The iconic western Clint Eastwood turned down: “He was going in a different direction”
During the 1960s, cinema shifted on its axis. Hollywood moved further away from classical modes of storytelling, and with the decline in censorship and the influence of foreign cinema, many filmmakers started to make more violent and nihilistic movies.
The western genre had been incredibly American; the cowboys were almost always the heroes, becoming symbols of ultimate freedom and masculinity. John Wayne was one of the biggest western stars, often playing the hero as he rode through vast plains, ready to fight the bad guys and save the day.
By the 1960s, the western genre had started to evolve, with the ‘spaghetti western’ emerging during the decade. These films harnessed a slightly different style from their American counterparts, and more violence. The first spaghetti western was 1964’s beloved A Fistful of Dollars, directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone and starring burgeoning American actor Clint Eastwood.
It formed the first part of the Dollars trilogy, which concluded with the iconic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, launching the young Eastwood to widespread fame. The movie is regularly heralded as one of the greatest westerns ever made, and it has gone on to influence many filmmakers in its wake, like Quentin Tarantino, who cites it as his all-time favourite.
Leone’s trilogy asserted him as a spectacular director of westerns, but the filmmaker wasn’t keen to box himself into the genre for the rest of his career. However, the director couldn’t turn down the chance to work with Henry Fonda when Paramount Pictures offered Leone the opportunity to fund his next project, even though they insisted it had to be a western.
Thus, Leone committed to the project, contacting Eastwood in the hopes he would want to star in the film. You’d think that Eastwood would have agreed following the success of the Dollars trilogy, and surely he would’ve loved to have worked with someone like Fonda, one of the industry’s greatest stars, but he simply wasn’t interested.
“But I felt at the time, after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, that [Leone] was going in a different direction than I wanted. He wanted to go more into a kind of spectacle thing. I think Leone more envisioned himself as a David Lean à la Italiano, and that’s understandable. He just wanted to make bigger, more elaborate projects,” he once revealed, as recorded in Conversations with Clint.
Leone wanted Eastwood to play Harmonica, a role that was inevitably portrayed by Charles Bronson instead. Meanwhile, Eastwood quickly appeared in various other westerns and crime dramas, like Hang ‘Em High and Coogan’s Bluff, before making his directorial debut in 1971 with Play Misty For Me.
That same year, Leone made the western Duck, You Sucker!, which he once again asked Eastwood to star in. The actor rejected the offer, with the part going to James Coburn. It seemed as though Eastwood was ready to part ways with Leone after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, even if the Italian director had essentially given him his career with the Dollars trilogy.
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