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A Fistful of Dollars

“A Fistful of Dollars” was filmed on a very limited, shoestring budget, but after watching it on the newly re-mastered Special Edition recently released by MGM, you can barely tell. This was one of the first, and still one of the best, spaghetti Westerns ever made, where legendary director Sergio Leone located and established his inimitable style and changed the face of the Western as we knew it. The close-ups interspersed with wide screen desert vistas, the atmosphere bereft of morality, the catchy Ennio Morricone score-–it all started with “A Fistful of Dollars,” which Leone would only improve upon.

Filmed in 1964 “A Fistful of Dollars” is an extremely close remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai tale, “Yojimbo,” in which one lone warrior comes to a crime-ridden town and offers his services to the highest bidder. As a counterpart to Toshiro Mifune’s title character Leone gave us Clint Eastwood as the “Man With No Name,” the laconic drifter whose lack of words only adds to his mystique. Upon finding out that the town of San Miguel, a Mexican border town, is ruled over and terrorized by two feuding gangs-–the ruthless Rojos and the slightly less evil Baxters-–our nameless protagonist goes about playing the two sides against the other. In perhaps the film’s most classic scene Joe (as he is sometimes referred to in this chapter of the trilogy) asks four henchmen to apologize to his mule for shooting at it earlier. When the men don’t, Joe gives them that dead-eyed Eastwood stare and kills them all in a matter of seconds.

Most of Joe’s killings in this film are brief spurts of carnage showcasing his incomparable speed at quick-draw, whereas most of the more graphic violence is reserved for the villains. Ramon (Gian Maria Volonte), leader of the Rojos, takes out dozens of men in the first minute he is on screen. It’s still easy to see why “A Fistful of Dollars” was so controversial when it first came out; even nowadays, the low budget notwithstanding, this is a startlingly violent film. For audiences who were only used to tame John Wayne Westerns with small body counts and tons of heroism this must have been shocking. Sure, Leone would only get more brutal with his follow-ups, but in terms of violence, “A Fistful of Dollars” really paved the way for them.

The moral ambiguity is thick here as well, and still refreshing compared to some of the few mainstream Westerns that get released these days. As a few bonus features on the DVD happily point out this film showed dozens upon dozens of people getting killed, with no moral justification for it, and ended with the “hero” walking off with all the loot. Even in 1977, ten years after it was released in America, television studios hired director Monte Hellman to film a terribly cheesy prologue to lend Joe some morality and purpose in San Miguel. Thankfully, it was only broadcast once. For the first time it is available to watch, thanks to an avid Leone collector who recorded the one broadcast on Beta.

But what about the movie itself? It’s not as funny as its successors, nor as compelling or beautifully lensed, but it has a grubby, sweaty quality of its own that stands apart. Not all of the acting is top-notch-–though Eastwood and Volonte are phenomenal together-–and it does all take place in a rather limited locale, but “A Fistful of Dollars” is all about its style and action. Yes, certain subplots are lame and distracting and yes, gaps in logic are not hard to find, but this is above all an exhilarating roller-coaster ride of a revisionist Western worth watching again and again.

Written by: Joe Pudas

Reviewers Rating: 8.5
Reader's Rating: 8.50
Reader's Votes: 2

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