DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University. Let's continue with our series about classic films and movie icons featuring interviews from our archives. Today, we're looking at Westerns. And though it's common to think of the genre as classically American, thanks to the films of John Ford and others, in the 1960s, some of the best Westerns were imported from Italy. That's when the Italian director Sergio Leone made such films as "A Fistful Of Dollars," "For A Few Dollars More," "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" and "Once Upon A Time In The West."
His brutal Westerns revived the genre, made a movie star of Clint Eastwood and created a visual style that influenced many film directors around the world. He also introduced many of us to the film music of Ennio Morricone. Yet despite all that, Leone's films at the time were disparagingly called spaghetti Westerns. In 2005, Terry Gross spoke with Christopher Frayling, one of the world's leading experts on Leone. At the time, Frayling had written the book "Once Upon A Time In Italy: The Westerns Of Sergio Leone."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
TERRY GROSS: What's a scene from Leone's first Western, "A Fistful Of Dollars," that you loved in 1967 when you first saw it and that you still love now, that you could describe for us?
CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING: (Laughter) Gosh. Four or five bad guys sitting on a five-bar gate in the main street of a flyblown Spanish town standing in for a northern Mexican town. And the man with no name, the hero, walks up to them. And there's this satisfying sort of crunch on the soundtrack as his boots walk down the main street, and lots of dust. And they start - in true macho style, they start abusing each other, and they start laughing at him. And he looks down and lights his cigarillo and says, my mule don't like you laughing. He gets the crazy idea you're laughing at him. Now, if you just apologize to my mule - and then there's silence. And there's a whirring sound on the soundtrack. And you get the eyes, and you get the puff of smoke, and suddenly an explosion and all five bad guys fall off the five-bar gate.
It's a sort of parody of the Western confrontation. It's so extreme and very, very stylish. And it was the first really big close-up of the young Clint Eastwood, who was fantastically good-looking in those days, only with a designer stubble smoking a cheroot with his eyes screwed up as he looked into the sun. It's a very memorable moment. It's stayed with me ever since.
GROSS: Well, I think we should hear that scene because it's classic Clint Eastwood...
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: ...Talking between his teeth. So here's that scene that you're talking about. And the explosion that we hear at the end is him shooting all those guys who are waiting for him.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS")
LORENZO ROBLEDO: (As Baxter Gunman #1) Adios, amigo. Listen, stranger. Didn't you get the idea? We don't like to see bad boys like you in town. Go get your mule. You let him get away from you?
CLINT EASTWOOD: (As Joe) See, that's what I want to talk to you about. He's feeling real bad.
ROBLEDO: (As Baxter Gunman #1) Huh?
EASTWOOD: (As Joe) My mule. You see, he got all riled up when you went and fired those shots at his feet.
LUIS BARBOO: (As Baxter Gunman #2) Hey, you making some kind of joke?
EASTWOOD: (As Joe) No. You see, I understand you men were just playing around. But the mule, he just doesn't get it. Of course, if you were to all apologize...
(LAUGHTER)
EASTWOOD: (As Joe) I don't think it's nice, you laughing. You see, my mule don't like people laughing, gets the crazy idea you're laughing at him. Now, if you apologize like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUN FIRING)
GROSS: That's a scene from Sergio Leone's first western, "A Fistful Of Dollars." Why did Sergio Leone love Westerns? Why did he want to make them in Italy?
FRAYLING: Well, you got to imagine a child growing up in 1930s Rome at a time when Mussolini was the dictator and when most American movies were banned, and those that were seen were dubbed into Italian. And the young Leone first saw Hollywood Western movies in the 1930s at that time, and his heroes were Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and films like "Stagecoach." And to him, they represented an absolute model of freedom. He lived in suburban Rome in cramped conditions. And he saw these wide-open spaces, this unimaginable desert that goes on forever. He saw these - he couldn't understand what they were saying. He never heard - in fact, he never learned to speak English, Sergio Leone. That's what's so extraordinary. But they were dubbed into a different language, not very well.
But nevertheless, they clicked in his mind. Then in the 1950s, when he went into the film industry, he found that nobody was really very interested in the Western. A lot of Hollywood veteran directors went over to Italy to make epics, films like "Ben-Hur" and "Helen Of Troy" and "Quo Vadis." And Leone hung around these films. Sometimes he was the assistant director. And he talked to directors like Fred Zinnemann, who'd made "High Noon," Robert Aldrich, who'd made "The Last Sunset" and "Apache" and films like that. And they all said to him, the Western's dead. It's finished. We don't make Westerns anymore.
So basically, Leone made Westerns because Hollywood had stopped making them, and because in Europe, and particularly in Italy, there was this huge interest in the Western and a huge knowledge of it, as well. So the whole thing starts in a kind of folk memory of American Westerns that went back to the 1930s. And it's partly political. But the other thing was that Leone felt that Westerns had got a bit talky. There was too much talking in them. He liked Westerns where Rin Tin Tin did all the thinking, you know?
GROSS: (Laughter).
FRAYLING: Old-fashioned Westerns where - lots and lots of action and not too much talk. He didn't like psychology. Freudian Westerns got on his nerves.
GROSS: Well, you know, but he knew he was making Westerns that were different from American ones. Like, he said - and I think this is to you that he said this, in your interview with him - that John Ford, the great director of Westerns, was full of optimism, whereas I on the contrary am full of pessimism.
FRAYLING: Well, that's the thing. He loved the look of the Western and the idea of the Western and the fairy tale of the Western. But he didn't like some of the ideologies. He didn't like John Wayne very much and some of the sort of crusading element of the Western that you got in '50s and early '60s Westerns. So loved the visuals, didn't like the ideology very much. So he takes the concept of the Western and makes it much, much more cynical. I mean, the hero, for example, when people ask him - why are you doing this for us? - as someone actually asks in "A Fistful Of Dollars," the first of his Westerns, why are you doing this for us? Instead of saying, you know, because a man's got to do what a man's got to do, or there's some things a man can't just ride around, things like that, he says $500? He works strictly for ready cash, so he has a very streetwise, 1960s cash-only attitude to life, and this was a very different kind of hero to the old-fashioned crusading hero.
And I think that the modern movie action hero begins with the Clint Eastwood character in "A Fistful Of Dollars," where you identify with the hero not because of what he believes in anymore 'cause he doesn't actually believe in anything. You identify with him because of his style - you know, the way he wears his clothes, the way he walks, the personal style of the man. And that, of course, is the basis of identification of all modern action heroes, and I think it begins with Clint Eastwood in "A Fistful Of Dollars."
GROSS: Let's talk a little bit about the casting in those Westerns. His casting is so good. Of course, Clint Eastwood is the most famous character in his Westerns, the Man With No Name in the "Fistful Of Dollars" trilogy. Clint Eastwood was known as Rowdy Yates on "Rawhide," the TV cattle herding series. What did Leone see in Eastwood, you know, in the mid-1960s when he cast him?
FRAYLING: Well, it was partly because Clint Eastwood wasn't very expensive (laughter). He came for $15,000-16,000 in those days, and they had a very, very limited budget on "Fistful Of Dollars." But mainly, he wasn't the first choice, either, that Leone had in mind Henry Fonda, right at the - even at that early stage. He had in mind James Coburn and one or two other actors, but they all proved to be - and Charles Bronson - and they all proved to be either too expensive, or they didn't read the script. And it has to be said, the script, in its early stages, which was badly translated from the Italian, is a very peculiar read. We will go to the Hill of Boots, you know, that sort of thing.
(LAUGHTER)
FRAYLING: And so I'm not surprised that they turned it down. Then Sergio Leone watched an episode of "Rawhide" on 16mm in Rome, at an agency, and saw Clint Eastwood. And what he saw was this man who walks in this very cat-like, light way - that light Californian voice, the squint of his eyes. And the legend has it - I don't know if it's true or not - that Leone started coloring in the picture with some stubble and some rough clothes, a sheepskin waistcoat, a dirty denim shirt. Roughed him up a bit, made a lot of makeup. There's a lot of makeup in these films. There's a surprising amount, by today's standards, to make him look much more dark and sunburned. He wanted a sort of rougher character. And, of course, the cheroot, the cigar, 'cause in the 1960s, the cheroot was sort of masculine and hard and a controlled person.
So he roughed Clint Eastwood up a bit, and together, they discussed the part. I think that Clint Eastwood is probably the only actor in history who's actually fought hard for less lines (laughter), that he read the script and thought he was saying much too much. It was much too talky. And he had these long speeches of motivation and everything, and Clint Eastwood just put a line through them and said, look - you can say this in one line.
BIANCULLI: Christopher Frayling, speaking with Terry Gross in 2005. Coming up, broken bones and near-death experiences. We hear from former stuntman Hal Needham. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ENNIO MORRICONE'S "ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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