See in this world, my friend, there’s two kinds of people. Those with loaded guns; and those who dig.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, released in 1966 and starring Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef, is my favorite movie of all time. I love the soundtrack, the cinematography, the story, the acting, makeup and effects. And I love the characters.

Eastwood plays Blondie, a mostly silent protagonist who is introduced as “the Good.”

Blondie looks back at Tuco after leaving him behind in the desert.

Wallach plays “the Ugly,” a bold but underhanded bandit named Tuco who goes from town to town making enemies. He shares a lot of screen time with Blondie, and is usually set as a contrast to him.

Tuco crashes through a window, turkey leg, liquor, and gun in hand.

The third and final main character, portrayed by Lee Van Cleef, is “the Bad,” or Angel Eyes, as he is known to the other two. Angel Eyes is set as the main antagonist to Blondie and Tuco, and his first two scenes in the movie showcase his brutality in perfect form, as he murders two men and a teenager in cold blood.

Angel Eyes relishes the joy of murder.

These three characters have a few things in common: they’re all bounty hunters or bandits, traditionally operating outside of the law (or at most adjacent to it), they’re all extremely adept at shooting guns, and finally, they’re all after the money. More specifically, a $200,000 sum that has allegedly been hidden in a grave with a name only Blondie knows, in a graveyard only Tuco knows. In pursuit of this fortune, they each employ their own methods, morals, and masculinities.

In “The Knight versus the Courtier,” Darrin Cox’s chapter from the book Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies, Cox describes the landscape of masculinity in the French courts in the 16th century, of noble-born knights and social climbing courtiers. Near the end of the chapter, he describes the effect of gunpowder weapons on the status of the knight: deprived of a horse and “expected to fight like cogs in a machine” (Cox 54), war quickly lost its glamor. In order to reach the heights of the great knights that came before them, Cox asserts, knights had to challenge each other to duels. This practice occurred “to the extent that modern scholars call the third quarter of the sixteenth century the French ‘Golden Age’ of dueling,” (Cox 59).

Anyone familiar with the genre of the Western knows that they are essentially synonymous with the gun duel. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is no exception. Each of the main characters is introduced in scenes where they are faced off against armed opponents and dispatch them with incredible precision. Three bounty hunters enter a restaurant, five shots are heard, and Tuco emerges unscathed. Angel Eyes beats a man he has been paid to kill to the draw (and then kills the man who paid him to do so). Tuco faces three bounty hunters, this time without his gun. Blondie appears, they try to kill him, but through a fake pocket in his coat, he shoots them all in quick succession. So each of the three main characters are martially capable men. So why resort to lives of crime? Why not join the army? Simple. Just like for the knights of the 16th century, war isn’t glamorous enough for these cowboys. The movie includes a scene that stresses this point, when Tuco and Blondie run into a Union camp led by an alcoholic commander who has been sending his troops to fight the Confederacy over a bridge two times a day. As he puts it, “it’s a flyspeck on headquarters’ maps. And the headquarters has declared, we must take that ridiculous flyspeck. Even if all of us are killed.” When faced with the inanity of the situation, young men being sent to die every day over a gridlock, Tuco and Blondie show what they think of the whole operation:

BOOM!

They blow up the bridge. What good was the bridge or the war for them? In order to achieve the heights that they dream of, they must operate outside of society’s normal bounds. Just as knights would engage in private duels in order to prove their masculinity to society and those around them, the three cowboys travel the West, seeking opportunities to prove themselves and make as much money as they can while doing so.

But beyond these broad characterizations of the three of them as a whole, there is also value in examining their differences. For in the differences manifest between them, one may get a glimpse into the masculinities deemed ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in media concerning the Wild West, and how analogous it is to mindsets of centuries long past.  The first and least ambiguous is Angel Eyes. In his attempts to locate the man who hid the money, he shoots three people, slaps a woman around, and nearly beats Tuco to death. Through these actions, it is demonstrated that there is no line that he will not cross in order to get what he wants. He’s pure evil manifested. Calculating, conniving, cold. He has a strong masculine image, but he isn’t knightly in the way he carries himself; that he kills for sport and has no respect for women indicates as much. Angel Eyes is more of a courtier sort of guy, smart and cunning. In an anecdote of a courtier defeating a knight in a duel, Cox describes: “Jarnac won by slicing the tendons of Châtaigneraye’s calf in a maneuver now called the Coup de Jarnac,” (Cox 53). If anyone were to win a duel like that, it would certainly be Angel Eyes.

Tuco is the most complicated. A significant part of his characterization is that he is an underhanded and cowardly figure, often being shown to betray the trust of those closest to him with his words and actions. He meets up with a trio that he clearly had personal history with, and the very next scene, he allows them to die by Blondie’s gun, as it allowed him the opportunity to catch Blondie by surprise. Later, he comes across his brother, Pablo, a priest. Pablo accosts him for having abandoned his family and reveals that their father had died, and though he had requested Tuco’s presence, Tuco had been nowhere to be found. In reaction to this, Tuco breaks down, and reveals another part of Tuco’s characterization that contrasts him with the other two: he is a strongly emotional character. In situations where Angel Eyes could offer but a cruel smile or Blondie remain stoic, betraying no emotion, Tuco wears his heart on his sleeve. Enraged by Pablo’s scolding, he tells him “You became a priest because you were too much of a coward to do what I do!” and when Pablo strikes him for it, he strikes back, much harder. And when the three main characters finally arrive at the graveyard in which the money is hid, the one who is shown gleefully running past every grave, desperately searching for the one containing treasure, is Tuco. See, Tuco isn’t unmasculine; it’s just that the ways that his masculinity manifest are immature and prideful. He’s prone to think more with his gun than his head: characteristic of the idea that “a formal education was harmful to a career in arms,” (Cox 53). He’s a knight.

Last but not least, Blondie. Stoic. Unmoving. Yet witty, and highly skilled with the gun. In an exchange after Angel Eyes tortured the location of the money out of Tuco, Blondie asks him why he had not done the same to him. In response, Angel Eyes tells him: “Not that you’re any tougher than Tuco; but you’re smart enough to know that talking won’t save you.” Blondie combines an intelligence to rival Angel Eyes with an equally strong sense of ‘justice.’ By ‘justice,’ I mean a sort of vigilante justice: Blondie clearly has a far greater respect for life than Tuco or Angel Eyes, but he is still relatively indiscriminate with his gun, and shows full willingness to dispatch anyone who would intend to do the same to him. In these situations, one may also observe what makes Blondie unique: no matter the situation, he always draws first. This is how we know that his masculinity is what is presented to the audience as superior. Because in the plot of the movie, he is never the one taking the bullet. Blondie is both knight and courtier. Blondie is a strong king, proving his masculinity again and again. 

And maybe a bit of a softer side, as well.

In fact, the movie’s morals are laid out bare in the final scene: the trio.

Who shot first?

Ultimately, the one who stands victorious, to take the money all to himself, is… Blondie AND Tuco? What? As it turns out, Blondie had taken the bullets out of Tuco’s gun the day earlier, but Tuco had simply failed to notice. Angel Eyes, of course, is the sole loser, falling to Blondie, who was much quicker on the draw, seeing as he knew he had only one true opponent. Thus, with both his smarts and his martial prowess, the king prevails in battle, and nobly splits the money with the knight.

Through this analysis, I hope a few things have been made clear: first, that art can easily contribute to our understandings of societal expectations and perspectives at a given time, and secondly, that, although the medium changed and the weapons employed are different, the tropes of masculinity in europe from the 16th century to the 20th has seen surprisingly little change, merely a bit more class mobility.