Clint Eastwood in the 1960s already becoming very popular in France, labelled as the "new Gary Cooper". In Paris, he met Pierre Rissient and had an affair with actress Catherine Deneuve. Two months later Eastwood began working on "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", the final film of the Dollars trilogy, in which he again played the mysterious Man With No Name character. Lee Van Cleef was brought in again to play a ruthless fortune seeker, while Eli Wallach, a character actor noted for his appearance in "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), was hired to play the cunning Mexican bandit "Tuco", although the role was
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Ugly" received criticism for its depiction of violence. Leone explains that "the killings in my films are exaggerated because I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek satire on run-of-the-mill westerns... The west was made by violent, uncomplicated men, and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures." To this day, Leone's effort to reinvigorate the timeworn Western is widely acknowledged. Critical opinion of the film on initial release was mixed, as many reviewers at that time looked down on "spaghetti westerns". In a negative review in "The New York Times", critic Renata Adler said that