This performance is the best early evidence of Clint’s confidence in his own identity, his feeling that even before it was fully established he could toy with his image without endangering his audience’s loyalty. The project had other attractions, too. One of them, certainly, was the chance to spend another month on his own in Rome as the era of la dolce vita wound down. More important to him were his costar and his director. Mangano’s wonderfully sensual performance in Bitter Rice—“in which I fell in love with her”—remained a vivid memory, and the idea that he was being sought after to play opposite a star he had long ago admired from afar pleased him deeply. So did the fact that De Sica would be directing his segment. One of the founders of neorealism (Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D.) he was unquestionably one of the great figures of the postwar renaissance in Italian filmmaking. And so it went, first-class all the way: Cesare Zavattini, De Sica’s collaborator on his most memorable films, cowrote Clint’s segment; the cinematographer of which was to be the gifted Giuseppe Rotunno. Clint was also flattered to hear that he had been competing for his role with no less a figure than Sean Connery, then at the height of his success in the 007 films.
De Laurentiis flew to New York and paid Clint’s expenses to meet him there in order to place an interesting choice before him: a flat fee of $25,000 for a month’s work or $20,000 and a Ferrari. Thinking to himself he would never buy a new Ferrari, he told his agents to accept the second alternative, realizing as well “that there’s no ten percent on that Ferrari.”
So it was back to Rome, sooner than he anticipated, for an experience that was as good, if not better, than he had anticipated, in a movie that was, overall, much less good than it might have been. Clint’s segment appeared last in the release print of The Witches, a tribute to the fact that, slight as it was, scarcely more than an anecdote, it was more smoothly polished and narratively more comprehensible than the other pieces. It was entitled “A Night Like Any Other,” and in it, he and Mangano appear as a husband and wife, their marriage having settled into dull routine, enduring yet another excruciating evening at home. The night is enlivened for her (and the audience) by her distinctly Felliniesque reveries about more exciting times past, and her equally wild sexual fantasies. In the last of these she is seen sashaying down the Via Veneto, followed by a crowd of eager men. She leads them to a stadium where Clint appears in a black cowboy outfit, shooting at her admirers. Later, inside the arena, she does a very discrete striptease to the baying delight of the all-male crowd while her husband is observed perched on a light pole, dressed in mufti, carrying a gun, which he eventually turns on himself.
In the domestic scenes, where Mangano wears a pair of particularly awful glasses, she gets to do dowdiness and exasperation. In the fantasy passages she gets to be glamorous and parodically sexy. (What range! we are supposed to exclaim.) Clint gets to do a real character turn, wearing nerdy horn-rimmed glasses (no Rock Hudson to stop him now) and a three-piece suit, talking in an exhausted monotone, avoiding eye contact with her. An utter blank, totally without intellectual or emotional resources, he obsessively complains about the traffic in Rome and the “honk-honk-honk” of its horns, is obsequious to and resentful of his boss, but unable to do anything to improve his working life. He also vacuously attributes the violence of the world to the failure of its population to get enough sleep, and as if to prove the point he actually nods off as his wife hectors him. When they finally retire to bed and she tries to seduce him, he recommends that she calm herself with chamomile tea as he sinks into oblivious slumber.
Watching The Witches now it’s hard to say if one’s amusement with Clint’s performance—broad, almost cartoonish, in keeping with the tone De Sica set—is a response to the intrinsic qualities of his playing or to the broad contrast between what he’s doing here and his screen character as it has since developed. But there is a kind of indolent self-regard about Clint’s Charlie, an utterly unexamined projection of male superiority, that slyly satirizes the most basic subtexts of conventional movie masculinity and hints at bolder subversions (see The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me) to come.
If De Sica’s work served his producer’s wife rather better than his directorial colleagues did—it is sleek, energetic and at least comes to a discernible, if predictable, point—it is like the film’s other segments in that it has a rather casual, tossed-off air about it. Nobody is digging very deep into himself or into the material to make these little films. It is all very much, in the blunt language of certain contracts, “work made for hire.”
When Clint’s role had been discussed via long distance, it had been decided that he would be an Italian from Trieste, where light eyes and hair are not uncommon. “So I get off the plane and I go in to meet De Sica and he takes one look and he goes, ‘No Trieste Italian, he’s American. We’re making an American living in Italy, married to an Italian woman’—without missing a beat.”
This was more comfortable for Clint. And work on the film was completely agreeable. He liked Mangano, whose English was fluent and who he says had the most beautiful hands he had ever seen. He also discovered that De Sica, despite his grand reputation—the crew always called him Commandatore—was his kind of director. “He was extremely organized. He only shot exactly what he wanted to use, not a frame more.” Indeed, though Clint is an extremely “lean” shooter, and has always said that his most important directorial mentor, Don Siegel, was even leaner, De Sica was the leanest of them all. He cut almost everything in the camera, sometimes not even covering an actor’s exit if he planned to pick it up from another angle later—doubtless a skill he had acquired in his early days of shooting in the streets, when film stock was perhaps the most expensive item in his minuscule budgets.
As they proceeded, De Sica gave Clint very little direction: “He just kind of stared. I think he was fascinated by American actors, the American style of acting.” But with Mangano, he was extremely detailed, demonstrating movements with great precision for her. “It was interesting because I’d never seen a director do this,” Clint said. “He’d say, ‘I want you to do this pirouette,’ and he’d do these great pirouettes.”
De Sica was generous in his public comments about Clint. One weekend they traveled to Paris together, where De Sica introduced him at the French premiere of For a Few Dollars More, calling him “a fine, sensitive actor” and predicting that “he will soon be one of the biggest stars in the business,” perhaps the “new Gary Cooper.”
This was prescient of De Sica, but The Witches contributed virtually nothing to that outcome. The picture was eventually released in Italy, but only spottily in the rest of Europe. It was picked up in the United States by United Artists after it had the Leone pictures in hand, but the company never released it in the full (or even the art house) sense of the word. It was dismissively reviewed in Variety in 1969, played in a festival of Italian cinema in Los Angeles in 1971 and in the Public Theater’s film program in New York in 1979. On none of these occasions did the reviewers pay much attention to Clint, except to register surprise at finding him in this unlikely context.
Clint shipped his new Ferrari to New York during production, then, after the film wrapped, met the car and Maggie there so they could vacation by driving it home to California. It didn’t work out quite as comfortably as they hoped; they had more luggage than the sports car could accommodate. “We looked like The Grapes of Wrath.” He laughs, adding, “Of course the vehicles were different.”
Scarcely more than a month later, Clint was back in Rome starting The Magnificent Rogues, as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was originally known. He was beginning to think it would be his last film with Leone, because what had turned out to be the opportunity of a lifetime was now beginning to look like a dead end. In particular he thought that as the budgets (and the lengths) of the pictures grew, Leone was becoming more self-indulgent: “I felt he was trying to be more David Lean than Sergio Leone.” Which was “fine for him,” but not so fine for Clint. The money was go
od, the billing top, and an element of openly expressed compassion had been added to his character in this script, which also carried a stronger, more traditional moral weight as well. But even more than in its immediate predecessor, Leone would use Clint iconographically in his grand design rather than as a compelling figure in himself. Or to put it another way, as the landscapes of Leone’s films expanded, Clint could see that his place in them was contracting.
The basic facts of the movie are these: The place is Texas; the time is the Civil War. A shipment of gold coins, belonging to the Confederacy, has been stolen and cached. Three men, Blondie (Clint), Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), whose evocatively ironic name was improvised by Leone on the set, and Tuco (Eli Wallach)—respectively the good, the bad and the ugly—learn of the treasure’s existence and seek it out, expending much blood and cruelty in their quest. Eventually arriving at a military cemetery where the coins are buried in one of the graves, they face off in another circle of stones, with Clint’s character this time an active participant (and ultimate winner) in another three-way confrontation.
The simplicity of this main plotline forms part of the point Leone wants to make. For the attempt to achieve an easily defined goal is constantly beset by dislocating coincidences, vertiginous reversals of fortune and, most significantly, the chance, megahistorical intrusions of the war.
As this sometimes-illogical tale develops, Clint’s character turns out to be the least interesting of the title figures. Van Cleef has pure evil to play, which is always compelling, and much of the time the movie runs on the manic energy of Wallach’s Tuco. A sort of Till Eulenspiegel (though his pranks are less merry than deadly), he is a small-time Mexican bandido, constantly seeing his ill-conceived plans go comically awry, constantly coping frantically with problems that are beyond his impulsive ability to calculate. Representing something new in Leone’s work, he is a figure who, for all his depredations, offers us a full range of emotions with which to identify: Clint’s Blondie, to be sure, eventually resolves all the film’s issues—he is, conventionally speaking, the hero—but much of the time he functions as Tuco’s straight man.
This movie traffics more heavily in extended torment than its predecessors did, and even though Leone maintains his usual objectivity in these passages, their sheer number creates a somewhat alienating effect. It is Angel Eyes who most enjoys his spot of cruel sport, endlessly torturing and killing in pursuit of the lost treasure. Which is not to say that the good and the ugly are without their dark humors. They are partners in a scam, in which Blondie brings Tuco (a much wanted criminal) to the nearest sheriff, collects the reward, then, as his partner is about to be hanged, shoots the rope away allowing them to escape. When Tuco quite reasonably suggests that since he is the one taking the larger risks he should take the larger share of their profits, Blondie abruptly severs their partnership and quite unreasonably abandons him in the desert, seventy miles from the nearest settlement. Somehow Tuco survives this ordeal, tracks Blondie down and subjects him to a similar calvary. While Tuco rides a horse and protects himself from the sun with a frilly parasol (a nice touch), Blondie is denied water and forced to stumble across the burning sands until, at last, he collapses. Tuco isn’t kidding; we have every reason to believe he will leave Blondie to die. But then a runaway stagecoach thunders by. Tuco stops it, and finds in it three Confederate soldiers, two of them dead, the other dying. The latter turns out to be a man who calls himself both Jackson and Carson, known by all the principals to know where the gold is hidden. In return for the promise of water he tells Tuco it is buried in a military cemetery, Sad Hill. When he actually gets a drink he will, he says, provide the name on the gravestone under which the loot is buried. While Tuco goes for his canteen Blondie makes his painful way to the coach, and it is he who is given the final clue to the mystery just before Jackson/Carson expires.
This revives the partnership. Tuco takes Blondie to a mission hospital to recover from his ordeal. It is run by Tuco’s brother, a priest, and they have a bitter confrontation, the priest chastising Tuco for his wicked ways, the bandit chastising the priest for his useless piety. In this exchange, Tuco observes that priesthood and outlawry represented the only opportunities for escape from the poverty in which they were raised. This is as close as Leone comes, in any of these films, to offering a conventional sociopolitical motivation for anyone’s behavior; it is much more old left than new, and more old movie than either. This argument essentially restates the ancient James Cagney–Pat O’Brien conflict—not exactly startling in its originality, but startling enough in this context. (There is another sequence, in which Tuco befuddles, then brutalizes, a shopkeeper in order to obtain a gun, that cross-references to a similar Cagney scene in Blonde Crazy.)
The film’s second act begins with Blondie and Tuco heading for Sad Hill, dressed in Confederate uniforms, when they encounter a detachment of soldiers also seemingly dressed in Rebel gray. Tuco hails them with comically fraudulent cries, both pro-Southern and anti-Yankee, but when the troop pauses the officer in command starts slapping dust from his uniform, and in one of the film’s neatest ironies we see that Tuco has been misled by the dust. The man is actually uniformed in Union blue.
They are taken to a prison camp where Angel Eyes is—quite inexplicably—the Sergeant of the Guard. Torture, a hairbreadth escape by Tuco, a false alliance between Blondie and Angel Eyes, a highly coincidental reunion between Blondie and Tuco and a sprawling gunfight then ensue. This is a very busy picture, and in this middle passage its plotting is at its most desperate. Only the good, the bad and the ugly survive this carnage, and they head for Sad Hill, with Blondie and Tuco pausing on their way for what is surely the most morally pointed passage in all of Leone’s work. They come upon a large detachment of Union troops, dug into a system of trenches overlooking a bridge that is the key to this sector of the war. The Confederates are similarly entrenched on the other side of the river, and each army has the same objective: drive the other out without destroying the crucial bridge. To this end they launch daily assaults on one another, fecklessly wasting many lives in the process. The Union commander has taken to drink and cynicism in order to endure this absurdity, and Blondie registers surprising sympathy with him: “I’ve never seen so many men wasted so badly,” he mutters.
When the commanding officer is wounded in another futile assault, Blondie appears at his side with a bottle of whiskey to ease him through surgery: “Take a slug of this, Cap’n, and keep your eyes open.” He has resolved to end the stalemate by blowing up the bridge, rendering further hostilities pointless. This he and Tuco do, and the captain dies happily when he hears the explosion. Thereafter the pair come upon a young soldier dying in the remains of a chapel—another of Leone’s bare, ruined choirs—and Blondie wraps him in his serape (which he has not yet worn in this film) and gives him drags on his cigar. In effect, he is wrapping the boy in his own death-defying raiment, and though it does not stay the boy’s fate, this is a tender moment unprecedented in the Leone-Eastwood collaboration.
While Blondie is thus preoccupied, Tuco rides off toward the cemetery, which is just beyond the former Confederate position. Blondie, smiling ironically, touches his cheroot to the firing hole of a nearby cannon—of the many outsize weapons Clint has fired in his films, this is the largest and most self-satirical—and with a perfectly placed shot stuns Tuco and his mount without harming them.
One might observe that neither in the battle scenes nor in earlier prison-camp sequences is Leone at his best. His ambitions may have been epic, but his sensibility was antiepic. Vast enterprises are to him the precise locus of humankind’s most destructive delusions, and he is unable to stage them with the kind of romantic conviction David Lean brought to them. Still, this passage at massed arms makes us fully aware of the moral point Leone has been pursuing: that the bloody deeds individuals do in pursuit of private gain, private obsession, are nothing compared to the slaughter nations do in pursuit of grander, more piously stated goals. A su
bstantial number of people have died as good, bad and ugly sought their gold, but probably not more than one well-placed cannonball took out in this military engagement, and at least they have not disguised their aims with sanctimonious prattle.
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.
Clint Eastwood Page 24