A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Director: Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood

This is the man with no name. Danger fits him like a glove.

Okay so it’s a spaghetti western and not an action movie, but Leone’s ‘Dollars Trilogy’ with their Mexican stand-offs and violent gun battles really helped influence later movies that I will be talking about. John Woo’s heroic bloodshed films nearly all have a Mexican standoff at some point and Antonio Banderas’s mysterious mariachi player who comes into town and finds himself in trouble is similar to Eastwood’s the Man with No Name, who funnily enough has a name in all three movies, here it is ‘Joe’. Also when talking about the best movie shoot-outs you need to mention The Wild Bunch, which is also a western and a movie I’ll be writing about later, so if that western is fair game then so I feel is A Fistful of Dollars. Also reviewing this means I get a break between Bond movies. Lastly I wanted to include this film as I loved it and well, it’s my blog so there.

From director Sergio Leone, who is a legend despite only directing seven movies, comes his second picture in what is basically an unofficial remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Kurosawa himself said A Fistful of Dollars “is a good movie, but it’s MY movie” and he even won a case against Leon’s movie and got an out-of-court settlement. What Fistful lacks in originality it does make up for however in style and the superb direction of Leone. This is an Italian movie filmed in Spain and the director and star Clint Eastwood had to communicate via one of the movie’s stuntmen who could speak both English and Italian. Indeed the movie was filmed in silent with actors having to dub their own lines in afterwards. Yet none of that matters or hurt the movie as Leone was a master visual storyteller.

Leone’s style is perfectly complimented by the great Ennio Morricone’s fantastic score. Morricone might just be my favourite film composer of all time and I can’t imagine these movies working without his music and it’s what I hear when I think of westerns. I mentioned in my review of North by Northwest how much I respected Alfred Hitchcock for making Cary Grant’s wait for the mysterious George Caplan by the side of the highway so, so long and building up an incredible amount of tension by doing so, well Leone may well do that even better that the great Hitchcock, best shown in Once Upon a Time in the West’s opening scene and the three way shoot-out in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. However Leone has said one of the reasons why some of those scenes are so long is because he didn’t want the music to end and with a score this good who can blame him? Leone considered music to be such a huge part of his movies and really this could almost work as a silent movie in many regards. In the opening scene you know what Marisol (Marianne Koch) is thinking just with her facial expressions, tears and hopeful looks to Joe alone.

You have Leone and Morricone who are two thirds of what make these movies so iconic, but the last part of the package is the superb Clint Eastwood in the role he was born to play. I know I use the word “cool” a lot, but when you are talking about Sean Connery’s James Bond, Steve McQueen on a Triumph motorbike or Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’ how can you not help but use that word to describe them? Eastwood’s cool, quiet, laconic portrayal fit Leone’s style like a glove. Leone said of Clint’s acting style “More than an actor, I needed a mask, and Eastwood, at that time, had only two expressions: with hat and no hat.”, and I get what he means as he needed a kind of blank canvas for which he could add expression onto with his direction or later with the score or editing, but it still sells Eastwood short on how great he was. For starters the look of the character, besides the poncho, was all Eastwood who bought the spurs, the gun holster, the gun prop, the jeans, the cigars and the hat. I just found out reading on Wikipedia that Eastwood is actually a non-smoker and that blew me away as if there was ever an advert to make smoking look cool (and sadly I’m sure there is) it’s Clint smoking his famous cigars. But no, Eastwood hated the taste of the cigars and reckons the foul taste put him in the right frame of mind for his character. Because The Man with no Name is so laconic it’s easy to overlook Eastwood’s performance, but he can convey more emotion in just the squint of his eye than some actors are capable of with their whole bodies and words.

The rest of the cast are all solid. Gian Marie Volonte’ is perfectly loathsome as villain as Ramon Rojo and I really hated (in the best possible way) Esteban Rojo played by Sieghardt Rupp, with his horrific laugh and smugness when Eastwood’s ‘Joe’ was being beaten up and I was so glad when innkeeper Silvantio (Jose Calvo) shoot him dead. Calvo and Joseph Egger brought real warmth to their roles, as innkeeper and undertaker respectively and were likeable being Joe’s only allies in the film. I feared that Silvantio would be killed due to his relationship with Eastwood which shows how much I liked him. The aforementioned Marianne Koch as Ramon’s kidnapped girlfriend and hostage brought a real vulnerability to her Marisol but I really liked how her weak female character was balanced out by Margarita Lozano’s strong Consuelo Baxter. Consuelo was the wife of the Baxter gang’s leader and sheriff, but she was the matriarch and really called the shots in the gang (it’s telling that Eastwood always spoke to her and not her husband) and Ramon even asks the sheriff if he needs his wife’s permission at one point too. She’s by far the best female character we’ve seen in a movie on my list so far and she was my second favourite person in the film, behind Joe.

I haven’t even touched on the plot to this film, which to be frank is really straightforward and secondary to the characters. It starts when Eastwood’s character rides into a town, a town which he is told by the bell-ringer, can either make you rich or get you killed. The Man with no Name decides to get try and get rich and play two warring families, the Rojos and the Baxters, against each other and get money from both, befriending both sides and crossing, double-crossing and triple-crossing them all. This all goes well until he sees the kidnapped Marisol, who has been pried away from her husband and child, and he decides he has to free her from Ramon’s clutches which has huge consequences. It’s kind of a basic plot, a real familiar one if you’ve seen Yojimbo, but I was engaged and the movie sped by for me so I liked it. I have to mention the huge gunfight, actually a “gun massacre” would be more accurate, at the end where the Rojos gun down the Baxters as it features an incredible stunt of an actor on fire for a really long time. I had to rewind it as I thought maybe I had not seen it properly and it was just a dummy on fire, but nope, it was a stuntman walking out of a burning house, on fire, and falling on the floor, still on fire, for ages before the camera cut. It was great stuff. At the time of release critics called it overly violent, and it was violent for the time, but none of it is violence for violence sakes and all the deaths matter in this movie.

I first, and last, watched this trilogy around fifteen years ago and while I loved the last movie, I didn’t enjoy the first two nearly as much, but this time around I really had fun watching A Fistful of Dollars and am now looking forwards to seeing For a Few Dollars More.

8/10- A really enjoyable western that introduced the world to Clint Eastwood and his famous Man with No Name character. Great film.

Best quote: “Get three coffins ready.” …. “My mistake, make that four coffins.”

Best scene: In between the two quotes above we have Clint Eastwood asking four of the Baxter gang to apologise to his mule and then shooting them all when they don’t. It’s a fantastic introduction to this character.

Kick-ass moment: Innkeeper Silvantio has been tied up by the Rojo gang and is about to be whipped but just when you expect to hear the crack of the whip you instead hear an explosion of dynamite as The Man with No Name has returned to save the day.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow what we’ll be talking about will be “Shocking. Positively shocking.”