The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the greatest Western movies ever made, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is completely accurate. From director Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly closed out the Dollars trilogy with a tale of three men in Civil War-era America, converging on a buried treasure.

The movie helped to popularize the Spaghetti Western movement and solidified Clint Eastwood as a Western icon. Nearly 60 years later, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains a Western movie masterpiece filled with some of the most iconic cinematic moments of all time. However, it is one of those moments that has been criticized for its inaccuracies.

Expert Calls Out The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly For Unrealistic Quick Draw Scene

The final showdown at the climax of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains one of the best Western endings of all time. As Blondie (Clint Eastwood), Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), and Tuco (Eli Wallach) converge on the buried gold, the three men square off in a standoff, building to the moment they all draw and fire.

As beloved as the moment is, when Old West historian Michael Grauer examined the scene, he found it was not realistic. Grauer broke down the myth of the Old West being filled with gunfighters, but his main concern with this sequence was that the gunmen had such accuracy, as Blondie shoots Angel Eyes with one sH๏τ:

So this whole idea of the quick draw is just nonsense. The revolver was still somewhat new. It had been around since the 1830s, but they’re notoriously inaccurate and [the gunmen are] standing so far apart they’d have emptied each of their cylinders probably to make one good sH๏τ.

While Grauer may be right about the inaccuracies in the scene, the showdown in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is not so beloved because people thought it was accurate. The scene is one of the greatest cinematic moments, showcasing brilliant use of close-ups, wide sH๏τs, editing, and score, all working together to make a masterpiece.

The scene could have featured the gunfighters in closer proximity and firing multiple sH๏τs to ensure they got their target. That would have been more accurate, but not more effective as a movie moment. Sergio Leone understood the best staging for the scene, and sacrificed a little realism to pull it off, making movie history in the process.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly’s Plot With The Gold Was Seen As More Accurate

Michael Grauer may not have been very impressed with the accuracy of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly‘s famous showdown, but he was more forgiving when it came to the main motivation of the plot. The movie follows the three main characters as they learn about a buried stash of gold and are determined to get to it first.

Grauer acknowledges that “gold fever” was a real thing in the Old West, with many people looking for ways to “get rich quick.” It is a subject of the era that has been explored in many other Western movies, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Apple Dumpling Gang.

Though The Good, the Bad and the Ugly does not deal directly with the California Gold Rush of this era of American history, the use of gold as a motivating factor that these characters would risk their lives for and kill for was true to what motivated many people of this time.