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There is a creative element in all this. A film print can’t just be ported onto a DVD, the way you tape something from TV. It has to be translated, and that translation involves decisions about how things look, sound and feel. For most of the history of the medium, movies were made to be projected in a cinema, on film; when you digitize them and squish them down for home video, to be shown in a living room on a television, what you want is for it to look as much as possible as it did on the theatre screen. The ideal is not necessarily the sharpest image or the most eye-popping colours. (Although that is sometimes the impulse of distributors who want to make striking products.) It is, or ought to be, the most faithful approximation of the way it was shown in cinemas when it was first released.

In the case ofThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly, that ideal is complicated by certain unusual factors. For one thing, the movie was an Italian production, shot partly in Spain, with a cast of Americans and Mexicans. For another, Italian movies of the era were almost always dubbed, in part so that actors of different backgrounds could read their lines in their native tongue.The Good, the Bad and the Uglywas therefore always intended with both an American and Italian audience in mind.

“The core thing you need to know about the film is that two versions were prepared and approved by its director, Sergio Leone,” Ross says. “One of them was the initial 1966 cut. It was dubbed in Italian, which was common in Spaghetti Westerns at the time, and ran just shy of three hours. And a year later Leone prepared the 1967 international cut, for which he supervised the English dubbing along with all of the cutting and additional music editing. That version runs about two hours and 42 minutes.”