“I use Bach as a brick.”
Ennio Morricone
Introduction
With a highly memorable signature tune, this 1966 Italian spaghetti western, directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach, was the third instalment and arguably the best of Leone’s Dollar trilogy. Blondie, Tuco and Setenza battle for a stash of buried gold. It is an epic film with a supporting cast of Italian actors whose voices are dubbed into English. With a memorable music score provided by Ennio Morricone and filmed mainly in northern Spain in the plateau region near Burgos and Almeria in the south of Spain, this is the ultimate western. This is one of Eastwood’s best performances, with clever use of long and close-up shots, especially in the closing scene. The man with no name smokes a cigar like no other, fires a precision shot and wears his hat at the perfect angle. He is the good of Van Cleef’s bad and Wallach’s ugly. Morricone’s music, a mix of trumpets, choir wails, and wah-wahs, is ever-present in the film and sounds like a bloom of dust at the optimum moments.
To call this film a spaghetti western gives it a disservice. This is a gold star western filled with drama, pathos and satire. Blondie runs rings around Tuco. He is clever, but his at-hand-length partner is not. All want the prized good, and you can see the scheming in their eyes. It is a film that is played in slow motion. The state, the walk, the drawing of guns, and even the striking of a match are filmed, and the camera spends several extra seconds or minutes on a single shot.
Complexity
Sergio Leone was undoubtedly not an easy director to work with, and the cast found this out at their peril. The original release had 14 minutes cut out of the film, not to be restored until a DVD release in 1998. The cast had to work as hard in this film as the characters to find Bill Carson’s $200,000 stash of gold. Wallach was almost poisoned during filming when he drank from a bottle of acid that a technician had put next to his soda bottle. He was also nearly killed when his horse continued running an extra distance with a severed noose around his neck and his hands still tied. The third time was when he was on a railway track, and he was waiting for the train to sever his chain from a dead body. If he had stood up too quickly when the train passed, Eli would have been decapitated by one of the jutting iron train steps.
This was a marathon film that tested Eastwood like no other picture. He had to play golf in between shooting to wind down. Leone was a perfectionist and was a stickler for minute detail. He hit the film from multiple angles, exhausted the cast, and Sergio often lost his cool during filming—a firebrand Italian director who was just as fierce as the wailing coyote in the music score.
Cruelty
The theme of cruelty runs deeply through the very core of this film. Duco is Blondie’s puppet. He dangles him as bait to achieve his aims, and Duco constantly falls for his box of tricks. Duco is portrayed as being physically and morally ugly. He is the dirty double-crosser engrained with the dust of the beaten track from his escapades. The bullets were removed from his gun when he wanted to kill, and he was only saved from death in the end by Blondie’s pity. He nearly dies more times in the film than someone on death’s row and goes through the motions of death in the final scene. Fatigued by staring and saved when Sentenza is shot, dies and falls into Bill Carson’s grave. Joining his skeleton in his coffin, quickly followed by his hat, shot by Blondie into the grave.
True Grit
This Gunslinger movie is like no other. It is icing on the cake to the trilogy of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. It was the swansong for Eastwood, who had never worked with Leone again. This was despite Sergio personally flying the script of his next western project, Once Upon a Time in America, to Clint in Los Angeles. Eastwood turned down Harmonica’s part, and Charles Bronson replaced him. Leone later described Clint as an actor who was like a block of marble or wax and inferior to the acting skills of Robert De Niro. Clint later gave his friend the cloak he wore in the films, and it now hangs in a Mexican restaurant in Carmel, California.
