in malayalam with Prem Nazir as the 'Shee Aye D' cowboy and Adoor Bhazi as his sidekick. It would ofcourse have Sheela as the damsel in distress/female film prop and the master villian Jose Prakash as the village folk terrorizing dacoit. That would have been the acme of entertainment.