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robyn-the-bank · 19 days ago

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For being the movie I see talked about the least out of the dollars trilogy, a fistful of dollars is a DELIGHT and also the longest 1 hour and 36 minutes ever.

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robyn-the-bank · 19 days ago

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Even more hardcore useless dialogue statistics on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Previously, I collected useless statistics on Blondie's dialogue. I did that because I figured he's a man of few words, transcribing his dialogue shouldn't actually be that much, it's not like I'm trying to do this for Tuco.

Well, now I have done it for Tuco, and Angel Eyes, and done even more hardcore statistical analysis! You will all feel deeply illuminated by this, I'm sure.

Methodology: because I would have gone insane if I had to manually transcribe every word anyone says in this three-hour movie, I worked from an existing transcript I found online; I made a number of corrections to it, but I can't guarantee it didn't miss an error somewhere that I didn't end up double-checking. The same caveats as before apply with regards to how I defined a line and precisely how lines were transcribed.

In the process of actually doing this for every scene and not just the ones with Blondie in them, the way I did the scene splits ended up with two more scenes that contain Blondie but where he does not speak than in the previous post's treatment of it, so in this re-analysis, I am considering Blondie to be present in thirty scenes out of forty-five. Angel Eyes is in fifteen scenes, half as many, while Tuco is in thirty-seven.

On the other hand, while in his thirty scenes Blondie says 721 words, Angel Eyes says 735 words in half as many scenes... and Tuco says more than twice as many words as both of them put together, with 2924 words by my count.

When counting by lines - and remember, the line splits are kind of arbitrary so these are a much more fuzzy statistic - Blondie does have more lines than Angel Eyes, or 86 compared to Angel Eyes' 76. (This makes sense; Blondie is significantly more laconic than Angel Eyes, so his lines are on average shorter.) However, Tuco once again has more than both of them put together, or 210 lines all in all.

In the median scene where they appear, Blondie says 2.5 lines totaling fifteen words with the new scene splits, Tuco says 57 words in four lines, and Angel Eyes says five lines totaling 34 words.

The full graph of word count per scene by main character:

As you can see, and as we all knew, Tuco is very talkative compared to the other two, and when Angel Eyes is in a scene, he tends to have more substantial dialogue than Blondie does in his scenes.

As I mentioned last time, Blondie at his absolute most talkative says 96 words in a conversation. Tuco at his most talkative says 275 words (at Blondie's bedside at the monastery), or 269 words (when Blondie's first bringing him in for a bounty), or 245 words (when speaking with Pablo). Angel Eyes at his most talkative says 131 words (interrogating Tuco pre-torture), and has three other scenes exceeding Blondie's maximum word count: the one with Stevens at the beginning (114 words), the one in the cabin with Blondie (101 words, and the conversation with Baker (99 words).

I noted last time that Blondie is extra laconic in threatening situations: he says three words per line during the inn hanging, desert walk, and in the cabin with Angel Eyes. I actually missed the one scene where he's even more laconic than that, namely where Tuco catches up with him at Shorty's hanging, where his three lines ("And Shorty?" "No?" "Sorry, Shorty.") total five words; that one's obviously also a threatening situation. However, Tuco actually has an even more laconic scene than Blondie: during the gun seller sequence, he says seventeen words in eleven lines, each line only one or two words. He's just returned from nearly dying in the desert here, and while he certainly has a sense of humour in that scene, the distinct lack of his usual talkativeness may be an effect of being exhausted and dehydrated and half-dead, which is fun to bear in mind more for that scene.

In the vast majority of scenes, if Tuco is present at all, he has the most dialogue of the main characters. Where he doesn't, he is generally in somewhat vulnerable situations where he is less sure of himself - being rescued from the bounty hunters by Blondie, having food with Angel Eyes, at the end.

Angel Eyes, meanwhile, grows quieter towards the end - in his scenes for most of the movie, when he's fully confident, he tends to speak a decent amount. But starting at the "Perfect number" scene, where Blondie threatens him and his men, he becomes a lot less talkative, which can be taken as a fun sign of his confidence already beginning to erode a bit once he's met his match. He laughs it off there, and continues to act pretty unfazed until the truel itself, but he never talks quite as much again.

Something else I noticed when putting this together: we all know how there's no dialogue for the first chunk of the movie, with the first line being spoken at 10:38 in, though the first three minutes are the opening credits which doesn't really count. What I didn't properly notice was that there's an even longer sequence of zero dialogue later, namely from Blondie's "Yeah. Sure, I'm sure" at 2:29:09 and until "It'll be a lot easier with that" at 2:40:59, for a whole eleven minutes and fifty seconds of only music, sound effects, and wordless grunts and such. This includes the bridge explosion, the crossfire between the two armies, Blondie and Tuco waking up and crossing the river, the chapel with the wounded soldier, Tuco's betrayal and Blondie firing the cannon after him, the Ecstasy of Gold sequence, and Tuco's digging at Arch Stanton's grave until Blondie appears. We just don't even notice just how long nobody's saying anything because it's riveting, while it's super noticeable in the opening. In the graph, I lumped this whole sequence together as "Towards the cemetery" so as not to have several scenes with no words for any of them taking up space.

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robyn-the-bank · 19 days ago

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Hi! Really love your art. May I ask you something? What does the barbed wire in Blondie’s fanart symbolize and why is it wrapped around his neck and making him bleed?

It's cover art for a fanfic I'm working on (currently in the editing phase, hopefully coming soon) exploring Blondie's character over the course of the film. One of the things it's exploring is the idea that, in his quiet, unemotional, outwardly stoic way, he's harboring some unresolved trauma after what Tuco did to him, and the extremely specific revenge that he pulls at the end (where the frame it's based on is from) is something he was ultimately driven to do because of that.

So the idea with the barbed wire is that this thing has been quietly choking him and he's 'bleeding' from it, and that that's the primary motivator behind this moment. It's meant to evoke a noose while being a little more symbolic and less just about that bit. I'm no master of symbolism or anything, but it's what came to mind for illustrating the fic.

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robyn-the-bank · 7 months ago

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