Nola
By Mike Scott
May 1, 2024
[Terence Hill, top, stares down Henry Fonda front of the Cornstalk Hotel on Royal Street in an image from the 1974 Western “My Name is Nobody,” which was produced by Sergio Leone, the legendary purveyor of spaghetti westerns.
When he moseyed into New Orleans to film the final scenes for 1974’s “My Name is Nobody,” Sergio Leone was, in fact, already somebody.
By then, the Italian director’s name had become synonymous with the spaghetti Western, the style-heavy genre that, through Leone’s “Man With No Name” trilogy, transformed Clint Eastwood into an international star.
Later, he directed the landmark 1968 epic “Once Upon a Time in the West,” widely considered among the greatest Westerns ever made.
The quirkily comedic “My Name is Nobody” wouldn’t quite reach the same heights, even with a star of Henry Fonda’s stature on the marquee.
Still, as the film’s 50th anniversary is marked this year by its fans — which reportedly include one Steven Spielberg — it occupies a special place in New Orleans film history, both for the legendary Leone’s involvement and for its brief but colorful local shoot.
By the time Leone and his cinematic posse rode out of town after two weeks of filming, they hadn’t just captured footage for what would become a noteworthy film. They had also created what can be considered a genre of one.
Call it the muffuletta Western.
Behind the scenes
Although he developed the story and served as producer, Leone didn’t direct “My Name Is Nobody.” Not officially, anyway.
After “Once Upon a Time in the West,” he intended to ease into semi-retirement. So, directing duties on “Nobody” went to one of his trusted acolytes, Tonino Valerii.
The finished film would bear so many Leone trademarks, however, whispers soon emerged as to who was really in charge.
In truth, Leone stayed away from the set for much of the film’s 1973 production, which also took place in Spain and New Mexico.
“The film was shot entirely by Valerii, with the exception of a few simple scenes in Spain that were shot by Sergio with a second-unit crew,” screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi said in a 2021 interview with the movie history website The Flashback Files.
That said, when the production showed up in New Orleans in late June, Leone was there. And, for at least part of the time, the old master — who spoke no English — was in the director’s chair, doing the duties with the help of an interpreter, according to a 1991 article in New Orleans magazine that consulted several local actors who appeared in the film as extras.
In total, the city gets only about 10 minutes of screen time, but it’s a memorable 10 minutes, highlighted by a climactic third-act gunfight between Fonda and his Italian co-star, Terence Hill, in front of the Cornstalk Hotel on Royal Street.
To set the scene, the street in front of the hotel had been blocked off and covered with two inches of sand — “to approximate the ‘cowboy town’ of the late 1880s and ‘90s that New Orleans never was,” The Times-Picayune Don Gross wrote.
[With the Cabildo and St. Louis Cathedral in the backdrop, actor Terence Hill enters Café Pontalba – doubling as a barber shop for the occasion – in the closing scene of the 1974 Western “My Name is Nobody”.]
French Quarter merchants were not amused.
Rose Noble of the Cornstalk Hotel was told the shoot in front of the hotel would take three or four hours. “Three or four hours turned in to three or four days,” she told Gross, “and I lost a great deal of my business, though it didn’t faze them one bit.”
Harder to ignore was the big black bull — cast as a background player — that escaped its riverfront enclosure, sending surprised pedestrians scrambling up trees and leading a column of police cruisers on a 48-block chase.
“One car sped ahead of the pack and cut across the bull’s path,” one newspaper report read. “Without breaking stride, the animal soared majestically over the patrol car and continued on its way.”
It eventually tuckered itself out around F&M Patio Bar, at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Lyons streets.
The show went on.
Ready for prime time
It wasn’t until more than a year later, on Sept. 27, 1974, that “My Name is Nobody” opened at the Joy Theater on Canal Street, giving locals their first look at it — and glimpses of such local sights as St. Louis Cathedral, the S.S. President and the aforementioned Cornstalk Hotel.
The plot wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to Western fans: Reflecting on his lifetime of death-dealing, an aging gunslinger (played by a tired-eyed Fonda) is determined to hang up his gunbelt once and for all — if he can survive the attempts on his life by various young guns equally determined to make a name for themselves.
Enter Nobody (Hill), a blond-haired, blue-eyed buck with the chiseled jaw of a silent-film idol and the childlike energy of a cartoon character. Armed with lightning reflexes, he takes it upon himself to help Fonda’s character — his idol — cement his name in history before his inevitable retirement.
[Henry Fonda on the New Orleans riverfront, on the S.S. President in an image from 1974’s “My Name is Nobody” Produced by Sergio Leone, the film marks its 50th anniversary in 2024.]
Overall, “Nobody” fits neatly into the spaghetti Western tradition, featuring grit, grime, quick zooms and quicker guns. Throughout, the dubbed dialogue provides an odd, dreamlike counterpoint to the prevailing sense of realism, all of which is underscored by an earworm-laden score from frequent Leone collaborator Ennio Morricone.
In the process, it becomes an intriguingly meta analysis not just of the old West but of cinema’s Western tradition.
Perhaps what most sets it apart, though, is its eschewing of blood in favor of broad, “Three Stooges”-style comedy, not unlike the genre’s “Trinity” films, which also starred Hill.
“More camp than catsup,” The Times-Picayune’s Frank Gagnard wrote in reviewing it, adding: “Silly but scenic.”
Fifty years on, that all still rings true.
So does the muffuletta comparison. “My Name is Nobody” might be a little heavy on the ham, but it remains a satisfyingly layered Italio-New Orleans classic that is best shared — and which always hits the spot.
Mike Scott can be reached at moviegoermike@gmail.com.
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