Clint Eastwood (30 page)

It was not long, of course, before Eric Fleming sensed the show’s balance tipping away from him, not long before he began complaining, which is perhaps too mild a term for Fleming in full cry. One day he loomed up suddenly in Reisman’s broom closet of an office, flung a set of keys on the desk and yelled: “I’m gonna walk out on this. If there’s any legal action you go ahead and take my house. I don’t give a damn.”

In the end, it was Geller, Kowalski and Reisman who took the walk—involuntarily—not because Eric Fleming was unhappy, but because William Paley was. He thought the show had drifted far from its basics. The faithful Endre Bohem was brought back again to produce the show until the end of the season.

By this time, however, Clint really didn’t care who was in charge at
Rawhide
, for Rome had at last been heard from. During the long silence of the late summer and early fall, the only word reaching him was unofficial, reports in the trades that all westerns were dead in Italy. One or two of the items did mention a movie that appeared to be bucking this trend. It was called
Per un Pugno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars)
, but the title meant nothing to Clint, until, a little later, his name was linked with
it in some item he read. “And I thought—could this be
Il Magnifico Stragnero?
Could this be?”

It was. What he did not know was that a small miracle had taken place in Italy. When the film was completed, it had not seemed particularly promising to its producers. But since they had taken government money to help finance it they were obliged under its rules to open the picture in at least one theater in Italy for a minimum of one week. After screenings in Rome and Naples, where exhibitors were contemptuous of its chances, they chose a theater in Florence for their run. This flew in the face of conventional wisdom, for almost every study of Italian life and history insists that the largely rural south, its population poorer and less educated, is more primitive in its tastes, the urbanized, industrialized north more sophisticated culturally.

But they went ahead anyway, opening the picture in August, without fanfare or hope, and under false pretenses. They tried to make it seem like an American import by giving all of the Italians who worked on it American-sounding pseudonyms in the credits. Leone chose to call himself Bob Robertson, which was a variation on the name his father sometimes signed to his films, “Roberto Roberti.” The cinematographer became Jack Dalmas, and even Gian Maria Volonté, not entirely an unknown, was billed as John Wells. Only Clint and Marianne Koch were credited by their real names.

It is hard to say what effect this ploy had on the film’s fate, but what is known is that by the end of the week the theater was playing to capacity, and its manager, as legend would have it, was refusing to surrender the print. The picture was enjoying a word-of-mouth triumph, and he was not going to stop playing it while the crowds were still packing his theater. Maybe it was smart, after all, to have opened the film in sophisticated Florence, where audiences could pick up on the movie’s revisionist approach. All one can say for certain is the movie struck a nerve, and the producers hastened to prepare a full-scale Italian release for November.

As they did so,
Variety
’s Rome correspondent saw the picture, and on November 18, 1964, his enthusiastic (and prescient) review, signed “Hawk,” appeared. The lead read: “
Crackerjack western made in Italy and Spain by a group of Italians and an international cast with James Bondian vigor and tongue-in-cheek approach to capture both sophisticates and average cinema patrons. Early Italo figures indicate it’s a major candidate to be sleeper of the year. Also that word-of-mouth, rather than cast strength or ad campaign, is a true selling point. As such it should make okay program fare abroad as well.”

Noting the “oater’s” lack of “epic sweep, grandeur” and offering a warning about its violence and sadism, the critic nonetheless offered a firm endorsement: “This is a hard-hitting item, ably directed, splendidly lensed, neatly acted, which has all the ingredients wanted by action fans and then some.” In other words “Hawk” got it in the same instinctive way that the Florentine audiences had. Clint, he added, “handles himself very well as the stranger, shaping a character strong enough to beg a sequel for admirers of this pic.”

Sequel? Did someone say “sequel”? Around the time this piece ran, Clint finally started receiving letters from Arrighi Columbo, full of apologies for his long silence and asking him if he would like to come back and make another western with Leone. A phone call was arranged and, as Clint recalls, “My first question was can we release it over here?” Well, er, um. “We have a question—the question of rights to
Yojimbo
,” said Columbo. Clint flashed back to a conversation he had had with the producer on location, when he was asked not to discuss openly their film’s source. At the time he had assured Clint that a deal with the Japanese copyright owners was being worked out. Now it was clear that these negotiations had never taken place. Indeed, he would soon learn that the Japanese had tried and failed to enjoin the picture’s release in Italy—Italian law prevented them from so doing—but that they had obtained court orders preventing its distribution elsewhere. Oh, swell, he remembers saying to himself, I get in a picture that’s a hit and now nobody’s going to get to see it because it’ll be tied up in litigation for years.

Columbo, of course, preferred to press on to more pleasant matters, like the new Leone project he was proposing. Clint was not about to commit to that until he saw his first collaboration with the director. The producer agreed to send him a print, but in the meantime the album of Ennio Morricone’s score for the film arrived from Rome (his billing on the original prints was Dan Savio). Clint had not met him when he was working on the film and had not even heard of him before (this was only the fourth score the composer had written for movies), and when Clint played the record he was impressed.

If Leone was in the process of reinventing the western, Morricone was in the process of reinventing—or, perhaps more accurately, vastly expanding—the language of film score. His budget had prevented the composer from employing a full orchestra for many sessions, but he responded brilliantly to necessity’s constraints. Here, as in his other collaborations with Leone, he made superb use of a new instrument, the Fender electric guitar (then sometimes called a “surf” guitar because it was so regularly employed by beachboy pop groups), which had an eerie capacity for vibrato. This he blended with the folk instruments of the
West, the Jew’s harp and the harmonica, to state themes with marvelous economy, the while building percussive sound effects (and, later, wordless choral moans and sighs) into his scores. What emerged, as Richard Jameson wrote, was “
memories of the Monogram-Mascot stock libraries [they were American poverty-row companies of the thirties and forties] filtered through a modern and European sensibility.” As he said, this work “complemented the bizarre exoticism of the film, the familiar made fresh, new and neurotically contemporary.”

Actually, Morricone’s work was more than a mere complement to Leone’s. Harsh and jarring, the score’s opening notes immediately signal that we are not in Kansas (or Texas or Montana or any of the other locales of the classic western) anymore, or, more important, in their psychological territory, either. Morricone is not going to rework “Red River Valley” in symphonic form, the way John Ford’s composers were obliged to, any more than Leone is going to rework Ford’s visual manner or moral themes. He was as committed to shaking us out of those complacencies as the director was, deftly underlining the film’s bitter ironies and its subtextual richness, especially in the way it commented on other westerns. To put the point simply: Morricone pulled the whole thing together.

Clint could not appreciate all that listening to the score. He only knew that he had never heard anything quite like it and that he liked what he heard. And then, with unwonted promptness, the print of
Per un Pugno di Dollari
arrived. Clint booked a screening room at the CBS Production Center and one night after work invited a few friends over to see it. He was careful, he says, not to heighten their anticipation. “You want to watch some little joke?” he remembers saying. “There’s this thing, and it’s all in Italian. I mean, it’s [probably] a real piece of shit.”

But then everyone assembled, the lights went down, the picture started unreeling, and “in a while we said, ‘Jesus, this isn’t too bad.’ And the end of the picture came and everybody enjoyed it just as much as if it had been in English.”

As soon as possible, Clint called Columbo. “Yeah, I’ll work for that director again,” he remembers saying. Columbo was a little vague about the nature of the new film, promising nothing more than that it would be a sequel. Clint almost immediately heard from someone representing Leone. He told him that although Constantin would still be involved, the producer this time was to be Alberto Grimaldi, an Italian lawyer who was representing Leone in a lawsuit he had brought against Jolly Film, which was withholding his 30 percent share of
Fistful
’s profits in an attempt to force the director to sign with them for the sequel.

Soon enough Grimaldi—who would go on to produce films by Fellini, Pasolini and Bertolucci—and Leone appeared in Los Angeles, eager to get Clint’s commitment to a picture they were calling
Per Qualche Dollari in Più (For a Few Dollars More)
. By now
Fistful
was well on its way to its Italian gross of $4.6 million, and though they didn’t have a finished script or a cast lined up, the cult developing around Clint in Italy made him vital to their hopes.

Clint’s mother remembers a meeting at his house at which she, Clint Sr. and Maggie listened astonished as Leone marched up and down the living room telling Clint the new film’s story, acting out all the key scenes. He remembers a meeting in a restaurant with Sandy Bressler, Lenny Hirshan and a William Morris lawyer, at which the visitors eagerly urged him to sign on. After dinner, as they stood in the parking lot, waiting for the valets to bring up their cars, Grimaldi reached in his pocket and withdrew an envelope containing at least half of the fifty-thousand-dollar fee he proposed paying Clint and tried to press it on him. Clint politely demurred. He would only assure them that if a satisfactory screenplay and contract were drafted he would undertake the project. But, he added, “There’s no hurry on it.”

There was, though. The Italians needed to follow as closely as possible on the success of
A Fistful of Dollars
, and so in a matter of months the script was finished and a contract drawn. In the spring of 1965 Clint was once again in Rome, preparing to start
For a Few Dollars More
.

It would turn out to be a marvelous film, arguably the best of the Leone-Eastwood collaborations. Balanced and shapely, it is at once more elegant and complex than
A Fistful of Dollars
, more tense and compressed than
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
. Unhindered by budgetary restraint (he had $750,000 to work with) on the one hand, unclouded by overweening ambition on the other, this film displays its director’s contradictory virtues—his bright satirical gift and his dark fatalism—with an easy confidence he didn’t always achieve.

Since, as David Thomson has written, “
Leone has been tossed back and forth as camp amusement and spacey visionary,” this is the film one most wants both his uncomprehending critics and his sometimes sappy cultists to conjure with. An inimitable director with, ironically, many imitators, a man who redirected the movies’ historical mainstream without himself ever fully entering it, he was, as Richard Corliss wrote, a man of “
seamless contradictions,” which included “labyrinthine plots
and elemental themes, nihilistic heroes with romantic obsessions, microcosmic close-ups and macrocosmic vistas, circular camera work and triangular shoot-outs, a sense of Americana and European sensibility, playful parody and profound homage”—all of which he is in succinct command of here.

The production process was similar to that of the first film: a short period in Rome, then to Manzanias and Almería, but this time with a short side trip to shoot sequences that required a railroad line. Conditions were much better than they had been before. The locations, representing both American and Mexican border towns this time, contained more interior sets and were generally more expansive and more richly detailed than anything in
A Fistful of Dollars
.

There were no arguments this time between director and star about the nature or volubility of Clint’s character. The success of the previous film had settled all that. Clint probably had a few more lines in this film, or at least more that registered sharply. This is mostly because in
For a Few Dollars More
he enters into an edgy partnership with another killer, and that relationship draws out his character, whose name is Monco (Italian for “monk”), which, again, has religious overtones but is, as Cumbow observes, easily mistaken for the Spanish
manco
(one-handed). Clint reinforced this transliteral pun by using his ambidexterity as a character trait. Monco only uses his right hand to draw and shoot; all his less deadly business is conducted with his left hand.