Authors: Richard Schickel
This is, of course, essentially the point Chaplin made less vividly with the endless speech that concludes
Monsieur Verdoux
, in which he compares the paltry body count of his Bluebeard character to that which could be attributed to the munitions makers, and at least once in talking about this film Leone specifically compared his intent to Chaplin’s. It is scarcely a blinding insight, but it is well put here by a director whose work, to this point, had been reviewed almost entirely in terms of its apparently anarchic violence.
Edward Gallafent, among others, also takes this passage to be a comment on America’s growing involvement in Vietnam, and it is certainly
possible that Leone, backed by a United States company, and sure of its release in America, was thinking of it. But the concrete visual evidence suggests that he must also have had the madness of World War I trench warfare at least equally in mind.
Indeed, Andrew Sarris argues that Leone’s effort in his westerns was always to show that there was a continuum between American and European experience. He observes that the typical American western treated the Civil War “
as an interruption to our Manifest Destiny,” whereas, for Leone, “the fratricidal fury of the Civil War is one of the keys to the rapacity and violence of the American West,” a true turning point for a nation “moving toward that nihilistic nowhere with which Europe has been so familiar for so long.”
The film’s final sequence is both another reflection on the highly organized “crime” of war vs. disorganized crime as it is perpetrated by individuals, and a final release of nihilism. It is Tuco who arrives first at Sad Hill, scurrying madly about to find the grave of “Arch Stanton,” which is where Blondie has told him the loot is buried. His small, scuttling figure is photographed several times against a panorama of neatly ranked military graves stretching virtually to the horizon and offering mute testimony to a far larger, more carefully organized criminal enterprise than the one he is intent on completing. But a military cemetery is also a historical marker, an attempt to grant solemn import to anonymous sacrifice. Already desecrated by the original thieves, it is about to be desecrated again by grave robbers to whom history has been an inconvenience and is now an irrelevance.
Tuco finds Stanton’s resting place and is digging furiously at it with his bare hands when Blondie arrives, and for the first time in this film he has donned his serape, his mythic garment. Soon Angel Eyes appears, but the grave, when opened, reveals only a skeleton. Blondie now says he will write the correct name of the grave where the treasure is buried and place it in the cemetery’s central plaza. Whoever survives the three-way shoot-out he is inviting will then be able to claim the gold.
Let the ritual game begin! And let it take any amount of time the director requires to complete his concluding tour de force. Tuco turns out not to be a deadly factor in the shoot-out; Blondie (we learn later) emptied his gun of bullets the night before. At its end, only Angel Eyes lies dead. Blondie supplies a brutally just coda by directing a shot into his corpse, which contemptuously knocks him into the newly opened grave; another shot sends his hat in after him. Thereafter he reveals that he wrote no name on the rock. For, as he explains, the gold is actually buried in the grave of an unknown soldier, next to Stanton’s. Tuco digs
it up and scoops coins out of their bags by the handful. When his greed is sated he looks up to see a rope hanging from a tree branch. Blondie then forces him to mount a rickety cross just beneath it and place his head in the noose while he ties Tuco’s hands behind him. Echoing Tuco’s misadventures at the end of a rope back in their scamming days, this is also another of Leone’s mock crucifixions.
Blondie takes his share of the gold, leaves Tuco’s share for him (if he can extricate himself from his precarious perch) and rides off, Tuco’s curses ringing in his ears. A very long shot away he severs the rope with a bullet, another reminder of their partnership’s beginnings and the signal of its dissolution. A concluding image of Blondie disappearing into an empty wilderness space signals the end of Clint’s partnership with Leone.
They had not quarreled, and, as he says, “Eli and I had a good time” making the picture. But it was Wallach who had the best time. He had played a Mexican bandit in the first western remade from a Kurosawa film,
The Magnificent Seven
, and was glad he had overcome his initial reluctance to work in this film. He says he had not heard the term “spaghetti western” until his agent called him one day to say that he had an offer to play in one. “
That’s like a Hawaiian pizza” the actor responded, not realizing that soon enough someone would concoct that unlikely dish, too. But he met with Leone when they happened to coincide in Los Angeles, where the director overcame Wallach’s dubiety by saying, “I will show you one minute of one of my movies.” He then took him into a screening room where he rolled the unforgettable main title sequence of
For a Few Dollars More
. “OK, where do you want me to go?” Wallach said when it was over.
On location, Leone was attentive and encouraging to Wallach—“He allowed me to have my romp with this little guy”—and Clint was protective. “Listen,” Wallach recalls Clint telling him on their first meeting, “never trust anyone on an Italian movie”; he also advised him to follow his lead in any questionable moments. They flew together from Rome to Madrid, stayed overnight in a friend’s apartment—they were obliged to share a bed—then, since Clint did not entirely trust the local airlines, they undertook a twelve-hour trip by car to Burgos, in Basque country (a fresh location for Leone), to start production.
Soon thereafter, Wallach had reason to be glad that he had tucked himself under Clint’s wing. For when it came time to blow the bridge at the climax of the battle sequence, he insisted on a position more protected than the one Leone originally assigned the actors. Whereupon, typically, someone misread one of the ever-gesticulating director’s arm
movements as a signal for action and dynamited the bridge before the cameras were rolling. Wallach thinks that if they had stayed where Leone had at first stationed them they might have been injured by flying debris. A week later, when the span was rebuilt and the shot was finally made, they were, at Clint’s insistence, in a shallow trench. On that occasion, Wallach recalls, Clint brought along a golf club to practice his swing during the lengthy setup.
When he is packing a golf club away from a course, it is a sure sign that Clint is bored, restive and out of sorts. There is nothing like the repeated swishing of a five iron to keep the world at bay, and that was the case here. He was tired of the haphazard ways of Italian moviemaking, cross about a production schedule twice the length of that of his first film with Leone and very conscious that in the scheme of this film his role was comparatively diminished. As if to point up his disenchantment, Clint was obliged to stop work on
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
and fly to Rome, where he held a press conference and launched a civil action against his sometime employer, Jolly Film. It had licensed a couple of old
Rawhide
episodes and was in the process of splicing them together to make a feature they proposed calling—yes!—
The Magnificent Stranger
.
Unaware of Clint’s feelings, Leone was talking to him about yet another western, still larger in scale than this one, the film that would eventually be known as
Once upon a Time in the West
. He also mentioned in passing the project that would, almost two decades later, come to the screen as
Once upon a Time in America
. But Clint remained noncommittal. He repeatedly told Wallach, “No more, I’m not coming back anymore.” Wallach, who would make several more Italian films, understood completely. “He knew the route. He knew his character. The only thing he had to do was make adjustments to me. Or to Lee Van Cleef.” As Clint would later put it: “I could have gone on doing them for another ten years, but there’s only so far to go, then you want a character with a different background or obstacles to overcome.” He was quite prepared, and financially able, to wait for such parts.
But when his plane landed in New York on November 1, all such thoughts were brutally driven from his mind. For he casually picked up a newspaper at the airport and discovered, to his horror, that Eric Fleming was dead. He had been in Peru, costarring with the English actress Anne Heywood in a made-for-TV movie called
High Jungle
. With the film about half completed, the company was shooting on the Huanaga River in a remote region some three hundred miles north of Lima, when a canoe in which Fleming was riding with a local actor capsized.
The other man was able to swim to shore, but Fleming was swept into the current and drowned. It would be two days before his body was recovered far downriver, and it would take Clint more time than that to absorb the shock. In his mind, Fleming’s death seems to have put a blunt and indelible period to this phase of his own life.
Y
ou know, it goes back to the old thing we used to talk about all the time in acting classes when I first came to Universal: They’d say, ‘What would you rather be, an actor or a movie star?’ Everybody used to say they’d rather be an actor, of course. But after you start thinking about it, you say: ‘Wait a second, who gets all the great roles?’ Movie stars. You’re a great actor and you’re sitting there waiting for the phone to ring, and it can be a long time coming. So you kind of have to throw all that out and not worry about what being a movie star is, so you can get the roles with more challenge to them.”
Thus does practical Clint Eastwood reflect on the course he chose to pursue in the late sixties. He was not unmindful that movie stars make more money than movie actors do. Clint is never unmindful of money, but it is never his first thought, either. The young actor who prudently deferred part of his
Rawhide
salary has remained willing to forgo instant gratification in return for freedom of choice (and, of course, a very nice back-end participation in the grosses).
Yet, as United Artists prepared to release the first of the Leone films in the United States (in February 1967, with
For a Few Dollars More
following in July and
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
coming along in January 1968), he was in limbo. Hollywood was interested. There was talk about the phenomenal grosses his films had recorded overseas and therefore talks among producers, Clint and his representatives. But it was easier for all parties to wait a few months and see how the Leone films fared in the American market.
A sort of class prejudice was operating as well. To American motion-picture executives Clint was less the Man with No Name than the Man from the Wrong Side of the Tracks—from television and B pictures, which these low-budget, lowbrow Italian movies were in Hollywood’s eyes. Yes, United Artists had put up a substantial sum to make the last of them, but the combined advance it paid for American distribution
rights to the first two—$110,000—is probably a clearer measure of how Hollywood valued them and, by inference, their star.
Clint could not evaluate his prospects on the basis of the success, so far, of the Leone pictures. He wondered: “Does this mean I’m going to be Rod Cameron or John Wayne? Or none of the above? Or does it mean that I’m going to be my own person, whatever that might mean?” It would be at least six months until any option was firmly in place, more than four years before Hollywood would fully acknowledge the power of his stardom.
A Fistful of Dollars
opened in February. Reviewers had been primed for “something different” by articles in the trades and by a piece that Bosley Crowther, the chief movie critic for
The New York Times
, had written in November 1966. The success of the Leone pictures in Europe, he said, was showing American producers that even if their home market had been softened by television westerns, the appetite for them overseas remained large. “
Don’t say you haven’t been warned,” he wrote, characterizing
A Fistful of Dollars
, which he had seen in Rome as “violent and bloody … as gory as any western I’ve ever seen,” and Clint’s character as “just this side of a brute, long on sadistic inclinations and short on heroic qualities.”
Nevertheless, this aesthetically conservative, socially liberal reviewer (who would soon be eased out of his job for failing to comprehend and support the new manners and morals of sixties filmmaking) seemed to see in Leone’s “unconventional” film possibilities for generic renewal. “Anti-heroes will flourish and the earth will shake!” he concluded, equably enough.
He retained this bemused tone when he formally reviewed the movie three months later: “
Cowboy camp of an order that no one has dared since, gosh, Gary Cooper’s ‘The Virginian.’ ” Trying desperately to get with it, he characterized Clint’s Joe as “ruthless without being cruel, fascinating without being realistic … a morbid, amusing, campy fraud.”
This is nonsense, of course. The camp spirit, moving gays to wicked, useful satire of the essentially bourgeois and heterosexual conventions of popular culture, had nothing in common with the spirit animating Leone’s films. His subversions were of quite a different kind. When Crowther returned yet again to
A Fistful of Dollars
for his Sunday piece a few days later, he was still calling it a “
deadpanned spoof,” but now he was “apprehensive that this most faithful and durable type of film [the western] is in for a kind of modernizing that is vicious and cruel … a violation of the happy romantic myth that has kept this type of picture popular through the years … a dangerous overturning of the applecart.” He feared, he said, “a swarm of imitations” and “some lasting harm.”
He did not specify what would be harmed. The comfortable conventions of a beloved, if tired, form? The movies in general? The body politic in general? The viscosities of Crowther’s prose were often difficult to penetrate. So much so that Clint remembers these pieces as positive notices, perhaps understandably, so outraged were the tirades in other quarters.