"spaghetti westerns"...what cigar???..
an interesting question.....what cigar did the clint eastwood character smoke??.....
Looking for the name of the cigar Clint Eastwood smoked as the Man with No Name in his spaghetti movies?”
Eastwood became a major star with his roles in the1967 movie trilogy directed by Italian director Sergio Leone, hence the reference to these films as “spaghetti Westerns:”
• A Fistful of Dollars (January)
• For a Few Dollars More (May)
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (December)
The best answer we found was in an excellent interview with Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling conducted by James Leavey in his “Sharing an Ashtray” series.
Asked about the cigars, Frayling said “There’s a great debate as to what kind of cigars they were. The Italians claim that they were a cigar called Toscano, or Toscani in the plural, which are these rather evil southern Italian cigars of very closely packed tobacco, very dark. I had a go at them. Wow, they’re strong stuff. If you notice in the movies, Eastwood is constantly lighting his cheroot and it keeps going out, I think deliberately, ‘cos he didn’t want to actually smoke, he disliked smoking a lot. But Toscani do that as well, you keep trying to get them going and they keep going out. What people in Italy do is cut them in half with a pair of scissors or a razor blade, and then try and draw on them – and it works a bit better. Some people claim they were actually American cheroots, but I like the Italian version actually.”
As the second film – For a Few Dollars More – was being planned, Frayling said “Leone told me that Eastwood said, ‘I’ll do anything you like for the second movie. I’ll wear the same costume, I’ll do everything, but please, no cigars.’ And Leone replied, ‘You’ve got to. The cigar’s playing the lead part.’ And then Eastwood admitted, ruefully, ‘Well, yeah, puffing on these things put me in the right frame of mind – kind of a fog.’ So later he sort of walked through his spaghetti western roles in a dizzy fog, with a Toscano in his mouth, and he reckoned this was the right way to handle the proceedings.”
~ Rich Perelman
