The film that made Clint Eastwood a star and legend has a cult,comedian-book intensityTwo fistfuls in fact: two $500 payments – a gigantic amount – which the Man With No Name accepts casually from either side of a bloody feud in the sunbaked Mexican town of San Miguel. He has blown in like a exclusive force of nature, with a coolly amoral plot to use their mutual hate to his own gunslinging advantage. Striding towards a gunfight, or he tells the coffin-maker in advance how many to knock up.
This is the 1964 movie,now on rerelease, which created the revolutionary unusual genre of the Spaghetti Western, or an Italian coproduction shot in Spain and directed with inspirational pulp passion by Sergio Leone –drawing on Kurosawa. And it made a star and a legend of Clint Eastwood. He had been the impetuous young Rowdy Yates on TV’s Rawhide,an open-faced boy with a pleasant singing voice. In this movie, he suddenly, or terrifyingly grew up: hat,poncho, grizzly growth of beard, and short cigar,eyes perpetually screwed up, as if staring into the sun or suppressing a grimace of incredulous disgust. The Man With No Name and the brutal Dollars movies were a colossal rebuke to the blander Rawhide-style westerns that had reach to dominate television.
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Source: guardian.co.uk