Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  What lovely stuff this is—“playful parody and profound homage” indeed, with dry humor of characterization and wild exaggeration of action deliciously, almost wordlessly, blended to establish a figure whose enigmatic contradictions draw you quickly into the film.

  Clint’s character is, perhaps, a simpler one, and, of course, his serape, his cigar, his manner, suggest that “Monco” is a pseudonym for “Joe.” But if identical dress and manner have their obvious commercial uses, they may also be misleading. It is true that here, as previously, the Clint character is simply in the game for the money. But as the precredit sequence—and epigraph—suggest, he is no longer an opportunistic drifter. He is, if you will, a man with a prospering career in legalized murder. He is also a much more self-conscious ironist. Admittedly, at a point late in the picture, Monco does say that he hopes to save enough from the rewards he collects to buy a little ranch and settle down, a comment that has distressed some critics; saving up for the good life gives him too conventional a motivation. But that, too, is probably meant ironically: Movie gunslingers are always talking about the ranch and the quiet life they hope to enjoy someday. They don’t mean it. And this one especially doesn’t mean it.

  Monco’s lines are usually sharper than that—shrewdly pointed goads to, and commentaries on, the film’s action. Consider his introductory sequence, when he enters a poker game with his current quarry, who eventually inquires what the bet was. “Your life,” Monco says dryly. After which much shooting ensues, five people are killed and Monco has a nice little exchange with the local sheriff, who has stood by impotently during the carnage. “Isn’t a sheriff supposed to be courageous, loyal and above all honest?” Monco inquires. “That he is” comes the reply. At which point the gunman removes the badge from the lawman’s vest, takes it outside and tells the gawking townsfolk, “I think you people need a new sheriff.” Then he tosses the badge into the street, an action that, of course, parodically refers us to the “classic” High Noon and prefigures the famous conclusion of Dirty Harry.

  Like all the films Leone made with Clint, this one is triadic in structure, with its third side the bandit leader, El Indio, once again played by Gian Maria Volonté, this time giving full vent to an evil the deliriousness of which he only hinted at in A Fistful of Dollars. A full-scale psychopath, smoking dope, torturing insects, if anything happier murdering innocent bystanders than he is doing away with those who have actually wronged him, achieving a kind of dreamy peace only after he has killed. In one typically Leonesque passage, he is seen presiding over a parody of the Last Supper, his twelve disciples gathered around him in a ruined church as he speaks in parables. Narratively, however, the most important thing about El Indio is that he is a man haunted by some terrible deed in his distant past and obsessed with a criminal masterstroke (the robbery of a supposedly impregnable bank in El Paso) that he is planning for his immediate future.

  We quickly guess that somehow his past and Mortimer’s are intertwined. We also guess that it will require more than one man to bring him down, that neither the unflappable experience of Colonel Mortimer nor the youthful reflexes of Monco alone can get the job done. The sequence in which the latter form their alliance is as boldly theatrical as anything Leone ever did. Everyone converges on El Paso, where El Indio’s men are casing the bank, and the two bounty hunters watch them—and watch each other watching them. Eventually, Monco orders a hotel bellhop to remove Mortimer’s luggage and take it to the station on the grounds that this town isn’t big enough for both of them. Mortimer then tells the man to return the bag to his room. Ultimately, the servant simply throws up his hands and scuttles away, leaving the two men alone for their confrontation. Now Leone reverses the strategy he favored in his previous film. There, scenes of this sort tended to begin with the antagonists distantly separated. Here, they are on top of one another, comically invading one another’s space. They circle one another like sniffing dogs. Then each steps on the other’s boots: Now they are like kids challenging one another.

  Eventually, they move apart—far enough apart to start some gunplay, as in those western sequences in which, usually, the town toughs terrify the newly arrived tenderfoot by shooting at his feet to make him dance, or shoot his hat off. Monco and Mortimer do both—to excess—but, of course, neither flinches and neither scares the other. Rather, they are mutually impressed, and their duel turns into a bonding ritual. It is, as well, a terrific deadpan-comedy sequence.

  The insertion of this long, very funny piece into a movie that is most basically concerned with anarchical violence and vengefulness is a bold stroke. It far transcends the incidental humor—for instance, jokey exchanges between sidekicks as they proceed to more deadly business—that is traditionally permissible in action films. But Leone and his actors carry the sequence off with sureness and panache, while making a very shrewd observation—that masculine violence has its roots in boyish play, the pushing, shoving, scuffling attempts of children to establish mastery within their group or the neighborhood. This is the first (and probably the only) western sequence to make that point explicitly.

  The film’s plotting soon becomes extremely intricate. There are betrayals, captures, beatings and finally a shoot-out in which all the bandits, save El Indio, are dispensed with, clearing the way for a final confrontation between him and Mortimer. By this time we know something of the event that haunts both Mortimer and El Indio. They carry identical locket watches that, when opened, chime a wistful little Morricone tune. In the cover of Mortimer’s timepiece there is the portrait of a beautiful young woman. El Indio uses his to time shoot-outs; when the tune stops it is the signal for him and his opponent to draw. Flashbacks reveal that in the past El Indio killed the woman’s husband and raped her, and we understand, of course, that she had some close relationship to Mortimer. What we don’t know until the very end is that she was his sister, and that in the course of El Indio’s attack on her she seized his gun and committed suicide with it. This revelation is a very powerful one. The movies have, of course, shown suicide as a consequence of rape before, but few have done so with such unprepared-for—and shocking—immediacy, for we also learn from it that this assault occurred on their wedding night, her innocence defiled at the very moment for which it had been defended. No wonder it haunts even the bestial El Indio.

  This sequence immediately precedes El Indio’s final, fated confrontation with Mortimer. Thinking he and Monco have dispatched all of his gang, Mortimer calls the bandit out, taking his stand in a circular plaza, its boundaries marked by stones. But El Indio has one last ally, whom he sends out ahead of him. In the confusion this man is killed, and Mortimer’s gun is shot from his hand. It lies on the ground, just out of reach as El Indio, a pistol in his holster, and thus holding one of the classic gunfight’s familiar advantages, sneeringly challenges him to go for it.

  He has not reckoned with Monco, who now appears to referee the duel. He tosses his gunbelt to Mortimer, who straps it on. Then he draws Mortimer’s watch, which he has, unknown to the colonel, appropriated earlier. Using El Indio’s ploy, he tells them to draw when the tune stops playing, and opens the watch. We have arrived at yet another of Leone’s signature moments, and the staging is masterful.

  When these pictures eventually reached the United States, there was much agitated discussion of their violence, but in fact Leone’s interest in death itself was minimal and almost prudish. The slow-motion exchange of shots, with blood colorfully spattering and oozing in aestheticized patterns—Sam Peckinpah’s most lasting or, anyway, most imitated, contribution to the grammar of film—was never part of Leone’s style. In the heat of action death is often as casual in his films as it is in most movies. But in the end, as he boldly extends time in stalking confrontations (of which this is the first classic example), he gives his people—and his audience—plenty of time to contemplate the consequences of the action on which they are embarked.

  El Indio’s end approaches slowly, but then suddenly when the watch s
tops playing its tune. “Bravo,” Monco murmurs from the sidelines, echoing an earlier comment on one of Mortimer’s displays of marksmanship. After which, the movie reverts to absurdity. Monco starts loading corpses into a wagon to take them to some lawman and collect the rewards on them. Packing them in, he counts his profits—a thousand for this one, two thousand for that one. One victim, however, is still alive; he draws on him, and is, of course, killed. “Any trouble, boy?” Mortimer inquires from afar. “No,” comes the reply, “thought I was having trouble with my adding …” The cross-reference is to the exchange with the coffin maker in Fistful. This return to the absurdity is balanced by an assertion of principle: Mortimer gives him El Indio’s body, the most valuable of their many corpses. He will not have the purity of his revenge tainted by mercenary considerations. Monco makes a polite demurrer: “What about our partnership?” “Maybe next time,” says the colonel, and off they go on their separate paths.

  This calmly stated grotesquery is the intellectual ground zero of all Leone’s work, the rich loam in which the seeds of violence are planted, from which it sprouts with such wild profusion. It is this grounding, and the fact that it is carefully calculated, entirely conscious, that set Leone’s westerns apart not only from the rationalist traditions of the genre as it developed in the United States, but also from the blood-soaked tradition quickly developed in the (literally) hundreds of European westerns produced in the aftermath of his success.

  But in the end we do not (and should not) attend For a Few Dollars More for comparison’s sake. It represents, after all, one-seventh of Leone’s total directorial output, and by no means its most negligible part. It is, in fact, part of a coherent continuum, demonstrating that the tone, style and point of view presented in A Fistful of Dollars were not accidental or opportunistic, and suggesting that the director was capable of sustaining and developing all of them still further.

  What is true of Leone is also true of Clint. The first film sketched, in bold strokes, a screen character—basically a self-contained ironist, worldly-wise but not world-weary, determined to pursue his destiny and equally determined not to define it, or himself, verbally—that was also capable of enrichment. There is something of his Leone character in much of everything he has done since. And when there is not, he (and we) are conscious of him going against its grain, so that this early work is always in some way part of his self-definition on-screen. The “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” Clint, the “Make my day” Clint, have their beginnings in the brutally frank figure who comically tallies his profits at the end of For a Few Dollars More.

  By the time he completed this second film with Leone, Clint was keenly aware that as an actor he had finally found a comfortable stride. That he was doing something that gave him pleasure and confidence carried the promise of freeing him from the sterilities in which he had been trapped for so many television seasons. He was at last being permitted to act his age. And now here comes a representative of Rawhide eager to extend that privilege.

  Ben Brady, who had previously produced Perry Mason and Have Gun, Will Travel, had now been hired as Rawhide’s latest executive producer, and given what appears to have been virtually a free hand in revamping the show. His first, and largest, decision was to fire Eric Fleming and to promote Rowdy Yates to trail boss. He flew to Europe to discuss the change with Clint, whose immediate response was “You mean fire the wrong guy? Keep Fleming and get rid of me. You really don’t need me. I would prefer to be out of the show.” Working on For a Few Dollars More, which he could see was good, and to which there was no bar to wide and virtually immediate international release, had emboldened him.

  But Brady, “a nice guy,” remained adamant. “It was just the old reverse psychology,” Clint comments, “the more you ask to get out, the more they want you to be there.” Apparently, though, he exacted a good price for his continued presence, a salary guaranteeing him payment for a full season’s work, even if the show was canceled before all the episodes were shot (the trades later reported a settlement of Clint’s final Rawhide contract for $119,000).

  There were other changes, too. The veteran John Ireland (who was the gunslinger Cherry Valance in Red River, and thus in a sense represented a return to basics) signed on as Rowdy’s deputy trail boss—and Fleming’s replacement as the wise older hand—Jed Colby. Rowdy’s old role as the perpetually impetuous youth was approximated by a young English actor, David Watson, whose pip-pip locutions as a radically displaced person offered some broad comic possibilities. Perhaps the most interesting new casting was that of Raymond St. Jacques as one of the drovers, Simon Blake. He was the first black man to have a regular role on a television western, and doubtless an element of sixties tokenism went into this casting. But he was also an imposing actor, less anonymous than most of the cowboys had been, and offered some potentially interesting dramatic possibilities that the show did not live long enough to exploit.

  To make room for these characters, other actors besides Fleming were dispensed with and Paul Brinegar professed “utter shock” at these changes. “They have decimated the cast,” he said. Fleming, naturally, took a contrary position. He saw his dismissal purely as a money-saving move. “They were paying me a million dollars a year,” he cheerfully lied. Clint expressed no pleasure at his “promotion.” He asked a reporter: “Why should I be pleased? I used to carry half the shows. Now I carry them all. For the same money.” To another journalist he complained: “In the first show of the season they don’t even explain how Rowdy Yates is promoted from ramrod to trail boss.” Nor did he much care for his new role. It was fine to play a mature male, but not this one. He is, in his nature, a loner, and even in his fifties and sixties, when father figures are age appropriate, he has not yet chosen to play one.

  In the end, though, it was probably not these changes, radical though they were, that undid Rawhide. It was primarily victimized in its final season by a catastrophic scheduling error. As Clint would tell a reporter early in 1966, “It had been the network’s only show to get a rating on Friday night; so they switched us to Tuesday, opposite a show with the same type of male audience, Combat.” The redesigned series languished for thirteen episodes in its new slot, then was canceled permanently. No attempt was made to bring Rowdy’s or anybody else’s story to a formal conclusion. The 217th episode, a rerun, simply aired in its regular spot on January 4, 1966, and then the program vanished as unceremoniously as it had begun.

  Clint was glad to escape the grind at last, and his future looked more promising than ever. For as Rawhide was stumbling to its end, For a Few Dollars More opened in Italy as strongly as its predecessor had. By the turn of the year it was on its way to a gross there that would exceed the takings of A Fistful of Dollars by some $400,000—a pattern that would obtain throughout the world over the next few years. It proved the success of the first film was not accidental, and it made Clint someone to reckon with, someone on whom an American company could sensibly take a chance. That winter United Artists agreed with Grimaldi to supply substantial backing (somewhere between $1.2 to $1.6 million) for the next Leone-Eastwood collaboration, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which would be epic in length (three hours long in its original Italian version, two hours and twenty-eight minutes in the version most of the world saw) as well as cost. (In addition to his $250,000 fee Clint was to receive a percentage of the western hemisphere net.) As negotiations for that film proceeded, UA’s head of production, David Picker, was also obtaining rights to For a Few Dollars More. Clint remembers running into him at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hearing this news and urging him to acquire the full set by pursuing A Fistful of Dollars as well. The conflict with Yojimbo’s proprietors was still unresolved, but as a neutral party, whose only interest was making money for all concerned, the American company might be able to settle it, Clint thought. This it eventually did by granting distribution rights to the film in many Asian territories to the Japanese, in return for which they ceased legal actions against it.


  In the meantime, Clint received an intriguing—even flattering—offer from Europe. Dino de Laurentiis was putting together a film entitled Le Streghe (The Witches) as a sort of vanity production for his wife, Silvana Mangano. She had become the first of the postwar Italian sex symbols with her appearance in Bitter Rice in 1948, but her international standing had been diminished by the rise of Gina Lollabrigida and Sophia Loren, who was married to Carlo Ponti, de Laurentiis’s erstwhile partner and now his rival as a high-rolling international producer. The latter’s plan was to make an anthology film—a form popular in Europe in this period—composed of five short stories, which would display several facets of his wife’s talent and, perhaps, revive her career. To this end he recruited some of Italy’s leading filmmakers (Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mauro Bolognini, Franco Rossi and Vittorio De Sica) to direct the segments. He also planned to employ first-class players to support Mangano—among them, in the event, Annie Girardot, Francisco Rabal, Alberto Sordi, Toto and Pietro Rossi. Given the huge Italian success of Clint’s westerns—by now they were calling him “El Cigarello” there—De Laurentiis believed he belonged among them.

  When a scenario (not a full script) of his segment arrived, Clint found it amusing even though it was “never a commercial item—you knew that.” Still, in its little way, it presented an interesting opportunity—a chance to get out of period costume and play a contemporary male. It also offered him an opportunity to subvert radically his newly created image by playing a middle-management banker who was in every respect the opposite of El Cigarello—passive, impotent, self-excusing, even a bit of a whiner.