Get the goods on the bad and ugly

“The Good, the Bad & the Ugly”

Extended version collector’s set

MGM, $30

The stars: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach.

The plot: During the Civil War in the southwestern United States, three gunmen engage in a battle of wits for $200,000 in gold hidden in a graveyard. Along the way there are alliances, betrayals, murders, torture, Civil War battles and even a stint in a Yankee prison camp.

The history: This was the third and final spaghetti western director Sergio Leone made with Eastwood. It was Leone’s most ambitious film to that point and is one of the best, most influential westerns ever made on either side of the Atlantic.

Leone, who died in 1989 at age 60, began working in films in his native Italy when he was a teenager. An assistant director in the early 1950s, he segued into a screenwriter and director by the decade’s end. His second feature as a director was 1964’s “A Fistful of Dollars,” a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” that starred Eastwood, then a “Rawhide” regular. Though “Fistful” wasn’t the first Italian spaghetti western, it was the first to find success outside the country and lifted Eastwood out of the ranks of TV regular to movie star. The two teamed the following year in “For a Few Dollars More” and then in 1966 did “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly,” which was far more epic in scale and size than the first two installments in the trilogy.

The film premiered in Rome in December 1966 with a nearly three-hour running time. When it came to America a year later, it had been cut by some 16 minutes.

The restoration: This two-disc DVD set features the extended version of “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly,” which restores the four scenes cut from the Italian release. These sequences were deleted before Eastwood, Wallach and Van Cleef had dubbed their lines from Italian into English. Some 36 years after they completed the picture, Eastwood and Wallach were brought in to dub their dialogue for the four excised scenes. An actor was brought in to imitate the late Van Cleef’s voice for the reinstated scenes.

Misnomer: Eastwood’s laconic, poncho-wearing character was advertised stateside as “the man with no name.” It was a great marketing tool, but Eastwood had a name in every one of these films. In “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly,” he is called Blondie.

Extras: “Leone’s West” is a terrific “making of” documentary that features fun, informative interviews with Eastwood and Wallach as well as with film critic and historian Richard Schickel. Equally engrossing is “The Leone Style,” a featurette on the director’s distinct vision -- he used extreme close-ups of actors mixed with long shots and allowed the film’s violent scenes to erupt slowly and methodically -- and a documentary on the composer Ennio Morricone, who frequently composed parts of the score before filming began so Leone could play the music on the set during production.

There is also a reconstruction of a deleted scene using stills, the script and clips from the French trailer; the American trailer (which mistakenly refers to Wallach as the bad and Van Cleef as the ugly); and fact-filled, folksy commentary from Schickel.