Hi-ho, Denaro!

Be mean, mean, mean. Don't punch cattle, punch a few women instead. Never waste a punch when a knee in the groin will do. Eliminate the love interest; it gets in the way of the violence. Surly, coldblooded, money grubbing antiheroes are the best, especially if they grunt a lot. And, most important for the successful western, it should be filmed in Spain by an Italian company with a cast of American stars and Italian and Spanish gypsy extras.

Such is the surefire formula of Italian Director Sergio Leone, 38, whose "macaroni westerns" are the fastest draw in theaters from Youngstown to Yokohama. A veteran of spear-and-sandal epics, he converted to shoot-'em-ups three years ago. To lend a scent of sagebrush to his first western, Leone changed his name to Bob Robertson and imported Clint Eastwood, a lanky, rawboned drover on TV's Rawhide. Eastwood's image was too clean-cut for an antihero, so Leone added the necessary smudges--slouch hat, black cheroot, stubble beard and a ratty-looking scrape. For the villain's role, he hired veteran horse-opera heavy Lee Van Cleef, and the shooting commenced.

Ringo Cycle. Leone called the flick A Fistful of Dollars. Basketfuls of denaro would have been more like it. The film outgrossed Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady in Italy, will net an estimated $10 million on its $250,000 investment in worldwide distribution. The success raised Actor Eastwood's fees; he got $15,000 for Fistful, now commands $500,000 a picture. It also encouraged Leone. Pouring on the tomato sauce, he followed last year with A Few Dollars More, which has become the second biggest money maker in Italian film history (No. 1: Dino De Laurentiis' War and Peace).

To Italy's film makers, the lesson was clear: Hi-ho, denaro, awaaay! Suddenly every actor in Italy was sitting short in the saddle and mowing down the bad guys with twelve shots from his six-shooter. Since Leone began the whole shebang-bang, Italian directors have cranked out 180 eastern westerns. Some of them, such as For a Thousand Dollars a Day and For Still More Dollars, are blatant copies. Most are long on gore but short on lore. One popular horse opera is set in Minnesota, a notorious badland just across the border from Mexico.

Prohibition Next. Leone would never be guilty of such a discrepancy. A cowboy buff since childhood, he has read 35 books on the subject, once spent a month researching the Old West in the Library of Congress. When he asked Eli Wallach to star in his latest Italian western, the actor cracked: "That must be something like a Hawaiian pizza." Wallach learned different when he arrived in Spain to shoot The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and found that Leone had meticulously reproduced settings and costumes from copies of old U.S. newspapers and photo albums. "He has a fantastic sense of composition and color," says Wallach. "He uses textures like a great painter."

If those textures seem to be mostly bloody red, Leone claims that it is only because "I am showing the Old West as it really was. Cinema takes violence from life, not the other way around. Americans treat westerns with too much rhetoric." The same is true, he believes, with the U.S. view of the Prohibition era. So he plans to treat U.S. audiences to his own bloodshot view of the good old gangster days. But before he hangs up his spurs, he wants to make one last, big, $7,000,000 epic called Once Upon a Time, There Was America (titles were never his strong point), which he says "won't leave any more to be said about the West." It will be filmed, curiously enough, in Arizona.

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