Culture
Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy
Shows
How Italy Turned Clint Eastwood Into a Movie Star
A $15,000 job, a handful of cigars, and very few words: the unlikely making of an icon.
For $15,000, Clint Eastwood agreed to spend part of 1964 making a western with an Italian director. Not because he had anything to prove. After all, Americans already loved him as Rowdy.
Yates on television's Rawhide. But he wanted another kind of part. That's why he accepted Sergio Leone's offer to make A Fistful of Dollars. He arrived on that set with much of his own wardrobe, plus a secret ingredient: cigars.
Eastwood wasn't a smoker. In fact, he thought cigars tasted dreadful. But they put him in a "terribly foul mood". Which, as it turned out, was just about perfect for his character, a mysterious stranger who rode into town, played rival gangs against each other, and collected money along the way.
The other thing Eastwood thought was that his character talked too much. So, he persuaded Leone to cut much of the dialogue, letting the eyes and silences do the work. And, as a proper Director, Leone knew how to make those silences count. His camera moved from wide-open landscapes to faces filling the screen. A micro expression could become the key focus before anyone even reached for a gun. And the cherry on top was Ennio Morricone's soundtrack. Eastwood barely had to move and somehow, you couldn't take your eyes off him. Then filming finished. Everybody went back home. Eastwood returned to Rawhide giving no particular thought to the reception this new foreign western of his was going to have. But then one day he came across a Variety report about a movie that had become a hit in Europe. He didn't pay much attention at first. Then he spotted something familiar.
His own name.
Try to imagine going back to your regular job, only to discover you'd become a movie star on the other side of the world. Not bad for a $15,000 job.
Just as Eastwood was processing it all, a phone call came. It was Sergio Leone: “Wanna make another?”
And so, an extraordinary partnership began, producing For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
All three films reached American cinemas in 1967. Audiences who knew the television cowboy now met the poncho, the cigar, and that long, unhurried stare. Which, as Eastwood is careful to remind people, were his ideas!
