The last time Clint Eastwood saw Sergio Leone was in 1988. His Charlie Parker biopic, Bird, had just been released in Italy, to great acclaim, and he was visiting Rome on a press tour. While he was there, the great director called him. They hadn’t seen each other in years, not since the late Sixties, and for a long while Eastwood thought they’d fallen out.
After three lucrative Spaghetti Westerns, Eastwood had bowed out of a fourth collaboration, called Once Upon a Time in the West, fearing the horse-opera boom would bottom out and take his burgeoning career with it. Leone was furious, but downplayed his disappointment; he later claimed, petulantly, that the actor only had two expressions anyway: "With or without a hat".
Yet that day Leone wanted to bury the hatchet. They went for a long lunch, with Lina Wertmüller, the director of Swept Away, and when Eastwood asked what he was doing next, Leone replied that he was still working on an idea for a film about Leningrad, a project he’d talked about while making The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 1966. He just never could pull it together, noted Eastwood.
If there had ever been any animosity between them, though, it faded that day. Leone, a big, proud man in his prime, wanted to put all that in the past; he was reaching out. "It was almost like he was saying goodbye," remembers Eastwood, his voice soft and clear, not at all like the gravelly growl of Dirty Harry or Gran Torino‘s Walt Kowalski. "Like he was feeling vulnerable." A few months later, in April 1989, Leone died of a coronary. He was 59.
April 22, 2009
