Cowboys and Indians
By Joe Leydon
From the August/September 2017 issue
The actor gained his first taste of international fame in
Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, released in the U.S. 50 years ago.
Looking very much like something the cat dragged in,
reconsidered, and dragged outside again, the gritty, grimy stranger rides into
the flyspeck border town. He passes a dead man who’s been tied to the saddle of
his cantering horse and adorned with a cryptic sign: “Adios, Amigo.” The
stranger tips his hat, then rides on.
Draped in a tatty poncho and riding a woefully weary
mule, he endures the derisive laughter of four thuggish cowboys who make rude
remarks about his humble steed and threadbare attire. They fire their guns into
the ground, spooking the mule into a terrified gallop. The stranger manages to
dismount only by grabbing a makeshift streetlamp.
In a decrepit cantina, the barkeep brings the stranger up
to speed: The town is dominated by two rival gangs, and each side uses hired
guns to maintain an uneasy truce. To earn a job, however, an applicant must be
a quick draw and a cold killer. The stranger appears intrigued by the
employment opportunities.
Back on the street, the stranger walks over to the
thuggish cowboys, pausing only to tell an industrious coffin-maker: “Get three
coffins ready.” He calmly confronts his tormentors, advising them to apologize
to his mule. They respond by laughing. So the stranger flips back his poncho,
revealing the six-gun at his side, and the laughter stops. The stranger rasps:
“I don’t think it’s nice, you laughin’. You see, my mule don’t like people
laughing. He gets the crazy idea you’re laughin’ at him. Now if you apologize,
like I know you’re going to, I might convince him that you really didn’t mean
it.”
For a long, lingering moment, there is nothing but an
ominous silence. Then the thugs start to draw their guns. But not nearly fast
enough. The stranger fires repeatedly, hitting each mark. The local
sheriff — who just happens to be the employer of the newly deceased — appears
from out of nowhere to issue impotent threats. The stranger replies: “If you’re
the sheriff, you better get these men in the ground.”
And then, as an aside to the coffin-maker, he adds: “My
mistake. Four coffins.”
All of which left movie audiences of the 1960s gaping
incredulously and gasping: “Just what the hell kind of western is this?”
Filmed in Spain by an Italian director inspired by a
Japanese script, with Italian and German supporting players backing an American
TV star in the lead role, A Fistful of Dollars represented an innovative twist
in multicultural cross-pollination. Director Sergio Leone 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.
A Fistful of Dollars stripped away the noble motives and
altruistic heroism that had been hallowed hallmarks of the western genre since
the silent movie era. The protagonist is a steely-eyed pragmatist who is driven
by self-interest, not justice and self-denial, and who gets into trouble only
when he impulsively aids a wife and mother commandeered by a bandit chief. He
shoots first — and last — and rarely bothers to ask questions afterwards. He
comes off as a good guy primarily because the bad guys are much, much worse.
Leone broke all the unwritten laws that had heretofore
defined the American-made western — including, most shockingly, the custom that
a character’s gun and its lethal impact should never be shown in the same
frame.
In 1964, when A Fistful of Dollars first appeared in
Leone’s native Italy, and 1967, when it finally appeared in the United States,
the wanton slaughter was all the more shocking because so many of the bullets
were fired by Clint Eastwood, the personable young star of Rawhide, a
then-popular TV western in which the actor played a thoroughly conventional,
uncomplicatedly amiable cowboy. Fistful — along with its two more ambitious
sequels, For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(1966) — turned Eastwood into an international star through the simple
expedient of transforming Mr. Nice Guy into a down-and-dirty antihero who would
become known throughout the world as The Man With No Name. Several other
actors — including Steve Reeves, Edd Byrnes, John Phillip Law, Alex Cord,
and — no kidding! — Elvis Presley (in 1969’s Charro!) would follow in
Eastwood’s hoofprints, attempting similar image makeovers during the heyday of
spaghetti westerns. But only Lee Van Cleef — who costarred in For a Few Dollars
More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — enjoyed anywhere remotely near the
same level of success.
So it’s all the more ironic that Eastwood was not Leone’s
first choice, or even the fifth, to play the starring role in a screenplay
originally titled The Magnificent Stranger. James Coburn, Henry Fonda, Charles
Bronson, Steve Reeves, and Eric Fleming (Eastwood’s costar on Rawhide) were
among the actors who were offered the part — but passed because of Leone’s
lowball salary offer of $15,000. In his 2009 book American Rebel: The Life of
Clint Eastwood, biographer Marc Eliot credits Claudia Sartori, a Rome-based
agent with the William Morris Agency, with suggesting Eastwood to Leone and his
producers. To make her case, she showed them “Incident of the Black Sheep,” a
1961 episode of Rawhide. The case got made.
More than 20 years later, Leone told biographer
Christopher Frayling: “What fascinated me about Clint above all was his
external appearance and his own character. In ‘Incident of the Black Sheep,’
Clint didn’t speak much ... but I noticed the lazy, laid-back way he just came
on and effortlessly stole every single scene from Eric Fleming.
“When we were working together, he was like a snake,
forever taking a nap 500 feet away, wrapped up in his coils, asleep in the back
of the car. Then he’d open his coils out, unfold, and stretch. ... When you mix
that with the blast and velocity of the gunshots, you have the essential
contrast that he gave us.”
For his part, Eastwood was at a point in his career when
$15,000 — and the opportunity to visit Europe for the first time — seemed very
tempting, and it didn’t hurt that he’d be able to fit the 11-week shoot into
his break between seasons of Rawhide. Better still, once production began on
location in Spain, Eastwood found Leone to be a confident yet flexible
collaborator. The director readily accepted his suggestion to greatly decrease
the amount of dialogue he would speak in order to seem more mysterious, even
iconic. (“Thus,” Frayling wrote, “Eastwood became one of the very few actors in
film history to fight for fewer lines.”) There was a method to his seeming
madness: He thought less dialogue, less explanation, would make his character
even more of an antihero. “More of a guy,” Eastwood said later, “who was a
gunman out for his own well-being, placed himself first, and didn’t get
involved in other people’s problems unless it was to his benefit.”
As for being laid-back and snakelike, well, Eastwood
admits: “Italian actors come from the hellzapoppin’ school of drama. To get my
effect, I stayed impassive — and I guess they thought I wasn’t acting. All
except Leone, who knew what I was doing.”
In Eastwood’s view, Fistful “changed the style, the
approach to westerns in [Hollywood]. They ‘operacized’ them, if there’s such a
word. They made the violence and the shooting aspect a little more larger than
life, and they had great music and new types of scores.”
Indeed, throughout all three films in what has become
known as Leone’s Dollars trilogy, 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.
It should be noted, however, that 50 years ago, when all
three films were released within months of each other in the United States,
many film critics — and quite a few devotees of traditional westerns — found
Leone’s spaghetti westerns to be thoroughly unappetizing. One of the most
influential movie reviewers in America, Judith Crist of the New York World
Journal Tribune and NBC’s Today show, savagely panned A Fistful of Dollars as a
“cheapjack production” that “misses both awfulness and mediocrity: It is pure
manufacture.” A few months later, Crist was even more incensed by For a Few
Dollars More: “A treat for necrophiliacs. The rest of us can get our kicks for
free at the butcher store.” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times chimed in:
“Mr. Leone piles violence upon violence and charges the screen with hideous
fantasies of sudden death.” The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was better received
by some critics —including such notables as Roger Ebert of the Chicago
Sun-Times and Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice — but Arthur Knight of
Saturday Review wrote for the majority when he described the film as “crammed
with sadism and a distaste for human values that would make the ordinary
misanthrope seem like Pollyanna.”
Even so, the only review that ever seriously rattled Leone
was an appraisal by famed Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, director of
Yojimbo, the internationally acclaimed 1961 drama about a wily 19th-century
ronin (masterless samurai) played by Toshio Mifune who wanders into a village
controlled by contending criminal gangs and plays the opposing groups against
each other for fun and profit. (Yes, this was the movie Kevin Costner took
Whitney Houston to see in 1992’s The Bodyguard.) Leone, ahem, borrowed freely
from Kurosawa’s film while crafting the scenario for A Fistful of Dollars. In
fact, he borrowed so much that after Kurosawa viewed Leone’s spaghetti western,
he famously dashed off a letter that began: “Signor Leone — I have just had the
chance to see your film. It is a very fine film but it is my film. Since Japan
is a signatory of the Berne Convention on international copyright, you must pay
me.”
Leone mounted a game defense — at one point, he and his
attorneys insisted that A Fistful of Dollars actually was inspired by Red
Harvest, Dashiell Hammett’s classic 1929 novel about an unnamed detective
(identified only as The Continental Op) caught between competing gangs. (Some
film historians have theorized that Kurosawa himself drew from the same source
material.) After more than two years of protracted legal squabbling, however,
Leone agreed to an out-of-court settlement with Kurosawa — thereby clearing the
way for United Artists to finally release the entire Dollars trilogy in the
United States in 1967.
But a funny thing happened to Eastwood’s sharpshooting,
cheroot-chewing gunfighter on his way to America: He kinda-sorta lost his
identity.
The Man With No Name actually had a name — three names,
actually — when the trilogy first appeared in European cinemas. Listen closely,
and you’ll hear him addressed variously as Joe (Fistful), Monco (For a Few
Dollars More), and Joe or “Blondie” (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). But the
advertising team at United Artists chose to pique interest in the enigmatic
antihero — and wound up playing a key role in the creation of a mythos — by
dubbing him The Man With No Name in trailers, posters and newspaper ads when
the studio opened A Fistful of Dollars at theaters and drive-ins everywhere.
(“This is the man with no name. In his own way he is, perhaps, the most
dangerous man who ever lived!”) UA reinforced the brand while promoting For a
Few Dollars More, which had Eastwood’s character in an uneasy alliance with a
rival bounty hunter played by Lee Van Cleef: “The man with no name is back...
The man in black is waiting! As if one wasn’t enough ... as if death needed a
double!” By the time The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had its U.S. premiere at
the end of 1967, there was no need for repetition: The no-name moniker already
was firmly, and immutably, established.
Leone’s later films — most notably, his magnificent Once
Upon a Time in the West (1968) — display even greater degrees of operatic
flamboyance. But his “Man With No Name” films have remained his most
significant and enduringly influential legacy. Originally derided in some
circles as blood-soaked pastiches and genre-defiling follies — the term
“spaghetti western” originally was coined as a dismissive put-down — they long
ago attained respectability for their own considerable merits and for inspiring
such action filmmakers as John Carpenter, Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, Walter Hill,
George Lucas, Guy Ritchie, and Robert Rodriguez. (Rodriguez admits that Once
Upon a Time in Mexico [2003], the follow-up to his El Mariachi [1992] and
Desperado [1995], completed his own version of a “spaghetti western” trilogy.)
And even though Clint Eastwood’s relationship with Leone was strained after he
passed on participating in two later Leone films, Once Upon a Time in the West
and 1971’s Duck, You Sucker, he openly acknowledged Leone’s influence on some
of his own directorial efforts, including High Plains Drifter (1973) and The
Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). He dedicated his 1992 Oscar-winning western
Unforgiven to two of his mentors, Don Siegel — who directed him in Dirty Harry,
The Beguiled, and four other films — and Leone.
Quentin Tarantino, not merely a fan but a full-bore
fanatic when it comes to Sergio Leone, once described The Good, the Bad and the
Ugly as nothing less than “the greatest achievement in the history of cinema,”
and has paid tribute to the filmmaker he credits as a mentor in many of his own
films, especially — but by no means exclusively — Django Unchained (2012) and
The Hateful Eight (2015).
Even now, 50 years after the U.S. release of the Dollars
trilogy, Christopher Frayling notes in his book Sergio Leone: Something to Do
With Death, “Leone’s images of showdowns and duels are still in the pantheon of
visual clichés. Like Janet Leigh in the shower, Judy Garland on the Yellow
Brick Road, Humphrey Bogart at the airport [in Casablanca] ... they are
instantly recognizable, and can register in seconds. The French philosopher Jean
Baudrilland called Sergio Leone ‘the first post-modernist director’ — the first
to understand the hall of mirrors within the contemporary ‘culture of
quotations.’ Thus, it is appropriate — necessary, even — that his work should
have been since reflected by so many others.”
And if it seems odd, if not absurd, for a French
philosopher to wax philosophical about the influence of spaghetti westerns,
consider: Leone — much like Akira Kurosawa — readily acknowledged being
influenced by arguably the greatest of all American directors of westerns, John
Ford. Sergio Leone passed away in 1989, at age 60. And yet: A man may die, but
his movies are forever in the present tense.
In His Own Words
Earlier this year, Clint Eastwood held court at the
Cannes Film Festival, appearing at a 25th anniversary screening of his
Oscar-winning Unforgiven and participating in a public interview session
focused on his life and career. During the latter event, questions posed by
noted Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan prompted Eastwood to look
back at the spaghetti westerns that transformed him from working actor to
international superstar. Here’s what he had to say.
“I just kind of stumbled through the ’50s, doing bit
parts and small parts here and there. Some of them on live TV. Some of them on
filmed TV. Once in a while, bit parts in the movies. At the end of the ’50s, in
1959, I got a test for a CBS hour show called Rawhide and I got the job. Then I
was employed, and actually making a living as an actor, and that was a dream
for me. I went for about six years.
By that time, I had an agent. Before that, I had a hard
time finding one, which was OK, I guess. But he asked me if I wanted to go to
Italy and make a western, a remake of a Japanese film. I said, “No, I really
don’t. I’m doing a western now and it’s on TV every week, and we have a little
hiatus. I’d just like to have a few days off and go fishing or something.”
But they asked me to read the script as a favor to the
head of the William Morris Agency in Rome. I thought, “This is going to be a
piece of crap.” But when I read it, I said, “Hey, this is Yojimbo.” See, I was
big fan of [Akira] Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. At the time I saw it, I thought, “That
would make a great western, but nobody would have the nerve enough to do it,”
as it was so wild. I thought, Gee, maybe I should do this. I’ve never been to
Italy. I’ve never been to Spain, where they did a lot of the filming.
So I went over there and it was a very small picture. It
was made for $200,000, but it was good. Then I went back and did the other two
pictures. ... I did [Fistful of Dollars], and then the next year, by that time,
[Sergio Leone] had more money to put into productions. I made [For a Few
Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly], which were fantasy westerns.
They were more operatic westerns than the others we grew up with, but very
stylized, and Sergio was great for picking faces. Just looking at things a
little different. ...
Sergio was a very interesting character. He had a
different way of looking at the size and scope of films. I learned a lot from
him.”
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