- Bronson
- Van Cleef
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Well, my choice would have always been Lee van Cleef. I’ve never been a real Bronson fan. He’s okay as Harmonica, not in the least because Leone asked him to act as little as possible, simply to be there. He looked like a tough, unflinching guy and therefore was at his best when he was asked to play tough, unflinching guys.
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I guess leone was afraid that audiences would identify Van Cleef too much with the Colonel Mortimer character. Mortimer is a positive character, one of the most humane and interesting characters of any spaghetti western, therefore he probably wanted a new actor - one who hadn’t acted in the first two parts of the Dollar Trilogy - to become Sentenza. As said, I’m not a Bronson fan, but he had an interesting face and Leone was above all interested in ‘faces’: he could have been a good Sentenza, an unflinching killer. But once you’ve seen GBU it’s hard to imagine any other than Lee in the role: he became Angel Eyes, just as he became Mortimer.
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This is possible. But Van Cleef as the Bad seems younger and more menacing so it worked really well, he comes across as a different character.
And Leone used the same actors in more than one film previously, Volonte, Mario Brega, Josef Egger, et cetera. So you could doubt that this claim about Bronson is true.
Anyway, a wise decision not to cast Volonte as Tuco though.
Directors usually prefer to work with actors they know (Ford - Wayne, Mann - Stewart, Boetticher - Scott, Corbucci - Nero, Fellini - Mastroianni, Woody - Allen), It is easier, if only because people know each other’s naughty tricks. But a special character can be exception, of course. Tuco was an exception indeed, I don’t think Volonté would’ve been believable in this part.
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Yes, this is true, you can add Scorsese to your list as well.
And John Carpenter, too.
It’s impossible to imagine another actor in the role but I can understand why Bronson was considered. Both are two of my favourite actors.