Clint Eastwood has been convinced for decades that the Western is one of the few things that the United States can truly call its own. The irony is that it was filming in Almería under the orders of a director from Rome that revitalized and updated the genre. He was there, but he still thinks that there are few things as American as the Westen.
Original art. In recent statementsEastwood stated that “Honestly, America is not like Europe. There aren’t many original art forms here. Most of them are derived from European art forms. Aside from Western, jazz or blues, that’s all that’s really original.” And there is nothing disdainful in his words, although it may seem like it: Eastwood rather seems to vindicate the genuinely North American nature of the Western, although the evolution of the genre and the actor’s own filmography have made it clear that, at this point, it is one of the most bastard genres in the history of cinema.
Western, jazz and blues. In fact, we could dwell on the very precise enumeration of artistic forms that Eastwood considers purely North American. The blues emerged from the deep south and the experience of slavery. Jazz, from New Orleans, at a cross between the African heritage and the music that European immigrants brought from their countries. Finally, the Western speaks of the border in perpetual movement, of the clash between European “civilization” and what it finds in its path (mainly, natives who defend themselves as best they can).
They are three artistic forms born from tension, conflict and miscegenation, which explains a lot about the way of being of the country’s inhabitants. And yes, they are purely North American because all three are firmly rooted in the history and philosophy of an unusually young country.
An American in Italy. Before 1964, Eastwood was a television actor moderately known for the series ‘Rawhide’. But that year, Sergio Leone signed him for ‘A Fistful of Dollars’‘, an Italian-Spanish-German co-production filmed between the Cinecittà studios in Rome and the Cabo de Gata Natural Park in Almería. The success of the film launched the Dollar Trilogy, completed with ‘Death Had a Price’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, which established Eastwood as an international figure of the genre.
A new character. Eastwood was more than just a protagonist for the trilogy: he was a new type of gunslinger: John Ford and John Wayne’s cowboys were moral heroes, protecting the weak and serving a code of honor. The Nameless Man of the Dollar Trilogy acts for money, switches sides without problems, and his moral compass is arid and often indecipherable, like the landscape of Almería.
Eastwood in America. The actor understood that vision and when he returned to his country, he modulated it to his liking, with westerns that are not a nostalgic tribute to the classics of the genre, but rather a dissection that takes into account what Leone and his many imitators contributed to the western. ‘Hell of Cowards’, ‘The Pale Horseman’ or, above all, ‘Unforgiven’ examine the violence of the West without glamor or redemption. “Killing is not right and it is not romantic,” he came to say.
The recognition. It is worth remembering that ‘Unforgiven’ won the Oscar for Best Film and Best Director in 1993. Before it, only ‘Cimarrón’ in 1931 and ‘Dances with Wolves’ in 1990 had won. That is to say, for the film industry to finally recognize the importance of the genre, it had to undertake a long journey of reinvention and self-observation in which the European vision had a lot to do with it.
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