Por Um Punhado de Dólares

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!

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.

When Per un pungo di dollari, or A Fistful Of Dollars, was released in the mid-1960s, the term "Spaghetti Western" was coined as a putdown to these brazen new films that dared to recreate the Wild West in a place as far away as Italy. However, the last laugh was shared by the Italian directors, whose new style of portraying Colonial America in a realistic style rather than the romanticised way that was characteristic of John Wayne and his contemporaries will be remembered long after the films of the romanticised style are no more.

The plot is indescribably simple, as Clint Eastwood simply wanders into a town where gang warfare has stripped the economy to the point where only the local undertaker makes a profit and turns the two warring families against one another. Sergio Leone's best-known trademark, his dynamic use of widescreen ratios, comes to the fore here as Clint shares a film frame with no less than four of his enemies, all of whom have plenty to say to him and vice versa. This is one film where a pan and scan transfer is purely and simply vandalism. Some of the dialogue that is included here absolutely takes the cake for cleverness and wit, too. Asking four gunslingers to apologise to a horse, well, if it wasn't a man as famous for playing a gunslinger as Clint Eastwood, it'd be ridiculous.

Transplanting old Samurai legends into the Wild West works well, as you can see here. Simply having an old mercenary who travels the land in search of wrongs to right and battles to be fought makes the story a lot more compelling than the Westerns where we are told every iota of the characters' motivations in the hope that it will give them some depth. The element of the main hero not getting involved in every scuffle that the bad guys cause, our semi-nameless hero's ignoring a drunken thug shooting at a little boy being the most obvious example, was another master stroke, one that got Eastwood involved in doing the film to begin with. The confrontation at the end of the film works well, too, with pyrotechnics exploding all over the picture in a bright display that keeps the film powerful and yet focused at the same time.

All in all, Per un pungo di dollari gets nine out of ten from me. The lack of any interesting support characters does dull the story a little, but this mistake was quickly rectified in the two sequels. The addition of Lee Van Cleef also worked well, but in this effort, it's all Clint Eastwood, and while the rest of the cast are nowhere near as interesting, it's all a better watch than anything the Americans were lumping out at the time.

'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 classic. The first, or one of the first, films to introduce the concept of the Western antihero. Sergio Leone pioneered a lot of things here. The brightness, the oppressive sunlight. The ugly brutality of Western gunfights, that had always been cleaned up in Hollywood. I understand that Leone's occasional framing of the shooter and his victims in the same shot was not allowed at the time in American films. I thought, upon seeing this film years ago, that some characters (Eastwood) spoke in English, and other characters in Italian. Who knows, maybe some spoke Spanish or German. Must make for an interesting acting job. I rarely notice a movie's music, but the original score by Ennio Morricone was so fitting. Probably the best match of film and music up to that time, and only bested by Hugh Montenegro(?) in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". A very good movie. Grade: A