Last night, I sat through the absolutely absymal movie “My Name is Nobody” starring Henry Fonda. Why Mr. Fonda made that piece of crap I’ll never know, but that’s not the pupose of this post. I watched it because my SO thought, from the title, that it was a completely different movie that she fondly remembers from years ago. Probably made in the 60’s, possibly the 50’s, probably in black and white. In the beginning, the hero is hanged but somehow survives (and has the rope marks around his neck for the rest of the movie). Some town is being harrassed by your typical western cliched bullies, and the hero does various things, setting traps, etc. to drive them out, with no help from the town. At the end, the town thanks him and asks his name and he says something like “I’m nobody.”
Sounds like she may be conflating Hang 'Em High and High Plains Drifter, both with Clint Eastwood. In the latter, Eastwood directs and plays his “Man with No Name” character, which owes much to Sergio Leone, (who directed My Name is Nobody) and his “spaghetti Westerns” which certainly helped Eastwood’s movie career.
What I never got about High Plains Drifter is that this guy is supposed to be that town’s sheriff right? He was hung and left to die but it had only been a small amount of time before he came back. So why the hell does no one remember what he looks like? Almost everyone in the town can recall, and often do, the former sheriff that took on these bad guys and went down because of it. I just don’t get it…
CP’s got it right. Marshall Jim Duncan (not sheriff), who was whipped to death by the three outlaws, looks totally different than Clint Eastwood’s “the stranger” character (and is played by a different actor.) The popular opinion is that the stranger is an incarnation of the late Marshall’s vengeful spirit.
As to the OP, I agree with xenophon41. The first part of the description with the failed hanging and lasting rope scars sounds like Hang 'Em High, and the second part with the protagonist helping a town fend off bullies sounds like High Plains Drifter.
At the VERY end of “High Plains Drifter,” the stranger played by Clint Eastwood is riding out of town. The last person he sees is the dwarf, who was his one true ally.
The dwarf says, “I don’t even know your name.”
Eastwood replies, “Yes, you do,” and rides on.
That’s when the camera pans down, and you see that the dwarf was tending to the grave of Marshall Jim Duncan.
The implication is that, somehow, the stranger is the ghost of the late Marshall.
Hey, I just bought My Name is Nobody on the memories that I have of it from my childhood. Okay, so it doesn’t stand up to be as good as I recall, but I still have the warm homey feelings of wasting away a Sunday afternoon in front of the tube. The bar scene alone is worth the price of admission (two hours of your time).
High Plains Drifter was the one I pictured from your description. I always thought it was the Marshalls brother who had come to turn this town to hell…I don’t recall exactly, but I thought at some point it had been intimated that he had come to revenge his brothers death on his killers and the pathetic townspeople.
While most of Eastwood’s films tend to venerate vigilatism (see Dirty Harry et al), the almost ironic thing about High Plains Drifter is how badly bringing in a hired gun to protect the townspeople from criminals works out for them. Several get killed, all are humiliated, and the “hero” leaves the town vandalized and burning, and of course torn assunder by their own guilt in the shared culpability for the murder of the sheriff. Great film, possibly even better than Unforgiven, though I still have to place The Wild Bunch and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as the #1 and #2 revisionist Westerns.
Thanks to all who replied. My SO agrees that it’s possible her memory of those two movies have melded into one over time. Guess we’ll have to look for them or rent them and see. I’m slightly embarrassed (as somewhat of a western movie fan) to admit that I’ve never seen either one.
Well, I may have come on a bit strong in the OP in this regard, but I do believe that it wasn’t worth the two hours of my time. It was billed as a parody, but it just wasn’t funny. On the other hand, it was too dumb to really be taken seriously. And it managed to both have very little plot, and for what little plot there was to make no sense. And that long, long interminable soliloquy/letter by Fonda at the end. What was that? Again, not funny, apparently trying to be serious, but just didn’t fit in a parody.
I think the parody category was because Terrence Hill was known for his other “Nobody” movies which were definitely parodies of Italian Westerns. I think it was more like the classic spaghetti western meets the “new” spaghetti western, as embodied by Fonda and Hill respectively. The humor came from that tension. I thought it was pretty funny.
