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.
