A long time ago, I was in a used book shop and stumbled upon a scholarly book about Westerns. The book covered all major Westerns up to 1975, but the chapter I had been interested in was conspicuously short. The author gave only lip service to "spaghetti Westerns", considering them to be nothing more than a travesty of the genre. The validity of such a notion might be debatable, but not for the critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who had been looking at that genre with the same snobbish disdain as blaxploitation or kung fu films. However, there was one director who managed to give "spaghetti Westerns" a good name. Sergio Leone is one of the greatest and most influential Italian directors and his films are often considered to be masterpieces. That was especially the case with three of his films known as the Man With No Name trilogy, which brought the subgenre of "spaghetti Westerns" to perfection. However, every beginning was hard and A Fistful of Dollars, made in 1964, is proof of that.
Leone was often accused of not being very original in his first major film. The plot of A Fistful of Dollars looks very much like the one used in Yojimbo, Akira Kurosawa's 1960 samurai classic. However, even Kurosawa found his inspiration elsewhere, and Dashiell Hammett's 1931 novel Red Harvest is often credited as the first to use the same plot. Some later critics, on the other hand, claimed that Leone found his inspiration in an 18th-century comic stage play by Italian author Carlo Goldoni.
In any case, original or not, the plot of this film begins when Joe (played by Clint Eastwood), a mysterious poncho-wearing, mule-riding stranger, comes to San Miguel, a small Mexican town on the US border. The town seems dead, and the reason for that is soon revealed in a conversation with the local bartender (played by Joseph Egger). The town is ruled by two gangs – the Rojos brothers, liquor smugglers led by the vicious Ramón (played by Gian Maria Volontè), and the Baxters, arms smugglers nominally led by Sheriff John Baxter (played by Wolfgang Lukschy) and really by his wife Consuelo (played by Margarita Lozano). These two gangs are fighting for control and the town is full of hired guns, so killings became part of everyday life. Joe, being fast on the trigger, sees that as an opportunity. He offers his gunfighting services to both clans, switches sides and then manipulates them into shootouts, earning lots of money in the process.
A Fistful of Dollars, being Leone's first spaghetti Western, is naturally inferior to his later classical works like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The cheap budget is very visible, the script seems rather unpolished and full of some interesting plot holes (a town on the Mexican side of the border having a sheriff is one of them). The acting at times, especially during the ultra-sentimental scenes in the Marisol subplot, is plain terrible. The ending is weak, sacrificing plausibility for the sake of a neat little happy ending.
On the other hand, even at his worst, Leone shows his immense talent. The pacing is brilliant, scenes are excellently shot and his trademark extreme close-up is used with great success. Black humour is also present in this film. And, of course, Leone used the services of the great Ennio Morricone, one of the best and most prolific music composers in the history of cinema. Leone, as he would do in all of his later films, used Morricone's score as the basis for his scenes, and not the other way around. Morricone (billed as Dan Savio on the credits) was here in his prime, using some of the motifs that would be enhanced and become even more effective in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Apart from Leone, this film was important for another great talent. Clint Eastwood had already become famous in the TV series Rawhide, but the role of The Man With No Name (although actually named in this film) was the one that launched him into orbit. Eastwood here plays one of the first great anti-heroes of cinema – a tough, cynical and utterly materialistic man who has no problem making money through bloodshed. The audience roots for him not for the sake of his moral superiority, but simply because he happens to be much smarter and more successful than others. On the other hand, Leone's script shows that under the mask of cynicism lies a kind human heart; Joe doesn't want to do the right thing not because he is bad; he is pragmatic because he knows better. And when he actually does the right thing, he suffers because of it.
Eastwood was the only major American actor in this film, but that didn't prevent him from partnering with truly talented actors. Gian Maria Volontè (billed as Johnny Wels) is impressive as a villain, and he would improve his villainy in Leone's next film. This film also features a whole bunch of actors whose faces are more than familiar to fans of Leone's spaghetti Westerns.
A Fistful of Dollars definitely pales in comparison to other films by Sergio Leone, but even such an imperfect and inferior example of that master's work should be recommended as a very entertaining film, even for those who are familiar with his masterpieces.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on December 11th 1999)
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Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/391-per-un-pugno-di-dollari
Critic: AA