The western — the most American of genres, all frontier myth and Monument Valley — was rescued in the 1960s by Italians filming in southern Spain. Hollywood had let the form slump into television, and it was there that Sergio Leone found his bargain leading man. For his 1964 picture A Fistful of Dollars, Leone had wanted established faces: Henry Fonda's people never bit, and actors including Charles Bronson and James Coburn passed or priced themselves out of a production whose entire budget was a few hundred thousand dollars. What the money could stretch to was Clint Eastwood, a 34-year-old known to American living rooms as cattle-drive ramrod Rowdy Yates on the series Rawhide, who flew to Europe for a fee commonly cited at $15,000 — plus, in his own tellings, the poncho, the cigars and a role he trimmed his own dialogue from, on the theory that the less this stranger said, the better he played.
Leone shot in the Spanish desert of Almería and at Cinecittà in Rome, with a crew speaking three languages and every voice dubbed afterwards, as was Italian practice. He also shot from borrowed blueprints: A Fistful of Dollars is an unauthorised, scene-for-scene reworking of Akira Kurosawa's 1961 samurai film Yojimbo. Kurosawa's side wrote to Leone — the gist, as endlessly quoted, was that it was a very fine film, but it was his film — and the resulting legal settlement handed the Japanese director a substantial cut and distribution rights in Asia. Kurosawa is widely reported to have remarked that the settlement earned him more than Yojimbo itself had. It is a tidy irony: Kurosawa had built his samurai films partly on American westerns, and now the debt came home by way of Rome.
Whips, whistles and pseudonyms
The films' most revolutionary component cost almost nothing: the music. Leone's composer was Ennio Morricone — by delightful coincidence a former primary-school classmate of Leone's in Rome — and with tiny orchestral budgets he built scores from whatever made a sound: whistling, whip cracks, gunshots, church bells, jaw harps, electric guitar, a soprano wailing wordlessly. The scores were often written before shooting, and Leone played them on set, choreographing his enormous close-ups and standoffs to the music — inverting the industry's usual order of operations. Early prints hid their nationality: Italian westerns were considered so unpromising that credits were anglicised, with Leone billed as "Bob Robertson" (a nod to his father's screen name) and Morricone as "Dan Savio". Eastwood's drifting gunslinger, meanwhile, was rebranded by American marketing as "The Man with No Name" — a splendid invention, since he has a name of sorts in every film: Joe, then Manco, then Blondie.
The formula detonated. A Fistful of Dollars became a European sensation, and Leone escalated through For a Few Dollars More (1965) to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), whose title entered the language and whose Morricone theme may be the most recognisable film music ever written. Morricone himself, astonishingly, waited until 2016 for a competitive Oscar — won for The Hateful Eight, half a century after the Dollars films, the Academy having managed only an honorary award in 2007. Critics coined "spaghetti western" as a sneer at the several hundred Italian-made westerns that stampeded through the decade — Sergio Corbucci's brutal Django among the best — and the label was worn down into affection. Leone's style — extreme close-ups on eyes, rituals of waiting stretched to breaking point, violence as opera — was the genre's revenge on its own clichés.
Fonda, finally
Leone got his original casting wish in the end, and used it like a weapon. For Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Henry Fonda — Hollywood's embodiment of blue-eyed decency — at last said yes, and Leone cast him as Frank, a child-killing enforcer, introducing those famous eyes in merciless close-up doing the worst thing imaginable. Eastwood, for his part, carried the persona home, and the genre Hollywood had abandoned returned transformed: his American westerns, through to his Oscar-winning Unforgiven (1992), are spaghetti westerns' direct descendants, morally overcast and stripped of song. The most American genre had needed to emigrate to survive — and it came back with an Italian accent it never lost.
Quiz nuggets
- A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was an unauthorised remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo; the settlement reportedly earned Kurosawa more than Yojimbo itself.
- Clint Eastwood, then Rowdy Yates in TV's Rawhide, took the lead for a fee commonly cited at $15,000 after bigger names fell through.
- Early credits hid the films' nationality: Leone was billed as "Bob Robertson" and composer Ennio Morricone as "Dan Savio".
- Morricone, Leone's former primary-school classmate, often wrote the scores before shooting, and Leone staged scenes to the music on set.
- Eastwood's "Man with No Name" actually has a name in each Dollars film — Joe, Manco and Blondie — and Henry Fonda finally played Leone's villain in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).