…I mean the grades of ‘man with no name’ films e.g. you have the essential trilogy, then eastwood did some more ‘stranger’ films. But what other films (possibly with different actors) are/were made in the same vain?
just off the top of my head;
palerider?
high plains drifter?
once upon a time in the west?
rodriguez’ ‘el mariachi’ trilogy’?
anymore for anymore?
ouatitw doesn’t really fit the scheme, unless you want to count “harmonica” as a man with “no name”.
palerider and high plains drifter would be those you mentioned in the sentence before, despite the fact that in palerider i think he clearly has a name.
the mariachi trilogy is not really a spaghetti western…
but there are many many spaghetti westerns made after that model, probably hundreds
[quote=“Sebastian, post:2, topic:808”]ouatitw doesn’t really fit the scheme, unless you want to count “harmonica” as a man with “no name”.
palerider and high plains drifter would be those you mentioned in the sentence before, despite the fact that in palerider i think he clearly has a name.[/quote]
Of course, even in the original trilogy he always had a name so I can see where Harmonica would kind of fit the mould too if we are talking about a taciturn, mostly anonamous character who rides off at the end. But as Seb said, that character could fit with an awful lot of films.
Tony Anthony’s Stranger films are clearly modeled after the AFoD pattern.
Absolutely - the first 2 are probably as close a rip-off, sorry, homage as you can get … and great fun.
Many films use just one main aspect of the persona. Anthony Steffen made a career of poker-faced mean and moody. Just one example of his (another ‘Stranger’ comes to mind…) in ‘Stranger in Paso Bravo’ he plays the mysterious drifter-type character, but is quite unlike Clint in almost every other way.
In ‘Duel in the Eclipse/Requiem for a Gringo’ the main character has a name and a family, but arrives on a mule and has stolen the ponchoed look - even if he has camped it up with leopard spots!!
Clint’s ‘stranger’ became an icon and bits of it have been borrowed in many a sw - but none as obviously as by Tony Anthony.
A more modern film which also references this mysterious stranger/drifter persona (altho’ a long duster coat is worn) is Richard Stanley’s ‘Dust Devil’ (1992). Altho’ this has the stylistic look of a Leone-esque western in parts, it is in fact a South African set horror/serial killer film. And bloody good it is too! There’s even a pocket watch … but you wouldn’t wanna use it once you find out where it’s been. 
If you accept Frayling’s ‘servant of two master’ as a template for a No Name movie, Giuliano Gemma has done some too.
In A PISTOL FOR RINGO Gemma promises to help the sherif (and try to liberate the man’s fiancee) but starts negociating with Sancho and his gang straight away. The film is of course more light-hearted than Leone’s, still Ringo’s behaviour is typical italian. John Wayne’s Ringo was definitely a different character! A darker movie with Gemma, cast in the No Name mould, is ARIZONA COLT. Like Ringo, Arizona Colt, is freed from jail, but not by the sherif, but by the villains (so he’s a villain himself!). He’s seeking his own gain constantly, is mutilated severely (shot through both arms and legs) and when he finally helps the town’s people, he does so reluctantly (and more to fulfill his own desire for revenge). By the way, the short but intense shoot-out in the street is very close to the one in FISTFUL …
It’s also essential, I think, that the protagonist is passing-by, gets involved in the conflict by accident (but immediately seeks his own advantage). He has no revenge mission to fulfill initially (like the Colonel or Django), although he may become an avenger in the course of the movie. On the other hand you could say that the Django type of protagonist (so the avenger from the start) is an alternative reading of the No Name persona (after all Django seems closer to No name than to the Colonel). Django doesn’t sound like a real name, nor does Ringo (although I remember a song by Jim Reeves about a man called RRRRingooo, so it may be a name after all). Arizona Colt is more a knickname than a Christian name (and ‘The man from Nowhere’ a bizarre title for a film originally called Arizona Colt); the main villain of that movie is called Gordo Watch, which means Fat Watch in Spanglish (he has a watch and is fat). On the contrary, Mortimer is positively a genuine name, so maybe nomen est omen here, the name is a sign: if it’s not real, it’s No Name, if it’s real, it is Not.