How did a Jewish guy from Brooklyn become the screen ideal in westerns as the colorfully swaggering, wise-cracking, mustachioed bandito with a huge sombrero?

Mention The Magnificent Seven and Eli Wallach’s nasty Mexican bandit, Calvera, pops to mind.

Bring up How The West Was Won, and it’s Wallach’s outsized train robber, the snarling Charlie Gant, which is immediately front-and-center in your mind.

Or, think of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, and Wallach’s deliriously captivating take on Tuco, The Bad, is in your head.

In Ace High, a lesser known western of the “spaghetti” school, Wallach is Cacopoulos, once again a disarming villainous rogue. This time, though, the man from Brooklyn is Greek/Mexican.

But it wasn’t only westerns in which Wallach became the template for these foreign and ferociously charismatic villains.

How about The Moonspinners, in which Wallach is Stratos, another of his wicked villains. This go-around, though, he’s a Greek bad guy.

Or Lord Jim, where Wallach is the General, a vile, sadistic, cruel Asian warlord. Viewed one way, The General could be looked at as a forerunner to the later Tuco from The Good, the Bad & The Ugly; or, perhaps, the General is actually a more complex take on Wallach’s Calvera from the earlier Magnificent Seven.

Or both.

A lesser talent might well have become locked into this sort of scene-stealing role, typecast. But the man from Brooklyn is anything but a one-note talent. For Wallach played many other villains, all of a far different stripe.

Check out his bad guy performances in the following: Seven Thieves, as the rattled Poncho involved in a Monte Carlo jewel heist; The Line-Up, where his cold-blooded killer is also vulnerable, anxious, and even thoughtful; How To Steal A Million, in which his business tycoon, lusting after a sculpture, calmly breaks the law to own it.

Nor has Eli Wallach confined himself to villains. The man with the raspy voice, the man from Brooklyn, has proven himself a master in drama (The Misfits), surreal comedy (The Tiger Makes Out), sheer comedy (Movie Movie), noir (Zigzag), satire (Mistress), intense war drama (The Victors), crime (The Two Jakes), family epics (Godfather III), and the heart-warming (The Holiday).

And he’s still hard at it, making films. Wallach is currently shooting Tickling Leo, which will be released in 2008.

Tune in Sunday, Nov. 11, 8 p, ET, as Eli Wallach discusses his six decade career with ICONs Radio hosts Stephen Bogart and John Mulholland. With a disarming modesty, Wallach discusses his work with some of the most legendary people in Hollywood history: Gable, Monroe, Clift, McQueen, John Huston, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, Wyler, Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone, Elia Kazan, Gregory Peck, Carl Foreman, Edward G. Robinson, Lancaster, Douglas, Nicholson, Coppola, Pacino, and his wife, the illustrious Anne Jackson, etc.
 

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