National Public Radio
August 30, 2024
DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of
television studies at Rowan University. Let's continue with our series about
classic films and movie icons featuring interviews from our archives. Today,
we're looking at Westerns. And though it's common to think of the genre as
classically American, thanks to the films of John Ford and others, in the
1960s, some of the best Westerns were imported from Italy. That's when the
Italian director Sergio Leone made such films as "A Fistful Of
Dollars," "For A Few Dollars More," "The Good, The Bad And
The Ugly" and "Once Upon A Time In The West."
His brutal Westerns revived the genre, made a movie star
of Clint Eastwood and created a visual style that influenced many film
directors around the world. He also introduced many of us to the film music of
Ennio Morricone. Yet despite all that, Leone's films at the time were
disparagingly called spaghetti Westerns. In 2005, Terry Gross spoke with
Christopher Frayling, one of the world's leading experts on Leone. At the time,
Frayling had written the book "Once Upon A Time In Italy: The Westerns Of
Sergio Leone."
TERRY GROSS: What's a scene from Leone's first
Western, "A Fistful Of Dollars," that you loved in 1967 when you
first saw it and that you still love now, that you could describe for us?
CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING: (Laughter) Gosh. Four or
five bad guys sitting on a five-bar gate in the main street of a flyblown
Spanish town standing in for a northern Mexican town. And the man with no name,
the hero, walks up to them. And there's this satisfying sort of crunch on the
soundtrack as his boots walk down the main street, and lots of dust. And they
start - in true macho style, they start abusing each other, and they start
laughing at him. And he looks down and lights his cigarillo and says, my mule
don't like you laughing. He gets the crazy idea you're laughing at him. Now, if
you just apologize to my mule - and then there's silence. And there's a
whirring sound on the soundtrack. And you get the eyes, and you get the puff of
smoke, and suddenly an explosion and all five bad guys fall off the five-bar
gate.
It's a sort of parody of the Western confrontation. It's
so extreme and very, very stylish. And it was the first really big close-up of
the young Clint Eastwood, who was fantastically good-looking in those days,
only with a designer stubble smoking a cheroot with his eyes screwed up as he
looked into the sun. It's a very memorable moment. It's stayed with me ever
since.
GROSS: Well, I think we should hear that scene
because it's classic Clint Eastwood...
GROSS: ...Talking between his teeth. So here's
that scene that you're talking about. And the explosion that we hear at the end
is him shooting all those guys who are waiting for him.
LORENZO ROBLEDO: (As Baxter Gunman #1) Adios,
amigo. Listen, stranger. Didn't you get the idea? We don't like to see bad boys
like you in town. Go get your mule. You let him get away from you?
CLINT EASTWOOD: (As Joe) See, that's what I want
to talk to you about. He's feeling real bad.
ROBLEDO: (As Baxter Gunman #1) Huh?
EASTWOOD: (As Joe) My mule. You see, he got all
riled up when you went and fired those shots at his feet.
LUIS BARBOO: (As Baxter Gunman #2) Hey, you making
some kind of joke?
EASTWOOD: (As Joe) No. You see, I understand you
men were just playing around. But the mule, he just doesn't get it. Of course,
if you were to all apologize...
EASTWOOD: (As Joe) I don't think it's nice, you
laughing. You see, my mule don't like people laughing, gets the crazy idea
you're laughing at him. Now, if you apologize like I know you're going to, I
might convince him that you really didn't mean it.
GROSS: That's a scene from Sergio Leone's first
western, "A Fistful Of Dollars." Why did Sergio Leone love Westerns?
Why did he want to make them in Italy?
FRAYLING: Well, you got to imagine a child growing
up in 1930s Rome at a time when Mussolini was the dictator and when most
American movies were banned, and those that were seen were dubbed into Italian.
And the young Leone first saw Hollywood Western movies in the 1930s at that
time, and his heroes were Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and films like
"Stagecoach." And to him, they represented an absolute model of
freedom. He lived in suburban Rome in cramped conditions. And he saw these
wide-open spaces, this unimaginable desert that goes on forever. He saw these -
he couldn't understand what they were saying. He never heard - in fact, he
never learned to speak English, Sergio Leone. That's what's so extraordinary.
But they were dubbed into a different language, not very well.
But nevertheless, they clicked in his mind. Then in the
1950s, when he went into the film industry, he found that nobody was really
very interested in the Western. A lot of Hollywood veteran directors went over
to Italy to make epics, films like "Ben-Hur" and "Helen Of
Troy" and "Quo Vadis." And Leone hung around these films.
Sometimes he was the assistant director. And he talked to directors like Fred
Zinnemann, who'd made "High Noon," Robert Aldrich, who'd made "The
Last Sunset" and "Apache" and films like that. And they all said
to him, the Western's dead. It's finished. We don't make Westerns anymore.
So basically, Leone made Westerns because Hollywood had
stopped making them, and because in Europe, and particularly in Italy, there
was this huge interest in the Western and a huge knowledge of it, as well. So
the whole thing starts in a kind of folk memory of American Westerns that went
back to the 1930s. And it's partly political. But the other thing was that
Leone felt that Westerns had got a bit talky. There was too much talking in
them. He liked Westerns where Rin Tin Tin did all the thinking, you know?
GROSS: (Laughter).
FRAYLING: Old-fashioned Westerns where - lots and
lots of action and not too much talk. He didn't like psychology. Freudian
Westerns got on his nerves.
GROSS: Well, you know, but he knew he was making
Westerns that were different from American ones. Like, he said - and I think
this is to you that he said this, in your interview with him - that John Ford,
the great director of Westerns, was full of optimism, whereas I on the contrary
am full of pessimism.

FRAYLING: Well, that's the thing. He loved the
look of the Western and the idea of the Western and the fairy tale of the
Western. But he didn't like some of the ideologies. He didn't like John Wayne
very much and some of the sort of crusading element of the Western that you got
in '50s and early '60s Westerns. So loved the visuals, didn't like the ideology
very much. So he takes the concept of the Western and makes it much, much more
cynical. I mean, the hero, for example, when people ask him - why are you doing
this for us? - as someone actually asks in "A Fistful Of Dollars,"
the first of his Westerns, why are you doing this for us? Instead of saying,
you know, because a man's got to do what a man's got to do, or there's some
things a man can't just ride around, things like that, he says $500? He works
strictly for ready cash, so he has a very streetwise, 1960s cash-only attitude
to life, and this was a very different kind of hero to the old-fashioned
crusading hero.
And I think that the modern movie action hero begins with
the Clint Eastwood character in "A Fistful Of Dollars," where you
identify with the hero not because of what he believes in anymore 'cause he
doesn't actually believe in anything. You identify with him because of his
style - you know, the way he wears his clothes, the way he walks, the personal
style of the man. And that, of course, is the basis of identification of all
modern action heroes, and I think it begins with Clint Eastwood in "A
Fistful Of Dollars."
GROSS: Let's talk a little bit about the casting
in those Westerns. His casting is so good. Of course, Clint Eastwood is the
most famous character in his Westerns, the Man With No Name in the
"Fistful Of Dollars" trilogy. Clint Eastwood was known as Rowdy Yates
on "Rawhide," the TV cattle herding series. What did Leone see in
Eastwood, you know, in the mid-1960s when he cast him?
FRAYLING: Well, it was partly because Clint
Eastwood wasn't very expensive (laughter). He came for $15,000-16,000 in those
days, and they had a very, very limited budget on "Fistful Of
Dollars." But mainly, he wasn't the first choice, either, that Leone had
in mind Henry Fonda, right at the - even at that early stage. He had in mind
James Coburn and one or two other actors, but they all proved to be - and
Charles Bronson - and they all proved to be either too expensive, or they
didn't read the script. And it has to be said, the script, in its early stages,
which was badly translated from the Italian, is a very peculiar read. We will
go to the Hill of Boots, you know, that sort of thing.
FRAYLING: And so I'm not surprised that they
turned it down. Then Sergio Leone watched an episode of "Rawhide" on
16mm in Rome, at an agency, and saw Clint Eastwood. And what he saw was this
man who walks in this very cat-like, light way - that light Californian voice,
the squint of his eyes. And the legend has it - I don't know if it's true or
not - that Leone started coloring in the picture with some stubble and some
rough clothes, a sheepskin waistcoat, a dirty denim shirt. Roughed him up a
bit, made a lot of makeup. There's a lot of makeup in these films. There's a
surprising amount, by today's standards, to make him look much more dark and
sunburned. He wanted a sort of rougher character. And, of course, the cheroot,
the cigar, 'cause in the 1960s, the cheroot was sort of masculine and hard and
a controlled person.
So he roughed Clint Eastwood up a bit, and together, they
discussed the part. I think that Clint Eastwood is probably the only actor in
history who's actually fought hard for less lines (laughter), that he read the
script and thought he was saying much too much. It was much too talky. And he
had these long speeches of motivation and everything, and Clint Eastwood just
put a line through them and said, look - you can say this in one line.