I also think that The Good Bad and Ugly is a very good western, or anti-western. It's probably Leone's best movie. But it is insanely self-indulgent as in way too long. After awhile all that baroque excess gets to be too much and things drag more and more. For instance, not only is the giganic civil war battle sequence tacky as in preachy and obvious, it also totally derails the main story so that we will, hopefully, shed a few cheap tears and also be impressed by Leone's ability to shift dramatic gears (except he can't). Maybe it works better in Italian without the dubbing, as the Union commander gets a Saturday Morning kid's cartoon voice and much alarmingly banal dubbed dialogue.
Underneath that supposedly cynical and tough exterior, Leone is mostly the same ol'bullshit sentimentality and Hollywood (on the Tiber or in Spain in this case) leftism.
But Wallach is really a blast. It's a very funny performance.
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