For a Few Dollars More (1965)

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Director: Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonte

The Man with No Name is back.

The Man with No Name is indeed back and this time he wants more dollars, $10,000 to be exact. The money comes in the form of Indio, an escaped criminal planning to rob a bank, who is also dealing with demons from his past. However there is another bounty hunter pursuing Indio too one who will not stand aside and let our hero take the rewards. Lastly there is a haunting jingle of a pocket watch which is shrouded in mystery and violence.

After the success Sergio Leone had with A Fistful of Dollars (in Europe anyway, the movie was not well-received in the US) another spaghetti western was always going to happen and the great director brought back his old crew including composer Ennio Morricone, star Clint Eastwood and the previous movie’s villain Gian Maria Volonte, this time in a new role. Previous to this blog I had only seen the first two parts of what came to be known as the ‘Dollars Trilogy’ once before about fifteen years ago. While I instantly fell in love with the final movie The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and I was quite fond of A Fistful of Dollars I didn’t enjoy For a Few Dollars More nearly as much. I have no idea why however as this movie is really good. I think maybe at the time after having heard many times that these three movies were part of a trilogy, even in reality they are not directly related films, I was confused as to why Volonte’s character was still alive and it took away some of my immersion.

The plot here, despite being more intricate than the previous film, lacks the crazy action set-pieces such as Roman’s gang shooting their rivals as they flee from the burning house but instead it builds up its characters and the ending here has far more emotional impact than the trigger-happy ending of Fistful. Well there are characters with a bit more depth here but Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name (nicknamed Manco this time round) isn’t really one of them and is as aloof as ever. In Fistful there was a quick throw-away line about something in his past that made him act heroic and defend Marisol against Ramon, but here he is just after the almighty dollar. I don’t mind that at all though as the less we know about Eastwood’s cowboy the more enigmatic he becomes. He also shoots a person without even looking at them at one point too. Such a badass.

I did love what they did with the bad guy El Indio (Volonte’) and think it was a great upgrade from his evil heartless villain of the previous movie. Oh he is still a complete sick psycho here, at one point he guns down a mother and child to get back at an old rival, but he carries around the pocket watch of one of his previous victims and is completely tormented by the clockwork jingle it makes, turning to marijuana as a coping mechanism to deal with the horrid deed he did. Volente is such an engaging actor and he has a magnetic presence that makes it hard for me to take my eyes of him. His El Indio, while almost as much of a mystery as Eastwood’s cowboy aside from a flashback of the incident that haunts him, is a fascinating character to watch. I feel that it is a massive shame he wasn’t brought back in some way for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly as he has added so much to the trilogy in his two roles that it’s sad he wasn’t in the grand finale. If I could go back in time I would love to have convinced Leone to direct a fourth movie so they could have added an extra adjective to Good, Bad and Ugly (Weird perhaps?....) and made that film end in an epic four way shoot-out.

The third lead in this film is Lee Van Cleef’s Colonel Douglas Mortimer and in many ways this is Van Cleef’s movie. I think every scene in this film includes one of the three main actors and while it’s El Indio’s actions that drive the plot along it is Mortimer who has the closest ties to our antagonist whilst Eastwood is really just along for the ride, almost a side character in his own movie. Van Cleef might even get more screen time and dialogue than Eastwood (which isn’t saying that much as The Man with No Name is famously shy of words) and I found myself rooting more for him than Clint. When Mortimer says they should team up I agreed completely and was annoyed at Manco when he tried to break their pact. Van Cleef gives a great performance and it’s alluded to in the movie that he is just like Eastwood’s character but a decade or so older and wiser which is matched very well by Van Cleef who gives out a confident portrayal of a man who’s seen this all before and is way smarter than everyone around him. I especially enjoyed it when Eastwood kept shooting Mortimer’s hat whenever Van Cleef tried to pick it up in a futile attempt to intimidate him and force him to quit his pursuit of Indio’s bounty. In return Mortimer shoots Manco’s hat off his head and then basically juggles with it by firing five more shots at the hat before it even touched the ground. Amazing. While I’m sad Volonte won’t be in the third movie I am happy we get to see one more film of Lee Van Cleef in my retrospective reviews.

Director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone pretty much mastered the western in the first attempt but if anything they have both improved here. Leone is now using some fantastic wide angles including the opening scene where a man rides a horse a few hundred feet in the distance before being shot to the ground by the gun of an unseen man in the foreground. It’s never revealed who the man on the horse or who the shooter were but it’s a spectacular camera shoot nonetheless. I also loved the shot during the Mexican standoff at the end of the film with Van Cleef on the far left, Volonte on the far right and Eastwood in the middle and it feels like a small hint as to what is to come next. Of course Leone is perhaps more famous for his extreme close-ups and in this film we get our first shots that show nothing but a character’s eyes which is something that has become such an iconic western visual now. Also the landscapes are simply stunning at times too and it feels like Leone is showing off in the best kind of way at times.

Then there is Morricone who composes another good theme tune, though I do like A Fistful of Dollars more, but it’s the beautiful, slow, creepy piece ‘30 Seconds to What?’ that plays every time Indio opens up the pocket watch that is truly his best work in the movie. I can’t say how much I adore that piece and it is the most memorable thing in the film (it was even sampled on an awesome garage track by 187 Lockdown called the Gunman) and it’s been stuck in my head all day- finally replacing the theme from Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill! I also really liked the clock-tower chime piece he used when El Indio was telling his second-in-command that he knew Manco and Mortimer were bounty hunters all along and that he was planning to kill them. The revelations and plotting went so well with the chimes after every sentence.

So was For a Few Dollars More as good as A Fistful of Dollars? I really can’t decide between the two, but when they are both this good does it matter? Leone, Morricone, Eastwood and Van Cleef were all excellent and I am so very much looking forwards to reviewing the final part of the trilogy.

8/10- This second instalment was a marvellous follow-up and you can see that everyone involved is just getting better and better. Now, time for them to make a masterpiece.

Best quote: No, old man. I thought I was having trouble with my adding. It’s all right now.

Best scene: I am going to go with the end duel between Mortimer and Indio.

Kick-ass moment: Mortimer is trying to collect a bounty but the man he pursuing is fleeing on a horse. Not fazed at all Mortimer walks to his own horse, suddenly unfurls a pouch that contains four rifles, casually picks one up and shoots the fleeing man dead.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we’ll be talking about another British secret agent movie. But this time it isn’t Bond…