The ‘meritless’ movie Clint Eastwood refused to star in: “I just don’t like the script”
Even when he was a jobbing actor struggling to gain a foothold in a cutthroat industry, Clint Eastwood always viewed himself as a man of principle who wouldn’t play a role just for the sake of it.
Admittedly, he did that a couple of times during his earliest years in the business, and it didn’t work out too well for him. Once Rawhide finally gave him the breakout gig he’d been searching for, the future superstar knew that the road to the top of Hollywood was paved with pitfalls.
Ironically, he got himself there by leaving America behind and heading off to Europe to shoot three westerns in Spain for an Italian director. After Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy became an international sensation that eventually gained a Stateside audience, Eastwood knew his next step was pivotal.
He was being inundated with offers to play characters who were essentially facsimiles of the ‘Man with No Name’, but he wasn’t well-known enough to turn them all down. His first post-Dollars project was key, and he decided to stick with what he knew by headlining another western, Ted Post’s Hang ‘Em High.
On paper, it was much of a muchness, with Eastwood again cast as a mysterious drifter who wanders into a new town to right some wrongs. However, he had the chance to appear in another western instead, but his gut feeling was that Hang ‘Em High had more substance and stood a better chance of success than the other film, even though it featured some big names and a significantly larger budget.
“It was funny because the agency wanted me to do a film called Mackenna’s Gold,” he told Paul Nelson. “I talked to Carl Foreman on several occasions, but I didn’t care for the script. They kept saying, ‘Wow, but you get to work with a lot of well-known actors,’ Omar Sharif, who was real hot stuff then, ‘And it will be a big showcase.'”
Eastwood’s team, as well as Mackenna’s Gold producer and screenwriter Foreman, were keen to bring him on board, but his answer was final: “Yeah, but I just don’t like the script.” He confessed that “the agency had a little apoplexy” when he decided to star in Hang ‘Em High, which was five times cheaper to make and didn’t boast any household names, at the expense of co-starring with Sharif, with the leading role of Sam Mackenna eventually going to Gregory Peck after Steve McQueen also turned it down.
“It was just my feeling that it was better to do a smaller script that at least had some merit,” he explained. As it turned out, his instincts were quite literally right on the money. Hang ‘Em High recouped its budget almost ten times over from cinemas, while Mackenna’s Gold bombed in the United States, even if it proved surprisingly popular in the Soviet Union, where it became one of the most popular American pictures ever released in the country.
Beyond that, it was a landmark moment for Eastwood’s career. Because Hang ‘Em High was “tacked onto the Leone trilogy, running foursomes of the picture all over the country,” people within Hollywood started realising, “We ought to use this guy, maybe he isn’t just a European deal.” He found Mackenna’s Gold to be a meritless movie, and it’s hard to argue that he didn’t make the right call, with the film he made after turning it down serving as his latest stepping stone toward the A-list.
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