Clint Eastwood (Paperback)

Description

Tall, laconic, and lethal, the ruthless gunslinger known as The Man with No Name was Clint Eastwood's first great screen persona.  Appearing in three spaghetti Westerns - A Fistfull of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) - this brutal antihero was an iconic image carefully cosntructed by Easwood and director Sergio Leone.  First, Eastwood's 6-footm 4-inch height made him a towering presence; the actor notes that he has been compared to a small redwood tree.  Then the squinty eyes, grizzled face, and ragged poncho gave him a mean look, not to mention the thin Mexican cigars that Eastwood hated to smoke and that put him in a sour frame of mind.  Leone advised the actor, "Don't just do something, stand there," and Eastwood's tense stillness conveyed the sense of a gathering rage about to explode from his Colt .45.  Eastwood cut his own dialogue to create an omnipresent sense of menace - "He let the air speak louder than the words," said Quincy Jones - and when he did speak, Eastwood hissed his threats through clenched teeth.  The film's producers were initially skeptical.  As Eastwood reports, they said, "Christ, this guy isn't doing anything.  He isn't saying anything.  He doesn't even have a name!  And that cigar is just sitting there burning."  But audiences all over the world responded to the powerful mystique conveyed by Eastwood's minimalist approach to character creation.