The western Clint Eastwood hated with a passion: “Wasn’t a great script and they obviously felt so, too”
Following several uncredited movie appearances, Clint Eastwood established himself as a western star with his leading role in the television series Rawhide, which would soon lead him to a project that would catapult him to Hollywood fame. Within a few years, he’d landed the main part in the Dollars trilogy by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, and the pair’s collaborations would become staples of the western genre.
In fact, A Fistful of Dollars is largely considered the first ever spaghetti western, bringing more violence and nihilism to a genre that was well-known for being quintessentially patriotic and heroic. Forget John Wayne, there was a new cowboy in town, and he soon became a cinematic icon. With The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the final instalment in the trilogy, Eastwood rose to even further acclaim, with the movie going down as a seminal piece of cinema which has inspired countless filmmakers in its wake.
Eastwood’s Dollars trilogy changed the face of westerns, a genre that was becoming less popular by this point. From here on out, westerns were much grittier, although Eastwood wasn’t afraid to criticise the ones he found to be poorly made.
In the book Clint Eastwood by Christopher Frayling, the actor revealed a ‘70s western that he thought was bad, even though it had all of the promise of becoming a success. “I don’t blame all that on the Western as much as on the material . . . that [Jack] Nicholson and [Marlon] Brando thing, The Missouri Breaks, for instance, was ridiculous,” he said.
Released in 1976, the Arthur Penn-directed movie saw two of Hollywood’s biggest stars team up for a tale of revenge and vigilantes, but it was a major critical and commercial bomb. Eastwood added, “It wasn’t a good script and they obviously felt so, too—why else would a guy dress up like his own grandmother? Brando obviously thought there’s nothing here, I might as well enjoy myself. So he’s going to go off and screw off somewhere. I think that if he’d truly believed it was a great piece of material and that he was going to contribute to something that might be a fine film, he might have thought otherwise. I like to think that, anyway.”
The movie was widely criticised for missing the mark, with the performances given by Brando and Nicholson paling in comparison to their recent endeavours, which included movies like The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Chinatown. Not every film can be a success, it seems, even if you get two of the most acclaimed actors (and recent Oscar winners) to be the leading stars.
It appears that Brando’s lack of professionalism, which became increasingly common as he got older, aided his lukewarm performance. He reportedly engaged in lots of strange behaviour while filming, including exposing his behind, and was generally erratic and chaotic as he moulded the character to suit his desires. This was one of the reasons critics were so divided on his rather unhinged performance – it seemed as though he wasn’t sticking to the script.
Evidently, Eastwood disliked more than just the performances. In his opinion, the script simply wasn’t good enough, resulting in its rather tragic failure.
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