Clint Eastwood (35 page)

Crowther’s chief rival for New York’s middlebrow readers, Judith Crist of the
World Journal Tribune
, as always combining vulgarity and prudery with hearty self-confidence, made much of the fact that the film carried no screenplay credit (admittedly an inexplicable oddity) and wrote that it lacked “
the pleasures of the perfectly awful movie.… The cheapjack production, drenched in Technicolor and provided by Sam Savio-Musical Edition RCA (who or whatever that purveyor of pseudo-Tiomkin sound may be) misses both awfulness and mediocrity; it is pure manufacture.” She did not even get Morricone’s pseudonym right, much less the originality of his work. (Tiomkin, indeed!)

When
she
returned to the film for her Sunday piece she insisted the film had nothing on its mind beyond sadism (Clint’s vicious beating at the hands of the Rojos got to almost all the reviewers) and “that handful of silver—nay, trunks and trunks full—that comes to those who cater to the lowest popular taste.” Her only valid point, one that in its general terms is still being argued, was that
A Fistful of Dollars
, despite its violence, had been given a Motion Picture Association Seal of Approval (its rating system had not yet been initiated), while
Blowup
, a more obviously artistic film, had been denied one, principally because of a nude romp between its photographer-protagonist and a pair of would-be models.

There was more of the same to come. “Like the villains it was shot in Spain,”
Time
snidely observed, “pity it wasn’t buried there.” Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles
Times
thought Leone had “studied and adopted the most sadistic excesses of Hollywood’s western directors … and gone them one worse.” To be sure, a few critics took a more genially patronizing tone, and several recognized Clint as a promising screen presence. Archer Winsten, in the New York
Post
, for example, thought he “should be good for many a year of hero stints.” But not one mainstream review betrayed the slightest awareness of, let alone appreciation of, how consciously and profoundly Leone was challenging genre conventions.

Not that it would have made much difference at the time. This was not, initially, a movie for people who read reviews. They would come to it later, as interest in Clint grew and as nonjournalistic critics began to reevaluate Leone’s work. For the moment, the film’s success depended
on the young male action fans, many of whom were drawn to the film by a clever teaser ad campaign. It consisted of a number of small ads, each of which featured some part of Clint’s regalia—the poncho, the hat, the cigar—scattered through all the sections of newspapers for several days preceding the film’s opening, when the parts were fitted together in a larger ad to form the whole mysteriously menacing image of the Man with No Name (which is how Joe was officially identified in the cast and credits handed out to reviewers).

But if the film’s commercial success in the United States depended on the subcritical audience, its first reviews still had considerable significance, for they reflected, without fully articulating, what Christopher Frayling would eventually, and aptly, identify as “the cultural roots controversy.” This, as he implies, derived from the critics’ sense that they were fighting a desperate rear-guard action against what might be called the invasion of the genre snatchers, the misappropriation by aliens of mythic territory to which they had no rights, ethically, psychologically, intellectually.

In fairness to the reviewers—and to what was left of the older movie audience—it must be said that they were particularly beleagured at this moment. From the thirties through the fifties, American movies had come neatly wrapped in genre conventions, toward which one could strike one of two poses—comfortable patronization or mild outrage—on an almost whimsical basis. The “important” films, by common-consent definition literary adaptations and examinations of socially significant themes, announced their intentions well in advance, so there was plenty of time to put on your sober face. Similarly, foreign films had mostly been in the sentimental humanist vein, very easy to digest.

Now all that was changing. One had to deal with Fellini and Antonioni, Bergman and Godard and a swarm of angry Brits, all of whom demanded a new kind of critical alertness. At the same time, American films were beginning to overflow their former boundaries, abandon their former pieties. To take just a few examples:
Psycho
had radically narrowed the distance between horror and everyday life, and made explicit its formerly implicit sexual component;
The Apartment
viciously satirized the pieties of corporate life;
Dr. Strangelove
and
The Manchurian Candidate
questioned the premises of our ruling political metaphor, the Cold War;
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
rudely, obscenely, overturned the conventions of domestic comedy. It could be argued that in the early sixties the best American movies, the ones that “thinking people” were most interested in, were, for once, ahead of—anyway, abreast of—the social curve, predicting attitudes and conflicts that would dominate our intellectual and political life for decades to come.

Into this confusion these spaghetti westerns—the very term is contemptuous—intruded themselves, and to many they seemed a final blow. Years later, Ethan Mordden would argue in his passionately intelligent study of sixties filmmaking,
Medium Cool
, that they were only “
taking the western at its word, filming what America’s movies were afraid, really, to show.” But until Leone, the western had remained a safe haven for traditionalists. Not only that, it was regarded, along with jazz and the Broadway musical, as one of America’s unique contributions to world popular culture. Who were these … 
Italians
 … to show us how to make an oater, to put in what we, in our wisdom, had chosen to leave out of our beautiful westering saga—its squalor, brutality and vicious economic determinism.

It was all right, perhaps, for Stanley Kubrick to show the high councils of state populated exclusively by dolts, for Edward Albee and Mike Nichols to show American couplehood—that fifties ideal—as screeching entrapment. They were Americans; they had a right to criticize. Worse, Leone’s stylistic innovations were not as immediately, cheekily, obvious as, say, a Godardian jump cut. Nor did they signal high artistic intent as, say, the stately emptiness of Antonioni’s frames did. His innovations could easily be mistaken for “cheapjack” carelessness. So by attacking him one could safely address that uneasiness—that outrage—traditionalists so often felt at the movies in those days, that feeling that one no longer entirely possessed one’s native ground. Or for that matter the narrative conventions that had ruled all movies, foreign and domestic, for almost a half century.

As for Clint Eastwood, the only American visible in the first of the Leone westerns, and the unquestioned star of them all, patronization was his lot. As we’ve seen, a few reviewers sensed a new star presence here, but if Leone was to be pitied for his ignorance, Clint was to be censured for participating in this travesty. It was his “cultural roots,” after all, that were being dug up and left to rot under the hot Spanish sun. And so the suspicion that this nice boy from television might possibly have sold something out was hinted at, especially since word of the ever-larger fistsful of dollars he had received for the sequels was widely mentioned at the time in the press.

Things did not improve for him (or for Leone) with the release in July 1967 of their next collaboration. Crowther, after seeing
For a Few Dollars More
, and observing that it was more overtly humorous than its predecessor in some of its passages, moved now to full moral outrage: “
The fact that this film is constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers, to emphasize killer bravado and generate glee in frantic manifestations of death is, to my mind, a sharp indictment of it as so-called
entertainment in this day. There is nothing wholesome about killing men for bounty; nothing funny about seeing them die, no matter how much the audience may sit there and burble and laugh.” Crowther had apparently forgotten that “killer bravado” had been one of the charms of American movies since Cagney was a snarling pup.

The other reviews were equally unpleasant.
Cue
was, like Crowther, worried about the film’s social implications: “There is something wrong with a society in which the chief attraction of a movie is vicious violence.”
Time
deplored its “lofty disdain for sense and authenticity.”
Newsweek
simply proclaimed it “excruciatingly dopey.”

The rising outrage one detects in the critics’ response to
For a Few Dollars More
derives in part from frustration. Despite the reviewers’ contempt for
A Fistful of Dollars
, people had gone to see it. United Artists was reporting an impressive number of bookings, often in the better theaters, with grosses that in some situations rivaled that of its James Bond titles. The company enjoyed domestic theatrical rentals of some $3.5 million on the first Leone western and $4.3 million on the second. Even allowing for the expense of prints and advertising, the return on an initial investment of a little more than $100,000 was staggering, probably as good a deal as David Picker ever made in the course of his long career as a studio production chief. And he had
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
, which would return some $6.1 million in rentals, ready to go.

It was released in January 1968 and, in a way, engendered the most curious response of all the Leone films. By this time, Crowther had been replaced at
The New York Times
. His outraged response to
Bonnie and Clyde
the previous summer had finally done him in. The Arthur Penn film, written by Robert Benton and David Newman and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, was to become one of the decade’s touchstone movies, a period piece that functioned as a brilliant historical metaphor—wildly funny and bleakly tragic—for the social unrest of the sixties.

Its implications were none too difficult to grasp but they were lost on poor Crowther. Led by Pauline Kael, who wrote a brilliant essay in
The New Yorker
defending the film—this was before she became a regular reviewer for the magazine—chic New York rallied to the film. Foolishly, Crowther kept returning to the subject, ineptly defending himself to the point where, at last, the
Times
could no longer defend him. The grumble that had been growing around him for years had now become outright contempt, and in the fall of 1967 he was made critic emeritus and replaced by Renata Adler, an extremely intelligent
New Yorker
writer. The trouble was that Adler knew almost nothing about movies, and in the year that she held the job, she would try unsuccessfully to
make a critical stance out of the wondering, occasionally offended, fastidiousness of a literary intellectual bringing her largely inappropriate values to film.

One of the first movies she confronted when she took up her post in January 1968 was
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
. Her response to it out-Crowthered Crowther. “
The Burn, The Gouge and The Mangle (its screen name is simply inappropriate) must be the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre,” she opined. “If 42nd Street is lined with little pushcarts of sadism, this film … is an entire supermarket.” The rest of her response remained in this vein. Referring to the scene in which Tuco is beaten in order to reveal the whereabouts of the gold, she wrote “that anyone who would voluntarily stay in the theater beyond this scene … is not someone I should care to meet, in any capacity, ever.”

So it continued to go. In Los Angeles, Charles Champlin, early in his long run as the
Times
’s film critic, began, like Adler, with some wordplay on the title: “
The temptation is hereby proved irresistible to call ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,’ now playing citywide, ‘The Bad, the Dull, and the Interminable,’ if only because it is.” He asserted, curiously, that “the intent of the violence, like the intent of the film as a whole, is comical,” but that the film’s “mannerisms and posturings finally become so obtrusive that their effects are diluted.” Kael, settling down at
The New Yorker
, found the film “stupid” and “gruesome,” but guessed, probably correctly, that its action-fan audience didn’t notice or care that the “western theme was missing.”
Time
finally conceded some “good” in
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
“
Leone’s skillful camera work—expertly combining color and composition, with sharp attention to the details of shape and texture,” before passing on to the de rigueur denunciations of “beatings, disembowellings [sic] and mutilations.” Its anonymous reviewer also tacked on a two-paragraph profile of Clint, characterizing him as “the real man in the money these days,” citing some well-paid roles he had by then accepted. He even supplied a modest quote to the magazine: “The critics are mixed, but the public has gone for me.” He then permitted his ambition to broaden his range (the magazine had characterized him as a Gary Cooper type) to surface: “I will play almost anything, except
Henry V
and that sort of stuff.”