The first major project that gave Clint Eastwood some visibility in the audiovisual industry was the television series broadcast in the United States in the late 1950s and set in the Wild West, ‘Rawhide’. For eight seasons, the actor played Rowdy Yates, a cowboy who, together with his partner, had to guide a large herd of cattle from Texas to Kansas, facing both outlaws who want to steal the cattle and harsh weather conditions along the way. This character ended up pigeonholing him at the beginning as an actor focused on the Western genre, which made it difficult for him to stand out since at that time, the film industry was full of profiles similar to his.

After five years on television, his acting career seemed to have come to a standstill, but the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone contacted him to travel to Europe and lead the ambitious film trilogy that he was preparing. due to the impossibility of other important performers such as Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson or James Coburn accepting the commission. At that time, the rise of the spaghetti western coincided with the decline of many classic American Western figures, who saw the genre lose strength and were forced to accept roles in low-budget Italian productions, where they were often portrayed in a somewhat cartoonish way in order to survive.

For this reason, Eastwood’s agent recommended that the actor not accept the assignment, since he considered it a “bad step” in his career, a phrase that the actor used years later to name his own production company, Malpaso Productions.. However, Eastwood decided to accept Leone’s proposal and moved to Europe for filming, where he finally took on the leading role in the three films that would make up the well-known ‘Dollar Trilogy’: ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ (1964), ‘Death Had a Price’ (1965) and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966). In them, the actor gave life to three different characters who had similarities and who were known as ‘The man with no name’, an enigmatic antihero, sparse in words and skilled with the revolver who definitively boosted his career and gave him international stardom.

Thus, after the filming of the first two films of the trilogy, Eastwood coincided with other American actors such as Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach in the filming of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ which took place in Spain. It is known that Eastwood’s experience in the two previous films was chaotic, due to a way of shooting the films in which actors from very different backgrounds spoke in their native languages ​​to later be dubbed, and a disorderly working methodology that sometimes put the physical integrity of the performers at risk. For this reason, Eastwood gave Wallach personal advice on the first day of shooting the film that became a phrase that perfectly defined the spirit of the spaghetti western: “I say this with all the respect in the world, but I know what I’m talking about when I say that you should never trust anyone in an Italian film. Stay away from special effects and explosives.”