Tough and Heroic: Quentin Tarantino names his favourite Clint Eastwood movie
The beloved American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino toys with genre as it’s a bouncy ball on a sunny day. Indeed, there seems to be absolutely no limits to the director’s creativity, using genre as a foundation point to explore his own pulp stories about stylish jewellery thieves, vengeful Nazi hunters or liberated Hollywood stuntmen, with each one of his stories breathing with an organic life of their own.
While his taste for violence is well-known, Tarantino is also rather fond of the western genre, likely for its stringently defined rules and iconography. Featuring cowboys, revolvers, horses and intimidating saloons in epic tales about great American justice, the iconic Hollywood western can be easily identified, and thus, its world can be easily explored and its rules upended.
Only two of his movies, 2012’s Django Unchained and 2015’s Hateful Eight, have been strict westerns, but aspects of the all-American genre crop up all over the remainder of his filmography, including 2003’s Kill Bill saga. When you look at his protagonists, even more western iconography arises, with characters such as Samuel L Jackson’s Jules Winnfield being reminiscent of such genre icons as Clint Eastwood.
This is no mistake either, with Tarantino being a considerable fan of the influential star who paved his own way through the industry in the late 20th century. In fact, one of Eastwood’s earliest hits would go on to become his most defining cinematic character, playing the mysterious ‘Man With No Name’ in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western trilogy, which started in 1964 with A Fistful of Dollars and ended in 1966 with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Speaking about quite how stylish and slick Eastwood was as a character actor, Tarantino claims, “You need no more proof than to watch his big introduction scene,” making reference to A Fistful of Dollars.
Continuing, he added: “When he kills Baxter’s men right at the beginning with one of the coolest, badass fucking speeches in the history of action cinema…That is why a hero was born that day”.
But, as the director more insightfully notes, “During this time, western heroes weren’t sexy. They didn’t look cool. They looked badass, and they looked tough, and they looked heroic, but they didn’t look cool. They didn’t look sexy,” with Eastwood very much changing the genre in that respect, giving Tarantino a template on which to base many of his own protagonists on.
Yet, A Fistful of Dollars is not Tarantino’s favourite Eastwood western, with this prize going to the aforementioned The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, co-starring Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef. Regularly naming the film an all-time favourite of his, when asked exactly why he still holds it in such high regard, he responded: “Because it’s the greatest cinematic achievement in the history of cinema”.
Take a look at the clip below to see how The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had a direct influence on Tarantino’s 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
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