Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964)

Sergio Leone

Italy-Germany-Spain

99 min, color, Italian (dubbed in English)

This is the first of the famous spaghetti-Western trilogy by Sergio Leone that stars Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name. Although not as good as its sequels, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, this one is quite entertaining as well, and perhaps even more important than the others bacause it was the first.

The story line follows Kurosawa's Yojimbo rather closely. It may be unfair to base one's evaluation of the film on a comparison with that masterpiece for in doing so, Leone's offering loses badly in every department, from the director all the way down to how the animals "act" (horses vs. the dog). Even Morricone's score gets a bit tiresome after the first 30 minutes because it is so repetitive. Not only is the story done better in Kurosawa's film, but the characters are more interesting, from the inn-keeper to main guy's most important rival (Nakadai in the original, Volonte in this one). The acting... let's not even get there. Suffice to say that Eastwood is no Mifune, and everyone else in the remake acts from bad to atrocious, never rising above general mediocrity.

So, if I am to compare this one to the original, Leone's film will get dismissed rather curtly and unceremoniously. This would be a pity because in itself, A Fistful of Dollars is pretty good. Not a masterpiece, but better than most traditional Westerns. One of its major claims to fame should be the introduction of the less-than heroic main character. Unlike most Westerns of the time, Eastwood's nameless gunslinger is motivated by greed, does not care much about anything (e.g. the scene where he sees a child being terrorized by a big ugly Mexican with a big ugly sombrero; something that would have caused John Wayne to rid the desert of him pretty fast), and is more interested in surviving, preferably richer, than doing what's right. By the end of the film, he is just as greedy and egotistical, but we have peered into his inner world and have seen that he's not all that bad. This, of course, is exactly what happens in Kurosawa's film too.

What begins as The Man with No Name's (Joe) playing off two petty local gangs of smugglers against each other, soon turns into a struggle for survival and revenge when the heart gets the best of Joe's head and he helps a woman and her family escape the clutches of the bandits. From a guy who shoots four unknown people on a whim to show his worth to the boss and get a job, Joe becomes the protector of the weak, much to his own chagrin. His helplessness to resist the demanding call of his conscience makes him quite appealing, even if his brutal ways make him equally dangerous.

The motivation of the character bothered many people and upon the film's initial release in the US, a distributor made an intro sequence (without the approval of either Leone or Eastwood) that showed Joe being released on parole and sent to St. Miguel to restore order there. This completely destroyed the intent and mood of the film and was thankfully removed from the later screenings (and the DVD). But it does reinforce the film's claim of contributing something uniquely worthwhile to the tradition of the Western.

The film is quite violent, although the body count does not exceed the original. There is also little screen violence apart from the inept beating of Joe and various people getting shot with no blood spilled. Instead of the usual wide shots, Leone goes for closeups to show both the killers and the victims, but a lot of screen time is wasted on repeated killings that contribute absolutely nothing to the experience because we are not shown the pain of dying, just the act of falling to the ground (cf. in particular the lengthy and pointless slaughter of the Mexican army detachment by the bandits). It would take Sam Peckinpah and his The Wild Bunch to do this right.

In the end, A Fistful of Dollars comes away as an entertaining film that fails to fulfill its promise. Fortunately, Leone's two sequels corrected this.

Interesting: Spain (where the film was shot) looks a lot like Southern Utah and the badlands in Southern California.

The MGM DVD is utterly devoid of extras (save for a trailer) but offers both the widescreen (2.35:1) and pan-scan versions of the film. I did not bother with the latter, but the widescreen (non-anamorphic) transfer is good, especially given the age of the film. The English mono soundtrack is horrible, mostly because the dubbing sounds unnatural. Dialogue is often inaudible, but I was unable to decide whether it was because of the horrible accents or the dub job itself. Subtitles in English (and French) can help decipher parts of it.

February 24, 2003