There once were three men; call them the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The Ugly knew the name and location of the graveyard in which a fortune in gold was buried. The Good knew the name of the particular grave. The Bad knew that they knew what they knew, and wanted the gold for himself.

It's not an affectation to refer to the characters in this way rather than by their names (which we're actually told in the course of the film, not that anyone remembers). The three men stalk the landscape of the Civil-War-era American West like gods. Without once doing anything impossible (although their ability to aim firearms is almost supernatural), they give us the impression they really are, if not gods, survivors of a race of supermen who have inhabited this rough, pagan, fairytale West since the dawn of time. Gods or supermen, they can be killed, by each other if by nobody else. It's this, as much as the sun-drenched images and perhaps the most perfectly apt musical score ever written, that makes the film so entertainingly tense as it winds its way to a climax.