The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Other mistake: In the very last scene of the movie, and just before Blondie shoots the rope that is holding Tuco on the grave's cross. You can see a car moving in the background, screen right of Tuco's head.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When Blondie abandons Tuco in the desert, watch the rope around Tuco's neck. It changes between shots, sometimes over his left shoulder, and sometimes hanging down in front of him. It is not due to the camera angle.

Other mistake: When Blondie and Tuco are talking about telling each other the location of the money, a car drives by in the background. In the shot where both Blondie and Tuco are visible, watch the top right in the trees in between the pillars supporting the bridge.

Jack Vaughan

Continuity mistake: Towards the beginning of the movie, Angel Eyes rides up to a house where he has to get information from a man inside and then kill him. After Angel Eyes kills him at the kitchen table, his son runs down some steps behind Angel Eyes in the background with a rifle in his hands. Angel Eyes pulls out his revolver, turns around quickly, and shoots him dead. Take note that the pistol is not pointing directly at the boy as he is firing it. (00:14:30)

RLN

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When Blondie is saved by the mortar shell, and it shows the empty noose, it is completely different than the noose that Blondie had around his neck. The loop that the noose went through to hold it to the beam has changed.

Ian Hunt

Plot hole: After Blondie has "teamed up" with Angel Eyes, he hears a gunshot and says something like "Every gun sings its own tune", indicating that he's recognized the shot as being from Tuco's gun. But how did Tuco get his gun back? It certainly would have been confiscated when he entered the prison camp, and the chance that the guard on the train has that exact gun is extremely unlikely - he would most likely have had an officially issued sidearm.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: It's the type of gun Tuco likes that makes that particular sound.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mistake picture

Revealing mistake: When Blondie is to be hanged by Tuco, and saved by an extremely lucky hit by a Union mortar, you can see that the wall that will be hit by the grenade has been blown to pieces at least once before; the bricks have no mortar between them, and there is a large circular scorched area on the brick wall. (00:47:10)

Continuity mistake: When Tuco is riding his horse, he encounters three bounty hunters - one fires a shot making the horse misstep, and fall, bringing Tuco down to the ground. One of the bounty hunters ask Tuco, "Hey amigo, you know that you have a face beautiful enough to be worth $2,000.00?" He has a big blade of grass between his lips as he backs away from Blondie (Eastwood), however, there was no blade of grass between his lips when Blondie and he were close to one another. As he backed away, he had a rifle in his right hand and a wanted poster in his left, and he knew that Blondie had a gun pointed at him through his overcoat, so he was not able to put a blade of grass between his lips at any point. (00:17:50 - 00:18:50)

RLN

Factual error: When Tuco is in the gunshop messing around with the guns, one gun has the cylinder and barrel moving back and forth by manipulating the trigger guard-lever. This is a Belgian Galand & Somerville revolver, a gun that did not exist until 1868. This film takes place during the US Civil War, which ended in 1865.

Factual error: When Clint Eastwood blows up the bridge, he lights only one fuse but all of the explosives detonate simultaneously, despite being attached to numerous, separate pilings.

Other mistake: Blondie suffers from severe sun burn wounds in the face, after the capture and dragging through the desert. The wounds look perfectly realistic, but disappear or change several times. The burns are completely gone shortly after leaving the monastery. Such burns would leave scars and traces for at least weeks.

Airborne60

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When Blondie and Tuco are planting dynamite to blow up the bridge, they are standing in the water. During the following blast, they are hiding away next to the river and from then on, they are totally dry again.

Other mistake: Director Sergio Leone uses one of his trademark filming techniques throughout this film, where anything outside the camera frame doesn't exist. Several times the characters react to situations and other characters when they come into frame that they logically would've seen much sooner. For example, at one point Blondie and Tuco are walking and stumble across an army camp. Even though in reality they would have been walking toward it for a long time and would have been aware of it, they react with surprise the moment it appears on screen.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mistake picture

Revealing mistake: After the explosion blows a hole in the wall and Tuco joins the procession of people flowing down the street, when the shot switches to face the characters you can see that the 'woman' in a blue dress in the wagon is actually a man. (Time is for the extended version of the film). (01:59:15)

xanderphillips

Continuity mistake: When Tuco tosses the rope to Blondie to hang himself with, the rope is all tangled up with no knot showing. In the scene break that cuts back to Blondie, the rope has changed to a nice neat coil with the hangman's knot showing.

harold

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mistake picture

Revealing mistake: When Tuco makes Blondie march through the desert, there is a shot at the very beginning and Blondie looks over his shoulder, feeling the strain of the desert. Then the camera focuses on Tuco and in this shot, you can see the tracks in front of his horse from a previous take.

Factual error: When Angel Eyes arrives at the Confederate Army Hospital, the Confederate flag that is flying is not the correct flag; it is the flag that people in the 20th century and later think of as the Confederate flag. The only rectangular flag with the blue St Andrew's cross on red was the Confederate navy flag and the battle flag of the Army of Tennessee, which was the standardized battle flag for the Western Armies (but not that far west) after January 1864, so didn't exist in the New Mexico campaign, nor at the time the story takes place.

genorp

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mistake picture

Visible crew/equipment: When Angel Eyes has finished paying the legless man for information, the legless man hops into the saloon. Notice he has two shadows, revealing the presence of stage lighting.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mistake picture

Factual error: Just before Angel Eyes confronts the girl in her room about the whereabouts of Bill Carson, we see her walking in the hall outside her room, and lighting this hallway is a very modern day lightbulb.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mistake picture

Visible crew/equipment: When Angel Eyes sits down at the dinner table in his first scene, there is a small unlit lantern hanging on the wall near his head, and unexplainable light sources reflected on it.

Tuco: Hurrah! Hurrah for the Confederacy! HURRAH! Down with General Grant! Hurrah for General... What's his name? Lee! LEE! Ha ha. God is with us because he hates the Yanks too. HURRAH!
Man With No Name: God is not on our side because he hates idiots also.

More quotes from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Trivia: When the camera crew were rigging the bridge to be blown up, the supervisor in charge of the detonation who didn't speak any foreign language thought he had been given the instruction to blow up the bridge and proceded to do it. Trouble was, the camera crew hadn't finished setting everything up and it was not filmed at all. Sergio Leone was (according to Clint Eastwood) the angriest anyone had ever seen him. As a result, the army agreed to rebuild the bridge for free and it hired a detonator who did speak the right language. This time they got the shot.

Gavin Jackson

More trivia for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Question: At the end of the film Blondie, sitting on the horse, turns around, aims his rifle, fires, and severs the rope with a single shot. Lets face it, that rope would be a very small target, and difficult to hit with precision, even from ten or twenty feet, and Blondie is now so far from Tuco that he would no longer even be able to see the rope. Could anyone hit such a small target from such a distance with such incredible accuracy?

Rob Halliday

Answer: There's a show called "Hollywood Weapons: Fact or Fiction" which dealt with this exact question (s01e03). Blondie is roughly 200 yds away. In the show the host didn't hit the rope, but only missed by an inch on his first attempt. I definitely think an expert Sharps Rifle shooter could make the shot. The issue however, is the bullet would most likely not actually slice the rope apart as seen in the film (they fired the Sharps at point blank and the rope remained partially intact still). They also tested shooting a hat off someone and (as expected) the bullet just goes right through the hat without lifting the hat at all.

Bishop73

That was another thing that puzzled me. On several occasions in this film, Tuco is suspended from a rope, and Blondie cuts the rope by firing a bullet at it, (I think Clint Eastwood repeated the trick in "The Outlaw Josey Wales"). But if you fired a bullet at a rope holding a (rather large) person like Tuco (or a similarly heavy weight), even at close range, would it really sever the rope? I will have to look out for "Hollywood Weapons Fact Or Fiction." I hope they only used a dummy or a model to re-create the shooting feats. I don't think I would have liked to have been hanging on a rope while somebody fired bullets at me to see if this would sever the rope, or to stand there while they fired bullets into my hat to see if they could lift it off my head.

Rob Halliday

Answer: Probably not, but remember...this is a movie, a western at that and they typically have over the top action to excite audiences. Kinda like how it's impossible to shoot someone's hat off without harming them. It's all for show.

Dra9onBorn117

More questions & answers from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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