‘The Man With No Name’ turns 50

Remember “The Spaghetti Western?” This is the 50th anniversary of the release of the first of three movies which became synonymous with the phrase: “The Man With No Name Trilogy.”

Actually I don’t think the trilogy most people think of when they hear that phrase was the first series of the Italian-made westerns that stressed pictorial realism, the parched country of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, and extreme, frequent, predictable violence. But mention “The Man With No Name Trilogy,” and you’ve kind of defined the genre right there. A youthful, brilliant Italian director named Sergio Leone was at the helm for all three pictures.

A young Clint Eastwood was that nameless man — his first appearance in “A Fistful of Dollars,” (1964), the initial entry in the series, set the tone. Tall, lean, with a handsome face and hawk-like eyes, he appears in a master shot as a dark speck on a mule, crossing the desert, stopping at an isolated farmhouse to water the mule — and himself — at a well. That very first close-up we see of him shows  him with his ever-present trademark skinny cigar, clutched in his teeth in the left side of his mouth (never the right side), his narrowed eyes calmly studying the landscape and a small child who runs from the well to the house when he sees — well,  in this first movie The Stranger is addressed as “Joe” by an older Mexican villager he later befriends. In the second in the series, “For A Few Dollars More,” (1965), he is referred to by one of the lead villains as “Manco,” which translates from Spanish as “one-handed” or  “one-armed.” And in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” the third of the trifecta and considered one of the best Westerns ever made, he has somehow gotten the nickname “Blondie.”

But no last name ever attaches itself to The Stranger. You don’t hear those nicknames often in the dialogue. Where did he come from? Where is he going? He is a walking enigma — always calm, soft-spoken, obviously intelligent by his actions. And — here’s what made the movies so popular — lightning fast with the six-gun that’s usually hidden under his serape.

Here we have no good-guy Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy, righting the wrongs of the frontier, marching the bad guys off to the hoosegow and saving the widow’s ranch.  No, Joe-Manco-Blondie isn’t into selfless altruism. In two of the three movies, he plays what we’d today call a bounty hunter — out to find wanted fugitives with a “dead or alive” price on their heads, and turn them in for the reward — usually dead. This comes after a blazing gunbattle with The Stranger in which he takes out three or four at a time with a like number of shots. Don’t mess with The Stranger — because he never misses. Especially when he fans the hammer of his gun to get his shots off faster.

In the third of the trilogy, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), The Stranger locks horns with Tuco, a middle-aged Mexican who is both comical and dangerous, and Angel Eyes, the tall, fearsome “Man in Black” who’ll hunt down and kill anyone for the right price. They’re all seeking a fabled $200,000 in cash which a dying Confederate soldier told Blondie was buried in a cemetery. But which grave? Only Blondie knows — and he’s very careful about what he divulges to the other two treasure hunters.

Eli Wallach does a star turn as Tuco, one of the most notable ones of his long career (he turned 98 last month, and is still performing). Angel Eyes is played by Lee Van Cleef, who must have appeared in at least 100 Westerns in his career, almost always as the bad guy. If the name doesn’t mean anything to you, you’d probably recognize him on sight: Tall, with a natural dignity about him, vaguely Oriental features and eyes, and an understated way of talking that leads one to believe he and The Stranger might have been older and younger brothers, in an earlier incarnation. But “Angel Eyes” is an ironic nickname for him. He looks more Satanic than anything else; possibly like the character Applegate in “Damn Yankees.” He LOOKS like the kind of man who would say calmly, “I’m being paid $5,000 to kill you. Nothing personal, you understand.” BANG!

The Stranger, A.K.A. Clint Eastwood, isn’t quite that cold-blooded. He doesn’t just walk up and shoot unarmed men, and he doesn’t harm women or children. He seems to prefer a trio or a quartet of baddies, always armed, at a time. Then there is a freeze frame — or what almost looks like one — of the bad guys and T.S., confronting each other silently, with close-ups of their eyes as they flit back and forth, trying to gauge the exact right second to do that most American of moves — the quick draw. The thugs always start to go for their irons first — it’s just a split second — and The Stranger beats them to the draw anyway, fanning the hammer of that hogleg and taking all three or four out — BAM-BAM-BAM! — without wasting a single round.

Amazing what these movie cowboys can do, that real people who have handled sidearms know is virtually impossible — like firing straight and true while fanning the hammer of your revolver with your gun hand. Unless you’re shooting at the broad side of a barn, you can forget about hitting anything — or should I say, “anyone”?

But that’s beside the point. Why spoil great scenes of violence with such minor quibbles? I can remember a guy who I worked with in the newsroom many years ago, who always said he didn’t like the old “B” Westerns because they weren’t realistic — “The cowboys didn’t sweat!” was the way he put it. Well, The Stranger and the other rough-hewn 19th Century cowboys and Mexicans in the trilogy sweat, all right. They all have several days’ growth of beard — they’d look right at home on late-night TV nowadays. Their clothing is dusty and dirty, and authentic looking. No Gene Autry-style embroidered shirt, well-tailored pants and monogrammed boots here. The actors look like the real thing, and so does the background — bleak desert, mostly, with dusty, dry cow towns scattered here and there. Leone is fond of long shots of a lone rider — usually Eastwood — just a dark speck on the horizon, making his way to his next destination.

But it isn’t always Eastwood. And that’s a big difference from the way feature movies are made nowadays. There are fairly long stretches in all three of the trilogy during which The Stranger does not appear. Of course, he always turns up again at the most unexpected moments. And each time he appears, that familiar “Man With No Name” theme music fills our ears — with the high-pitched up-and-down sound that says, “He’s BAAACK!”

Modern-day directors would have collective apoplexy at the suggestion that they film in such a way that the star was absent for minutes at a time. The current thinking is, “We’re paying this guy (or girl) a king’s ransom for this picture, so be sure he’s in every scene!”

And what of the women in the trilogy? Well, they’re mostly on the periphery. Several express romantic interest in the tall and handsome Stranger, but he seems not to take a whole lot of notice. Romance doesn’t play much of a role in the trilogy; the men are too busy making corpses out of bad guys, to have much time to be making love to attractive women.

This is a much different situation than that in a later Spaghetti Western of Eastwood’s, “High Plains Drifter.” In that one, The Stranger rides into town, unknown to anyone, and during the course of the movie beds at least two women (I haven’t seen it in a long time, but I THINK it was only two). This leads to one of the most delightful (to me, anyway) of The Stranger’s clever tricks played on bad guys. He’s asleep — supposedly — in his hotel room, after a liaison with a young lady who has departed, presumably satisfied. Several baddies have sneaked up to his room, armed with heavy clubs, bent on destroying this man who is making things hot for them in town. We see a shot of Eastwood, in bed, with the covers pulled up to his chin. He mumbles in his sleep, rolls over to his other side, and apparently sleeps on. The thugs enter his room, arrange themselves on either side of his bed, and when one says, “Take this, you son of a bitch!” or words to that effect, they begin pounding the sleeping Stranger unmercifully with the clubs.

Or rather, they THINK they are beating him. Cut to a shot out on the balcony. The Stranger is standing out there, fully dressed including hat, lighting the fuse on a swad of dynamite, which he then proceeds to throw back through the open window into the room. Exclamations of alarm and panic from the bad guys; sound of them trying to flee the room; then, BOOM! Problem solved.

Why do we take great pleasure in such scenes, as well as the ones from the trilogy? People are being shot full of holes, blown to smithereens, subjected to near-hanging experiences. Should we cheer and exult at that? After all, these are our fellow human beings. Have we no mercy?

Well, let me try to dissect that. Number One, these guys who are being killed are all, without exception, pieces of crap, in one way or another. They are men who would kill others — possibly even women and children — without a second thought if they thought it advantageous to themselves. They would kill The Stranger if he did not always beat them to the draw. To many of us, Joe-Manco-Blondie is simply ridding the world of vermin. If it was the 21st Century, they might well escape all punishment. If arrested and charged, they would have to be read their “rights.” They would have the right to a court-appointed attorney. If convicted of murder, and sentenced to death, their attorneys could tie the legal system in knots for 20, 30, 40 years, trying to prevent their execution. Witness Mumia Abu Jamal, the smug savage who killed a policeman in Philadelphia in 1981, and has had his death penalty commuted to life imprisonment.

Besides, these movies depict a different time, with different, simpler values; a frontier society where the law was often ineffective, or even absent. Where a man had to take care of himself. And where he would have laughed scornfully if told he had to apply to some government bureaucrat for permission to own a gun.

I think that’s one big reason that The Stranger’s identity is always kept vague, his background virtually unknown. He is a live, breathing man, of course. But more important, he’s a symbol of an America that we’ve lost as we’ve become more civilized. If he were a real person, and alive today, and he happened to be walking down the street in a big American city one evening, and suddenly saw a group of young black thugs approach a peaceable citizen, with one throwing a sucker punch that knocked the man out, do you think he’d do what most of us today would do? That is, pretend we didn’t see anything and get away as quickly as possible?

Or would he throw his serape up off his right shoulder, tell the thugs to stop in their tracks, and, if one seemed to be reaching toward a pocket for a weapon, say, “Go ahead! Make my day!”

I think we all know the answer to that. A few “Man With No Name” moments, well publicized, and our thug class would become remarkably tame and law-abiding.