Clint Eastwood (28 page)

The films are also full of references to Leone’s childhood religion. As the critic Robert C. Cumbow has observed, “
The Catholic dichotomy between the material world of death and the spiritual world of life everlasting is grounded in the notion that the material world is inherently defective.” San Miguel, the Mexican border town Joe enters, could not be a more vivid symbol of that defectiveness, “
irredeemably condemned to immobility, somnolence, to the lack of all resource and development,” as the Italian critic Franco Ferrini described it. Since Joe enters not on a hero’s impressive steed, but on a humble mule, which is, of course, the way Jesus traveled, we are encouraged to see him as a redeemer of the irredeemable. Before he leaves he will endure a sort of calvary and a kind of resurrection, and he will certainly assist many of San Miguel’s residents to find life everlasting—usually before they are quite ready for it.

In any event, there is no doubting the accuracy of Richard Corliss’s confident description of Clint’s character as “
very much the grizzled Christ.” All of Leone’s films contain religious references of this kind—mock sermons, mock calvaries, disused churches and bell towers, a Bible used to hide a killer’s gun. And always, when he comes to the final shoot-out, it is as ritualized as a mass.

His disappointment with religion is of a piece with Leone’s disappointment in the failure of contemporary Americans to be the idealists (and saviors) our movies had promised they might be. It doubtless accounts for his sense of humor, described by Clint as “very ironic, dry and a little bit sardonic,” not to say cynical, perhaps, full of the arrested adolescent’s dismay at discovering that the world is not as it had been promised to him.

Leone’s movies’ characters—including Clint’s—are moved by base instinct. He ends up more or less doing right not because he acts out of any grand principles, but because power equals morality, and his skill with weapons is thus more potent than anyone else’s. In effect, he subverts the customary western formula, which always implies that distinctly higher moral standards have the effect of steadying the beset hero’s hand, fixing his eye when, at last, he draws.

Childishness of outlook does not necessarily imply primitiveness of technique. As Corliss notes, Leone was a tutored talent “
not only a delirious descendant of
both
John Fords, but a spiritual brother of such ‘operatic’ Italians as Visconti, Bertolucci (who worked on the screenplay of
Once upon a Time in the West
), Minnelli and Coppola—a natural filmmaker whose love of the medium and the genre is joyously evident, and infectious, in every frame he shoots.”

They spent about a week in Rome, shooting (at Cinecittà) the sequence where Joe, grievously tortured by the Rojos, the marginally more vicious of the two criminal gangs contending for control of San Miguel, recovers from his wounds by taking refuge in a mine shaft (definitely to be compared to Christ entombed). It was necessary to shoot a minimum amount of the picture on Italian soil in order to be eligible for certain subventions the government was then offering producers. But as soon as possible the company moved on to Spain, first to locations in Manzanias, about an hour outside of Madrid on the way to Segovia, then to Almería, in bleak Andalucia, in the southern part of the country.

The set was a small Tower of Babel, with scripts available in Italian, English, German and Spanish. Everyone was friendly enough, but Clint could not communicate with the other leading players—among them Gian Maria Volonte (playing the psychopathic leader of the Rojo gang, Ramon), a highly regarded stage actor and a committed leftist on his way to a distinguished career in more politically conscientious films. One of the producers, Arrighi Columbo, spoke English well, but he and Clint did not take to one another, and besides Stefanelli the only other member of the cast and crew with whom he could communicate in English (and then only primitively) was Massimo Dallamano, the cinematographer, whom Clint admired—he “worked a little bit differently with light,” meaning he refused to cast the standard romantic glow over his landscapes.

He was glad he had insisted on bringing Bill Tompkins along for company, and he was happy, too, that he had arranged for Maggie to join him. She spent only a few days on location, her presence providing his only real break in what amounted to eight weeks of hard labor in a harsh land on a budget that permitted few amenities.

Clint scoffs at the often-repeated rumor that Leone had a print of
Yojimbo
threaded up on a Movieola in his trailer so that he could run its equivalent to whatever sequence he was working on. “We couldn’t afford Movieolas. We had no electricity; we didn’t have a trailer with a toilet. We just went out behind rocks. That was just people trying to put Sergio down when he was a success.”

For the moment, he was very far from that status. He was just another director with no name, coping with troubles a lot more serious than the absence of honey wagons. Absence of cash, for example. The Spanish coproducers would claim that the money for the week’s salaries was due from the Germans, and then, says Clint, “the money guy from Constantin Films wouldn’t show up and the crew was balking and Sergio would go crazy.” The relentless insecurity eventually led to defections. Worse, the dailies were coming back from the lab scratched, and this made Leone “paranoid.” Though he came to the set each day with his angles all planned out, and did not improvise much with the camera, he shot multiple takes on each setup and printed all of them—as many as six or eight—hoping at least one or two would survive the technicians’ rough handling.

One anecdote perhaps sums up the spirit in which the film was made. One day Leone decided that his set required a tree, something from which you could hang a man. None was conveniently available in this sere landscape, but Leone went out scouting and saw just what he wanted in a farmyard. He returned the next day with a truck and a few crew members and began haranguing the elderly farmer in his most impressive manner. Clint: “He goes barging in there and he says, ‘We’re from the highway department. This tree is very dangerous, it’s going to fall and someone’s gonna get hurt. We’ll take this tree right out for you.’ This old guy’s standing out there and before he knows what’s happening there are these Italians sawing his tree down.”

The director’s energy never flagged. He liked to demonstrate actions to his actors, show Clint how he wanted him to light up his cigar or whatever, “and of course I’d be laughing because I’d see this guy with these little tiny glasses and the western hat on trying to do me. He looked like Yosemite Sam.”

The first thing that drew Clint to this script was Joe’s entrance. Clopping along on his mule, ponchoed and unshaven, he spies a house and turns in for a drink at its well. Almost immediately a gang of desperadoes abusively chases a little boy away, and then the stranger sees a beautiful woman, Marisol (played by Marianne Koch, the German actress who starred in some of Constantin’s Karl May adaptations), staring piteously at him from behind barred windows. It is obvious that she has been sequestered against her will for sexual use, and that her husband and child (who is named Jesus) are impotent to save her. It is also obvious that this family is to be read as a version of the Holy Family, which means, if one follows out the film’s symbolism to its logical end, that a Christ figure will ultimately be obliged to rescue a Christ figure, or a younger version of himself.

Clint, largely innocent of religious training, and certainly not conversant with Catholic belief, read the situation much more simply. “Our hero’s standing there and he doesn’t do a thing,” he says. “You know, your average western, the hero’s got to step forth and grab the guy who’s shooting the kid or something like that. But this guy doesn’t do anything; he turns and rides away. And I thought, That is perfect, that’s something I’ve always wanted to do in a western.”

This essentially wordless sequence establishes Clint’s character and the premises from which he will operate for the rest of the movie. The sequences that almost immediately follow it establish with similar deftness the iron and irony of his nature. Proceeding into town on his mule, passing a hanged man, he arouses the contempt of gunfighters loyal to the Baxter clan, the Rojos’ deadly rivals. They shoot at him, causing the animal to shy. To avoid falling off, Joe leaps from the saddle and catches himself on an overhanging signboard. Now, of course, he must challenge these subsidiary heavies. On his way to this confrontation he passes the town carpenter and places an order for three coffins.

Moving on to his tormentors, he demands an apology on behalf of his animal: “You see, my mule don’t like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea they’re laughing at him.” The gunmen eye him quizzically. He is perhaps a harmless, certainly a self-destructive, lunatic. It is their last, erroneous thought before he throws back his serape and almost literally blasts them out of their boots. This performance serves as a sort of audition for the Rojos, with whom Joe will forge a false alliance, the better to sow the seeds of the anarchy from which he hopes to profit. More important, the scene establishes his preternatural cool: Walking back past the carpenter, he apologetically murmurs, “My mistake—four.”

This attitude was not unprecedented. The gunfighter is traditionally given to understatement, which is intended to cause underestimation on the part of his enemies. But there was, in the staging and the playing of this sequence, a black humor entirely new to the genre. Moreover, as Clint says, “Leone had a great visual sense as well as a sense of humor. He was extremely bold. He was never afraid to try anything new.”

The contrast between this picture and
Rawhide
, “where everything was regimented,” was naturally vivid to Clint. An example he likes to cite is Leone’s staging of gunfights. Television had adopted the rule of the old Motion Picture Production Code: If a gun was fired you were not allowed to show its human target in the same shot. You had to show the shot being squeezed off, then cut to the staggering and falling victim. It was an utterly pointless gentility, of course, but for all his studies of the American western Leone had either failed to observe it or didn’t
understand that it was a near-sacred convention. “So,” says Clint, “I didn’t tell him. This was fun, because we were breaking all the rules.”

Actor and director had their differences, of course. Clint recalls, for example, that they argued about his performance a little bit at the beginning. Leone “wanted me to do a lot of Mifune’s type of deals. He liked Mifune’s gestures, and I told him, ‘Sergio, I’ve got to do my own thing here. I mean, Mifune was wonderful in the movie but it’s a different view, different times, different cultures.’ ”

They also continued their argument about the script’s lengthy rationalizations of Joe’s behavior. This disagreement came to a head when they began to work on the passage where Joe finally rescues the tormented Marisol, who has by this time been abducted from the Rojos by the Baxters, then offered back to them in an exchange of prisoners.

According to Clint, a prologue had been written for the picture in which a young Joe’s mother was killed in a similar situation. That was never made, and the exposition Leone had written for this sequence was supposed to convey that history. Clint argued that “it doesn’t matter where this guy comes from. We can leave it all in the audience’s imagination. We can just hint that there’s some little incident, some little parallel, and just kind of let the audience draw in the rest of the picture.”

Leone, however, remained dubious until Clint at last won him over with a different argument: “OK, Sergio, look. In a B movie we tell everybody everything. But in a real class-A movie we let the audience think.”

This, it might be noted, was not the end of attempts to supply Joe with conventionally moral motivation for his activities. Years later, when the movie was sold to American television, a network executive, in order to placate his standards and practices department, had yet another prologue shot. In this one, a man in a serape (not Clint) was seen from the back as a prison warden commutes his sentence on condition that he go to San Miguel and clean it up, in effect licensing his subsequent killings—and confusing some subsequent critical discussions of the movie, since this corrupted print played widely on TV.

Be that as it may, in the film Leone delivered, when the rescued woman tries to express her gratitude to Joe and asks why he helped her, he simply says: “Because I knew someone like you once and there was no one there to help.” It is the only time that he openly acknowledges either past or principle, his only humane moment, really, and it is the more effective because of its terseness and brusqueness.

Clint thinks his other major contribution to the way Leone realized
the film may have been stylistic. The middle distance was never territory the director comfortably inhabited, and in
Colossus of Rhodes
he had already demonstrated his predilection for extreme wide shots and extreme long shots. “He really liked panorama, and he knew how to do panorama,” is the way Clint puts it, adding that herein lay Leone’s largest influence on him as a director. Close-ups, however, were rare in that film, and that concerned Clint. Having determined to play his character as stoically as possible, a distantly placed camera would not be able to read his minimal expressions. So he went to Leone and “told him I thought I could sell this character better in close-up.”

Most actors, of course, will tell a director something like that—“in all objectivity and sensitivity,” as Clint ironically puts it. But in this case he felt he had a legitimate argument, especially given the Italian custom of recording no more than a guide track on location and postsynchronizing all dialogue later on a dubbing stage, where another actor would do the lines. If he was going to be deprived of his own speaking voice, he was determined that his subverbal expressions be understandable. (When the film was released in the United States, three years later, Clint rerecorded his dialogue, relying on notes he made every night about the day’s divergences from the script, glad he had been forewarned by his friends in Rome that the Italians would inevitably lose the guide tracks, which they did.)