Clint Eastwood (31 page)

Prosperity brought Clint another American actor to work with—Lee Van Cleef—and it was a great gift for both of them. Up to then the latter had been, in the critic G. Cabiria Infante’s recent, nicely punning phrase, one of the “reservoir gods” of American movies, a small-parts player, mainly in westerns (most memorably, perhaps,
High Noon
), whose name, usually low in the credits, caused a small, pleasurably anticipatory frisson among devotees of the genre. His career had been in decline, partly because of a drinking problem he had only lately overcome, partly because of a near-crippling knee injury, from which he had also just recovered.

His casting represented either admirable daring or possibly last-minute desperation on Leone’s part. In the script Leone wrote with Luciano Vincenzoni, Van Cleef’s character, Colonel Douglas Mortimer, though second-billed to Clint’s, is actually the central figure, even a bit of a father figure, to Monco. For that reason the director had at first approached Henry Fonda, whom he thought, correctly, was a good match for Clint—another slender, light-eyed minimalist. But he couldn’t meet Fonda’s price, and, happily, Jack Palance, who was perhaps as wrong for
the part as Fonda was right for it, also turned him down. It was only then that he recalled, or someone suggested, Van Cleef, whose career was rescued by this role, which led to larger, stronger parts in the years ahead. “
My story turned into a rags-to-riches story,” he would say, “and not a moment too soon.”

Van Cleef had done a
Rawhide
the previous year, and Clint says that when they met in Rome his costar, who had worked for John Ford among several other western classicists, expressed some doubts about
For a Few Dollars More
. Clint told him that if he went into it thinking he was doing something straight and traditional it wouldn’t work. He advised him to see
A Fistful of Dollars
to get the spirit of the thing.

That Van Cleef did—to splendid effect. In the new film, the languid elegance of this narrow-eyed, hawk-nosed older man, dressed in black and often smoking a curved pipe, which, together with his considered manner of speaking, gives him a deceptively contemplative air, contrasts vividly, even movingly, with Clint’s more rough-hewn character. When we see him we immediately know Mortimer is a man with a past, and that it is not a happy one. This suggestion, however, is very delicately made.

The film begins with a powerfully disorienting sequence. We see first a vast, bleak western panorama, with a rider in its center, so tiny in the frame as to be barely visible. It seems to be a classic western opening, and we sit back awaiting the cuts that will bring us closer and closer to the film’s protagonist. Instead, the director holds on the distant rider, and we hear whistling, then the scratch of a match and then the sound of someone inhaling and exhaling. The shootist’s identity is never revealed—though based on past experience it is easy to guess his identity.

Soon a rifle rings out, the anonymous rider topples from the horse, and then more shots frighten off the horse. Shooting continues to punctuate the main titles, which float in and out, sometimes at odd angles. When Leone’s credit appears, shots wipe out all but the Os in his name—which suggest, perhaps, the all-seeing eyes of the auteur. This brings up the film’s epigraph: “Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.”

Significantly, the first of these huntsmen-for-profit to appear recognizably is Van Cleef’s Mortimer (whose name, of course, suggests the Italian word for death), wearing preacher’s garb, reading a Bible, riding on a train, then forcing it to make an unscheduled stop so he can get off where he wants to—at Tucumcari. He may make his living as a bounty hunter, this one-time Confederate officer, but that’s incidental to his
main purpose in life, perhaps even a form of disguise, an excuse for traveling about in search of his dark destiny.

But he is never less than courtly. Arriving at the hotel in Tucumcari he learns that the outlaw he seeks is to be found in a room upstairs. Mortimer slips the man’s wanted poster under the door, is greeted by shots fired through the door, then bursts in. It happens that his quarry is sharing the room with a woman who is naked in her bath. The miscreant flees through the window, and Mortimer, heading back out the door, politely apologizes for the intrusion: “Pardon me, ma’am.” Outside, the man he is pursuing mounts a horse and gallops off. Mortimer, at his own horse, unties a canvas roll, in which are tucked at least a half-dozen different firearms. He studies them thoughtfully—a surgeon selecting just the right instrument for his operation—chooses a heavy pistol to which he carefully fits a rifle stock, then, with an expert’s unhurried ease, mows his man down.

What lovely stuff this is—“playful parody and profound homage” indeed, with dry humor of characterization and wild exaggeration of action deliciously, almost wordlessly, blended to establish a figure whose enigmatic contradictions draw you quickly into the film.

Clint’s character is, perhaps, a simpler one, and, of course, his serape, his cigar, his manner, suggest that “Monco” is a pseudonym for “Joe.” But if identical dress and manner have their obvious commercial uses, they may also be misleading. It is true that here, as previously, the Clint character is simply in the game for the money. But as the precredit sequence—and epigraph—suggest, he is no longer an opportunistic drifter. He is, if you will, a man with a prospering career in legalized murder. He is also a much more self-conscious ironist. Admittedly, at a point late in the picture, Monco does say that he hopes to save enough from the rewards he collects to buy a little ranch and settle down, a comment that has distressed some critics; saving up for the good life gives him too conventional a motivation. But that, too, is probably meant ironically: Movie gunslingers are always talking about the ranch and the quiet life they hope to enjoy someday. They don’t mean it. And this one especially doesn’t mean it.

Monco’s lines are usually sharper than that—shrewdly pointed goads to, and commentaries on, the film’s action. Consider
his
introductory sequence, when he enters a poker game with his current quarry, who eventually inquires what the bet was. “Your life,” Monco says dryly. After which much shooting ensues, five people are killed and Monco has a nice little exchange with the local sheriff, who has stood by impotently during the carnage. “Isn’t a sheriff supposed to be courageous,
loyal and above all honest?” Monco inquires. “That he is” comes the reply. At which point the gunman removes the badge from the lawman’s vest, takes it outside and tells the gawking townsfolk, “I think you people need a new sheriff.” Then he tosses the badge into the street, an action that, of course, parodically refers us to the “classic”
High Noon
and prefigures the famous conclusion of
Dirty Harry
.

Like all the films Leone made with Clint, this one is triadic in structure, with its third side the bandit leader, El Indio, once again played by Gian Maria Volonté, this time giving full vent to an evil the deliriousness of which he only hinted at in
A Fistful of Dollars
. A full-scale psychopath, smoking dope, torturing insects, if anything happier murdering innocent bystanders than he is doing away with those who have actually wronged him, achieving a kind of dreamy peace only after he has killed. In one typically Leonesque passage, he is seen presiding over a parody of the Last Supper, his twelve disciples gathered around him in a ruined church as he speaks in parables. Narratively, however, the most important thing about El Indio is that he is a man haunted by some terrible deed in his distant past and obsessed with a criminal masterstroke (the robbery of a supposedly impregnable bank in El Paso) that he is planning for his immediate future.

We quickly guess that somehow his past and Mortimer’s are intertwined. We also guess that it will require more than one man to bring him down, that neither the unflappable experience of Colonel Mortimer nor the youthful reflexes of Monco alone can get the job done. The sequence in which the latter form their alliance is as boldly theatrical as anything Leone ever did. Everyone converges on El Paso, where El Indio’s men are casing the bank, and the two bounty hunters watch them—and watch each other watching them. Eventually, Monco orders a hotel bellhop to remove Mortimer’s luggage and take it to the station on the grounds that this town isn’t big enough for both of them. Mortimer then tells the man to return the bag to his room. Ultimately, the servant simply throws up his hands and scuttles away, leaving the two men alone for their confrontation. Now Leone reverses the strategy he favored in his previous film. There, scenes of this sort tended to begin with the antagonists distantly separated. Here, they are on top of one another, comically invading one another’s space. They circle one another like sniffing dogs. Then each steps on the other’s boots: Now they are like kids challenging one another.

Eventually, they move apart—far enough apart to start some gunplay, as in those western sequences in which, usually, the town toughs terrify the newly arrived tenderfoot by shooting at his feet to make him
dance, or shoot his hat off. Monco and Mortimer do both—to excess—but, of course, neither flinches and neither scares the other. Rather, they are mutually impressed, and their duel turns into a bonding ritual. It is, as well, a terrific deadpan-comedy sequence.

The insertion of this long, very funny piece into a movie that is most basically concerned with anarchical violence and vengefulness is a bold stroke. It far transcends the incidental humor—for instance, jokey exchanges between sidekicks as they proceed to more deadly business—that is traditionally permissible in action films. But Leone and his actors carry the sequence off with sureness and panache, while making a very shrewd observation—that masculine violence has its roots in boyish play, the pushing, shoving, scuffling attempts of children to establish mastery within their group or the neighborhood. This is the first (and probably the only) western sequence to make that point explicitly.

The film’s plotting soon becomes extremely intricate. There are betrayals, captures, beatings and finally a shoot-out in which all the bandits, save El Indio, are dispensed with, clearing the way for a final confrontation between him and Mortimer. By this time we know something of the event that haunts both Mortimer and El Indio. They carry identical locket watches that, when opened, chime a wistful little Morricone tune. In the cover of Mortimer’s timepiece there is the portrait of a beautiful young woman. El Indio uses his to time shoot-outs; when the tune stops it is the signal for him and his opponent to draw. Flashbacks reveal that in the past El Indio killed the woman’s husband and raped her, and we understand, of course, that she had some close relationship to Mortimer. What we don’t know until the very end is that she was his sister, and that in the course of El Indio’s attack on her she seized his gun and committed suicide with it. This revelation is a very powerful one. The movies have, of course, shown suicide as a consequence of rape before, but few have done so with such unprepared-for—and shocking—immediacy, for we also learn from it that this assault occurred on their wedding night, her innocence defiled at the very moment for which it had been defended. No wonder it haunts even the bestial El Indio.

This sequence immediately precedes El Indio’s final, fated confrontation with Mortimer. Thinking he and Monco have dispatched all of his gang, Mortimer calls the bandit out, taking his stand in a circular plaza, its boundaries marked by stones. But El Indio has one last ally, whom he sends out ahead of him. In the confusion this man is killed, and Mortimer’s gun is shot from his hand. It lies on the ground, just out of reach as El Indio, a pistol in his holster, and thus holding one of the
classic gunfight’s familiar advantages, sneeringly challenges him to go for it.

He has not reckoned with Monco, who now appears to referee the duel. He tosses his gunbelt to Mortimer, who straps it on. Then he draws Mortimer’s watch, which he has, unknown to the colonel, appropriated earlier. Using El Indio’s ploy, he tells them to draw when the tune stops playing, and opens the watch. We have arrived at yet another of Leone’s signature moments, and the staging is masterful.

When these pictures eventually reached the United States, there was much agitated discussion of their violence, but in fact Leone’s interest in death itself was minimal and almost prudish. The slow-motion exchange of shots, with blood colorfully spattering and oozing in aestheticized patterns—Sam Peckinpah’s most lasting or, anyway, most imitated, contribution to the grammar of film—was never part of Leone’s style. In the heat of action death is often as casual in his films as it is in most movies. But in the end, as he boldly extends time in stalking confrontations (of which this is the first classic example), he gives his people—and his audience—plenty of time to contemplate the consequences of the action on which they are embarked.

El Indio’s end approaches slowly, but then suddenly when the watch stops playing its tune. “Bravo,” Monco murmurs from the sidelines, echoing an earlier comment on one of Mortimer’s displays of marksmanship. After which, the movie reverts to absurdity. Monco starts loading corpses into a wagon to take them to some lawman and collect the rewards on them. Packing them in, he counts his profits—a thousand for this one, two thousand for that one. One victim, however, is still alive; he draws on him, and is, of course, killed. “Any trouble, boy?” Mortimer inquires from afar. “No,” comes the reply, “thought I was having trouble with my adding …” The cross-reference is to the exchange with the coffin maker in
Fistful
. This return to the absurdity is balanced by an assertion of principle: Mortimer gives him El Indio’s body, the most valuable of their many corpses. He will not have the purity of his revenge tainted by mercenary considerations. Monco makes a polite demurrer: “What about our partnership?” “Maybe next time,” says the colonel, and off they go on their separate paths.

This calmly stated grotesquery is the intellectual ground zero of all Leone’s work, the rich loam in which the seeds of violence are planted, from which it sprouts with such wild profusion. It is this grounding, and the fact that it is carefully calculated, entirely conscious, that set Leone’s westerns apart not only from the rationalist traditions of the genre as it developed in the United States, but also from the blood-soaked tradition
quickly developed in the (literally) hundreds of European westerns produced in the aftermath of his success.