Clint Eastwood almost missed out on most iconic role in 1964 classic

It was to become a career-defining role for the not-yet-iconic Clint Eastwood, enjoying his first outing as a leading man, and make the name of director Sergio Leone, who had made the switch from sword-and-sandals films to the Spaghetti Western. But the Italian didn't want Eastwood to play the Man With No Name - the poncho-wearing, cigar-gnawing drifter who rode into town in 1964's A Fistful Of Dollars, then returned a year later in For A Few Dollars More and once again in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly in 1966.

Leone had originally wanted Henry Fonda, James Coburn or Charles Bronson. But the established stars were either too expensive or uninterested in Leone's dirt-cheap western, an Italian-Spanish-German co-production with a terribly-translated screenplay and hand-me-down costumes.

Eastwood was primarily a TV actor at the time, playing clean-cut cowpoke Rowdy Yates in Rawhide. Leone was persuaded to watch an episode, but couldn't imagine Eastwood as his gunslinging anti-hero.

"This man, with a vacant look on his face, in an unwatchable film about cows?" Leone later said about Eastwood. But Clint was affordable and keen - mainly because he'd never visited Europe before. Eastwood's subsequent casting is what film historian Henry Blyth now describes as "a happy accident".

The Man With No Name character transformed him into a cinematic icon and - combined with Leone's intense, close quarters direction and the wailing, off-kilter score from legendary composer Ennio Morricone - made Spaghetti Westerns (so-called because they were made in Europe, often co-productions between Italy and Spain) a cultural phenomenon, too.

All three films - known collectively as "the Dollars trilogy" - are being released on limited edition 4K by Arrow Video, beginning with A Fistful Of Dollars. It's the film that set the literal scene for Leone's western vision: a sun-baked, not-quite-reality where the Man With No Name (actually called Joe in the first film) survives with sharp wits and even sharper shooting.

"A Fistful Of Dollars was something totally new," says Blyth. "It fused the classic iconography of the Wild West with an irreverent cynicism that felt very European, along with the style, mood and violence of Japanese samurai films, which were becoming very popular with cinephiles in the 1950s and 1960s."

A Fistful Of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari) was not the first Italian western. But previous Euro-westerns were pale imitations of the American originals. "After that, Italian and Spanish westerns stopped trying to fake being American, and became something totally different: raw, edgier and more unpredictable," says Blyth.

In truth, A Fistful Of Dollars was something of a knock-off itself. Leone was inspired to make the film after seeing the Japanese film, Yojimbo (1961), directed by legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. The Italian film business was in a downturn at the time and Leone was hungry for a new project. And there was a precedent for such a transition. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) had already influenced the ensemble western, The Magnificent Seven (1960).

Leone wrote a screenplay, originally called The Magnificent Stranger, that transported the story and characters of Yojimbo to the US-Mexican border town of San Miguel.

In Leone's version, the stranger, Joe, arrives and plays two rival families off against each other before his crafty games are discovered by the Rojos' murderous leader, Ramón (Gian Maria Volonté).

Teaming up with an Italian production outfit, Leone secured $200,000 - a pittance of a budget - on the condition that he reused locations, costumes and crew from another western. The Magnificent Seven had ten times that budget. Leone's film was shot between April and June 1964 in locations around Rome, Madrid, and the deserts of Almería in southern Spain. Eastwood wanted the experience of making a film in Europe and arrived with some of his props from Rawhide, including his pistols and gun belt.

The Leone-Eastwood relationship was tricky at first. Leone didn't speak English and Eastwood didn't speak Italian. They communicated through an interpreter - a Polish woman who had survived a German concentration camp.

Leone's script had reams of expository dialogue, which Eastwood insisted on cutting. Eastwood had already seen Yojimbo and admired the lead performance of Toshiro Mifune. "Clint remembered Mifune's tense, restrained yet effortlessly cool performance and fought to preserve the same quiet mystique as Joe," says Blyth.

As Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling wrote: "Eastwood became one of the very few actors in film history to fight for fewer lines."

Eastwood admitted that he had deliberately set out to play an anti-hero."I did get awfully tired of playing the conventional white hat," he recalled.

But there's more to Joe than anti-hero. He's the embodiment of Leone's west. He's harsh, grizzled, and witty - much funnier than his reputation suggests, in fact.

"Get three coffins ready," he tells the town undertaker as he strolls into the opening gun fight. "My mistake, four coffins," he says after killing more men than he expected (the scene is lifted directly from Yojimbo).

Both Leone and Eastwood would take credit for creating the iconic look - the hat, the poncho, the sheepskin waistcoat, the cheroot cigar - and each gave their own account of how the costume was cobbled together. It's perhaps fitting that the character's creation has become more myth than fact. Eastwood was warned early that the film would be a turbulent experience. And it was.

"The production was always on the verge of shutting down the whole way through, and constantly ran out of money until finally one of the Italian producers had to smuggle a suitcase full of cash into Spain," says Blyth.

Indeed, at a time when it was illegal to export currency from Italy, producer Arrigo Colombo sneaked a suitcase with 30 million lire [equivalent to £585,000] across the border.

Part of the film's magic is the Wild West iconography transplanted onto a European setting. The effect is that it doesn't feel like either place, but a sort of nowhere-ville. It knowingly treats the west as more fairy tale than historical fact.

It's in the truest spirit of the western genre, which mythologised the Wild West as if it was still happening through dime novels, travelling circuses, and early cinema. But there's a viciousness to A Fistful Of Dollars, too.

The Rojo gang tortures Joe and burns down the Baxter family stronghold. They massacre the Baxter men - and women - as they flee the flames and surrender.

The action concludes when Joe strolls back into town for the final shootout, this time with a metal bullet-proof breastplate - a trick used by real-life Wild West gunfighter Jim Miller.

Leone's trademark close-ups on Joe and Ramón create intensity, putting you eye-to-eye as they prepare to pull the trigger - you can feel the sweat on their brows.

As Blyth points out, Leone couldn't shoot the sweeping landscapes of the American West, so emphasised the dramatic faces of his actors instead.

"He knew that by taking a more intimate approach and emphasising close-ups - being able to see every expression on the gunfighters' faces as they contemplated their next moves, and drawing out those confrontations as slowly as possible - it would be just as riveting but in a totally new way," he says.

Also crucial to the success of the Dollars trilogy is composer Ennio Morricone, who had actually been at school with Leone. For A Fistful Of Dollars, Morricone would use a mix of guitar, whistling, and chanting.

His most iconic theme came two films later in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly ("Owee OweeOweeOw WahWahWaaah"). The power of Morricone's scores is that they're so evocative - and now so culturally ingrained - that they somehow put you among the rattlesnakes, galloping horses and rounds of pinging bullets.

"When you remember these films, you hear them before you see them," says Blyth. "Morricone's music was as contemporary and iconoclastic as Leone's direction, using all kinds of unconventional instrumentation, including a very 1960s-sounding dose of electric Fender Jaguar guitar. It was exciting when it needed to be, it was funny when it needed to be, it was deeply emotional and stirring when needed, too.

"Leone and Morricone were a match made in movie heaven."

A Fistful Of Dollars was released on September 12, 1964. As the legend goes - a legend often spun by Leone himself - it was released in a single cinema in Florence with no publicity, but became a homegrown hit.

Back in the United States, Clint Eastwood read a report in the film trade magazine Variety that hailed the success of A Fistful Of Dollars in Italy. It meant nothing to him. He had no idea the film title had been changed from The Magnificent Stranger. It would take almost three years for A Fistful Of Dollars to reach America and Britain.

The filmmakers hadn't secured proper permission from Akira Kurosawa to remake Yojimbo. Kurosawa wrote to Leone, demanding payment. "It is a very fine film," Kurosawa told Leone about his western. "But it is my film." The litigation delayed the film's release in both the US and UK. Leone eventually placated Kurosawa by giving him distribution rights in Japan and other Asian territories, plus 15% of the global box office.

By the time A Fistful Of Dollars reached the US and UK, Leone and Eastwood had already made the next two films.

In the second film, For A Few Dollars More, Eastwood joins forces with Lee Van Cleef to hunt down a brutal bank robber. It's the best, most emotionally powerful of the three films, and hangs on a perilously dark backstory.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, however, is arguably the most iconic western ever made. Eastwood and Van Cleef return - alongside Eli Wallach as a crafty Mexican bandit - in a three-way feud over a buried stash of Confederate gold.

The films are not technically sequels. Each is a separate story. And while Eastwood's character is known as the Man With No Name - a moniker that came from the American marketing - he does in fact have a different name in all three films: Joe, Manco and Blondie.

The Man With Many Names might be more accurate. He's less an actual person than he is an archetype, wandering from town to town, story to story.

All three films were released in the US in relatively quick succession, in February and July 1967 and January 1968. Critics slated the films, but they were a hit with audiences.

"I think the main reason it succeeded is the same reason the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did," says Blyth. "In the 1960s, people wanted something new, and exciting."

The cultural resonance would continue as the Man With No Name defined Eastwood's further American-made westerns. He played either a variation or subversion of the character in films such as High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and his Oscar-winning masterpiece, Unforgiven (1992).

The Man With No Name had ridden deep into the western myth.

A Fistful Of Dollars is out on 4K UHD Blu-ray from Arrow Video from May 12. For A Few Dollars More is out May 26, and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is out June 23