After 52 Years, This Universal Western Still Moves Audiences Worldwide

It’s not uncommon for a Western to impart a life lesson: we immediately recall the ode to bravery in the face of collective cowardice in “High Noon” or the lessons from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” However, for the Western at hand, the real message isn’t clear until the very end.

In “My Name is Nobody,” produced by Sergio Leone and directed by Tonino Valerii, we follow the exploits of the young “Nobody” (Terence Hill) who aims to give his idol, the aging gunslinger Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda), a legendary send-off by confronting the fearsome Wild Bunch. However, Beauregard isn’t keen on facing 150 wild riders alone…

A Universal Message

At the film’s end, Nobody visits the barber, mirroring a scene from the beginning of the film where Jack Beauregard finds his lower face covered in shaving foam, with a shady character wielding the razor. The scene ends with Fonda pulling a gun on the villain, aimed delicately at his groin, to keep him under control, allowing him to leave the shop alive after forcing the thug to actually shave him before gunning him down with a Colt Army!

Nearly two hours pass before Nobody experiences an almost identical situation. He gets a shave, well aware that the man with the razor is one of the surviving members of the Wild Bunch who intends to slit his throat. He’s not fooled, but instead of drawing his gun, he places his finger between the bandit’s buttocks! Freeze frame. End of film.

Trivial? Only on the Surface!

This ending is not just a humorous, slightly crass twist; it effectively juxtaposes the two styles of Westerns being made at the time: traditional American cinema still featured old Western stars like John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, alongside the emerging New Hollywood, while Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone had pushed the genre to confront – graphically – the violence of the Old West.

However, some Italian directors took the irony and gravity of Sergio Leone’s films and turned them into Western comedies, the most famous of which is certainly “They Call Me Trinity,” starring… Terence Hill! In this film, there are no tense duels but plenty of punches thrown in a consistently light-hearted atmosphere. The success of “Trinity” spawned a variety of less inspired imitators.

On the other hand, Henry Fonda epitomizes the American Western. Thus, when his character writes to Nobody, “Try to rediscover some of those dreams that inhabited us, the older generation. Even if you mock them with your usual whimsy, we’d be grateful. At heart, we were sentimentalists.” It’s a plea for the Western genre, then declining at the box office, to continue, even if it must do so with irony and detachment.

He adds, “Hurry up and have fun, because it won’t last much longer. The country has developed, changed, I no longer recognize it. I already feel like a stranger here. Worse yet, even the violence has changed. It’s organized now. A gunshot is no longer enough, but you already know that, because it’s your century, not mine. (…) Besides, I’m tired. Because it’s not true that years make sages. They only make old men (…).”

In addition to bidding farewell to the American West as we knew it, “My Name is Nobody” also suggests that we should enjoy life while we can, and that the younger generation should be able to break free from the previous one without systematically rejecting its dreams. A human passing of the torch, which then transcends the confines of just the Western genre to touch on something universal. And that, is great cinema.