Matt Here…

LEE VAN CLEEF is one of my favourite screen presences’ (is that a term?) of all time. Let’s now bow to the feet of Tom Fallows for this superb look at his career! By the way if you have any suggestions for future articles, don’t be afraid to drop us a line. Tom has chosen all six so far but I’m sure he would be willing to listen to your ideas. E-mail us at editor @ obsessedwithfilm.com.

By 1962 his career as an actor was over. A car accident in ’58 had left him badly injured with a shattered kneecap and a recurring limp. Hell, he’d been getting tired anyway, the parts were no good and he was sick of playing two-bit snakes and snarling bad men in countless big and small screen Westerns. Sure, he’d been in some classics – classics like High Noon (1952) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) – but he was always too ugly to play the hero.

“In just about every film I ever made I was killed off by John Wayne or Gregory Peck or Gary Cooper,” recalled Lee Van Cleef without nostalgia.

His face was frontier mean: his eyes narrow, his skin tight and his mouth curled in an amused snarl. If he wanted better parts he’d have to get that hawk nose of his fixed. So he gave it up; took to painting and living off unemployment checks and his wife’s job as a secretary. Making the phone bill every month became a struggle. Hard times, as they say. The booze helped.

Then in the mid sixties someone went to LA looking for him. An Italian was in town with an old photo of Van Cleef and a suitcase full of dollars.

Sergio Leone wanted him for a movie and unlike Hollywood adored his cragged face:

“He has the physical appearance of an eagle,” marvelled Leone. “He’s grizzled, black and grey.”

Leone’s West wasn’t pretty, and Van Cleef would fit right in. For a Few Dollars More (1965) was the sequel to his smash hit A Fistful of Dollars (1964), an Italian western shot in Spain with German money. The original film featured Clint Eastwood as a laconic gunslinger playing two rival gangs against each other. It was ruthless, bloody and cool as hell. Italian audiences were desperate for more.

Eastwood was back for the sequel, this time as a bounty killer forced to team up with a rival while in pursuit of the Mexican desperado El Indio. That rival was Colonel Mortimer (Van Cleef), an aging soldier with a cunning professionalism and saddlebag full of weapons.

We first meet Mortimer on a train, his face hidden by the Holy Bible he’s reading. He’s clad head to foot in black – like a vision of death. A fellow passenger mistakes him for a preacher, until he lowers the good book to reveal devil eyes and a mocking grin. He’s on the train to Tucumcari, hunting a man in exchange for dollars.

Together Van Cleef and Eastwood became the epitome of 60s screen cool. Both are professionals and master gun-fighters. Clint swaggers across screen with his chewed cigarillo and rugged manner, while Van Cleef is the sophisticated gentleman killer who knows all the angles. They execute their prey with an impassive precision and together bring down bloody hell onto the filth-stained banditos.

Mortimer is a deeply complex character; at once pitiless and humane. He treats outlaws like scum, casually baiting them towards their own destruction. In a saloon he strikes a match across a hunchback killer’s hump and later shoots the enraged man dead with a concealed pistol. His stony eyes show no remorse.

Van Cleef’s career playing badmen had prepared him for this, but it is the assuredness with which he handles the Colonel’s human side that is truly remarkable. He is not after Indio for money – he wants revenge. Indio is the man who raped and murdered his sister and Mortimer hides a mute pain behind those killer’s eyes.

As the sun sets and the final showdown looms, he finds himself unarmed and in Indio’s sights. The bandit produces a musical watch stolen from the Colonel’s sister and the chimes remind Mortimer of everything Indio has taken from him. This is all in Van Cleef’s face: a history, a feeling of loss and of pain and of ultimate failure.

His narrow eyes swell and as he stands, calmly waiting for death, Van Cleef shows us a man broken, yet standing to the last with an unflinching dignity. That is until Eastwood appears and hands him his gun. Mortimer will get his chance at revenge after all.

In Italy the film broke box office records and other Italian filmmakers clamoured for a piece of the action. Countless imitations followed, including Django (1966) and A Bullet for the General (1966). They were called Spaghetti Westerns and Van Cleef’s next film in this subgenre would cement him its biggest star. Yet this time the complexity of Colonel Mortimer was abandoned. Here he was just plain bad.

Leone’s final film in his Dollars Trilogy was to be epic; the story of three men driven by greed while the American Civil War explodes around them. For 1966s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone once again teamed Eastwood and Van Cleef, this time throwing in veteran character actor Eli Wallach as the dangerous buffoon Tuco (aka The Ugly).

Van Cleef is Angel Eyes, a corrupt Union Sergeant in charge of a prisoner of war camp. Though clad in black, he is less refined than Mortimer, his shabby clothes covered in a desert filth that won’t wash off.

The character could easily have been a step backwards for Van Cleef; a quick return to the unshaven heavies of old. But Van Cleef was no longer that actor. He had been given a second chance to show what he was capable of and he wasn’t about to let that go so easily. Angel Eyes isn’t just the film’s nominal villain, in Van Cleef’s hand he’s the personification of evil.

He moonlights as a hired killer and in an early scene sits down to eat with the farmer he’s about to kill. When he speaks his voice is bone dry, sounding like a lizard gasping in the desert heat.

“That your family?” he asks with a threatening smile while examining a photo of the farmer’s brood. “Nice family.”

He’s the kind of man who’d kill you just to see the look on your face. As he commits countless atrocities, beating women and shooting children to get what he wants, Van Cleef relishes it all with a Machiavellian smile. He may be called Angel Eyes, but Van Cleef has given him the devil’s heart.

Following the movie’s worldwide success, Eastwood made a triumphant return to Hollywood. Van Cleef stayed behind. After all, he was a star here – an above the title player. Back in the US he had been overlooked and ignored. There he was nothing. In Italy he was Lee Van Cleef.

And so he rode out in the Spanish desert: usually clad in black, sometimes chewing on a pipe, always one step ahead of his enemy and packing a loaded pistol. His characters were ambiguous and hard to tell apart from the criminals. He became an anti-hero for a generation grown cynical of the righteous goodness of Wayne, Peck and Cooper. He’s the bad man with a good heart.

In 67’s Death Rides a Horse he played a no good outlaw who after 15 years in jail pays penance for his sins by gunning down his former gang. In Sabata (1969) he’s like an Old West James Bond, suavely dressed, relaxing in casinos, and with a host of gadgets to get his man.

When he’s attacked by an assassin Padre, he uses a bag that fire bullets to send the deranged holy man to meet his maker.

“Sabata is not a good Christian,” one character observes.

He seeped these characters in mystery, playing with that good/bad ambiguity that delighted audiences. In Sabata we don’t know if he’s a lawman, an assassin or just an opportunist. The closest we get to an answer is when one hood screams, “Who the hell are you?” to which the town drunk replies:

“He could just be your pallbearer, eh.” The amount of corpses Sabata leaves behind make this the most resonate explanation.

He played Sabata once more (in 1971s The Return of Sabata) but later that same year the role was taken over by Yul Brenner. Interestingly Van Cleef’s return to the US would see him pick up from Yul in The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972). By this point Leone’s Dollar Trilogy had become a global phenomenon and studios could no longer overlook the stoic power Van Cleef brought to those films.

With its open riff off on 1967’s The Dirty Dozen (criminals recruited to fight for law and order) The Magnificent Seven Ride! marks perhaps the best of the Seven sequels. This is largely down to Van Cleef. His Chris begins as a dogged US Marshall, taking a firm hand against law breakers.

“The men I hung never killed again,” he explains. “Some of those I let go did.”

But when his wife is wife is raped and killed he finds himself ready to break any law to bring the men responsible to justice. Chris teams up with dangerous convicts, many of whom he put behind bars to begin with. Some of the seven want revenge, but Van Cleef exudes inner toughness.

He is older here, but still looks gnarled enough to bite the head of a chicken. Taking one look in his dead man’s eyes the others know that he has seen hell, and can call it forth with a whisper.

In the late 70s, as his stardom waned, Van Cleef went back to taking parts to pay the bills. He was still appearing in some decent Spaghettis (like ‘77s Kid Vengeance) but they lacked the magic of his earlier work.

In 1981 he got his last great role in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, playing Hauk, the police commissioner antagonist to Kurt Russell’s snarling outlaw.

So excited was Russell by the prospect of working with Van Cleef that he decided to base his performance on Clint Eastwood and allow Carpenter his dream of:

“Resonating the Sergio Leone picture here in the future.”

As Snake Plissken Russell is one tough hombre, but Van Cleef’s face tells us that he’s seen his kind before. Hell at one time or another he probably was Snake. When Plissken threatens murder alls Van Cleef does is grin. Give it your best shot, his smile suggests. I can take it.

When Lee Van Cleef died of heart failure in December 1989 the newspapers focused on his work prior to For a Few Dollars More. To them he was still the heavy of American Westerns. If it didn’t happen in Hollywood it didn’t happen, right?

But the second half of his career allowed him to become the rich and versatile actor he always knew he could be. When remembering a time when studios asked him to fix his hawk nose to get leading parts, Lee Van Cleef, typically, grinned.

“After all,” he said. “Now people remember this beak.”

And they’ll never forget it.

Tom Fallows is a well respected writer and soon to be published author when the pocket essential guide to George A. Romero’s work hits stands in October.

This article is the fifth in the marvellous Cult Actors Series…

Cult Actors #5 – Peter Weller

Cult Actors #4 – Yaphet Kotto

Cult Actors #3 – Rutger Hauer

Cult Actors #2– Adrienne Barbeau

Cult Actors #1: Brad Dourif