A Fistful of Dollars

Clint Eastwood was best known to American audiences for his role as Rowdy Yates in the series Rawhide. The series had ended and he was offered this strange new and challenging role in this movie of the American West that was made in Italy! Eastwood said his wife read that script and liked it. She said it was really "wild" because it was written in Western "slang" by Italians who really didn't understand English. He did this picture almost as a lark, and then read that it had become one of the biggest hits in Europe and then when it was released in America it outgrossed even the most popular current American films and made Clint Eastwood both a star and a phenomenon. Its strange to me that the best films ever made about the American west should have been made by Sergio Leone, an Italian who couldn't even speak English. Clint Eastwood said that all he knew in Italian was "arrevadershi" and all Leone knew in English was "goodbye" and yet these two combined to make an awesome film. As the poncho clad "Man With No Name", Eastwood created a role that hit us like a punch in the face and really re-defined the definition of the true Western hero. Eastwood tore out pages and pages of the dialogue and reduced his character to the bare bones to make him more mysterious. Leone said that he clad Eastwood in that sweat stained serepe to give him a cloak of mystery and put the cheroot in his mouth as a pendant between his two cold eyes and it worked like a charm. He broke all the rules and re-defined screen violence. I read that Leone wanted to make a blood and guts Western and show to the audience "I want them to feel what the hell it is like to get shot" and he does it! The scene where Clint is beaten to a pulp is one of the most graphic that you will ever see. It would have killed most other men!

In the middle '20's, Dashiell Hammett (best known as author of "The Maltese Falcon") wrote'Red Harvest", in which a nameless private eye (also alcoholic, a status shared by many Hammett heroes) is hired to clean up a small town kept in fear by two warring boot-leg mobs.

I believe "Red Harvest" did make it to film in the '30's, but I haven't been able to track that down and never saw it.

In 1961, Akira Kurosawa brought a version of the story to the screen in "Yojimbo', with Toshiro Mifune playing the nameless hero. Kurosawa and Mifune add an earthiness to the hero lacking in Hammett's tension filled original: Mifune's samurai is always scratching, eating, cringing or sneering. Perhaps this is to make up for the subtraction of the element of alcoholism that was the chief weakness of Hammett's anti-hero. But it also has the effect of rounding out the character so that he becomes human to us in a way Hammett's anti-hero is not.

In 1965, an Italian director, not yet credited with completed film, Sergio Leone, was hired to do a typical "spaghetti western" of the era. Instead, he remade 'Yojimbo" (without giving credit to the original, by the way) as "A Fistful of Dollars". The failure to credit "Yojimbo" as inspiration raises some ethical questions - but it must be noted that Kurosawa himself made no reference to Hammett in the credits to "Yojimbo"! In any event, "A Fistful.(...)" is a young director's film, full of flaws; but it has an undeniable black-humor and is crisply directed, with some striking visuals that seem to come out of nowhere, given the genre context in which the film is made. The nameless hero is played with a particular coolness by Clint Eastwood, which undercuts the earthiness- the scratching and scruffiness - that remains from the Mifune version - Eastwood's anti-hero rarely eats, and never cringes or sneers. The pivotal torture scene from Yojimbo remains, given a peculiar brutality by the addition of a pan of the expressionless faces of the onlooking outlaws. This scene - predicated on Eastwood's unwillingness to give up the young family he has saved, is finally what makes him a hero. Is it enough? Well. if not, he's certainly one stinky of a masochist, taking a beating like that for nothing. In a world as corrupt as that in which our hero finds himself, it is the smaller sacrifices that determine the ethics of a man. Remaining silent is sometimes the boldest statement to make; it was good enough for Kurosawa and Leone; it's good enough for me.

e.j. winner

'A Fistful Of Dollars' is a wonderful movie which, despite having an enormous following of fans around the world, sometimes gets unfairly dismissed in my opinion. For two reasons - firstly because the second and third movie in Leone/Eastwood "Man With No Name" trilogy ('For A Few Dollars More' and 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly') are so damn good it's easy to overlook this one. Despite being made on a much tighter budget and being less ambitious than the sequels to follow, it's still one of the greatest westerns ever made in my opinion. The second reason is the Yojimbo thing. Now movie buffs frequently slam 'A Fistful Of Dollars' as being a rip off of Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo', which I think is extremely misleading. I'm not disputing that Leone was familiar with Kurosawa (I have no idea one way or the other), but one name I rarely hear ANYONE mention is Dashiel Hammett. Hammett's hard boiled crime classic 'Red Harvest' was published THIRTY YEARS before 'Yojimbo' and features the same central premise of an anti-hero playing two rival groups off against each other. So if anyone deserves acknowledgement as uncredited inspiration for Leone (AND Kurosawa) it's Hammett. Anyway, this is an absolutely brilliant movie and it launched Clint Eastwood, a popular TV actor, into being a major movie star, and likewise put Sergio Leone on the map. I can't recommend 'A Fistful Of Dollars' highly enough, it's pure entertainment, and very, very cool!

'A Fistful of Dollars' is the first from Sergio Leone's trilogy about "The Man with No Name". The other two movies are 'For a Few Dollars More' and the famous 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'. Although 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' is considered the best this one comes pretty close. It is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' and it comes also pretty close to that movie. It was also the first real Spaghetti Western.

Clint Eastwood is "The Man with No Name" who comes to a small town where two families run the place. Both families hate each other and he thinks he can make a lot of money with playing both parties against each other. This is basically the main story. There are some sub-plots, one of them involves Marisol (Marianne Koch) who is taken by a leader of one of the families. Her husband and child still live in the town.

For me it was not the story that made this movie interesting. It was the whole atmosphere. I like all Leone's westerns for that reason. Of course some are better than others, but they are never boring. The way we see Eastwood kill four man early in the movie is simply spectacular.

This no 'Once Upon a Time in the West' or even 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' but we have the same atmosphere, the same kind of score by Ennio Morricone and a Clint Eastwood at the beginning of a great career.

ALthough in many respects this film pales in comparison with Leone's later films, it is itself a brilliant cinematic achievement. In part, this is because its failings primarily appear to be due to constraints of budget (very small and highly uncertain) and time more than anything else. Even to the extent that the skills of Leone, Morricone, and others hadn't fully flowered yet, this film is incredible at how brilliantly it is handled for what is really a first-time go. Leone had worked on, and even directed, films before, but this is his first real foray in his own direction, and into a genre that he revolutionised and with which he became forever synonymous. Who can imagine westerns without at least thinking of Leone's films, while who can think of Leone without thinking of westerns (even though his last, and arguably greatest, film was a sort of gangster film)? Similarly, one should not criticize this film for being based on Yojimbo, for that film itself was based on an American story while A Fistful of Dollars really is very different in many key respects, not least of all Leone's visual style or his own sense of irony and symbolism derived from Italian precedents and Hollywood westerns.

We also see the nascent Leone visual style here, with the close-up style and contrast of close-ups and long shots appearing. This alone sets it apart from previous films, westerns and non-westerns alike, and still provides for great visual treats that one can appreciate today.

This film also ushered in Leone's obsession with details, hard faces, grungy people, etc., that also revolutionsed the genre.

This films also marks the first brilliant score of Ennio Morricone. It is here that he introduced the lonely whistling, guitar music, chorus, and unusual combinations and styles that developed into the music that has become in the U.S. synonymous with westerns and duels in the same way that Leone's visuals and themes have.

Despite its minor flaws, this is still a great film that is not only revolutionary but still great and fun to watch even today. Like Leone's other films, it is timeless.

One must also admit that it is amazing that in the U.S. an Italian film maker basing his films partly in Italian culture and an Italian composer could come to so define and be synonymous with this genre that Americans had considered so uniquely American, and highlight its underlying universality. That alone reveals the greatness of the films, of which this is the first.