An actor who, a priori, did not have to say any dialogue, fired four shots and uttered a phrase that sixty years later is still quoted in all Western stories. But that phrase wasn’t in any script. What’s more, the actor who pronounced it was not even the protagonist of a legendary spaghetti western work: ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.
What’s happening. Tuco (Eli Wallach) is taking a bath when an old enemy surprises him with a revolver. Tuco shoots through the bathwater, cloudy with dust and soap, gets up and blurts out: “When you have to shoot, you shoot, you don’t talk.” According to Wallach himself, the scene I had no dialogue; It was he himself who improvised the phrase on the spot, and both Sergio Leone and the rest of the team laughed so hard that they kept it in the final cut. It is significant that the phrase was only uttered on two occasions: one during filming, in 1966, and another a year later, when dubbing the scene in the studio.
How it got there. The actor used to say that Leone had signed him for his role as the bandit Calvera in ‘The Magnificent Seven’. However, what actually convinced Leone was a specific moment from ‘The Won of the West’, from 1962. Wallach recalled that his agent told him about “an Italian director who has seen your Western films”, to which he responded skeptically that he did not believe that Italian Western existed. However, he changed his mind when Leone showed him a sequence from ‘Death Had a Price’.
All yours. Once he won the role, Leone let him do practically whatever he wanted with Tuco: the straw hat, the leather knee pads, the gesture of crossing himself at full speed several times in a row, it was all Wallach’s idea. Also he improvised almost the entire armory scenedespite having no idea how to assemble a revolver, and the real bewilderment of the clerk who was explaining the parts to him was captured on camera.
Eastwood’s jealousy. The star of what would be the third film in the Dollar Trilogy worked in a much more contained manner, and his final presence on screen was much more dependent on editing. The script distributed the narrative weight between three characters for the first time, and he was not happy about that. In fact, Clint Eastwood he was close to turning down the roleuncomfortable with Tuco having more footage and better lines than him. He negotiated $250,000 and 10% of the profits in the United States before accepting.
The film would end up grossing more than 38 million dollars with a budget of just 1.2 million, a success that consolidated both Eastwood’s status as an international star and Leone as a leading author of the genre. However, his fears were more than justified: decades later, it is Wallach’s improvisations that are most frequently cited when discussing the film. That’s what the classics are: untamable.
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