And the way men walk down a street in full view and nobody is able to shoot them, maybe because they are not in the same frame with them. And a moment in a cemetery when a man materializes out of thin air even though he should have been visible for a mile. There is a moment, for example, when men do not notice a vast encampment of the Union Army until they stumble upon it. At important moments in the film, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot be explained by the practical geography of his shots. In these opening frames, Sergio Leone established a rule that he follows throughout ' The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.' The rule is that the ability to see is limited by the sides of the frame.

The long shot has become a closeup without a cut, revealing that the landscape was not empty but occupied by a desperado very close to us. Then the shot slides onto a sunburned, desperate face. Here are a few - beginning with Roger Ebert's 2003 Great Movies review:Ī vast empty Western landscape. We've had several excellent appreciations of how the opening shot of Sergio Leone's 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' works, each with its own unique angle, if you will.

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