Western historians might dispute this vision of frontier America as earnestly as they would dispute Ford’s more pastoral portrayal of it. The historical truth—in which no moviemaker has ever been interested for very long—is more complex than either interpretation can possibly comprehend. But at this stage in movie history it is indisputable that Leone’s view of the West was much more interesting dramatically and, as it would turn out, visually.
In these early days Leone was not quite so articulate a revisionist as he later made himself out to be. But as far as Clint was concerned, he didn’t need to be. It was enough for him that, for whatever reasons, Leone and his several writing collaborators had scraped away the western’s romantic, poetic and moral encrustations, leaving only its absurdly violent confrontational essence. It was very close to an act of deconstruction, for it might be said that instead of offering metaphors for moderns, as the “message” westerns did, the Leone films were postmodernist in their very essence. Like grander and more self-conscious works in this new tradition, they were fully, wickedly aware of the conventions they were sometimes rendering as ironic abstractions and sometimes completely subverting. In the end, it is the absence of earnest, overt messages—political, psychological, whatever—that constituted the real message of these films, and their profoundest appeal to a young actor restively working in a TV western, the squarest and most reductive version of the genre yet devised. It is also because of this omission that Leone’s films elicited such contempt and controversy when they were eventually released in the United States.
Clint and Leone did not discuss Il Magnifico Stragnero in these terms. “Realism” was their concern, and their conversations about Clint’s character were about enhancing his believability. (This figure, by the way, had a name—Joe—as he did in all the Eastwood-Leone collaborations; the more famous “Man with No Name” sobriquet was supplied well after the fact by an anonymous United Artists marketing executive looking for a way of selling the pictures in the United States.) They asked themselves what Joe would “really” do, “really” say—or, more likely, not say—when he was placed in different situations.
Knowing as we do the film they created, realism seems perhaps the least useful way of describing it. What’s memorable and marvelous about it is the way it severs all ties both with the real West and the romanticized version of it that the movies and the rest of popular culture had pretty much convinced audiences was real. As The New York Times critic Vincent Canby would later write, Leone’s films always had “the strange look and displaced sound of an unmistakably Italian director’s dream of what Hollywood movies should be like, but aren’t.”
Yet Leone and Clint were not wrong to concern themselves with behavioral authenticity. It is important in all movies, of course—the grounding that makes us suspend disbelief in essentially fantastic constructs. In this film it was even more significant. Clint would be the only American in a company otherwise peopled entirely by European performers, and they would all be working on Spanish locations that were to the landscape of the American West what the script was to the conventions of the American western: a spare, quite visibly inauthentic representation of what audiences had been taught to expect. The same might be said for Joe’s almost parodic silence and deadliness, the former deeper, the latter quicker, than we were used to in even our most enigmatic and skillful gunfighters. Somehow, the actor had to give good, solid, persuasive weight in this context.
In his way—a way that led most early reviewers to believe that Clint was doing nothing, was perhaps incapable of doing anything, in the way of conventional acting—that is what he did. The casual and uninflected sobriety with which Joe goes about his deadly business contrasts vividly—and to subtly humorous effect—with the operatic carnage that follows in his wake. It was a rather distant danger that didn’t occur to him at the time, but Clint was risking critical contumely—assuming any critic paid attention to this extremely marginal enterprise—with this performance. He was also offering a bold contrast with Toshiro Mifune’s manner in Yojimbo. His is a marvelous performance, but it is quite different from Clint’s, nowhere near as still and affectless. His freelance samurai, selling his services to rival criminal gangs, just as Clint’s freelance gunman does in Leone’s film, much more openly and comically communicates—through shrugs, twitches, flickers of disdain—his disgust with the warring factions.
Each actor fits, and to some degree sets, the quite divergent tones of his film. In their plotting, as everyone knows, the two films are very (but not entirely) similar, and the point that they are driving at is identical, perhaps because, as Sarris observed, similar national experiences were working on both directors. Japan and Italy, he notes, were both defeated in World War II. Therefore, he argues, their western protagonists “are less transcendental heroes than existential heroes in that they lack faith in history as an orderly process in human affairs. What Kurosawa and Leone share is a sentimental nihilism that ranks survival above honor and revenge above morality. Hence the Kurosawa and Leone hero possesses and requires more guile than his American counterpart. Life is cheaper in the foreign western, and violence more prevalent.”
So in copying Yojimbo’s basic situation Leone inevitably retains its most basic difference from the traditional western. As Kael observed, it is customary, when the mysterious stranger rides into a situation like the one set forth in these movies, that he be offered a clear-cut choice as to whom he should offer his services and “the remnants of a code of behavior.” But as she puts it, here “nobody represents any principle” and “the scattered weak are merely weak.” Which leaves existential improvisation—stylishly managed—as the protagonist’s only option.
In his nicely judged study of Kurosawa’s films, Donald Richie points out, as Kael does not, that the Mifune character’s moral superiority to everyone he encounters in the violently riven town he enters quite by chance is marginal. He may eventually tame the place, but that’s incidental to the money he thinks he can make in the process. Richie argues that since “no great moral purpose looms in back of him,” Kurosawa cannot, will not, “be portentous about an important matter—social action.” Therefore, “he refuses first tragedy, then melodrama. He insists upon making a comedy,” which was, as Kael put it, “the first great shaggy man movie.”
Everything thus far said about Yojimbo applies equally to Leone’s version of it—except that his sense of humor is entirely different from Kurosawa’s and so is his style. Much as he would later protest that his true inspirations were Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century farce, The Servant of Two Masters, and the comically violent puppet shows of his childhood, easy as it is to cite sequences in his film that bear no resemblance to anything in Kurosawa’s, Leone’s best defense against the charge of plagiarism lies in the attitude he took to this material.
There is a curiosity here. Kurosawa is himself austere and laconic in manner, not at all the kind of man one would imagine being drawn toward a farcical style. Conversely, Leone’s voluble, excitable nature suggests a natural taste for high-energy comedy. Yet the humor in his film—and some of its violence—are much more understated. (He did not, for example, quote what may be the most famous shot in Yojimbo, in which a dog trots by the camera carrying a severed arm in his mouth.) Indeed, his staging in general is less compressed and bustling, and far more ritualistic, particularly in the way its confrontations are set up, than Kurosawa’s is. It is almost as if each made the other’s movie. Or to put it another way, Yojimbo in its exuberance sometimes seems more Italianate than Leone’s work, while the latter’s film sometimes seems almost Oriental in its manner.
Not that there was anything enigmatic or withdrawn in Leone’s manner when he was at work. On the set he was aboil with energy, fussy about every detail. As Clint puts it, “He loved the joy of it all. I know he had a good time shooting when he wasn’t getting furious.” And furious he did get, at delays, at incomprehension, for Leone was also a “very nervous, intense and serious guy.” H
e clearly understood that despite its economic marginality this film represented his best, possibly his last, chance to make his mark as a director, and whatever his budgetary-constraints, he was determined to realize all its possibilities.
Clint responded, humorously but admiringly, to Leone’s intensity. The self-conscious revisionist and the perhaps unconscious modernist had another likable quality as well: disarming naïveté. “He had this childlike way of looking at the world,” Clint says. Unlike directors trying to re-create for modern audiences the conventions of, and through them their emotional responses to, the genres they had adored as kids, Leone, Clint thought, was trying to go a step further. He was trying to re-create the very feelings a child brings to his first experiences of the movies—the enormity of the screen looming over him, the overpowering images of worlds previously only imagined suddenly made manifest, made realer than real in the mysterious darkness of the theater.
Considering this point Clint summons up the familiar experience of reencountering as a grown-up some building or landscape that made a huge impression on you as a child and finding it to be smaller, less imposing than you remembered. In all his films Leone was, he thinks, trying to restore this remembered scale to the screen. Clint sees it in the low angles Leone favored for the characters he played, angles that offered, to put it simply, a child’s-eye view of heroism. He sees it, too, in the vast panoramic views of countryside and town streets that Leone loved, and loved alternating with extraordinarily tight close-ups of faces, of guns being drawn and fired, even of boots carrying their wearers toward their violent destinies, the jingling of their spurs unnaturally loud on the soundtrack, “Everything’s enhanced,” says Clint. “You’re seeing the films as an adult, but you sit and watch them as a child.”
The films are also full of references to Leone’s childhood religion. As the critic Robert C. Cumbow has observed, “The Catholic dichotomy between the material world of death and the spiritual world of life everlasting is grounded in the notion that the material world is inherently defective.” San Miguel, the Mexican border town Joe enters, could not be a more vivid symbol of that defectiveness, “irredeemably condemned to immobility, somnolence, to the lack of all resource and development,” as the Italian critic Franco Ferrini described it. Since Joe enters not on a hero’s impressive steed, but on a humble mule, which is, of course, the way Jesus traveled, we are encouraged to see him as a redeemer of the irredeemable. Before he leaves he will endure a sort of calvary and a kind of resurrection, and he will certainly assist many of San Miguel’s residents to find life everlasting—usually before they are quite ready for it.
In any event, there is no doubting the accuracy of Richard Corliss’s confident description of Clint’s character as “very much the grizzled Christ.” All of Leone’s films contain religious references of this kind—mock sermons, mock calvaries, disused churches and bell towers, a Bible used to hide a killer’s gun. And always, when he comes to the final shoot-out, it is as ritualized as a mass.
His disappointment with religion is of a piece with Leone’s disappointment in the failure of contemporary Americans to be the idealists (and saviors) our movies had promised they might be. It doubtless accounts for his sense of humor, described by Clint as “very ironic, dry and a little bit sardonic,” not to say cynical, perhaps, full of the arrested adolescent’s dismay at discovering that the world is not as it had been promised to him.
Leone’s movies’ characters—including Clint’s—are moved by base instinct. He ends up more or less doing right not because he acts out of any grand principles, but because power equals morality, and his skill with weapons is thus more potent than anyone else’s. In effect, he subverts the customary western formula, which always implies that distinctly higher moral standards have the effect of steadying the beset hero’s hand, fixing his eye when, at last, he draws.
Childishness of outlook does not necessarily imply primitiveness of technique. As Corliss notes, Leone was a tutored talent “not only a delirious descendant of both John Fords, but a spiritual brother of such ‘operatic’ Italians as Visconti, Bertolucci (who worked on the screenplay of Once upon a Time in the West), Minnelli and Coppola—a natural filmmaker whose love of the medium and the genre is joyously evident, and infectious, in every frame he shoots.”
They spent about a week in Rome, shooting (at Cinecittà) the sequence where Joe, grievously tortured by the Rojos, the marginally more vicious of the two criminal gangs contending for control of San Miguel, recovers from his wounds by taking refuge in a mine shaft (definitely to be compared to Christ entombed). It was necessary to shoot a minimum amount of the picture on Italian soil in order to be eligible for certain subventions the government was then offering producers. But as soon as possible the company moved on to Spain, first to locations in Manzanias, about an hour outside of Madrid on the way to Segovia, then to Almería, in bleak Andalucia, in the southern part of the country.
The set was a small Tower of Babel, with scripts available in Italian, English, German and Spanish. Everyone was friendly enough, but Clint could not communicate with the other leading players—among them Gian Maria Volonte (playing the psychopathic leader of the Rojo gang, Ramon), a highly regarded stage actor and a committed leftist on his way to a distinguished career in more politically conscientious films. One of the producers, Arrighi Columbo, spoke English well, but he and Clint did not take to one another, and besides Stefanelli the only other member of the cast and crew with whom he could communicate in English (and then only primitively) was Massimo Dallamano, the cinematographer, whom Clint admired—he “worked a little bit differently with light,” meaning he refused to cast the standard romantic glow over his landscapes.
He was glad he had insisted on bringing Bill Tompkins along for company, and he was happy, too, that he had arranged for Maggie to join him. She spent only a few days on location, her presence providing his only real break in what amounted to eight weeks of hard labor in a harsh land on a budget that permitted few amenities.
Clint scoffs at the often-repeated rumor that Leone had a print of Yojimbo threaded up on a Movieola in his trailer so that he could run its equivalent to whatever sequence he was working on. “We couldn’t afford Movieolas. We had no electricity; we didn’t have a trailer with a toilet. We just went out behind rocks. That was just people trying to put Sergio down when he was a success.”
For the moment, he was very far from that status. He was just another director with no name, coping with troubles a lot more serious than the absence of honey wagons. Absence of cash, for example. The Spanish coproducers would claim that the money for the week’s salaries was due from the Germans, and then, says Clint, “the money guy from Constantin Films wouldn’t show up and the crew was balking and Sergio would go crazy.” The relentless insecurity eventually led to defections. Worse, the dailies were coming back from the lab scratched, and this made Leone “paranoid.” Though he came to the set each day with his angles all planned out, and did not improvise much with the camera, he shot multiple takes on each setup and printed all of them—as many as six or eight—hoping at least one or two would survive the technicians’ rough handling.
One anecdote perhaps sums up the spirit in which the film was made. One day Leone decided that his set required a tree, something from which you could hang a man. None was conveniently available in this sere landscape, but Leone went out scouting and saw just what he wanted in a farmyard. He returned the next day with a truck and a few crew members and began haranguing the elderly farmer in his most impressive manner. Clint: “He goes barging in there and he says, ‘We’re from the highway department. This tree is very dangerous, it’s going to fall and someone’s gonna get hurt. We’ll take this tree right out for you.’ This old guy’s standing out there and before he knows what’s happening there are these Italians sawing his tree down.”
The director’s energy never flagged. He liked to demonstrate actions to his actors, show Clint how he wanted him to light up his c
igar or whatever, “and of course I’d be laughing because I’d see this guy with these little tiny glasses and the western hat on trying to do me. He looked like Yosemite Sam.”
The first thing that drew Clint to this script was Joe’s entrance. Clopping along on his mule, ponchoed and unshaven, he spies a house and turns in for a drink at its well. Almost immediately a gang of desperadoes abusively chases a little boy away, and then the stranger sees a beautiful woman, Marisol (played by Marianne Koch, the German actress who starred in some of Constantin’s Karl May adaptations), staring piteously at him from behind barred windows. It is obvious that she has been sequestered against her will for sexual use, and that her husband and child (who is named Jesus) are impotent to save her. It is also obvious that this family is to be read as a version of the Holy Family, which means, if one follows out the film’s symbolism to its logical end, that a Christ figure will ultimately be obliged to rescue a Christ figure, or a younger version of himself.
Clint, largely innocent of religious training, and certainly not conversant with Catholic belief, read the situation much more simply. “Our hero’s standing there and he doesn’t do a thing,” he says. “You know, your average western, the hero’s got to step forth and grab the guy who’s shooting the kid or something like that. But this guy doesn’t do anything; he turns and rides away. And I thought, That is perfect, that’s something I’ve always wanted to do in a western.”
This essentially wordless sequence establishes Clint’s character and the premises from which he will operate for the rest of the movie. The sequences that almost immediately follow it establish with similar deftness the iron and irony of his nature. Proceeding into town on his mule, passing a hanged man, he arouses the contempt of gunfighters loyal to the Baxter clan, the Rojos’ deadly rivals. They shoot at him, causing the animal to shy. To avoid falling off, Joe leaps from the saddle and catches himself on an overhanging signboard. Now, of course, he must challenge these subsidiary heavies. On his way to this confrontation he passes the town carpenter and places an order for three coffins.
Clint Eastwood Page 20