God imagine being Lee Van Cleef and you get typecast as a villain a lot because you are capable of looking Like This
But you’re also just like. a guy who lost a fingertip trying to build a playhouse for your daughter and an EXCELLENT actor who initially was offered a main heroic supporting role in High Noon on the strength of your acting skills before some fuckwad who I would love to go back in time and strangle said your nose looked villainous and tried to convince you to get plastic surgery and demoted you to minor villain when you refused
And you almost die in a car crash, your acting career never really took off, then out of nowhere some Italian director called Sergio Leone loses the actor he wanted for his secondary protagonist for his second movie with this new guy called Clint Eastwood, panics, looks around, decides on you and hauls you across the ocean to play a sympathetic antihero protagonist in a role that makes you famous across Europe. You are now a Spaghetti Western Guy. You play another villain in another Leone movie, what turns out to be one of the most famous Westerns, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, along with many other roles across the spectrum of villainous to heroic.
Anyways I love how much character we get to see in For a Few Dollars More. He comes in with the steely-eyed “out of my way or I will shoot you” but then we get to see, for example, the confusion and consternation of having to deal with Manco:
The “sorry, you don’t have enough friendship points to ask about the tragic backstory yet, try again later” face
here he is growing increasingly concerned at what he sees from his surveillance window
a silent “oh. fuck.”
experiencing a partnership breakup
trying to process how on earth intentionally letting him escape benefits his enemy’s schemes
being rescued in the eleventh hour by a guy who he thought hated him (why is my copy of this scene the grungiest quality I’ve seen)
Is this what it feels like to care about actors? Am I only capable of caring about actors if they’re deceased WWII veterans with villain-typecast faces? Anyways I think LVC is very cool















