Lee Broughton has had a chapter entitled ‘Restoration, restoration, restoration: charting the changing appearance of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on British home video’ published in Jonathan Wroot and Andy Willis’ new edited collection Cult Media: Re-packaged, Re-released and Restored (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
The chapter charts the numerous formal changes that have been made to Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (the restoration of a variety of distributor and censor cuts, changes to the film’s soundtrack, changes to the film’s colour timing and so on) during the course of its life on British TV and on British home video. The chapter also considers how cuts that were made by the British distributor and censor might have affected viewers’ appreciation of the film’s central characters and its representation of the US Civil War. In addition, the chapter highlights how fans have reacted to ongoing efforts to restore the film while also discussing how pointed changes in the way that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has been packaged on British home video might suggest that the British public’s understanding of the film’s “authorship” has evolved over time.