This is a long-awaited title, not because there aren’t umpteen previous versions out there but because this new restoration job by the Italians promised something better, a definitive improvement on MGM’s many DVD and Blu releases. I’ve seen in person the problems MGM had with this particular show both on film and on video. The quality notes in this review are covered further below.
There’s hardly a reason to reassess the Leone Dollars films, which have remained favorites in America from the moment that United Artists imported them several years after they had become hits in Europe. UA’s monster success with James Bond cued a major ad blitz with special artwork and a campaign strategy customized to appeal to American action fans. Clint Eastwood shot to top popularity and stayed there permanently; his ‘Man With No Name’ character became the best-known Western hero this side of John Wayne.
Fans that doted on the picture were fascinated to discover that the first film A Fistful of Dollars was actually the result of a three-way exchange of pop cinema trends between Italy, Japan and the U.S.. Japanese crime & costume action directors fashioned their own hyper-violent and stylized responses to American genre pictures, especially after director John Sturges re-imagined Akira Kurosawa’s classic epic Seven Samurai as a western, making gunfight choreography the most important element. Knowing that Europeans were bigger fans of American westerns than anyone, the ex-assistant director Sergio Leone fell in with a couple of producers stealing adapting Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as an American-style western for the Italian market. Leone added a style and attitude of his own, borrowing a sense of freebooting cynicism from Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz. Leone conceived of story in terms of a poker game in which every hand is a new violent action set piece.
Eastwood saves A Fistful of Dollars by investing Leone’s mercenary action hero with grit and stature. His ‘Joe’ bluffs his way through situations with a knowing, self-assured smile and an ability to stay cool when others are emotional. As in a poker game Joe never shows what he’s feeling. He injects himself into a bloody feud between two bordertown gangs, the Baxters and the Rojos, hiring himself in turn to each side while provoking more violence. His goal appears to be stolen gold but he also has the more honorable motive of saving Marisol, a damsel in distress (Marianne Koch of Georges Franju’s Spotlight on a Murderer).
Had Clint Eastwood previously been given the opportunity to contribute to a movie to the degree he had here? The Man With No Name is really the actor’s own creation — his interpretation of the script is a far cry from the basically happy-go-lucky character he played on TV’s Rawhide. Eastwood’s hero is the apotheosis of the lethal gunslinger that little boys (Sergio Leone among them) have adored ever since Matt Dillon made his first triple-play gun-down. Joe talks in a raspy whisper, snarls with a cheroot in his mouth and shoots his six-gun like nothing human. Leone plays up the mythic aspect of this magic gunfighter. For the finale, Joe makes a ghostlike entrance out of a cloud of dust. For a moment, his opponent thinks he must be superhuman, or a ghost.
Rarely have so many elements come together so well ‘the first time out.’ Despite his tiny budget Leone was able to muster key talent like the excellent art director Carlo Simi and composer Ennio Morricone, whose contribution to the series would equal Leone’s own. When Per un pugno di dollari took off like wildfire in theaters around the world the director became fully established in the Roman filmmaking scene. The Italian western would take over from the sword ‘n’ sandal epic as Italy’s most successful filmic export.
A Fistful of Dollars was the perfect movie for the Vietnam years, when the byword wasn’t honor or morality but the rule of force. The Man With No Name cares nothing for the finer points of politics and recognizes only the practical power presented at the point of a gun. He’s the ultimate opportunist, a prince among fools; knowing that confusion rewards the loner who keeps his head he creates the chaos that allows him to subvert his enemies. Joe can decimate San Miguel because he so thoroughly destabilizes it. That he pauses to aid Marisol seems the one character quality that doesn’t quite fit, a nod to the Sir Galahad virtues of sentimental westerns of yore. Subsequent oaters of the Italian school would quickly leave such niceties far behind.
