Clint Eastwood And Charles Bronson Only Worked Together Once On This Western Series

Clint Eastwood is a legend who needs no introduction. He's an icon of cinema, both as an actor and director, with his work in movies like "Dirty Harry" and "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" giving him immortal status. His true breakout role came on the Western TV show "Rawhide," which also started Eastwood down the path to becoming a director. But as the show was nearing its conclusion, Eastwood crossed paths with another legend of the screen.

"Rawhide" ran for eight seasons and a whopping 217 episodes. Eastwood was a part of every single one of them as Rowdy Yates. Turning Eastwood into a cowboy took some trickery from the crew, but they pulled it off and the actor very convincingly wore the cowboy boots for a long time. The show, generally speaking, focuses on the challenges of drovers and cattle drivers moving cattle across the country.

The episodes are pretty formulaic (it was a simpler time), with the group generally happening upon people on the trail, getting involved in their affairs. Either that or members of the crew would get themselves into trouble in a town they happened to be near. It was one of these "getting into trouble" setups that allowed Eastwood to cross paths with Charles Bronson.

"Duel at Daybreak" was the 214th episode of the series, meaning it came right towards the end of its run. In retrospect, it was hugely consequential as it marks the only time that Eastwood and Bronson shared the screen in a scripted movie or TV show.

The episode sees Rowdy delivering cattle to a rancher. But the sadistic top hand of the rancher (Charles Bronson) bullies and humiliates one of the drovers when he shows interest in the rancher's daughter. Despite their attempts to talk him out of it, the young drover is determined to avenge his honor with a duel.

As exciting as it would be for people to imagine that it was Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson drawing pistols at dawn, that's not how it went down. But while the two legends didn't duel, they did share the screen. Bronson had done a lot of episodic television up to that point before truly becoming a superstar in the low-budget crime thriller "Machine-Gun Kelly."

Meanwhile, "Rawhide" was truly just the start of a very long career in Westerns for Eastwood. While he branched out into many other genres, Westerns were a staple for him. The Oscar-winning "Unforgiven" marked the end of an era for Eastwood's career, but even decades after he played a cowboy on TV, he was still doing some of his best work in the Old West.

As for Bronson, he went on to have an impressive career, getting something of a late stage reinvention as an action star thanks to the "Death Wish" series. Given their trajectories, it wouldn't have been hard to imagine these two legends crossing paths in a movie at some point. But this single episode of TV represents the entirety of their shared, scripted screen time.

You can grab "Rawhide: The Complete Series" on DVD from Amazon.