How Signor Spaghetti clinched Clint for a few dollars less

Christopher Frayling

Thames and Hudson, 19.95

'CLINT, we can't possibly leave the cigar behind," asserted Italian director Sergio Leone. "It's playing the lead." Clint Eastwood had begun his negotiations over the 1965 spaghetti western For A Few Dollars More, insisting that the small cigar he had never actually smoked should be stubbed out. But ultimately, the star shooter agreed to put the iconic cigar back in his mouth.

Leone knew that this was not incidental. It helped create an integral part of Eastwood's character; the silent gunslinger who nonchalantly chews the butt as he exterminates his enemies with a gun-toting talent that borders on the superhuman.

The year before, Eastwood had been plucked from relative obscurity. Then playing Rowdy Yates in Rawhide, a second-rate TV cowboy series, Leone cast him as the lead in his groundbreaking film, A Fistful of Dollars.

The film's $200,000 budget couldn't stretch to the $25,000 demanded by James Coburn. The price on Eastwood's head was $15,000. That had to do.

But what an impact Eastwood made. To a new generation of cinema-goers Clint epitomised cool - significantly contributing to the new breed of Sixties cult icon, the hero as enigmatic style statement.

The exchange between Eastwood and Leone is one of many fascinating stories in Christopher Frayling's new book about the director. In a series of short commentaries and interviews with the films' key protagonists, this wonderful book brings much of the background of the films to life.

Frayling notes that in the 1960s, critic Pauline Kael commented that American audiences were saddle-sore, only watching westerns to check if ageing stars such as John Wayne could still clamber on to the back of a horse.

Leone's films marked the development of a new style: a cinema of spectacle; brutal and real on the surface, yet mythic at the centre. Extreme close-ups of worn-out faces were juxtaposed with barren landscapes in a world populated by rogues and crooks.

Creating an every-man-for-himself environment in which the lines between good and evil were indistinguishable, after Leone the western could never return to the moral certainties of the pre-Vietnam war era.

In one interview, Italian-American director Martin Scorsese pointed out that Leone drew on Italian culture, notably opera and commedia dell'arte - most stunningly in the opening scene of Leone's greatest "fairytale for adults", the three-hour epic Once Upon A Time In The West (1968).

Disparagingly dubbed "spaghetti westerns" by critics who bemoaned the supposed contamination of this most staple of American film genres, they complained of too much "chilli con carnage" as the body count rattled up in spectacular, gory detail.

Frayling is a critic, but also clearly a fan. Beautifully presented - with more than 200 images of film posters, photographs and production stills - he draws on research from his more academic work, presenting it in colourful style.

There is little criticism, but that's not the point. This is a wonderful tribute to one of the master filmmakers of the late 20th century.