Four Movies on TV: Part 1

I had an interesting "movie night" at home the other night. All from my cable-provided television. First I caught the ending of Clint Eastwood's first spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars. Then I watched, for the very first time, Die Hard: Bruce Willis's foray into motion pictures after his success in TV's romantic detective series Moonlighting. After Die Hard, I switched to Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's epic science fiction collaboration 2001: A Space Odyssey. And finally, I began watching the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, which starred Roger Moore as British spy Bond and Barbara Bach as his Soviet partner/rival. It was a case of being glued to my chair all night.

Although Eastwood's A Fistful of Dollars predated his The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by about four years, it was the latter that I saw first, and not until the early 1980s at that. It was after the 11 pm local news, and I had to be at work at 10 the next morning. But my local station was showing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly right after the news and I said to myself, I'll just watch this movie and go to bed when it's over around 1:30 or so. Well, the movie dragged on and on and on. And on and on. With all of the commercials thrown in, it wasn't until 3:30 when the movie ended. And I wasn't too happy the next day trying to stay awake! But here's the point: that movie, as quirky and flawed as it was, made such a deep impression on me that I couldn't turn off the TV. And it still remains as one of my all-time favorites.

A Fistful of Dollars is much more compact, but the main character, the soft-spoken sharpshooting no-nonsense Man With No Name portrayed by Eastwood, dominates the movie (whereas Eli Wallach tended to dominate The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). This film introduced to the western genre of movies the notion of the "anti-hero", someone with many character flaws (Eastwood's character killed with no remorse and was a supreme manipulator), mixed with elements of compassion, generosity and loyalty. In other words, the anti-hero concept sought to make the western "hero" more compatible with people as they really were instead of simple goodie-goodie superheroes (which John Wayne had worked into a successful formula for decades). It worked so well for Clint Eastwood that he carried his anti-hero persona into other genres like comedy (Every Which Way But Loose) and his Harry Callahan crime series. He has only improved over the years.

One side note: over the years, I have enjoyed seeing how different actors Eastwood used in his films kept appearing in them and what roles they played.

Next segment of this article (at a future date): Bruce Willis in Die Hard.