Why Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name is the greatest Western hero

Collider film writer André Joseph argues that Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name is the greatest Western hero of all time, in a piece published Jan. 28, 2026. Joseph says Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars broke the mold for Western protagonists when it premiered in Italy in 1964 and reached U.S.

audiences in 1967, arriving as trust in American institutions was eroding amid the Vietnam War and a youth movement pushing back on the political establishment and law enforcement. The character was inspired by Toshirō Mifune’s ronin in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and Leone made the film as an unofficial remake before settling a copyright lawsuit with Kurosawa.

Eastwood was cast partly because of the international popularity of his CBS series Rawhide. What makes the Man with No Name distinct, Joseph writes, is his lack of backstory and clear allegiances: a silent, morally ambiguous antihero who sometimes acts for money (as in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and sometimes for a shared mission (as in For a Few Dollars More).

Eastwood himself said in Howard Hughes’s Once Upon a Time in the Italian West that he was tired of the conventional white-hat hero and wanted to play an antihero.

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