A Fistful of Dollars (1964)In late 1963, an offer was made to Eastwood's co-star Eric Fleming on Rawhide to star in an Italian made western, originally to be named The Magnificent Stranger (A Fistful of Dollars) to be directed in a remote region of Spain by a relative unknown at the time, Sergio Leone.
However, the money was not much, and Fleming always set his sights high on Hollywood stardom, and rejected the offer immediately.
A variety of actors, including Charles Bronson, Steve Reeves, Richard Harrison, Frank Wolfe, Henry Fonda, James Coburn and Ty Hardin were considered for the main part in the film, and the producers established a list of lesser-known American actors, and asked the aforementioned Richard Harrison for advice.
Harrison had suggested Clint Eastwood, whom he knew could play a cowboy convincingly. Harrison later said: "Maybe my greatest contribution to cinema was not doing Fistful of Dollars, and recommending Clint for the part".
Through Irving Leonard, the offer was made to Eastwood, who saw it as an opportunity to escape Rawhide and the states and saw it as a paid vacation.
He signed the contract for $15,000 in wages for eleven weeks work and which also threw in a bonus of a Mercedes automobile upon completion, and arrived in Rome in May 1964.
Eastwood was instrumental in creating the Man With No Name character's distinctive visual style that would appear throughout the Dollars trilogy.
He had brought with him the black jeans he had purchased from a shop on Hollywood Boulevard which he had bleached out and roughened up, the hat from a Santa Monica wardrobe firm, a leather bracelet and two Indian leather cases with two serpents, and the trademark black cigars came from a Beverly Hills shop, though Eastwood himself is a non-smoker and hated the smell of cigar smoke.
Leone decided to use them in the film and heavily emphasised the "look" of the mysterious stranger to appear in the film. Leone commented, "The truth is that I needed a mask more than an actor, and Eastwood at the time only had two facial expressions: one with the hat, and one without it".
Eastwood said about playing the Man With No Name character in the film, "I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement. It was just the kind of character I had envisioned for a long time, keep to the mystery and allude to what happened in the past. It came about after the frustration of doing Rawhide for so long. I felt the less he said the stronger he became and the more he grew in the imagination of the audience"
The first interiors for the film were shot at the Cinecittà studio on the outskirts of Rome, before quickly moving to a small village in Andalucia, Spain in an area which had also been used for filming Lawrence of Arabia (1962) just a few years earlier.
This would become a benchmark in the development of the spaghetti westerns, and Leone would successfully create a new icon of a western hero, depicting a more lawless and desolate world than in traditional westerns.
The trilogy would also redefine the stereotypical American image of a western hero and cowboy, creating a character gunslinger and bounty hunter which was more of an anti hero than a hero and with a distinct moral ambiguity, unlike traditional heroes of western cinema in the United States such as John Wayne.
Since the film was an Italian/German/Spanish co-production, there was a major language barrier on the set.
Eastwood communicated with the Italian cast and crew mostly through stuntman Benito Stefanelli, who acted as an interpreter for the production.
The cast and crew stayed on location in Spain for nearly eleven weeks, during which Eastwood's wife Maggie came over for a visit and found time to take a break in Toledo, Segovia and Madrid.
Promoting A Fistful of Dollars was difficult given that no major distributor wanted to take chance on a faux-Western and an unknown director and the film ended up being released in September which is typically the worst month for sales.
The film was shunned by the Italian critics who gave it extremely negative reviews.
However, at a grassroots level its popularity spread and would end up grossing $4 million in Italy, about three billion lire and American critics felt quite differently to their Italian counterparts, with Variety praising it as, "a James Bondian vigor and tongue-in-cheek approach that was sure to capture both sophisticates and average cinema patrons".
The release of the film was delayed in the United States because distributors feared being sued by Kurosawa, and as a result it was not shown in American cinemas until 1967.
This made it difficult for the American public or other people in Hollywood to understand what was happening to Clint in Italy at the time and for an American actor making films in Italy it was met with considerable prejudice and seen in Hollywood as taking a step backward rather than a career development.
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
Leone hired Eastwood to star in his second film of what would become a trilogy, For a Few Dollars More (1965).
Leone was convinced that Jolly Film were withholding his share of the profits and sued them and joined forces with producer Alberto Grimaldi who founded the Produzioni Europee Associate (PEA) film company.
The company gave Leone a larger $350,000 budget to make the next film. Screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni was brought in to write the script which he wrote in nine days; two bounty hunters (Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef) pursuing a drug-addicted criminal (Volontè), planning to rob an impregnable bank.
Eastwood was given $50,000 in advance and a first-class plane ticket but was not looking forward to having the cigar in his mouth again which at times made him feel sick during the first film.
For a Few Dollars More was shot in the spring and summer of 1965 and again interiors of the film were shot at the Cinecittà studio in Rome before they moved to Spain again.
Screenwriter Vincenzoni was very important in bringing the films to the states, given that he was fluent in English and accompanied Leone to a cinema in Rome to show the new film after completion to United Artist executives Arthur Krim and Arnold Picker.
He sold the rights to the film and the third film (which was yet to be written let alone made) in advance in the states for $900,000, advancing $500,000 up front and the right to half of the profits.
As trouble brewed with Rawhide back in the United States as Eric Fleming quit the series (which lasted just thirteen more episodes without him) and faced increasing competition from the new World War II series Combat! which eventually led to the demise of the series in January 1966, Eastwood met with producer Dino De Laurentiis in New York City and agreed to star in a non-Western five-part anthology production named Le Streghe or The Witches opposite his wife, actress Silvana Mangano.
Eastwood travelled to Rome in late February 1966 and accepted the fee of $20,000 and a new Ferrari. Acclaimed director Vittorio De Sica was hired to direct Eastwood's segment, called A Night Like Any Other, which is only nineteen minutes long and involves Clint playing a lazy husband stuck in a stale marriage who refuses to go and see A Fistful of Dollars in the cinema with his wife and would rather stay home.
Meanwhile his wife dreams of having a fit, active husband who dances like Fred Astaire and is fantastic at making love.
Eastwood's installment only took a few days to shoot and was not met well with critics, who described it as "no other performance of his is quite so 'un-Clintlike' ", with the New York Times disparaging it as a "throwaway De Sica".
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Two months later Eastwood began working on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the final film of the Dollars trilogy, in which he again played the mysterious Man With No Name character.
Lee Van Cleef was brought in again to play a ruthless fortune seeker, while Eli Wallach, a character actor noted for his appearance in The Magnificent Seven (1960), was hired to play the cunning Mexican bandit "Tuco", although the role was originally written for Volontè, who passed on working with Leone again.
The three become involved in a search for a buried cache of confederate gold buried in a cemetery by a man named Jackson, in hiding as Bill Carson.
Eastwood was not initially pleased with the script and was concerned he might be upstaged by Wallach, and said to Leone, "In the first film I was alone. In the second, we were two. Here we are three. If it goes on this way, in the next one I will be starring with the American cavalry".
Filming began at the Cinecittà studio in Rome again in mid-May 1966, including the opening scene between Clint and Wallach when The Man With No Name captures Tuco for the first time and sends him to jail.
The production then moved on to Spain's plateau region near Burgos in the north, which would double for the extreme deep south of the United States, and again shot the western scenes in Almeria in the south.
This time the production required more elaborate sets, including a town under cannon fire, an extensive prison camp and an American Civil War battlefield; and for the climax, several hundred Spanish soldiers were employed to build a cemetery with several thousand grave stones to resemble an ancient Roman circus.
Wallach and Eastwood flew to Madrid together and between shooting scenes, Eastwood would relax and practice his golf swing.
One day, during the filming of the scene in which the bridge is blown up with dynamite, Eastwood, suspicious of explosives, urged his co-star Wallach to retreat up to the hilltop, saying, "I know about these things. Stay as far away from special effects and explosives as you can".
Just minutes later, crew confusion over saying "Vaya!" which was meant to be the signal for the explosion but that a crew member had said without thinking to turn the cameras on, resulted in a premature explosion, resulting in the bridge having to be rebuilt.
The bridge was rebuilt for free by the Spanish army, that gallantly assumed responsibility, but the expense of redoing the scene and other costs resulted in the cost of making the film exceeding the budget by $300,000.
The Dollars trilogy was not shown in the United States until 1967.
A Fistful of Dollars opened in January, For a Few Dollars More in May and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in December 1967.
Some twenty minutes however were cut from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, particularly many of the scenes involving Lee Van Cleef, although Eastwood's remained intact.
The trilogy was publicised as James Bond -type entertainment and all films were successful in American cinemas and turned Eastwood into a major film star in 1967, particularly the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly which eventually collected $8 million in rental earnings.
However, upon release, all three were generally given bad reviews by critics (despite the select few American critics who had seen the films in Italy previously having a positive outlook) and marked the beginning of Eastwood's battle to win the respect of American film critics.
Judith Crist described A Fistful of Dollars as "cheapjack" while Newsweek described For a Few Dollars More as "excruciatingly dopey".
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was similarly panned by most critics upon US release with Renata Adler of the New York Times describing it as "the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre".
However while Time highlighted the wooden acting, especially Eastwood's, critics such as Vincent Canby and Bosley Crowther of the New York Times were highly praising of Eastwood's coolness playing the tall, lone stranger; and Leone's unique style of cinematography was widely acclaimed, even by some critics who disliked the acting.
"Westerns. A period gone by, the pioneer, the loner operating by himself, without benefit of society. It usually has something to do with some sort of vengeance; he takes care of the vengeance himself, doesn't call the police. Like Robin Hood. It's the last masculine frontier. Romantic myth. I guess, though it's hard to think about anything romantic today. In a Western you can think, Jesus, there was a time when man was alone, on horseback, out there where man hasn't spoiled the land yet"
Clint Eastwood on his philosophical allurance to portraying western loners
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