An original Italian-language script on display in the show reveals that Eastwood’s character at first was named “Ray.” But that got dropped as unnecessary exposition.

But as Chung explains, Leone didn’t plan it that way. Thus was movie history and pop-cultural mythos changed. With each picture is a slogan: “This short cigar belongs to a man with no name.” “This long gun belongs to a man with no name.” “This poncho belongs to a man with no name.” And then, the kicker: “He’s going to trigger a whole new style in adventure.” One can’t tell whether it’s Eastwood or not. Rather, it contains three illustrations of a rather disreputable-looking, shadowy character. It has neither the film’s name nor the star’s on it. The accomplishment of creating the Man With No Name persona is so great that it’s trumpeted by a rare 1966 poster at the entranceway to this show. “And the work he did with Westerns is groundbreaking.” “We focus on his Westerns because the West is the mission of this museum,” says the Autry’s Estella Chung, the show’s co-curator.

Leone changed the very nature of Westerns, as well as notions of movie heroism/anti-heroism in his Eastwood movies and his subsequent epic, 1968’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Leone saved the movie Western, which had lost its audience to TV cowboy shows in the early 1960s, by making it cool and new for Boomer-era teenagers. The history and impact of those films, as well as of Leone’s artistry, are the subjects of this innovative and surprising multimedia exhibit at the Autry’s Museum of the American West in Griffith Park through Jan.

It would be fitting if, for the duration of its “Once Upon a Time in Italy…the Westerns of Sergio Leone” exhibit, the Autry National Center called itself the Museum With No Name.įor Italian film director Leone is most famous for transforming TV actor Clint Eastwood into the enduringly mythic Man With No Name in a series of three mid-1960s “spaghetti Westerns”: “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” BY STEVEN ROSEN / LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS / 2005

Man with no name series