Leone's first “spaghetti” western was an unauthorized reworking of Yojimbo in which Clint Eastwood appeared on the international horizon as The Man With No Name, the rootless gringo who manipulates the rivalry between two rapacious clans, one Mexican, the other American, in a windswept border town. As in Kurosawa's version there are no good guys, only bad and ugly ones, but Leone's are worse and uglier, and his film a good deal bloodier. Using Yojimbo, already several steps removed, as a source is almost a joke, for Leone (a former assistant to Walsh, Aldrich, Zinnemann and others) and his film have far more direct, more obvious links to the thing-in-itself, the American western. In some of the boldest use of ‘scope ever attempted, Leone makes evident what American directors pretended to hide: that composition is all, and the western is less a genre of action than of poetry. His monumental figures in great empty spaces were already suggested by Boetticher (see Comanche Station, August 8) and by Ford's Monument Valley sagas; likewise, his dreamlike sense of time (stretching High Noon interminably) and camera movement are exaggerations of the western's primary icon, the loneliness of the long-distance rider. “Close-ups in my films are always the expression of an emotion,” says Leone, who differs from his American mentors in one respect: he shoots from the hip.