by Daniel Garcia
Daily Lobo
I must confess that I thoroughly enjoy spaghetti Westerns.
As a kid, I found old Westerns to be long and boring, so I didn't familiarize myself with those made by Italian directors until a friend loaned me a copy of Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," the final film in his "The Man With No Name" trilogy. It, of course, stars Clint Eastwood, whose archetype of the lone gunfighter has had a huge influence on the arts, including Stephen King's The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King's Magnum Opus. However, the character that truly caught my attention was Angel Eyes, played by Lee Van Cleef.
Van Cleef's presence on screen is nothing short of amazing. His gaunt and angular features combined with his persistent gaze made him a favored bad guy by casting agents back in the day. His villains' movements are slow and deliberate, but the tension behind them is so great that one feels as if he could run from zero to 60 with the drop of his 10-gallon. Rather than run, his characters riddle their enemies with bullet holes.
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I was easily drawn to the preceding films in the trilogy, "A Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More." Van Cleef appears only in the latter as a protagonist. In spite of this, his ease and confidence in extremely tense situations still translate effectively. I recall a scene early in the film at a saloon where he casually lights a match on a ne'er-do-well's facial stubble. He then completely ignores his aggravated newfound enemy while he uses the lit match to ignite his pipe tobacco for several moments. After engaging in his brief but ill-timed burning ritual, he calmly turns his attention to the flustered fellow. A fatality ensues.
I'm sure that much of Van Cleef's on-screen persona was heightened by his work with Leone, who was known for emphasizing a slow pacing that simmered with anticipation in the long and drawn-out moments before the violence erupted in the sun-washed desert. It's known that Leone was heavily influenced by samurai films - especially by Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," whose copyright he infringed when he copied it too closely in "A Fistful of Dollars" - which frequently exhibit a similar emphasis on the buildup that culminates in brief and extremely violent katana slashing.
Van Cleef went on to play the lead role in his own Western trilogy called "Sabata" in the years that ensued. Later, near the end of his life in the '80s, Van Cleef was cast as a ninja in a short-lived television series called "The Master." This was a kind of circle in that Van Cleef got his start in Westerns that were based on Japanese movies.
Van Cleef, who died in 1989, remains one of the greatest villains
in film.
