The western that Clint Eastwood shot himself after saying no to Leone

The Nameless Foreigner (1973) ends up dialoguing with the Italian director's cinema: is it a good film?

Esquire

By Giuseppe Giordano

11/20/2025

One of the recurring figures in the western is that of the nameless stranger, and one of the recurring roles in Clint Eastwood's filmography is precisely the gunslinger with no past: a man skilled at shooting who comes from nowhere, settles the score and returns to nothing. The Nameless Stranger (1973) is also the Italian title of the first western in which Eastwood self-directed: the original title is High Plains Drifter, but in Italy we imported it with a reference to the recurring mask in Sergio Leone's cinema.

In Leone's masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the nameless stranger is Harmonica, played by Charles Bronson, but the director had no intention of changing a winning team: yet the relationship with Eastwood, protagonist in the Dollar Trilogy (1964-1966), appears at this point already cracked. Each attributed the success of the other, while Eastwood found the practice of dubbing in Italian cinema absurd, and had protested, creating problems, at the time of the post-production of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He had also seen his character's prominence dilute over the course of For a Few Dollars More (in which he is joined by Lee Van Cleef) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (with Lee Van Cleef and especially Eli Wallach, who seems to be the real protagonist). Before '73, Eastwood made other westerns that were not directed by Leone. But The Nameless Stranger, the first western he directed, dialogues with Leone in a special way.

Some lines of dialogue would like to have the sententious force of Sergio Leone's phrases, and even the tenses tend to dilate. But this is an art that only the Italian has managed to master: in Eastwood's film, it ends up becoming a quotation of a quote, on balance a caricature and parody. Parody and caricature are also a surreal shooting in a bathtub and a truly gigantic cigar, a clear reference to the cigar that Leone put in Eastwood's mouth at the time of A Fistful of Dollars and that Eastwood had no intention of smoking. The nameless stranger is therefore out of the coordinates of the genre from the first minutes, when a man on horseback emerges from nowhere, while both the image and the music are distorted, suggesting a hallucination.

The destination of the man on horseback is a mining town built on the shores of a lake (a western with a water background??) that seems to have no reason to exist: there is no station or a port, the streets are almost completely empty. The houses are scattered and polished. They possess the dimension of depth, while in other westerns they are usually flat sets, facades with nothing behind them. Some buildings are still under construction. Eastwood's character, who of course does not have a name, crosses Lake – as the village is called – under everyone's eyes. Three outlaws confront him and are left with a stunt. They had been hired to protect the citizenry from other outlaws hired before them. The most logical successor is the foreigner, who is hired by the inhabitants of Lago as yet another protector in exchange for... anything he wants. And the foreigner ends up repeating the same story, becoming the tyrant of Lago. But there seems to be something personal about his persecution.

"I'm not a gunslinger," Eastwood's character says. At the end of the film, we will find out that he is not lying. Harmonica, Charles Bronson's character in Once Upon a Time in the West, already had an esoteric quality: coming from nowhere, being everywhere, fighting without being hit and without missing a shot, he looked more like an idea (on a meta-cinema level) or a ghost (on a narrative level) than a flesh-and-blood character. It was the idea, or the ghost, of the Old West, of the West that retreated with the advance of the train. Even in Lago, a mining town, modernity has arrived in the form of capitalism: avarice is the original sin that Eastwood's character comes to cleanse like an avenging angel evoked by the accumulation of goods, therefore of guilt. He is the one who establishes the link, punishing consumption with consumption, accelerating it, going to get boots that he will not pay for, offering for everyone at the bar but without dropping a dollar. He rapes a woman and continues to "order" others in a hotel he occupies for free: commodification concerns minorities first and foremost.

Is The Nameless Stranger a must-see movie?

Eastwood's post-western takes up Leone's demystifying discourse, but if Once Upon a Time in the West has the melancholic tones that will also be of Once Upon a Time in America, The Nameless Stranger is a cynical and ruthless film, with which Eastwood punishes the emerging consumer society by making use of an unpleasant protagonist and a series of repulsive supporting actors, giving the punishment a religious and ritual dimension, evident above all in the ending – which we do not anticipate. All these choices end up giving a hallucinatory, metaphysical, paranormal and horrific tone to this unmistakable and frankly absurd western. It is the greatest quality of the first Eastwood, that of Thrill in the Night (1971), The Texan with Ice Eyes (1976) and The Man in the Crosshairs (1977). His cinema is never superfluous, made to fill the theaters, keep the machine running. It is not self-preservation cinema, because otherwise it would have been better to make a more digestible western. The nameless foreigner, regardless of artistic merits, which are still great, has a strong idea and something interesting to say. It's one of those films that they add, necessary for cinema to survive and keep up with the changing times. In interviews, Eastwood often repeats that he only chooses stories that he himself would like to see on the screen: watching The Nameless Stranger we end up believing him.