Authors: Marc Eliot
At the Leonardo da Vinci Airport they were met by a small entourage that consisted of the film’s publicist, Geneviève Hersent; assistant director Mario Cavano; and dialogue director Tonino Valerii, who offered Clint Leone’s apologies for not being there himself, saying he was unfortunately tied up with preproduction. In truth, Leone did not speak a word of English and did not want to be embarrassed by it in public, especially since a handful of dependable paparazzi were sure to be there to photograph the arrival of the famous American TV cowboy.
Leone was thrilled that Clint had agreed to be in the film. Leone loved Hollywood films and actors. In his early, struggling years he had worked as an assistant to various American directors who occasionally shot abroad and needed some native help. Among those Leone had worked for were Raoul Walsh, William Wyler, Robert Aldrich, and Fred Zinnemann, mostly for their sandals-and-robes ventures such as Wyler’s 1959 production of
Ben-Hur
.
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Wyler, like the others, had used Leone to help organize and stage the big outdoor scenes, such as the famed chariot race.
When he finally got the chance to direct his own movie, it was
Il Colosso di Rodi
in 1961 (released in the United States as
The Colossus of Rhodes)
, with American actor Rory Calhoun in the lead. The film did surprisingly well internationally as well as in Italy, briefly resurrected
Calhoun’s Hollywood career, and put Leone in a position to choose his own next project.
He had had it in mind as early as 1959, when he was still a screenwriter on Mario Bonnard’s 1959
Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii)
, filmed on location in Pompeii and Naples and starring Steve Reeves,
of Hercules
fame. (Reeves seriously dislocated his shoulder during the film; the injury eventually forced his acting career to end prematurely.) Bonnard had fallen ill the first day of shooting, and with no one else available, Leone stepped in and “finished” it, directing all but the first day’s footage. Working closely with Duccio Tessari, his co-writer, Leone managed to turn out a respectable film that made money. He was determined now to direct his own films.
In between working on other directors’ movies, he and Tessari went to see as many as they could. One day in 1961 they saw
Yojimbo
, and Leone was blown away as much by Kurosawa’s directing style as by the film’s story. (Kurosawa had co-written
Yojimbo
with Hideo Oguni and Ryuzo Kikushima.) Leone contacted Kurosawa and asked for permission to adapt
Yojimbo
as an American-style Italian-made western. He already had a title that was in itself an homage to another favorite film, if not an outright steal:
The Magnificent Stranger
was a play on
The Magnificent Seven
, John Sturges’s smash 1960 western adapted from Kurosawa’s 1954 classic
Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai)
, the film that had made Kurosawa’s reputation in the United States.
However, Kurosawa, perhaps weary of his films being “borrowed” by other directors, asked for an upfront $10,000 rights fee. Leone was confident he could get the money from Jolly Films, the production company that had agreed to back the first acceptable script he brought them; but to his surprise and dismay, Jolly said no, even though the entire proposed budget for the film, including Kurosawa’s fee, was only $200,000. When it appeared that no deal could be reached, Jolly Films producers Harry Colombo and George Papi managed to work out a tentative deal with Kurosawa that bypassed the upfront $10,000 in exchange for 100 percent of the film’s gross profits in Japan. Colombo and Papi thought it was a good deal for Kurosawa because
Rawhide
was a big hit on Japanese TV and Clint Eastwood was considered a major star. But in the end Kurosawa said no, a decision that would later come back to haunt Leone.
Nonetheless, early that June location shooting began in Spain,
before moving on to Rome for interiors at the famed but underused and relatively inexpensive Italian studio Cinecittà.
Within days of his being on the set, Clint realized that the film Leone was making was far different from the more conventional script he’d read back in the States. The story was familiar enough—a stranger comes to town, watches bad guys bully good people, is reluctant to take sides, gets drawn in to it, is nearly killed and left for dead, and then comes back and takes revenge against impossible odds to emerge victorious. Westerns in every decade of Hollywood filmmaking had elements of this scenario, including John Ford’s
My Darling Clementine
(1946) and his
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962), Howard Hawks’s
Rio Bravo
(1959), Raoul Walsh’s
The Lawless Breed
(1953), Fred Zinnemann’s
High Noon
(1952), and George Stevens’s
Shane
(1953), to which Leone’s film also bears an especially strong resemblance in plot and visual stylistic touches; the Man with No Name, in poncho and sheepskin vest, vividly echoes Alan Ladd’s mysterious stranger, gloriously costumed in buckskins.
Though it owes much to
Yojimbo
and
Shane
, however,
A Fistful of Dollars
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also owes a great deal to the great pulp and genre writers of the first half of the twentieth century. The British critic and film historian Christopher Frayling has traced all these films’ common plot line and characters to Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel
Red Harvest
(the Continental Op is, significantly, a man without a name) and even further back to Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century play
Servant of Two Masters
. Leone himself often said that
Red Harvest
was a primary source of his script.
†
What impressed Clint, and first clued him in to the fact that something might be going on other than just another European ripoff of American genres, was the stylistic flourish Leone used to shoot the film. Clint had become interested in directing well before he showed up in Italy, especially in the stylistics of directors that made their films personal. As he told it, during one episode
of Rawhide:
We were shooting some vast cattle scenes—about two thousand head of cattle. We were doing some really exciting stampede stuff. I was
riding along in the herd, there was dust rising up, and it was pretty wild really. But the shots were being taken from outside the herd, looking in, and you didn’t see too much. I thought, we should get right in the middle of this damn stampede. I said to the director and producer, “I’d like to take an Arriflex [camera], run it on my horse and go right in the middle of this damn thing, even dismount, whatever—but get in there and really get some great shots, because there are some beautiful shots in there that we are missing.” Well, they double-talked me. They said, “You can’t get in there because of union rules.” I could see they didn’t want to upset a nice standard way of moviemaking.
Even before he worked on
A Fistful of Dollars
, Clint had been thinking a lot about how familiar setups, camera angles, and methodology—establish the scene in a master shot, cut to over-the-shoulder one-shots for the dialogue, finish the scene with the master shot, dissolve into the next master—bred a uniformity in TV directors and made them all (directors and their shows) stylistically look the same. The day Clint wanted to shoot the cattle drive a little differently was the day the seeds of his future role as a director were planted.
Finally, I asked Eric Fleming, “Would you be averse to my directing?” He said, “Not at all, I’d be for it.” So I went to the producer and he said great. Evidently he didn’t say great behind my back; but he said great at the time. He said, “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you direct some trailers for us—coming attractions for next season’s shows?” I said, “Terrific. I’ll do it for nothing and then I’ll do an episode.” And I did the trailers. But they reneged on the episode because, at that time, several of their name actors on other television shows were directing episodes, not too successfully.
So about the time I was getting set to do it, CBS said no more series actors could direct their own shows … then I went to work with Sergio Leone.
A
cting in the film proved difficult for Clint, primarily because Leone insisted on shooting in three languages simultaneously. Clint had to speak his lines in English while the other actors spoke in either Italian or Spanish. The result was a limited amount of dialogue that
Leone used to help create the strong silent mystique of the Man with No Name. Rather than having the character talk a lot, at Leone’s insistence (Clint enthusiastically supported this decision and, with Leone’s permission, cut much of his own dialogue out), he smoked cigarillos and used his big gun to do a lot of the talking for him. All of it allowed Clint to act with his face and his eyes rather than to talk as Rowdy Yates and almost every other character on
Rawhide
did, because on TV describing action is always a lot cheaper than actually showing it. (“You know those rustlers we rounded up yesterday?” “Yeah, I remember.” “Well, two of them had a fight in their jail cell last night and we had to break it up.” “Too bad I missed it.” “One of them hit the other over the head with a bottle … and now the doc is with him. Let’s go see how he’s doing and maybe we can get some more information out of the varmint …”)
Gradually, the slim backstory of the Man with No Name began to take shape. He was some kind of wandering knight in shining armor, which is revealed in a single sentence, after he helps a young couple escape the clutches of the evil Rojo, by explaining, “I knew someone like you once and there was no one there to help.” That was all, and that was enough.
Clint found a wide hat he liked and wore it low to shade his eyes, giving him an even more menacing look while preserving a certain coolness—not an easy balance to maintain. And he wore a poncho, donned in the second half of the film, to hide his mangled hand from his opponents.
*
It became akin to Batman’s cape. Finally, the metal shield he wore during the climactic shoot-out made him appear unearthly, as if he were an invincible alien from another world. Clint combined all these character accoutrements perfectly, throwing the cape back with a flourish in the film’s final shoot-out, which Leone cut perfectly in sync to the extraordinary score by Ennio Morricone, the best film music for any western since Tiomkin’s Academy Award-winning theme for
High Noon
.
Besides the stylized music-to-action and the low angles that Leone used to shoot the Man with No Name, he also cut close-ups of the characters’ eyes in strong, rhythmic motions. As the action of the film
intensified, the close-ups got closer. And for the final, climactic shootout, Leone came up with one of the film’s most unforgettable sequences; after a series of close-ups of eyes, a double-barreled shotgun appears through a window, and the shot turns them into the perfect cold, unfeeling, unblinking steely eyes of evil incarnate. The moment never fails to evoke cheers and chills in audiences, and rightly so. It is the kind of effect no other form can achieve, not theater, not television, not the novel—a moment that is purely kinetic, a triumph of directing and editing that does not take away from the story but adds a dramatic flourish to it.
Leone’s cinematic feel was not lost on Clint:
An American would be afraid of approaching a western such as
Fistful of Dollars
with that kind of style. For instance, there were shots of a person being shot. In other words, you never shot a tie-up shot of a man shooting a gun and another person getting hit. It’s a Hays Office rule from years ago, a censorship deal. You’d cut to the guy shooting, and then cut to a guy falling. That was all right—the same thing—the public isn’t counting the cut. But you could never do a tie-up. We did because Sergio didn’t know all that. He wasn’t bothered by that. Neither was I. I knew about it but I couldn’t care less. The whole object of doing a film with a European director was to put a new shade of light on it.
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W
ith filming completed, Clint packed his things and boarded a plane for America. It would make a brief stopover in London, then continue to Los Angeles, just as filming on the seventh season of
Rawhide
was about to begin. Maggie met Clint in person at the airport. Roxanne Tunis called the next day and happily informed him that he was now the proud father of a baby daughter, Kimber Tunis, born June 17, 1964, at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Hollywood. Although the
father is listed on the birth certificate as Clinton Eastwood Jr., Tunis publicly gave the baby her last name, protecting Clint. He promised to support the child and did, emotionally and financially, asking from Tunis only that, if possible, the baby’s identity be kept secret.
Clint now had to negotiate a fine line to make sure his worlds (and women) didn’t collide. Thompkins, his longtime friend, agreed with Tunis that Clint should at least tell Maggie about the baby. Clint immediately and permanently cut him off. Thompkins was summarily fired from
Rawhide
and permanently disappeared from Clint’s life.
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As for Maggie, it is difficult to say for sure that she actually knew about the baby, although it would have been nearly impossible for her not to. Everyone on the set knew, many of Maggie and Clint’s friends knew, and it is simply too difficult to keep a secret like that when the mother and the illegitimate child live in the same small town, especially when that small town is Hollywood.
Perhaps that was one reason Clint suddenly decided he and Maggie should move north, to the Monterey Peninsula. He found a small home for them in Pebble Beach, and a second getaway place in Carmel, and assigned Maggie the familiar job of making the two houses into homes, even if he was going to be away from them, and her, most of the time, working on the show.
M
eanwhile
Rawhide
was continuing to have problems not just with ratings but with salaries. The standard seven-year contracts that both Fleming and Clint had signed, the maximum allowed under AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), were set to expire at the end of the season, and neither the network nor the stars were particularly eager to extend them. New contracts for Fleming and Clint, the network knew, would be expensive propositions, more now for Clint than for Fleming, whose fan mail had markedly decreased while Clint’s had steadily grown.