10 Best Characters From Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns [Part 1]

Screen Rant

By Ben Sherlock

March 29, 2024

From the Man with No Name to Once Upon a Time in the West’s Frank, spaghetti western pioneer Sergio Leone is responsible for some of the western genre’s greatest villains and antiheroes. Leone blazed the trail for Italian cinema’s brutal, bloody, darkly comedic take on the American western with A Fistful of Dollars, his westernized remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Leone followed this up with two sequels – For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – to complete the Dollars trilogy and solidify his place as one of the world’s greatest western directors.

Leone also helmed an underrated spaghetti western gem, Duck, You Sucker!, and offered up a definitive treatise on the Wild West with his breathtaking epic Once Upon a Time in the West. Leone’s spaghetti westerns are renowned for their moral ambiguity, their uncompromising depiction of violence, and their operatic filming style, complemented beautifully by Ennio Morricone’s iconic scores. But Leone didn’t just bring captivating visuals to the western genre; he also created some of its most iconic characters, like Once Upon a Time in the West’s Harmonica and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’s Tuco.

10 Colonel Douglas Mortimer - Played by Lee Van Cleef in “For a Few Dollars More”.

The first sequel to Leone’s pioneering spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, shook up the formula by giving the Man with No Name a partner. In A Fistful of Dollars, he was a lone wolf playing by his own rules, looking for criminals to bring to justice, but in For a Few Dollars More, he’s part of a team. Colonel Douglas Mortimer is a fellow bounty hunter going after the same targets. When they realize that neither of them can vanquish the villains alone, they reluctantly join forces.

Lee Van Cleef shares a spectacular on-screen dynamic with Clint Eastwood in the role of Mortimer, which keeps the narrative engaging from start to finish. At first, they can hardly stand each other. But by the end of the movie, they’ve developed a mutual respect for one another.

9 Jill McBain - Played by Claudia Cardinale in “Once Upon a Time in the West”.

Leone rarely included any major female characters in his movies – it’s one of the only blind spots in an otherwise near-perfect filmography – but he did feature a female lead in the sprawling ensemble of Once Upon a Time in the West. Claudia Cardindale plays Jill, who arrives in Sweetwater supposedly to marry the murdered Brett McBain. However, as it turns out, she already married him a month earlier, making her the sole heir of the slaughtered family’s fortune.

Jill spends the rest of the movie being targeted by Frank’s henchmen while seeking retribution for the death of her late husband and his family. This creates an interesting dynamic with Harmonica, because they both have a vendetta against Frank and both want to see him suffer. Along the way, a touching friendship blossoms between the two.

8 Juan Miranda - Played by Rod Steiger in “Duck, You Sucker!”.

Leone’s final western, Duck, You Sucker!, is also his most overlooked. It takes place during the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s and stars Rod Steiger as an unscrupulous Mexican outlaw named Juan Miranda. Juan is different from Leone’s other gunslinging antiheroes in that he’s not a lone wolf; he’s a father. His merry band of outlaws is mostly made up of his own children.

Juan’s arc in Duck, You Sucker! is similar to Han Solo’s arc in the original Star Wars movie. At the beginning of the movie, Juan couldn’t care less about the revolution, but after meeting somebody with a vested interest in the resistance – a Fenian revolutionary named John H. Mallory – he eventually comes around to seeing the importance of the revolution. This rousing journey is one of Leone’s best dramatic storylines, with a real sense of organic character development.

7 Manuel "Cheyenne" Gutiérrez - Played by Jason Robards in “Once Upon a Time in the West”.

Cheyenne is a local bandit caught in the crossfire between Harmonica and Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West. Cheyenne and his men are framed for the movie’s opening murders and spend the rest of the film trying to clear their names. He has a $5,000 bounty on his head, so he’s eager to get the hit called off and place responsibility on the true guilty party.

This could’ve easily been a forgettable character who exists purely to pad out the conflict between the main hero and villain and never makes much of an impression in his own right. But that’s where it comes in handy to cast a screen legend like Jason Robards. Robards, the leading interpreter of the works of playwright Eugene O’Neill, brought a lot of depth to Cheyenne’s character.

6 Angel Eyes - Played by Lee Van Cleef in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”.

Angel Eyes is the eponymous “The Bad” in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. “The Good” and “The Ugly” aren’t particularly good guys, but they look a lot better compared to “The Bad.” Angel Eyes is first introduced interrogating a former Confederate soldier named Stevens for the location of the gold he stole. Angel Eyes’ duplicitous, self-serving ways are established right off the bat as he kills Stevens, even though Stevens gave up the information he wanted, and then he kills his own employer as he decides to seek the gold for himself.

Lee Van Cleef played this part spectacularly. He’s one of the staples of the spaghetti western subgenre, perfectly attuned to the unique brutality of Leone’s Wild West, and his menacing glare was ideal for a villainous role. Even his name, Angel Eyes, is hilariously ironic, because he’s devilishly devious.