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Who Played the Man with No Name, and why did the actor choose to play this role? Clint Eastwood played the Man with No Name to critical acclaim. In the Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western Trilogy, Clint Eastwood portrayed the Man with No Name antihero role in the film A Fistful of Dollars. The other two movies in the trilogy are For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Clint Eastwood signed on to play the role during his break from filming the Western TV series Rawhide and worked with Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone to create the character. Eastwood was given credit for the character’s iconic look and style. Many of the clothing pieces were taken from his own wardrobe. Eastwood also omitted much of his dialogue to make his character more mysterious. Eastwood is a lifelong non-smoker but decided to smoke for this movie.
Casting the lead role was a challenge, though. There were many worthy candidates, including Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn. Henry Fonda was too big of a star, Charles Bronson hated the script, and James Coburn wanted too much money so all there were out. Ultimately, the role went to Clint Eastwood because Sergio Leone had very little money and Eastwood was all he could afford.
Clint had a youthful look but he made some adjustments to ensure that the character had a more mature and grown-up appearance. While Eastwood’s character is portrayed as an outlaw, his poncho stays a dark, unclean color.
Kurosawa’s groundbreaking movie Yojimbo was the film that most influenced Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western film A Fistful of Dollars. Clint Eastwood’s character in the film shares many similarities with the lead character, Sanjuro Kuwabatake, in Yojimbo. Sanjuro is a wandering ronin and master swordsman who is drawn into a gang war while Clint plays a wandering gunfighter who is selling false information to sheriff John Baxter and the three Rojo brothers.
The actor also plays his role in an unpretentious manner, which would soon become his trademark as evidenced by his roles in movies such as Dirty Harry, Unforgiven, and In the Line of Fire. Eastwood modeled his character on the idea of a modern hero, but one with moral ambiguity.
The first Man with No Name movie, A Fistful of Dollars, broke box office records in Italy after it was released in September. It ended up making a surprising $4.4 million during its entire run in Italian theaters, which was the most money any Italian film made up to that point.
The distributors delayed the release of the movie in the United States because they thought that Akira Kurosawa would file a copyright infringement lawsuit. It did not do as well in North America, only making $14.5 million in the United States and Canada.
It has become an instant classic for action fans. Critics loved the film for its plot and morally ambiguous characters, which prompted the film industry to produce more films in that genre.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is about three men who are trying to acquire a cache of gold buried at a cemetery. This movie takes place during the American Civil War (1861–1865) so it is considered a prequel to the other two films. Clint’s character, Blondie, slowly acquires the pieces of his Man with No Name outfit during this movie.
Clint Eastwood squared off against one of his most formidable adversaries in this movie, the iconic Angel Eyes character played by Lee Van Cleef. By the end of the movie, Blondie kills Angel Eyes in a duel and ends up with the gold. Later in his career, Lee Van Cleef would appear in films such as Death Rides a Horse (1966) and The Big Gundown (1966). Later in his career, Lee Van Cleef would go on to star in the Sabata trilogy (1969-71).
