American Rebel (11 page)

French movie poster for
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
1967

D
e Laurentiis was on a mission to sign Clint, believing that, once the Leone westerns were released in the States, he would be box-office gold anywhere in the world there was a movie screen. De Laurentiis thought Clint could be his generation’s Gary Cooper, and he wasn’t shy about telling him so. Like any good hustler, he knew how to seduce to get what he wanted.

De Laurentiis had been in a successful film business partnership with Carlo Ponti, who in the mid-1950s had decided to turn his wife, Sophia Loren, into Italy’s finest screen actress by having her play working-class Italian women and allowing her real-life glamour to peek out like expensive lingerie. She often starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni, who could effortlessly flip back and forth between glamour and working class, comedy and drama. Under Ponti’s guidance, both Mastroianni and Loren became world famous and (along with Ponti) extremely wealthy.

De Laurentiis envisioned the same thing for himself and his new wife, Silvana Mangano. Another icon of postwar Italian cinema, she had gained international fame with her performance in
Bitter Rice
(1949), written and directed by Giuseppe De Santis and produced by De Laurentiis. At that time “anthology” films were the rage in Europe, so he decided to put together five of the best directors and have them each make a short film with Mangano. Each would reflect, like a highly polished diamond, a different facet of her ability.

And he didn’t want any superstar like Mastroianni to steal his wife’s thunder. After searching among suitable actors he could afford, De Laurentiis decided that Eastwood might be right. He knew he wasn’t the best actor—a plus, to De Laurentiis—but he was one of the hottest faces in Europe. His popularity could only help his box office, but his acting, De Laurentiis was confident, could never overshadow Mangano’s.

To entice Clint, De Laurentiis laid out the proverbial red carpet for his arrival in New York. He put Clint in a five-star hotel and drove him all around the city in a black stretch limousine, talking up the “great” script he had in mind. Then he closed in for the kill. De Laurentiis, who had done his homework, knew that Clint loved cars and so offered him his choice of two deals: $25,000 for one month’s work, or $20,000 and a brand-new Ferrari. Clint grabbed the Ferrari deal (knowing he wouldn’t have to pay an agency fee on it if it was listed as a gift).

That February 1966 Clint flew to Rome, a city that by now he knew quite well and had come to like a great deal, to appear in one episode of De Laurentiis’s planned five-part epic,
Le streghe (The Witches)
. His episode was to be directed by Vittorio De Sica, who had made his name helming one of the defining films of postwar neorealism,
The Bicycle Thief (
1948).
^*

“A Night Like Any Other” (aka “An Evening Like the Others”), nineteen minutes long, featured Clint in modern dress, with button-down shirt and slicked-back hair, trapped inside a loveless, unfulfilling marriage to Silvana Mangano. Only when he is asleep does he “live,” as the sex star of his wife’s fantasies; the episode climaxes with a self-imagined suicide, while his wife “dances” for dozens of men in a flesh club. This description does too much justice to the actual piece of film.

The film’s American rights were acquired by Krim and Picker’s UA on the strength of Clint’s appearance. They were hoping to cash in on their eventual release of the Leone trilogy, but it was not officially released in the United States until 1969.
^†

According to Clint: “The stories [of the five episodes] didn’t mean a whole lot. They were just a lot of vignettes all shuffled together. I enjoyed them, they were fun to do. Escapism.”

It wasn’t a total loss, though. When the film premiered in Paris (dubbed inexplicably into English), Clint met and had a brief but passionate affair with Catherine Deneuve that both managed to keep from the public. And there was also the new Ferrari, which he shipped home to Carmel while he remained in Rome to begin production on
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. Filming began at Cinecittà in May 1966, after a short delay during which Clint refused to report for work because Leone had yet to agree to his demand for $250,000 and another new Ferrari. Soon enough Clint got everything he wanted, and with cigarillo in place and fake guns strapped to his body, he slid himself back into his European cinematic saddle.

Early into production of Leone’s third spaghetti western, Clint began to feel the same vague discontent he’d experienced with
Rawhide:
that the film was bloated, rather than expansive; that the script was far too wordy (something he would clamp down on for virtually every film he would eventually produce); and that the only fully fleshed character was “the Ugly” (Eli Wallach), while “the Good” (himself) and “the Bad” (Lee Van Cleef) were more caricatures than characters, without enough satiric heft to make that approach workable. Leone still didn’t (or perhaps preferred not to) speak a word of English, despite the fact that this film depended far more than the first two on the spoken word than on the visual image.

Clint’s instincts as to the diminution of his character’s stature were essentially correct. In the first film he had been a loner, a man with practically no past and no foreseeable future. His singular stature suggested isolation, cynicism wrapped in heroic determination, and a forcefulness that made him—even with all his glamorized imperfections—irresistible to the audience. In the second film the Man with No Name had been forced to deal with and ultimately share his screen space with Colonel Mortimer (played by Lee Van Cleef, whose successful appearance in
For a Few Dollars More
had not only resurrected his film career but guaranteed his return in the last film of the trilogy). Now Van Cleef was playing someone named Sentenza, along with movie veteran (and inveterate scene stealer) Wallach. “If it goes on that way,” Clint grumbled to Leone, “in the next one I will be starring with the whole American cavalry.”

Between takes Clint took to practicing his golf swing, a signal to Leone and everyone else that he was now so detached from the
production that he no longer cared about his character, the other characters, the director, or the film itself. Later on, when Leone approached him about a fourth film, Clint would flatly reject the offer.

During the filming, Clint and Wallach had become good friends, and Clint, who had a long-standing aversion to flying in small planes, convinced Wallach to drive with him from Madrid to Almeria. As production dragged on, Clint helped guide Wallach through the script, emphasizing the importance of action over dialogue, acting as Wallach’s personal director. Then, the week before filming finished, Clint and Wallach had dinner together. “This will be my last spaghetti western,” he told Wallach. “I’m going back to California and I’ll form my own company and I’ll act and direct my own movies.”
Oh sure, that’ll be the day
, Wallach thought to himself.

    
M
eanwhile Leone had visions of creating a second, more expansive trilogy. According to Leone,

While Clint knew this would be his last film for Leone, it was by no means his last western. He had had too much spaghetti and not
enough hamburger; he was determined now to take the essential elements of the character of the Man with No Name, which had been so good to him in Europe, back to Hollywood, where it could be redeveloped and redefined.

Home by July, Clint quickly grew restless in Carmel and frequently hooked up with old friends, including David Janssen, who had finished production on his fourth and final season as Dr. Richard Kimble on the hit TV show
The Fugitive
. The series had perfectly touched the boomer zeitgeist of the 1960s, made a cultural hero out of Kimble, and (for a relatively brief time) a star out of Janssen.

Clint and Janssen got together often during these months, as Clint sought guidance from his friend, now a major TV star, for his own floundering career. (Clint had been offered, and accepted, the role of Two-Face on the campy
Batman
series, but it was canceled before he could do it.) Janssen, meanwhile, had just accepted an offer from John Wayne to appear in the upcoming Wayne-produced-and-directed
The Green Berets
, as a skeptical liberal newspaper reporter embedded with a unit of the Green Berets.

And then on September 30, 1966, Clint was shocked to learn that Eric Fleming, while on location in Peru filming an MGM movie for TV called
High Jungle
, had died. About halfway through the shoot, Fleming’s canoe had capsized on the Huallaga River. With him was another actor, Nic Minardos, who managed to swim safely to shore. Fleming’s body was found two days later.
^*
Clint found out by reading it in the newspaper.

    
O
n January 18, 1967,
A Fistful of Dollars
finally opened in Los Angeles, followed by a national release a month later. The film’s stylized violence (which viewed today is neither all that violent nor all that stylized) had prevented it from being shown in America for three years. In 1966 Mike Nichols’s groundbreaking
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, in which vulgar language was crucial to the film’s story, had finally broken through the outdated restrictions of the Production
Code. Thereafter Krim and Picker thought the time was right to try an American release for their Leone film.
^*

And critics wasted no time in pouncing on it. Leading the parade of negative reaction was Bosley Crowther, the crusty film critic of the
New York Times
, who dismissed the film as “cowboy camp.” Judith Crist, the main film reviewer for the
World Journal Tribune
, called it “perfectly awful … an ersatz western … [where] men and women [are] gouged, burned, beaten, stomped and shredded to death.” Philip K. Scheuer wrote in the
Los Angeles Times:
“Like the villains, it was shot in Spain … pity it wasn’t buried there.”
Newsweek
called it “excruciatingly dopey.” In almost every review, Clint received only casual mention, and Leone was barely mentioned at all.

Yet, to everyone’s surprise,
A Fistful of Dollars
made money from its first day of release. If the critics didn’t get it, audiences did. They could sense the power of Clint’s character, the attraction of his strength and conviction, and the film’s original viewpoint on brutality. Moreover, every campus town in America had a revival theater that regularly played
Yojimbo
, so college audiences—who made up a large number of the film’s early faithful—were familiar with the tactics of the scenario. The artifacts of the Man with No Name’s character—the cig-arillo, the poncho, the wide-brimmed hat—all became elements of 1960s campus hip style.

Meanwhile, Clint was having trouble getting work, or at least the kind he wanted—an American western with a toned-down version of his nameless hero—even as that May, United Artists, encouraged by the box-office take of
A Fistful of Dollars
, released
For a Few Dollars More
as one of their big summer movies, while
A Fistful of Dollars
was still holding on to a sizable number of its first-run screens. It had already grossed a hefty $3.5 million, which was excellent for a 1960s studio film and extraordinary for any foreign independent released in America.

In between promotional interviews and extensive redubbing sessions for all three films, at UA’s expense (rather than using the more conventional and less expensive subtitles), Clint continued to meet
with producers and directors and continued to be rejected by all of them. At best they considered his current movie success to be a fluke, the product of a novelty, and at worst they still thought of him as a TV actor, a ghetto from which few actors managed to escape.

As the months passed, Clint formulated an idea that had been cooking since the days
of Rawhide
, when he had wanted to film that cattle drive differently: to make a project of his own choosing, shot in the way he wanted it done. If American studios weren’t falling over themselves to latch on to Clint Eastwood Movie Star, then he would produce a film that would not only equal but surpass Leone’s achievement with the western genre.