May 18, 2004 | The Man With No Name actually had a name - and a nickname - when Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly galloped into theaters throughout Italy in 1966. By the time the movie arrived in the United States, however, Clint Eastwood's sharp-shooting, cheroot-chewing antihero was established as anonymous.

And the movie itself - the final chapter of a "Spaghetti Western" trilogy that Leone began with A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and continued with For a Few Dollars More (1965) - was 20 minutes shorter.

Blame it on United Artists, the original U.S. distributor of Leone's revisionist masterworks. Even though Eastwood's character is referred to by name in each film - Joe (Fistful), Monco (Few More), Joe or "Blondie" (Good, Bad and Ugly) -- UA executives chose to pique interest by dubbing him The Man With No Name in trailers, posters and newspaper ads while releasing English-dubbed versions of the three Italian-produced films back to back between February 1967 and January 1968. The movies were hits, and the no-name moniker has remained part of the legend ever since.

The same UA decision-makers trimmed 20 minutes from Good, Bad and Ugly, figuring that would make the movie more accessible, and less exhausting, for American audiences. Some of the deleted footage was included as bonus material when MGM Home Entertainment first released the sprawling epic on DVD in 1998. (MGM, which merged with UA decades ago, currently controls much of the UA film library.) Even then, however, the long-missing scenes were not fully re-integrated into the narrative. Rather, they simply were bunched together and presented -- with the original Italian soundtrack -- as a separate "special feature."

But now there's good news for Western fans and Leone aficionados: A newly restored and virtually complete version of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly finally is available in the United States. Originally prepared for airing on the American Movie Classics cable network, then briefly showcased in a handful of U.S. theaters, the three-hour magnum opus has been released as a "Collectors Edition" DVD.

The restoration was a labor of love for John Kirk, an MGM film archivist who fondly recalls seeing Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More during their original theatrical runs in his native Houston.

"I kind of hate to admit this," Kirk says, "but The Good, The Bad and the Ugly was the only one of the Leone movies I didn't see while I was growing up. In fact, I didn't see it until I started working on this project. But I already knew that it was every bit as important as the other two in terms of having a great impact on movie history."

Throughout the entire trilogy, Sergio Leone (1929-89) took the conventions of traditional sagebrush sagas and pushed them to unprecedented extremes of graphic violence and seriocomic cynicism. By doing so, he more or less invented a new subgenre - the so-called "Spaghetti Western" - in which old rules did not apply, and new attitudes propelled heroes and villains alike. Originally derided by some critics as blood-soaked pastiches and genre-defiling follies - the term "Spaghetti Western" initially was coined as a dismissive put-down - Leone's films long ago attained respectability for their own considerable merits, and for inspiring such action filmmakers as John Carpenter, Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, Walter Hill, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

Clint Eastwood - who achieved international superstardom after appearing in Fistful of Dollars and its sequels - often has claimed that Leone "operacized" the Western. The description is apt, given the director's penchant for stylistic overstatement in all three films. Time and again, you see self-consciously ritualized gunfights that intercut immense wide shots of wary antagonists and intense close-ups of their squinty eyes. Everything is overlaid with Ennio Morricone's alternately twangy and thunderous music, and protracted by pauses sufficiently pregnant to produce quintuplets.

"But The Good, The Bad and the Ugly went much, much further than the other two," Kirk says. "In fact, it reminded me of something by David Lean. It was that big a movie, that wide a canvas.

" Set in the wilds of Texas during the Civil War, Good, Bad and Ugly traces the interactions and machinations of three avaricious rogues as they hunt for a buried stash of stolen gold.

The "good" Joe (Eastwood) knows the name on a tombstone that marks where the booty is buried. But "ugly" Tuco (Eli Wallach), a wily Mexican rapscallion, knows where to find the graveyard where the tombstone is located. Although the unwilling allies suspect the worst of each other - and with good reason - they reluctantly join forces to claim the glittering prize. Unfortunately, their journey repeatedly is impeded by the inconvenient clashes of Union and Confederate armies. Even more unfortunately, they are hotly pursued by the "bad" Setenza (Lee Van Cleef), a.k.a. Angel Eyes, a cold-hearted villain who's eager to make a killing, one way or the other.

Kirk first heard of the 20-minute gap in Leone's original scenario when a colleague prepared the '98 DVD. "At one point," Kirk says, "he casually said something like, ''You know, it's really too bad that the movie was cut for U.S. release.' Well, that's the kind of statement that always makes my ears prick up. I couldn't help thinking, 'How dare they! What's the mater? They didn't think we're as good or a smart as the Europeans?' And that's when I decided to investigate, to see if I could restore the film."

Working through the Cineteca Nazionale in Italy, Kirk managed to obtain the best available negative of the original Italian version. "But it's a good thing I was a language major at the University of Texas," Kirk says, "because we never were able to locate an English version of the original shooting script to guide us. I wound up having to translate an Italian script on my own."

American Movie Classics provided financing for the project in December 2002 - with the proviso that Kirk complete his work within a seven-week period, prior to a locked-in airdate. "I usually have anywhere from three to eight months to finish a project like this," Kirk says. "But, fortunately, I'd already done a lot of homework when AMC came through. In fact, about six weeks before we got the green light, I had to go to New York on other business, and that's when my boss suggested I record Eli Wallach to dub the new scenes. He told me, 'Look, this guy is like 87 years old. Even if we don't have the money for the whole project right now, we better get him on tape while we still can.'"

Voiceover artist Simon Prescott was hired to record English dialogue for the late, great Lee Van Cleef.

"But Clint Eastwood wanted to record his own dialogue," Kirk says. "And that was terrific, because, frankly, I'm not sure there would have been much point in doing this if he wasn't interested in helping out. But he sent word to us that he thought the restoration was a great idea.

"The trouble is, when we finally got up and running, he was shooting Mystic River in Boston. And that did toss us into a panic for a while. But it turned out that he had to be in Los Angeles for a couple of days, so he agreed to come in on a Saturday morning - the Saturday before Christmas, as a matter of fact - for a half-hour. Fortunately, he only had a handful of lines to do. Because, remember, he doesn't really talk that much in the movie anyway."

"Of course, the one thing that was impossible to do, even though we really did do our best, was precisely match the quality of the voices (in the restored footage). Because, obviously, Clint was like thirtysomething when he made the movie, and now he's seventysomething. It wasn't as much of a problem with Eli Wallach, because he was already middle-aged when he made the film. Clint's voice was a little harder to equalize. But you know what? We felt the real fans would want to hear the real voices in any event."

Those fans should be delighted by the addition of "lost scenes" that clarify fuzzy plot transitions and provide revealing character details. "For example," Kirk says, "we've put a scene back in the movie where you see Lee Van Cleef's character going to a Confederate camp and being stunned by all the devastation there. It's one of the few moments where you feel he has any sort of compassion at all.

"And we've finally cleared up something that apparently has always confused some people. You know that scene where Tuco seems to suddenly have three gunfighters helping him hunt down Blondie? Well, we've restored the scene that shows how Tuco recruited these guys - tricked them, really, into working for him. Actually, this is one of the few scenes in the entire movie where Tuco demonstrates any kind of intelligence. I mean, he's going up against Clint Eastwood, for heaven's sake, and he knows he'd better get some backup help. It doesn't end up working, of course, but at least he's smart enough to make the effort."

Kirk insists that his restored edition of Leone's classic is "not intended as a replacement" for the version available since 1968 in the United States. "In fact," he says, "that other version is still available on video, and we've still got prints of the other version. We just wanted to give people the picture how it would have existed if UA had not made the cuts that it required to be made.

"And I have to say, nothing pleased me more than when Alberto Grimaldi, the original producer of the film, who helped us so much during the restoration, told me: 'Finally, this is the version that Sergio would have wanted you to see. I only wish he could have been here to see it himself.'"