Today it is considered one of the best Westerns of all time, but at the time even Clint Eastwood did not believe in its success.

After signing on to the success of Colossus of Rhodes in 1961, and then directing the sequel to Robert Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomorrah, Sergio Leone turned his attention to the Western, even though the genre was in progressive decline outside the Atlantic. .

It will be a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which he directed under the pseudonym Bob Robertson. Leone then established himself as a champion of a new style, the “spaghetti” western, which sought to explode the codes of traditional westerns, parodying typical situations, favoring slow and overstretched scenes, using close-ups (colts, faces, looks) as if capturing landscapes of wildness and In a picaresque story mixed with cruelty.

For a Fistful of Dollars was a bitter legal battle in the United States, at the end of which Kurosawa won the rights to distribute Leone’s film throughout the Far East, where the film was a huge success, as was the part. profit in the world.

As a result of this legal battle, the first part of the Dollar Trilogy arrived on American soil in February 1967, 18 months after its release in Europe. The film helped catapult the career of Clint Eastwood, whose rise began with the Western series Rawhide in 1959.

“I thought it was going to be a big fiasco.”

The man who went down to posterity as “The Man With No Name” was nevertheless hesitant to act in Leone’s film. In fact, Clint Eastwood was not the first choice to play the character. It was Eric Fleming, the co-star of the TV series Rawhide, who was offered the role. Fleming was a promising star at the time and found the role too risky for him, so he turned it down.

Richard Harrison, a B-movie actor, was considered a second time and also declined, but offered Leone another name: Clint Eastwood. In Filmed interview from August 2003Clint was only recounting his beginnings under the auspices of Leone.

Explained how strange the idea of ​​shooting a western in Italy was to him at first and how he thought it would fail. Then he heard that the filming would take place in Spain. “I thought it was going to be a huge bust, but I’m going to travel to Italy and Spain. I’ve never been to any of those places, so it’s going to be a great experience. It was a Western. A version, a remake of the Western Yojimbo, and I’ve always loved Yojimbo, so this is what inspired me to participate in the project.

A happy and wise decision, which posterity has taken responsibility for ratifying, much to the delight of moviegoers.