The Good, The Bad And The Ugly Special Edition (18)

An extreme close-up of a grotesque, sneering face. A gaping longshot of a ramshackle building clinging to unyielding scrubland. A coyote-howl vocal echoing on the soundtrack. Laconic gunmen dealing death in long, dusty coats. And not a hero in sight... Instead we get a grimy trio of amoral drifters (Clint Eastwood's Blondie, Lee Van Cleef's Angel Eyes and Eli Wallach's Tuco), all scrapping for a wad of cash while civil war rages around them.

Safe to say that, having spaghettified the nag opera in A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More, Sergio Leone sealed his rep for irreverent reinvention with The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Not only did he re-energise the Western as an art form, but he also made it more palatable for the counterculture-savvy American kids of the late '60s. Not that they saw the full, 177-minute version - US distributor United Artists chopped into it, fearing that the hefty running time would put audiences off. Thankfully, MGM has now restored the missing footage for this DVD release and even roped in Eastwood and Wallach to freshly loop lines that only previously existed in Italian.

The good news? UA were wrong, the extra minutes doing nothing to damage Leone's bold, stately action masterpiece. The bad? Now 89 years old, Wallach's croaky dubbing sticks out like a jagged tombstone. The ugly? There isn't any. The idiosyncratic score, pithy dialogue and central performances make sure this extended cut still stands as an ozone-piercing tower of achievement.

DVD Extras:

There are two kinds of Special Edition, my friend. The extravagant kind and, well, the not particularly special kind. Sadly, beyond its restored edit, this two-disc set is the latter. A string of featurettes skim over the making of the movie with some talking heads with Eastwood, Wallach and other key players. But in terms of insights into Leone's methods, it's cursory. Film historian Richard Schickel's creaky commentary is also a letdown, as is the similarly droney `documentary' on the real Civil War campaign (really a dry lecture pasted over stills and animated maps).Then things get better: Reconstructing The Good, The Bad And The Ugly details how Leone's original edit was resurrected for this DVD, and a mixture of cut footage, photos and text offer an entirely lost sequence. A generous-enough platter of bonus nibbles, then, but not the feast Leone fans have been craving.

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