Clint Eastwood (33 page)

Watching
The Witches
now it’s hard to say if one’s amusement with Clint’s performance—broad, almost cartoonish, in keeping with the tone De Sica set—is a response to the intrinsic qualities of his playing or to the broad contrast between what he’s doing here and his screen character as it has since developed. But there is a kind of indolent self-regard about Clint’s Charlie, an utterly unexamined projection of male superiority, that slyly satirizes the most basic subtexts of conventional movie masculinity and hints at bolder subversions (see
The Beguiled
and
Play Misty for Me
) to come.

If De Sica’s work served his producer’s wife rather better than his directorial colleagues did—it is sleek, energetic and at least comes to a discernible, if predictable, point—it is like the film’s other segments in that it has a rather casual, tossed-off air about it. Nobody is digging very deep into himself or into the material to make these little films. It is all very much, in the blunt language of certain contracts, “work made for hire.”

When Clint’s role had been discussed via long distance, it had been decided that he would be an Italian from Trieste, where light eyes and hair are not uncommon. “So I get off the plane and I go in to meet De Sica and he takes one look and he goes, ‘No Trieste Italian, he’s American. We’re making an American living in Italy, married to an Italian woman’—without missing a beat.”

This was more comfortable for Clint. And work on the film was completely agreeable. He liked Mangano, whose English was fluent and who he says had the most beautiful hands he had ever seen. He also discovered that De Sica, despite his grand reputation—the crew always called him Commandatore—was his kind of director. “He was extremely organized. He only shot exactly what he wanted to use, not a frame more.” Indeed, though Clint is an extremely “lean” shooter, and has always said that his most important directorial mentor, Don Siegel, was even leaner, De Sica was the leanest of them all. He cut almost everything in the camera, sometimes not even covering an actor’s exit if he planned to pick it up from another angle later—doubtless a skill he had acquired in his early days of shooting in the streets, when film stock was perhaps the most expensive item in his minuscule budgets.

As they proceeded, De Sica gave Clint very little direction: “He just kind of stared. I think he was fascinated by American actors, the American style of acting.” But with Mangano, he was extremely detailed, demonstrating movements with great precision for her. “It was interesting because I’d never seen a director do this,” Clint said. “He’d say, ‘I want you to do this pirouette,’ and he’d do these great pirouettes.”

De Sica was generous in his public comments about Clint. One weekend they traveled to Paris together, where De Sica introduced him at the French premiere of
For a Few Dollars More
, calling him “
a fine, sensitive actor” and predicting that “he will soon be one of the biggest stars in the business,” perhaps the “new Gary Cooper.”

This was prescient of De Sica, but
The Witches
contributed virtually nothing to that outcome. The picture was eventually released in Italy, but only spottily in the rest of Europe. It was picked up in the United
States by United Artists after it had the Leone pictures in hand, but the company never released it in the full (or even the art house) sense of the word. It was dismissively reviewed in
Variety
in 1969, played in a festival of Italian cinema in Los Angeles in 1971 and in the Public Theater’s film program in New York in 1979. On none of these occasions did the reviewers pay much attention to Clint, except to register surprise at finding him in this unlikely context.

Clint shipped his new Ferrari to New York during production, then, after the film wrapped, met the car and Maggie there so they could vacation by driving it home to California. It didn’t work out quite as comfortably as they hoped; they had more luggage than the sports car could accommodate. “We looked like
The Grapes of Wrath
.” He laughs, adding, “Of course the vehicles were different.”

Scarcely more than a month later, Clint was back in Rome starting
The Magnificent Rogues
, as
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
was originally known. He was beginning to think it would be his last film with Leone, because what had turned out to be the opportunity of a lifetime was now beginning to look like a dead end. In particular he thought that as the budgets (and the lengths) of the pictures grew, Leone was becoming more self-indulgent: “I felt he was trying to be more David Lean than Sergio Leone.” Which was “fine for him,” but not so fine for Clint. The money was good, the billing top, and an element of openly expressed compassion had been added to his character in this script, which also carried a stronger, more traditional moral weight as well. But even more than in its immediate predecessor, Leone would use Clint iconographically in his grand design rather than as a compelling figure in himself. Or to put it another way, as the landscapes of Leone’s films expanded, Clint could see that his place in them was contracting.

The basic facts of the movie are these: The place is Texas; the time is the Civil War. A shipment of gold coins, belonging to the Confederacy, has been stolen and cached. Three men, Blondie (Clint), Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), whose evocatively ironic name was improvised by Leone on the set, and Tuco (Eli Wallach)—respectively the good, the bad and the ugly—learn of the treasure’s existence and seek it out, expending much blood and cruelty in their quest. Eventually arriving at a military cemetery where the coins are buried in one of the graves, they face off in another circle of stones, with Clint’s character this time an active participant (and ultimate winner) in another three-way confrontation.

The simplicity of this main plotline forms part of the point Leone wants to make. For the attempt to achieve an easily defined goal is constantly beset by dislocating coincidences, vertiginous reversals of fortune and, most significantly, the chance, megahistorical intrusions of the war.

As this sometimes-illogical tale develops, Clint’s character turns out to be the least interesting of the title figures. Van Cleef has pure evil to play, which is always compelling, and much of the time the movie runs on the manic energy of Wallach’s Tuco. A sort of Till Eulenspiegel (though his pranks are less merry than deadly), he is a small-time Mexican
bandido
, constantly seeing his ill-conceived plans go comically awry, constantly coping frantically with problems that are beyond his impulsive ability to calculate. Representing something new in Leone’s work, he is a figure who, for all his depredations, offers us a full range of emotions with which to identify: Clint’s Blondie, to be sure, eventually resolves all the film’s issues—he is, conventionally speaking, the hero—but much of the time he functions as Tuco’s straight man.

This movie traffics more heavily in extended torment than its predecessors did, and even though Leone maintains his usual objectivity in these passages, their sheer number creates a somewhat alienating effect. It is Angel Eyes who most enjoys his spot of cruel sport, endlessly torturing and killing in pursuit of the lost treasure. Which is not to say that the good and the ugly are without their dark humors. They are partners in a scam, in which Blondie brings Tuco (a much wanted criminal) to the nearest sheriff, collects the reward, then, as his partner is about to be hanged, shoots the rope away allowing them to escape. When Tuco quite reasonably suggests that since he is the one taking the larger risks he should take the larger share of their profits, Blondie abruptly severs their partnership and quite unreasonably abandons him in the desert, seventy miles from the nearest settlement. Somehow Tuco survives this ordeal, tracks Blondie down and subjects him to a similar calvary. While Tuco rides a horse and protects himself from the sun with a frilly parasol (a nice touch), Blondie is denied water and forced to stumble across the burning sands until, at last, he collapses. Tuco isn’t kidding; we have every reason to believe he will leave Blondie to die. But then a runaway stagecoach thunders by. Tuco stops it, and finds in it three Confederate soldiers, two of them dead, the other dying. The latter turns out to be a man who calls himself both Jackson and Carson, known by all the principals to know where the gold is hidden. In return for the promise of water he tells Tuco it is buried in a military cemetery, Sad Hill. When he actually gets a drink he will, he says, provide the name on the gravestone under which the loot is buried. While Tuco
goes for his canteen Blondie makes his painful way to the coach, and it is he who is given the final clue to the mystery just before Jackson/Carson expires.

This revives the partnership. Tuco takes Blondie to a mission hospital to recover from his ordeal. It is run by Tuco’s brother, a priest, and they have a bitter confrontation, the priest chastising Tuco for his wicked ways, the bandit chastising the priest for his useless piety. In this exchange, Tuco observes that priesthood and outlawry represented the only opportunities for escape from the poverty in which they were raised. This is as close as Leone comes, in any of these films, to offering a conventional sociopolitical motivation for anyone’s behavior; it is much more old left than new, and more old movie than either. This argument essentially restates the ancient James Cagney–Pat O’Brien conflict—not exactly startling in its originality, but startling enough in this context. (There is another sequence, in which Tuco befuddles, then brutalizes, a shopkeeper in order to obtain a gun, that cross-references to a similar Cagney scene in
Blonde Crazy
.)

The film’s second act begins with Blondie and Tuco heading for Sad Hill, dressed in Confederate uniforms, when they encounter a detachment of soldiers also seemingly dressed in Rebel gray. Tuco hails them with comically fraudulent cries, both pro-Southern and anti-Yankee, but when the troop pauses the officer in command starts slapping dust from his uniform, and in one of the film’s neatest ironies we see that Tuco has been misled by the dust. The man is actually uniformed in Union blue.

They are taken to a prison camp where Angel Eyes is—quite inexplicably—the Sergeant of the Guard. Torture, a hairbreadth escape by Tuco, a false alliance between Blondie and Angel Eyes, a highly coincidental reunion between Blondie and Tuco and a sprawling gunfight then ensue. This is a very busy picture, and in this middle passage its plotting is at its most desperate. Only the good, the bad and the ugly survive this carnage, and they head for Sad Hill, with Blondie and Tuco pausing on their way for what is surely the most morally pointed passage in all of Leone’s work. They come upon a large detachment of Union troops, dug into a system of trenches overlooking a bridge that is the key to this sector of the war. The Confederates are similarly entrenched on the other side of the river, and each army has the same objective: drive the other out without destroying the crucial bridge. To this end they launch daily assaults on one another, fecklessly wasting many lives in the process. The Union commander has taken to drink and cynicism in order to endure this absurdity, and Blondie registers surprising sympathy with him: “I’ve never seen so many men wasted so badly,” he mutters.

When the commanding officer is wounded in another futile assault, Blondie appears at his side with a bottle of whiskey to ease him through surgery: “Take a slug of this, Cap’n, and keep your eyes open.” He has resolved to end the stalemate by blowing up the bridge, rendering further hostilities pointless. This he and Tuco do, and the captain dies happily when he hears the explosion. Thereafter the pair come upon a young soldier dying in the remains of a chapel—another of Leone’s bare, ruined choirs—and Blondie wraps him in his serape (which he has not yet worn in this film) and gives him drags on his cigar. In effect, he is wrapping the boy in his own death-defying raiment, and though it does not stay the boy’s fate, this is a tender moment unprecedented in the Leone-Eastwood collaboration.

While Blondie is thus preoccupied, Tuco rides off toward the cemetery, which is just beyond the former Confederate position. Blondie, smiling ironically, touches his cheroot to the firing hole of a nearby cannon—of the many outsize weapons Clint has fired in his films, this is the largest and most self-satirical—and with a perfectly placed shot stuns Tuco and his mount without harming them.

One might observe that neither in the battle scenes nor in earlier prison-camp sequences is Leone at his best. His ambitions may have been epic, but his sensibility was antiepic. Vast enterprises are to him the precise locus of humankind’s most destructive delusions, and he is unable to stage them with the kind of romantic conviction David Lean brought to them. Still, this passage at massed arms makes us fully aware of the moral point Leone has been pursuing: that the bloody deeds individuals do in pursuit of private gain, private obsession, are nothing compared to the slaughter nations do in pursuit of grander, more piously stated goals. A substantial number of people have died as good, bad and ugly sought their gold, but probably not more than one well-placed cannonball took out in this military engagement, and at least they have not disguised their aims with sanctimonious prattle.