The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Sergio Leone's 1966 masterpiece exists in a temporal and cultural space so remote from contemporary progressive sensibilities that scoring it on these metrics feels almost quaint. The film is a work of pure genre cinema, concerned with visual composition, narrative economy, and the mythic archetypes of the western rather than with any form of social consciousness. The three protagonists are all men. The film is set during the American Civil War yet shows no interest whatsoever in the war's actual stakes, causes, or moral dimensions. The Mexican character, played by Eli Wallach, is a bandit and comic relief, which reflects precisely the sensibilities of 1966 Hollywood without commentary or self-awareness.

The film's only claim to any progressive element is its cynicism about human nature and capitalist greed, a fairly universal theme that predates modern social justice discourse by centuries. Leone treats all three men as equally morally compromised, none heroic in any conventional sense. This is not progressive politics. This is nihilism dressed in a duster and a poncho. The film contains no female characters of any significance, no LGBTQ+ representation, no neurodivergent coding, and certainly no revisionist engagement with history. It simply ignores history entirely in favor of myth.

What we have here is a film from an era before the cultural markers we are measuring became culturally salient. To score "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" on a scale of contemporary progressive consciousness is to commit a category error, though we do so anyway, as is our solemn duty. The film deserves its place in cinema history based on its formal brilliance and thematic sophistication about human nature. It simply has nothing to say about the things we are measuring.