A half-century ago in Rome, a camera technician named Enzo Barboni walked out of a movie theatre. He\u2019d just seen Akira Kurosawa\u2019s Yojimbo, about an amoral samurai who manipulates two warring merchant factions in a small village, and he liked it a lot. So when he ran into his friend, the fledgling director Sergio Leone, on the street, he told him to go see it. He thought Leone would be particularly impressed.He was. The Italian film industry was in a worrying slump by late 1963, the once thriving \u201csword-and-sandal\u201d genre having gone to dust and the international biblical epic \u2013 both forms that Leone had made his bones with \u2013 dead on the cross. So when he saw Yojimbo, Leone saw more than a movie he liked. He saw the horizon, and on it rode a man on a horse. An Italian cowboy.<\/p>\n
The idea was not new, despite the fact that history has often granted Leone the status of inventor of the so-called \u201cspaghetti western.\u201d Westerns had been made intermittently in Italy since 1913, when Sergio\u2019s own father Vincenzo had made a frontier melodrama \u2013 starring Sergio\u2019s mother Edvige \u2013 called La vampira indiana. Moreover, in its latter-day bid to remain a player in the international B-movie market, Italy had been producing badly dubbed westerns (with titles like Bullets Don\u2019t Argue) for a few years before Leone was struck by inspiration.<\/p>\n
But it was the nature of that inspiration that eventually produced A Fistful of Dollars, which in turn would alter the landscape of the movie western until it\u2019s final fade as a popular genre. In his mind, Leone saw a movie that would restore to this once-mighty form \u2013 which the 34-year-old filmmaker adored, and especially the westerns of John Ford \u2013 its grit, epic grandeur and irresistible danger. Leone felt that the American western had lost its way of late, and that the movie he\u2019d make might point the way back. He went to work on a script.<\/p>\n
It galloped along. By early 1964, Leone was finished. In the Italian exploitation tradition of modifying the titles of successful Hollywood movies, in this case another westernized Kurosawa copy called The Magnificent Seven, it was called The Magnificent Stranger. That wasn\u2019t the only nod to exploitation tradition. As the appearance of American stars in the sword-and-sandal and biblical epics had proven, a little Hollywood glamour went a long way in international sales. Leone\u2019s stranger would only be made truly magnificent by being American.<\/p>\n
The John Ford fan in Leone had always imagined Henry Fonda \u2013 who\u2019d been Ford\u2019s Wyatt Earp \u2013 in the role, but when the script went stateside the actor\u2019s agent didn\u2019t even bother sending it to him. The Magnificent Seven\u2019s James Coburn said he\u2019d do it if they paid him $25,000, much too dear for the production\u2019s tiny budget. When Coburn\u2019s Seven co-star Charles Bronson was handed the script, he proclaimed it \u201cjust about the worst I\u2019d ever seen,\u201d and walked off. (In later years all three would appear in Leone movies.)<\/p>\n
Just as Leone was getting despondent, his production office was contacted by the William Morris Agency\u2019s office in Rome. They had an episode of an American TV show, already six seasons in, that they thought Leone ought to look at, and especially at the tall, handsome sidekick character named Rowdy Yates.<\/p>\n
Clint Eastwood was then 33-years-old, and his career was on hold. A bit contract-player during the 1950s (Revenge of the Creature, Francis in the Navy), Eastwood had enjoyed some success on Rawhide, one of a slew of TV westerns that dominated American prime-time TV in the early sixties. But now, in concert with the decline of the western on the big screen, TV westerns were on the wane and Eastwood had nothing on the horizon. Besides, his CBS contract forbade him from making any movies in America while on the series. For a bargain-basement $12,000, Eastwood agreed to fly to Europe for six weeks and make the movie. Before leaving, he scooped up some of his Rawhide wardrobe, and went out and bought a new hat and black jeans. He also claimed to have provided the beat-up poncho that would complete the Man With No Name\u2019s iconic wardrobe, but Leone also claimed the same thing. It would be disputed for years.<\/p>\n
So would much in the ensuing few years. Eastwood found the multilingual production confusing and his director frustrating, but the resulting isolation of the actor served the character brilliantly. When he returned to Hollywood, he wondered if he\u2019d ever hear from Leone or about The Magnificent Stranger again. Meanwhile, back in Italy, the imminent release of the film, freshly retitled A Fistful of Dollars, was stopped dead by a letter from Akira Kurosawa himself, who accused Leone of plagiarizing his samurai movie. (An odd claim, considering how Kurosawa\u2019s movie itself borrowed so heavily from Dashiell Hammett\u2019s Red Harvest.)<\/p>\n
Because of the legal entanglements, it would take nearly a year for the movie to open in Italy, and two for it to arrive in North America, where it would have its very first commercial run in Toronto, at the Odeon Carlton Theatre. It would only open a year later in the United States, where Clint Eastwood didn\u2019t even realize it was the movie he\u2019d made a few years ago in Spain. By that time, the spaghetti-western revolution was under way, Eastwood was about to become a huge international star, Kurosawa was reaping 15 per cent of the movie\u2019s profits, and Sergio Leone was becoming almost as famous as John Ford.<\/p>\n
As for the western, it rode back into town briefly but spectacularly \u2013 flourishing in the 1960s, diminishing in the seventies and pretty much dying in the eighties \u2013 its extinction postponed by a big wind from Italy.