Authors: Richard Schickel
By the time they met, Leone was convinced that the American genres in general, the western in particular, were in dire need of revitalization, an opinion Clint shared. A decade before Pauline Kael was to become Clint’s most implacable critical enemy, and a year or two before Clint and Leone started work on their remake of
Yojimbo
, she reviewed it and wrote: “
In recent years John Ford, particularly, has turned the Western into an almost static pictorial genre, a devitalized, dehydrated form which is ‘enriched’ with pastoral beauty and evocative nostalgia for a simple, heroic way of life.… If by now we dread going to see a ‘great’ Western, it’s because ‘great’ has come to mean slow and pictorially
composed. We’ll be lulled to sleep in the ‘affectionate,’ ‘pure,’ ‘authentic’ scenery … or, for a change, we’ll be clobbered by messages in ‘mature’ Westerns.” A few years later (1967) she would observe, again quite acutely, that
the form had become a kind of rest home for aging stars, men who could no longer play romantic leads persuasively, but whose cragginess of features and traditional styles of self-presentation matched the standard western landscapes and the conventional morality of the genre in ways that were comforting to the older, but still profitable, audience that continued to love the form.
Writing shortly after the Leone/Eastwood westerns were released in the United States, Andrew Sarris, who was Kael’s critical opposite, both agreed and disagreed. “
The western hero as a classical archetype possesses a certain nobility,” he wrote, “but he is too solemn and simple-minded to deserve the majesty of his milieu.” He, however, saw in the postwar development of the genre a healthy expansion of range: “The western, like water, gains flavor from its impurities, and westerns since 1945 have multiplied their options, obsessions and neuroses many times over.”
Clint, ironically (and laconically), was more in Kael’s camp than Sarris’s regarding the current state of the art: “To me, the American western was in a dead space.” Leone agreed, saying that “
the western had been killed off by those who had maltreated the genre.” It had lost touch with what Leone understood to be the harsh historical reality of the Old West, had become at once too mythopoeic in tone, too Freudian in its underpinnings. He would say at some later point, “
The West was made by violent, uncomplicated men, and it is that strength and simplicity I want to recapture.” He also said that America, as an idea, does not really belong to Americans: “
They are only borrowing [it] for a time,” and so had no hesitation about undertaking his revisionist task.
Christopher Frayling’s thorough and scholarly study
Spaghetti Westerns
offers a longer quotation from Leone that reveals much about how the director fell into the lover’s quarrel with America that supplied so much of the tension in his work. In childhood, he said, America had been “
like a religion” to him. “I dreamed of the wide open spaces of America. The great expanses of desert. The extraordinary ‘melting pot,’ the first nation made up of people from all over the world.” This idealized vision was darkened, he said, by his encounter with real Americans, the occupying army of World War II, who were not at all like the Yanks he had read about. They had energy, to be sure, but “they were no longer the Americans of the West. They were soldiers like any others.… Men who were materialist, possessive, keen on pleasures and
earthly goods.” Casually mixing up his prewar and postwar reading, he said that “in the GIs who chased after our women and sold their cigarettes on the black market, I could see nothing that I had seen in Hemingway, Dos Passos or [Raymond] Chandler.… Nothing—or almost nothing—of the great prairies, or of the demi-gods of my childhood.”
The disillusioning disjunction between the reality of the American male as he observed him and the images of that figure that Leone had absorbed from books and films was confirmed by his later readings in western history. In another important quotation offered by Frayling, Leone says: “
The man of the West bore no resemblance to the man described by Hollywood directors, screenwriters, cineasts.… One could say all the characters they present to us come from the same mold: the incorruptible sheriff, the romantic judge, the brothel keeper, the cruel bandit, the naive girl.… All these molds are mixed together, before the happy ending, in a kind of cruel, puritan fairy-story.” He added: “The real West was a world of violence, fear and instinct.… Life in the West was not pleasant or poetic, at least not in any direct sense … the law belonged to the most hard, the most cruel, the most cynical.”
Western historians might dispute this vision of frontier America as earnestly as they would dispute Ford’s more pastoral portrayal of it. The historical truth—in which no moviemaker has ever been interested for very long—is more complex than either interpretation can possibly comprehend. But at this stage in movie history it is indisputable that Leone’s view of the West was much more interesting dramatically and, as it would turn out, visually.
In these early days Leone was not quite so articulate a revisionist as he later made himself out to be. But as far as Clint was concerned, he didn’t need to be. It was enough for him that, for whatever reasons, Leone and his several writing collaborators had scraped away the western’s romantic, poetic and moral encrustations, leaving only its absurdly violent confrontational essence. It was very close to an act of deconstruction, for it might be said that instead of offering metaphors for moderns, as the “message” westerns did, the Leone films were postmodernist in their very essence. Like grander and more self-conscious works in this new tradition, they were fully, wickedly aware of the conventions they were sometimes rendering as ironic abstractions and sometimes completely subverting. In the end, it is the absence of earnest, overt messages—political, psychological, whatever—that constituted the real message of these films, and their profoundest appeal to a young actor restively working in a TV western, the squarest and most reductive version of the genre yet devised. It is also because of this omission
that Leone’s films elicited such contempt and controversy when they were eventually released in the United States.
Clint and Leone did not discuss
Il Magnifico Stragnero
in these terms. “Realism” was their concern, and their conversations about Clint’s character were about enhancing his believability. (This figure, by the way, had a name—Joe—as he did in all the Eastwood-Leone collaborations; the more famous “Man with No Name” sobriquet was supplied well after the fact by an anonymous United Artists marketing executive looking for a way of selling the pictures in the United States.) They asked themselves what Joe would “really” do, “really” say—or, more likely, not say—when he was placed in different situations.
Knowing as we do the film they created, realism seems perhaps the least useful way of describing it. What’s memorable and marvelous about it is the way it severs all ties both with the real West and the romanticized version of it that the movies and the rest of popular culture had pretty much convinced audiences was real. As
The New York Times
critic Vincent Canby would later write, Leone’s films always had “
the strange look and displaced sound of an unmistakably Italian director’s dream of what Hollywood movies should be like, but aren’t.”
Yet Leone and Clint were not wrong to concern themselves with behavioral authenticity. It is important in all movies, of course—the grounding that makes us suspend disbelief in essentially fantastic constructs. In this film it was even more significant. Clint would be the only American in a company otherwise peopled entirely by European performers, and they would all be working on Spanish locations that were to the landscape of the American West what the script was to the conventions of the American western: a spare, quite visibly inauthentic representation of what audiences had been taught to expect. The same might be said for Joe’s almost parodic silence and deadliness, the former deeper, the latter quicker, than we were used to in even our most enigmatic and skillful gunfighters. Somehow, the actor had to give good, solid, persuasive weight in this context.
In his way—a way that led most early reviewers to believe that Clint was doing nothing, was perhaps incapable of doing anything, in the way of conventional acting—that is what he did. The casual and uninflected sobriety with which Joe goes about his deadly business contrasts vividly—and to subtly humorous effect—with the operatic carnage that follows in his wake. It was a rather distant danger that didn’t occur to him at the time, but Clint was risking critical contumely—assuming any critic paid attention to this extremely marginal enterprise—with this performance. He was also offering a bold contrast with Toshiro Mifune’s
manner in
Yojimbo
. His is a marvelous performance, but it is quite different from Clint’s, nowhere near as still and affectless. His freelance samurai, selling his services to rival criminal gangs, just as Clint’s freelance gunman does in Leone’s film, much more openly and comically communicates—through shrugs, twitches, flickers of disdain—his disgust with the warring factions.
Each actor fits, and to some degree sets, the quite divergent tones of his film. In their plotting, as everyone knows, the two films are very (but not entirely) similar, and the point that they are driving at is identical, perhaps because, as Sarris observed, similar national experiences were working on both directors. Japan and Italy, he notes, were both defeated in World War II. Therefore, he argues, their western protagonists “
are less transcendental heroes than existential heroes in that they lack faith in history as an orderly process in human affairs. What Kurosawa and Leone share is a sentimental nihilism that ranks survival above honor and revenge above morality. Hence the Kurosawa and Leone hero possesses and requires more guile than his American counterpart. Life is cheaper in the foreign western, and violence more prevalent.”
So in copying
Yojimbo
’s basic situation Leone inevitably retains its most basic difference from the traditional western. As Kael observed, it is customary, when the mysterious stranger rides into a situation like the one set forth in these movies, that he be offered a clear-cut choice as to whom he should offer his services and “
the remnants of a code of behavior.” But as she puts it, here “nobody represents any principle” and “the scattered weak are merely weak.” Which leaves existential improvisation—stylishly managed—as the protagonist’s only option.
In his nicely judged study of Kurosawa’s films, Donald Richie points out, as Kael does not, that the Mifune character’s moral superiority to everyone he encounters in the violently riven town he enters quite by chance is marginal. He may eventually tame the place, but that’s incidental to the money he thinks he can make in the process. Richie argues that since “
no great moral purpose looms in back of him,” Kurosawa cannot, will not, “be portentous about an important matter—social action.” Therefore, “he refuses first tragedy, then melodrama. He insists upon making a comedy,” which was, as Kael put it, “
the first great shaggy man movie.”
Everything thus far said about
Yojimbo
applies equally to Leone’s version of it—except that his sense of humor is entirely different from Kurosawa’s and so is his style. Much as he would later protest that his true inspirations were Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century farce,
The Servant of Two Masters
, and the comically violent puppet shows of his
childhood, easy as it is to cite sequences in his film that bear no resemblance to anything in Kurosawa’s, Leone’s best defense against the charge of plagiarism lies in the attitude he took to this material.
There is a curiosity here. Kurosawa is himself austere and laconic in manner, not at all the kind of man one would imagine being drawn toward a farcical style. Conversely, Leone’s voluble, excitable nature suggests a natural taste for high-energy comedy. Yet the humor in his film—and some of its violence—are much more understated. (He did not, for example, quote what may be the most famous shot in
Yojimbo
, in which a dog trots by the camera carrying a severed arm in his mouth.) Indeed, his staging in general is less compressed and bustling, and far more ritualistic, particularly in the way its confrontations are set up, than Kurosawa’s is. It is almost as if each made the other’s movie. Or to put it another way,
Yojimbo
in its exuberance sometimes seems more Italianate than Leone’s work, while the latter’s film sometimes seems almost Oriental in its manner.
Not that there was anything enigmatic or withdrawn in Leone’s manner when he was at work. On the set he was aboil with energy, fussy about every detail. As Clint puts it, “He loved the joy of it all. I know he had a good time shooting when he wasn’t getting furious.” And furious he did get, at delays, at incomprehension, for Leone was also a “very nervous, intense and serious guy.” He clearly understood that despite its economic marginality this film represented his best, possibly his last, chance to make his mark as a director, and whatever his budgetary-constraints, he was determined to realize all its possibilities.
Clint responded, humorously but admiringly, to Leone’s intensity. The self-conscious revisionist and the perhaps unconscious modernist had another likable quality as well: disarming naïveté. “He had this childlike way of looking at the world,” Clint says. Unlike directors trying to re-create for modern audiences the conventions of, and through them their emotional responses to, the genres they had adored as kids, Leone, Clint thought, was trying to go a step further. He was trying to re-create the very feelings a child brings to his first experiences of the movies—the enormity of the screen looming over him, the overpowering images of worlds previously only imagined suddenly made manifest, made realer than real in the mysterious darkness of the theater.
Considering this point Clint summons up the familiar experience of reencountering as a grown-up some building or landscape that made a huge impression on you as a child and finding it to be smaller, less imposing than you remembered. In all his films Leone was, he thinks, trying to restore this remembered scale to the screen. Clint sees it in the
low angles Leone favored for the characters he played, angles that offered, to put it simply, a child’s-eye view of heroism. He sees it, too, in the vast panoramic views of countryside and town streets that Leone loved, and loved alternating with extraordinarily tight close-ups of faces, of guns being drawn and fired, even of boots carrying their wearers toward their violent destinies, the jingling of their spurs unnaturally loud on the soundtrack, “Everything’s enhanced,” says Clint. “You’re seeing the films as an adult, but you sit and watch them as a child.”