Por Um Punhado de Dólares

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

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 drifter gunman (Clint Eastwood) arrives in the Mexican village of San Miguel in the border of United States of America, and befriends the owner of the local bar Silvanito (Jose Calvo). The stranger discovers that the town is dominated by two gangster lords: John Baxter (W. Lukschy) and the cruel Ramón Rojo (Gian Maria Volontè – a.k.a. John Wells). When the stranger kills four men of the Baxter's gang, he is hired by Ramón's brother Esteban Rojo (S. Rupp) to join their gang. However, the stranger plots a scheme working for both sides and playing one side against the other.

"Per un Pugno di Dollari" is a milestone in the history of the cinema, since the genre of "Spaghetti Westerns" didn't really exist previous to this movie. Sergio Leone used the storyline of Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo", replacing the samurai without a master ("ronin") Sanjuro Kuwabatake performed by Toshirô Mifune and the scenario of the rural Japanese town in Nineteenth Century by the stranger without a name (Clint Eastwood) and a small Mexican town in the border of the Wild and Far West. The result is a magnificent and remarkable movie, and beginning of the trilogy of Clint Eastwood's character Joe, who proves that "a man with a rifle beats a man with .45", completed by "Per Qualche Dollaro in Più" and "Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo", . My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Por um Punhado de Dólares" ("For a Fistful of Dollars")

A one man vigilante enters town, proceeds to take four shooters down without a frown, the filling of, a feudal sandwich, allies to both, presents his own pitch, it's not too long before his masterplan is blown. As the barrels start to role and then cascade, cadavers keep the coffin man in trade, the bullets ricochet, will our Joe make his payday, or will the bandits and the smugglers have their say.

It's hard to believe this 1964 western is as engaging as it was when I first watched it as a kid growing up. I've enjoyed its company many times since, as well as that of Yojimbo upon which it was based; the timeless tale of one man doing the right thing, fighting the corrupt and the crooked, just for a fistful of dollars or, in modern parlance, a computer full of crypto - I know which I prefer.

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.