Clint Eastwood starred in three loosely connected westerns for director Sergio Leone: “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (1966). All three are critically adored and held up by critics as some of the best westerns ever produced. Leone and Eastwood nearly made one more western in the ’60s: “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
Leone described the film to Eastwood, who couldn’t understand one of the script’s more complicated moments. He also didn’t like how Leone envisioned the movie as an ensemble piece, meaning Eastwood would have to share top billing. He passed on “Once Upon a Time in the West,” and Eastwood’s role went to Charles Bronson.
By 1984, Leone realized that he didn’t care for Eastwood’s stoic acting style, on display in those ’60s westerns. “If you think about it, they don’t even belong to the same profession. Robert De Niro throws himself into this or that role, putting on a personality the way someone else might put on his coat, naturally and with elegance, while Clint Eastwood throws himself into a suit of armor and lowers the visor with a rusty clang,” Leone told American Film (via Scraps from the Loft) in 1984. “Look at him carefully. Eastwood moves like a sleepwalker between explosions and hails of bullets, and he is always the same — a block of marble.”
