Clint Eastwood not please the critics, one writing that "no other performance of his is quite so 'un-Clintlike'." Two months later Eastwood began work on the third "Dollars" film, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", again playing the mysterious Man with No Name. Lee Van Cleef returned as a ruthless fortune seeker, with Eli Wallach portraying the cunning Mexican bandit Tuco Ramirez. The storyline involved the search for a cache of Confederate gold buried in a cemetery. During the filming of a scene in which a bridge was blown up, Eastwood urged Wallach to retreat to a hilltop. "I know about
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Ugly" received criticism for its depiction of violence. Leone explains that "the killings in my films are exaggerated because I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek satire on run-of-the-mill westerns... The west was made by violent, uncomplicated men, and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures." To this day, Leone's effort to reinvigorate the timeworn Western is widely acknowledged. Critical opinion of the film on initial release was mixed, as many reviewers at that time looked down on "spaghetti westerns". In a negative review in "The New York Times", critic Renata Adler said that