A Fistful of Dollars

A one man vigilante enters town, proceeds to take four shooters down without a frown, the filling of, a feudal sandwich, allies to both, presents his own pitch, it's not too long before his masterplan is blown. As the barrels start to role and then cascade, cadavers keep the coffin man in trade, the bullets ricochet, will our Joe make his payday, or will the bandits and the smugglers have their say.

It's hard to believe this 1964 western is as engaging as it was when I first watched it as a kid growing up. I've enjoyed its company many times since, as well as that of Yojimbo upon which it was based; the timeless tale of one man doing the right thing, fighting the corrupt and the crooked, just for a fistful of dollars or, in modern parlance, a computer full of crypto - I know which I prefer.

'A Fistful Of Dollars' is a wonderful movie which, despite having an enormous following of fans around the world, sometimes gets unfairly dismissed in my opinion. For two reasons - firstly because the second and third movie in Leone/Eastwood "Man With No Name" trilogy ('For A Few Dollars More' and 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly') are so damn good it's easy to overlook this one. Despite being made on a much tighter budget and being less ambitious than the sequels to follow, it's still one of the greatest westerns ever made in my opinion. The second reason is the Yojimbo thing. Now movie buffs frequently slam 'A Fistful Of Dollars' as being a rip off of Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo', which I think is extremely misleading. I'm not disputing that Leone was familiar with Kurosawa (I have no idea one way or the other), but one name I rarely hear ANYONE mention is Dashiel Hammett. Hammett's hard boiled crime classic 'Red Harvest' was published THIRTY YEARS before 'Yojimbo' and features the same central premise of an anti-hero playing two rival groups off against each other. So if anyone deserves acknowledgement as uncredited inspiration for Leone (AND Kurosawa) it's Hammett. Anyway, this is an absolutely brilliant movie and it launched Clint Eastwood, a popular TV actor, into being a major movie star, and likewise put Sergio Leone on the map. I can't recommend 'A Fistful Of Dollars' highly enough, it's pure entertainment, and very, very cool!

The epitome of the S.W. is violent , beautifully crafted and exaggerated . This was the first S.W. to receive a major international release . It is a remake of Yojimbo (1961), which itself was based on 1929 novel "Red Harvest" by Dashiell Hammett . It pits ¨Man with no name¨ against two families that are feuding over business : the Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy , Margarita Lozano) and the Rojo (Gian Maria Volonte , Antonio Pietro , Sieghardt Rupp) . Meanwhile , Eastwood saves a damsel in distress (Marianne Koch) , her husband (Daniel Martin) and son . ¨Man with no name¨ is helped by Silvanito (José Calvo) and an old gravedigger , Piripero (Joseph Egger).

This classic Western contains slow and deliberating filming , elaborate shoot-outs , and portentous close-ups of grime-encrustred faces with bloodbaths included . A remake to Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa , in fact he sued the filmmakers for breach of copyright . The impact of this Spaghetti opened the gate for the huge numbers of Italian-Spanish Western which made fortune for their producers and directors in the sixties and early seventies . This has been described as the first "spaghetti western", but when this film was made , there had already been about 25 such westerns produced in Italy . This one made Eastwood an international star and previously better-known for his running character in TV series ¨Rawhide¨. Leone did revive his career almost instantly on the strength of this film , though the role was formerly offered to Charles Bronson , Frank Wolff , Rory Calhoun , Steve Reeves and Richard Harrison . In fact , Richard Harrison was the one who suggested Clint Eastwood to Sergio Leone when the famed director was looking for the main actor , as Harrison said : Maybe my greatest contribution to cinema was not doing Fistful of Dollars , and recommending Clint for the part . Leone came to the set of ¨Rawhide¨ intending to recruit Eric Fleming for the lead in the upcoming "A Fistful of Dollars" , due to Fleming's off putting personality, Leone looked elsewhere , director Charles Marquis Warren suggested Eastwood as an alternative . As all of Eastwood's later Western and his ¨Dirty Harry¨ movies owe a considerable debt to Leone . Furthermore , here appears Leone's habitual secondaries , acting as ominous hoodlums , such as : Mario Brega , Aldo Sambrell , Antonio Molino Rojo , Lorenzo Robledo , Jose Canalejas , Frank Braña , among them.

It's a slick remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo , the plot is mainly ripped off from classic Japanese , as Kurosawa wrote to Leone reclaiming the copyright . Ultimatelly , the Toho (Yojimbo's producer) obtained the rights of exhibition and received 15% of the film's worldwide gross and exclusive distribution rights for Asian countries . ¨Fistful of dollars¨ was filmed in low-budget during seven weeks on location in Golden City (Sierra of Madrid) , and Almeria : Albaricoques and Tabernas ; besides , interiors located on Roman Cinecitta studios . In the premiere the main cast and technicians were replaced by American names as John Welles (Gian Maria Volonte) , master of arms Benny Reeves (Benito Stefanelli), Dan Savio (Ennio Morricone who composed a groundbreaking and streaking soundtrack) , designer production by Charles Simons (Carlo Simi) and even Bob Robertson (Sergio Leone) ; nowadays , justly stay the true names . For Leone enthusiastic with his usual trademarks , it's full of which made his films so memorable, others might find it a bit long but no one can deny its sense of style what achieved a great burst of world-wide popularity .

When Per un pungo di dollari, or A Fistful Of Dollars, was released in the mid-1960s, the term "Spaghetti Western" was coined as a putdown to these brazen new films that dared to recreate the Wild West in a place as far away as Italy. However, the last laugh was shared by the Italian directors, whose new style of portraying Colonial America in a realistic style rather than the romanticised way that was characteristic of John Wayne and his contemporaries will be remembered long after the films of the romanticised style are no more.

The plot is indescribably simple, as Clint Eastwood simply wanders into a town where gang warfare has stripped the economy to the point where only the local undertaker makes a profit and turns the two warring families against one another. Sergio Leone's best-known trademark, his dynamic use of widescreen ratios, comes to the fore here as Clint shares a film frame with no less than four of his enemies, all of whom have plenty to say to him and vice versa. This is one film where a pan and scan transfer is purely and simply vandalism. Some of the dialogue that is included here absolutely takes the cake for cleverness and wit, too. Asking four gunslingers to apologise to a horse, well, if it wasn't a man as famous for playing a gunslinger as Clint Eastwood, it'd be ridiculous.

Transplanting old Samurai legends into the Wild West works well, as you can see here. Simply having an old mercenary who travels the land in search of wrongs to right and battles to be fought makes the story a lot more compelling than the Westerns where we are told every iota of the characters' motivations in the hope that it will give them some depth. The element of the main hero not getting involved in every scuffle that the bad guys cause, our semi-nameless hero's ignoring a drunken thug shooting at a little boy being the most obvious example, was another master stroke, one that got Eastwood involved in doing the film to begin with. The confrontation at the end of the film works well, too, with pyrotechnics exploding all over the picture in a bright display that keeps the film powerful and yet focused at the same time.

All in all, Per un pungo di dollari gets nine out of ten from me. The lack of any interesting support characters does dull the story a little, but this mistake was quickly rectified in the two sequels. The addition of Lee Van Cleef also worked well, but in this effort, it's all Clint Eastwood, and while the rest of the cast are nowhere near as interesting, it's all a better watch than anything the Americans were lumping out at the time.

The Western genre changed forever with the release of Sergio Leone's landmark Spaghetti Western "A Fistful of Dollars," but not necessarily for reasons you might think when it comes to a movie deemed a "classic."

The story is weak, most of the acting bordering on comical and there's no depth to speak of, but the Akira Kurosawa-inspired style of "A Fistful of Dollars" makes it entertaining and a rather fascinating watch from a stylistic perspective. Leone did things with a camera that Hollywood hadn't seen before (probably … I admit I wasn't there), an approach that made the Western more entertaining yet more dramatic and tense.

Clint Eastwood stars as Joe, or more popularly, "The Man with No Name," in the role that launched the "Rawhide" star's film career. When he comes upon the Mexican border town of San Miguel – where you either get rich or get killed – the anonymous gunslinger puts himself at the center of a bloody feud between the Baxters and the Rojos, playing them off of each other for his financial gain.

The Man with No Name is essentially the Western's first true anti- hero. That's the primary contribution "Fistful of Dollars" makes to the genre – it pushes past the black-and-white cowboy heroes and wanted bandits dynamic. "Joe" has one character-revealing moment when he takes pity on a woman named Marisol (Marianne Koch) and her family, who are captives, in a sense, of the Rojo brothers. Otherwise, he's a troublemaker with money on his mind; we just like the guy because he's a badass who is less slimy than the rest of the characters.

The script annoyingly drifts between too overt and not explicit enough, but eventually it becomes clear that the only dialogue worth paying attention to is the clever quips, and that it doesn't matter how a point of tension or violence is reached, but how it looks and feels when we get there.

Leone isn't at the peak of his powers here by any stretch, which should be obvious given this was his first foray into Western territory and second film ever, but he gets enough right to open the door to a shift in thinking about how these movies are made. "Fistful" is an experimental playground for camera angles and various perspective shots. Cinematographers Massimo Dallamano and Federico Larraya play a lot with lighting, incidentally creating Eastwood's trademark squint. You might argue that Leone and crew stumbled upon greatness and that this movie is a combination of stumbles and sure-footed landings.

The secret weapon is Ennio Morricone. The composer's score feels familiar to modern audiences, but it's his creativity using raw sounds and singular instruments in striking patterns that ultimately redefined the genre. He brings the tension, mystery and swagger to the film. He even recognizes when silence works better than anything he could write. In so many ways, his music really glues this experiment of a movie together.

Movies that rise to the top in spite of their weaknesses by means of style and creativity are extremely rare, and they're usually an indicator of a film that's a game-changer to the art form. "A Fistful of Dollars" qualifies. It's a film that is much more important than it is great.

~Steven C

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