Summary
- Sergio Leone revolutionized western cinema with iconic villains like Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West.
- Lee Van Cleef’s Colonel Douglas Mortimer gave the Man with No Name a formidable partner in For a Few Dollars More.
- Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West, played by Charles Bronson, brought a new antihero dynamic to Leone’s films.
From the Man with No Name to Once Upon a Time in the West’s Frank, spaghetti western pioneer Sergio Leone is responsible for some of the western genre’s greatest villains and antiheroes. Leone blazed the trail for Italian cinema’s brutal, bloody, darkly comedic take on the American western with A Fistful of Dollars, his westernized remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Leone followed this up with two sequels – For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – to complete the Dollars trilogy and solidify his place as one of the world’s greatest western directors.
Leone also helmed an underrated spaghetti western gem, Duck, You Sucker!, and offered up a definitive treatise on the Wild West with his breathtaking epic Once Upon a Time in the West. Leone’s spaghetti westerns are renowned for their moral ambiguity, their uncompromising depiction of violence, and their operatic filming style, complemented beautifully by Ennio Morricone’s iconic scores. But Leone didn’t just bring captivating visuals to the western genre; he also created some of its most iconic characters, like Once Upon a Time in the West’s Harmonica and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’s Tuco.
Sergio Leone: 10 Best Scenes From His Spaghetti Westerns
Sergio Leone defined the spaghetti western with the Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West. These are the greatest scenes from his westerns.
10 Colonel Douglas Mortimer
Played by Lee Van Cleef in For a Few Dollars More
The first sequel to Leone’s pioneering spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, shook up the formula by giving the Man with No Name a partner. In A Fistful of Dollars, he was a lone wolf playing by his own rules, looking for criminals to bring to justice, but in For a Few Dollars More, he’s part of a team. Colonel Douglas Mortimer is a fellow bounty hunter going after the same targets. When they realize that neither of them can vanquish the villains alone, they reluctantly join forces.
Lee Van Cleef shares a spectacular on-screen dynamic with Clint Eastwood in the role of Mortimer, which keeps the narrative engaging from start to finish. At first, they can hardly stand each other. But by the end of the movie, they’ve developed a mutual respect for one another.
9 Jill McBain
Played by Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West
Claudia Cardindale plays Jill, who arrives in Sweetwater supposedly to marry the murdered Brett McBain.
Leone rarely included any major female characters in his movies – it’s one of the only blind spots in an otherwise near-perfect filmography – but he did feature a female lead in the sprawling ensemble of Once Upon a Time in the West. Claudia Cardindale plays Jill, who arrives in Sweetwater supposedly to marry the murdered Brett McBain. However, as it turns out, she already married him a month earlier, making her the sole heir of the slaughtered family’s fortune.
Jill spends the rest of the movie being targeted by Frank’s henchmen while seeking retribution for the death of her late husband and his family. This creates an interesting dynamic with Harmonica, because they both have a vendetta against Frank and both want to see him suffer. Along the way, a touching friendship blossoms between the two.
8 Juan Miranda
Played by Rod Steiger in Duck, You Sucker!
Leone’s final western, Duck, You Sucker!, is also his most overlooked. It takes place during the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s and stars Rod Steiger as an unscrupulous Mexican outlaw named Juan Miranda. Juan is different from Leone’s other gunslinging antiheroes in that he’s not a lone wolf; he’s a father. His merry band of outlaws is mostly made up of his own children.
Juan’s arc in Duck, You Sucker! is similar to Han Solo’s arc in the original Star Wars movie. At the beginning of the movie, Juan couldn’t care less about the revolution, but after meeting somebody with a vested interest in the resistance – a Fenian revolutionary named John H. Mallory – he eventually comes around to seeing the importance of the revolution. This rousing journey is one of Leone’s best dramatic storylines, with a real sense of organic character development.
7 Manuel “Cheyenne” Gutiérrez
Played by Jason Robards in Once Upon a Time in the West
Cheyenne is a local bandit caught in the crossfire between Harmonica and Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West. Cheyenne and his men are framed for the movie’s opening murders and spend the rest of the film trying to clear their names. He has a $5,000 bounty on his head, so he’s eager to get the hit called off and place responsibility on the true guilty party.
This could’ve easily been a forgettable character who exists purely to pad out the conflict between the main hero and villain and never makes much of an impression in his own right. But that’s where it comes in handy to cast a screen legend like Jason Robards. Robards, the leading interpreter of the works of playwright Eugene O’Neill, brought a lot of depth to Cheyenne’s character.
6 Angel Eyes
Played by Lee Van Cleef in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Angel Eyes is the eponymous “The Bad” in
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
.
Angel Eyes is the eponymous “The Bad” in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. “The Good” and “The Ugly” aren’t particularly good guys, but they look a lot better compared to “The Bad.” Angel Eyes is first introduced interrogating a former Confederate soldier named Stevens for the location of the gold he stole. Angel Eyes’ duplicitous, self-serving ways are established right off the bat as he kills Stevens, even though Stevens gave up the information he wanted, and then he kills his own employer as he decides to seek the gold for himself.
Lee Van Cleef played this part spectacularly. He’s one of the staples of the spaghetti western subgenre, perfectly attuned to the unique brutality of Leone’s Wild West, and his menacing glare was ideal for a villainous role. Even his name, Angel Eyes, is hilariously ironic, because he’s devilishly devious.
5 John H. Mallory
Played by James Coburn in Duck, You Sucker!
Whereas Juan doesn’t care about the revolution at first in Duck, You Sucker!, his partner John H. Mallory is all-in on the revolution from the get-go. Revolution is in his blood. Not only is John a Fenian revolutionary; he’s also an explosives expert – and a notorious wanted man. After being caught killing British troops in Ireland, John fled to Mexico, where he ended up joining another revolution.
John has a lot in common with the Man with No Name, drifting from one locale to the next and seeking justice along the way, but on a geopolitical scale. The Man with No Name takes down street gangs and hired guns, but John takes down political forces. As John inspires Juan to get involved in the revolution, he inspires the audience to get behind it as well.
4 Harmonica
Played by Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West
After finishing the Dollars trilogy, Leone left behind the Man with No Name and gave Once Upon a Time in the West a new antihero: Harmonica. Played with the perfect ice-cold stare by Death Wish’s Charles Bronson, Harmonia is so-called because he plays his harmonica right before he guns down one of his enemies. Much like the Man with No Name, Harmonica is softly spoken and doesn’t like to open up about his past. Instead, the film relies on flashbacks to fill in his tragic backstory.
When he finally tracks down the big bad, Frank, one last flashback reveals what he did. When Harmonica was a young boy, Frank hanged his older brother and forced him to support his dying brother on his shoulders. Before departing, Frank stuffed the harmonica in the younger brother’s mouth, at which point the younger brother swore revenge. A symbolic totem like this harmonica is a classic way to make a character iconic.
3 Tuco
Played by Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The titular “The Ugly” in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is Tuco, played brilliantly by Eli Wallach. Tuco provides this blood-soaked spaghetti western epic with some much-needed comic relief, and Wallach’s comedic style lined up beautifully with Leone’s dark sense of humor. Out of the eponymous trio, “The Ugly” is the underdog, and arguably the most likable one of the bunch.
Throughout the middle section of the movie, the Man with No Name reluctantly travels with Tuco as they both seek the stolen Confederate gold. In these scenes, Tuco and the Man with No Name develop a hysterical on-screen dynamic, with Clint Eastwood playing the “straight man” opposite Wallach’s comic antics. Tuco is so memorable and iconic that he went on to become the namesake of an equally unpredictable and darkly comedic villain in Breaking Bad.
2 Frank
Played by Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West
Arguably the most ingenious piece of casting in Leone’s filmography was casting Henry Fonda against type to play Frank, the sadistic villain of Once Upon a Time in the West. Frank is easily the most diabolical villain in any of Leone’s movies. In his introductory scene, Frank massacres the entire McBain family – kids and all – making him a truly hateable baddie right out of the gate.
Fonda was one of the most renowned movie stars in the world.
It was a stroke of genius to cast Fonda as this scene-stealing western movie villain. At the time, Fonda was one of the most renowned movie stars in the world, and he was famous for his clean-cut on-screen image as a righteous hero. It would’ve been shocking for an audience to see any grown man murder children in a movie in 1968, but it made it particularly shocking that that man was Henry Fonda.
1 The Man With No Name
Played by Clint Eastwood in the Dollars trilogy
Leone created the quintessential western movie gunslinger with the iconic antihero of his Dollars trilogy, the Man with No Name. Clint Eastwood’s grizzled on-screen persona can be traced back to his unforgettable turn as the Man with No Name. All the other gunfighters he’s played over the years have been variations on A Fistful of Dollars’ stern-faced protagonist. He’s a man of few words who tends to let his bullets do the talking. He’s a wanderer who drifts from town to town in search of injustices to fix and fortunes to seize.
The Man with No Name has since been used as a template for ice-cool gunslinger characters. Everyone from Boba Fett to Roland Deschain has taken influence from the Man with No Name. He’s remembered as the defining character of the Sergio Leone oeuvre.
