WHY THE MAN WITH NO NAME NEARLY WASN'T CALLED CLINT

His first casting as a leading man in Spaghetti Western classic A Fistful Of Dollars made Eastwood a cinematic icon. But 60 years on, as the film is re-released on Blu-ray, why director Sergio Leone wanted someone else to play his charismatic (and taciturn) drifter

- By Tom Fordy

IT WAS to become a career-defining role for the not-yet-iconic Clint Eastwood, enjoying his first outing as a leading man, and make the name of director Sergio Leone, who had made the switch from sword-and-sandals films to the Spaghetti Western. But the Italian didn’t want Eastwood to play the Man With No Name ~ the poncho-wearing, cigar-gnawing drifter who rode into town in 1964’s A Fistful Of Dollars, then returned a year later in For A Few Dollars More and once again in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly in 1966.

Leone ‘had originally wanted Henry Fonda, James Coburn or Charles Bronson. But the established stars were either too expensive or uninterested in Leone’s dirt-cheap western, an Italian-Spanish-German co-production with a terribly translated screenplay and hand-me-down costumes.

Eastwood was primarily a TV actor at the time, playing clean-cut cowpoke Rowdy Yates in Rawhide. Leone was persuaded to watch an episode, but couldn’t imagine Eastwood as his gunslinging anti-hero.

“This man, with a vacant look on his face, in an unwatchable film about cows?” Leone later said about Eastwood. But Clint was affordable and keen — mainly because he’d never visited Europe before. Eastwood’s subsequent casting is what film historian Henry Blyth now describes as “a happy accident”.

The Man With No Name character transformed him into a cinematic icon and — combined with Leone’s intense, close quarters direction and the wailing, off-kilter score from’ legendary composer Ennio Morricone - made Spaghetti Westerns (so-called because they were made in Europe, often co-productions between Italy and Spain) a cultural phenomenon, too.