Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Last night we went to see The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at the new AFI Theater in Silver Spring, MD. This was only the second time I’ve been to this place, but I have a feeling (or at least a hope) that I will be coming here a lot more often in the future. It is just to great a resource to have in one’s backyard. The first time we were in one of the smaller theaters, but this time it was what I’m guessing to be their main one and it was quite large. Of course the fact that they brew real espresso for you and have beer on tap doesn’t hurt, but the selection of movies, the print quality and their bringing in people involved in the making of the movie to field questions from the audience makes it a unique resource.

Eli Wallach (no relation, unfortunately) was actually at this screening. He talked and answered questions from the audience before the movie. For a man of 88, he sure was amazing! He could rattle off details about the making of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, in addition to many other movies. A couple of interesting notes – he said one of his favorite movies he was in was his first, Baby Doll. He also mentioned a bunch of movies that he loves which he wasn’t in, but I can’t recall them unfortunately. He is a big fan of French cinema, and used to watch it when he was a young, struggling actor. He is actually writing an autobiography, so hopefully we will see that out next year some time – he has a lot of ground to cover and it sounded like he was only half or a little more through it!

This screening of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, was actually the premier screening of the new extended English language version. As Wallach told us, Sergio Leoni, in addition to many Italian directors at the time, would film the entire movie with a certain time of soundtrack (can’t recall what he called it now) which recorded sounds, but probably not all that well, and would catch all kinds of background noise as well. Then in the editing phase all the actors would come in and lip-synch their parts. This is what Wallach and Clint Eastwood did. He said he spent 7 months doing this after the movie was filmed! Anyway, apparently some of the scenes they shot were tossed aside and never recorded in post-production. I guess eventually these shots were reincorporated into an extended version that was made available in a language or languages other than English – or maybe even these were kept in the original non-English version of the film. But for whatever reason, a longer English version was not made until now. The makers of this version actually got Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood back in the recording studio to dub in their voices again for the new scenes. It was fairly obvious which scenes they were, partly because I’ve seen the movie a few times and so didn’t recognize the new scenes as ones I’d seen before. But also, you could tell a difference in the characters’ voices over the 36 years since it was initially filmed! Eli Wallach’s voice had become a bit higher in tone and Clint Eastwood’s a bit lower. The lip-synching seemed more noticeable in these scenes as well, although some of them were seamless enough that they could have been recorded 36 years ago and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference if I was seeing the movie for the first time. Actually, for anyone seeing the film for the first time, I wonder whether they will be able to distinguish these new scenes from the old at all!