Sergio Leone: A Fistful of Dollars ("My mistake… 4 coffins…")

[Cyril Tourneur]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=s2ar1OB1LSQ


The first of Leone's spaghetti western trilogy is a classic, making a star out of Eastwood and changing the face of the western forever. A Fistful Of Dollars is much shorter (and in parts) simpler than it's sequels, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. However, the hallmarks of the Dollars trilogy are well in place to ensure that first-time viewers will be thrilled by what they see and hear, stunning visuals and an unforgettable musical score.

In every human activity, the most innovative, ground-breaking ideas of genius are very simple. The two main ideas of genius "Per un pugno di dollari" is based on are: first, to put twenty shoot-outs in the movie, instead of the canonical two/three of the classical westerns; second, to erase any "love interest" from the story. This had the effect to enormously increase the action and strain in the movie, with an inebriating effect on the audiences of the early 1960's.

Clint Eastwood's performance as the Man With No Name (Joe in the credits) is superb. I can't remember any actor who has achieved the coolness of Clint Eastwood in the Dollars Trilogy, and I don't think any actor Ever will. The epitome of coolness, Clint Eastwood will always be the first person to come into my mind when the words 'coolness' or 'cool' are said.

And when CLINT EASTWOOD looks over the town, decides to play two feuding gang families against each other and tells someone, "There's a lot of money to be made in this town," you're reminded that the producers of this film had the same idea when they fashioned the script out of a Japanese story and decided to make a lot of money out of it.

It all clicks--the no name anti-hero who cleans up a town so thoroughly within the first hour that you wonder how there are any inhabitants left. He's certainly doing the coffin-maker a favor. And when he shoots it out with the bad guys, you know he's got nothing to worry about. You can almost predict he'll walk off into the sunset for the finale.

Equally impressive is Gian Maria Volontè as Ramon, the central villain. Volontè's performance is wonderfully over-the-top, and he has a very intense look that befits the character and lends him a real sense of menace. Leone and the screenwriters do an excellent job building up Ramon as a formidable opponent, making him do increasingly insane and savage things until the audience is bursting to see Eastwood take him down a peg.

It is fashionable to see Leone as an abstract artist, a Melville of the Western, and there is much here to bear this out. DOLLARS opens with a haunting animated shadowshow, stripping the tenets of the genre - landscape, history, the powerful white man - to its mythical bones. The genius first sequence features a triangle - Joe drinking water, the crying child and father on one side, the helpless mother and the thugs on the other. This triangular composition is mirrored by the shape of the well where Joe drinks, turning physical action into sheer abstraction. This triangular shape runs throughout the film (eg Joe, the Rojos and the Baxters), as it does throughout the trilogy as a whole, infecting even the title of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, and provides a cool, ironic counterpoint to the excessive passions, the burning colours, the sun-parched landscape, the bibulous action.

Brilliant, superb, ingenious are the first words to come into my mind to describe Ennio Morricone's brilliant soundtrack. Morricone's scores are one of the most essential things about Sergio Leone's films, see "A Fistful Of Dollars" and you'll know what I mean.

Clint was never better than as The Man With No Name, handsome, funny, cruel, sexually ambiguous. DOLLARS works best as a European ghost story, full of mysterious strangers, gallows, corpses on horseback, widows, coffinmakers, cemetaries, nocturnal orgies, dead defenders of graves etc., reminding us of a Europe itself not uncontaminated from a brutal, pointless, nihilistic, bloody history.

SORRY, FOR NOT SOUNDING TOO SCIENTIFIC IN THIS REVIEW, BUT WHEN IT COMES TO THE DOLLARS TRILOGY I MUST ADMIT THAT THEY ARE MY FAVORITES SINCE YOUTH AND I CAN BE VERY SUBJECTIVE

[paeng]

Fantastic! The film should definitely be seen together with the work that inspired it: Yojimbo. Also, for some reason, when I think of the film, I'm reminded of works like Burn! and even The Wild Bunch.

[trieffiewiles]

Leone continued in this tradition with Once Upon a Time in the West, definitely one of my favorite movies, definitely one that's painful to watch when you're not in the best of moods. How'd they find a kid that looks like a young Charles Bronson anyway?