Film Review
A Fistful of Dollars
(originally released in Italy under the title
Per un pugno di dollari) may not
have been the first spaghetti western, but it is the first that
counts. Taking his inspiration (and virtually the entire plot)
from Akira Kurosawa's samurai masterpiece
Yojimbo
(1961), director Sergio Leone not only reinvented the western at a time
when it had degenerated into a sad morass of tired clichés, but
also established the international reputation of his lead actor Clint
Eastwood, who was at the time known only for his fairly undistinguished
appearances in the American television series
Rawhide. Whilst it is far less
polished than Leone's subsequent westerns - including the sequels
For a Few Dollars More (1965) and
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
-
A Fistful of Dollars was
something of a cinematic revolution. It kicked the old
clichés into the dust and pumped gallons of badly needed fresh
blood into the veins of a dying genre (spilling quite a bit of it on
the set).
Kurosawa may be the most obvious influence (enough of an influence to
prompt the Japanese director to take Leone to court for breach of
copyright) but it is not the only one. The classic westerns of
John Ford and Howard Hawks are referenced in Leone's tongue-in-cheek
portrayal of the lone hero nonchalantly facing up to adversity and also
in the inclusion of the landscape as a dynamic element of the drama,
rather than just a pretty backdrop. Clint Eastwood's
unnamed character (referred to as Joe in this film but better known as
The Man With No Name) is the amalgam of every western action hero
before him, every bit as enigmatic, cool and deadly as Toshirô
Mifune's anonymous samurai in
Yojimbo.
Unlike what we find in previous westerns (for example, George Stevens'
Shane,
1953), the gunslinger we are invited to identify with is not a true
hero; he does not wear his morality on his sleeve. He is neither
good, nor bad. Whatever moral code he abides by is strictly his
own, and it is hard for us to define just what that may be. We
struggle to understand just why the laconic stranger feels impelled to
orchestrate the massacre of an entire town. Is he an angel of
judgement, on a personal crusade to punish the unworthy? Is he a
psychopath who delights in watching people suffer and die? Or is
he just what the film's title implies, a cold-hearted mercenary who acts
purely for financial gain, extorting a few paltry dollars from the
misery of others? One of the charms of this film, and its two
sequels, is that we never get to discover just who is The Man With No
Name. He is a force of nature, mysterious, wild and unfathomable.
When it was first seen,
A Fistful of
Dollars was widely criticised for its depiction of physical
violence, in particular the drawn-out sequence in which Eastwood's
character is brutally tortured by his enemies. Today, Leone's
film is judged to be considerably more honest about violence than
previous American westerns, which tended to gloss over the fact that
getting shot is a rather painful and unpleasant business. In the
classic western, one cowboy pulls a trigger and another instantly drops
dead, sometimes with a muted grunt. In Leone's film, and
virtually all subsequent westerns (not to mention other genres), the
act of taking a human life is shown to be a far nastier business, and
so it should be. Whilst other filmmakers (notably Sam Peckinpah)
stole much of his thunder, Sergio Leone was one of the first film
directors who had the guts to portray the suffering caused by violence
in his films. Far from being a sadist, Leone simply wanted to
show that violence hurts, otherwise it is just meaningless spectacle.
Leone also broke new ground with his use of close-ups - long, lingering
close-ups which give the spectator the chance to divine the intent that
hides behind the impassive facades of his protagonists. The
dialogue tells us nothing about what the characters are thinking or
feeling; what we learn about them comes entirely through what we see in
their eyes or on their lips - hatred, fear, insecurity, cunning,
contempt and lust for revenge. Dialogue is so superfluous
to
A Fistful of Dollars that
it could legitimately have been made as a silent film. What
dialogue there is serves merely to keep the plot moving, it adds
nothing to the characterisation. The characters reveal themselves
not by what they say but by the subtle clues that are etched on their
faces. Eastwood is particularly adept for this kind of cinema; he
is one of a rare breed of actor who finds it far easier to communicate
with an audience through his eyes rather than his mouth. It is no
accident that most of Eastwood's subsequent screen roles would be
variations on the one he portrays in this film - he was born to play the
tough taciturn mystery man. The film's other iconic performance
is supplied by Gian Maria Volonté (here credited as Johnny
Wels), who is superb as Eastwood's sharpshooting nemesis Ramón
and would subsequently enjoy a high profile career in mainstream
Italian cinema.
Another important element of the film is Ennio Morricone's
distinctively jaunty score, which combines various cultural influences
into a memorably haunting sound that is eerily reminiscent of Masaru
Satô's score for
Yojimbo.
Like the rest of the Italian cast and crew, Morricone is credited under
a more American-sounding name (Dan Savio) and was a virtual unknown
when he worked on this film. Through this and his subsequent
collaborations with Leone, he became one of the most sought-after and
most highly paid film composers in the world. His theme for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is
arguably the best-known and most iconic in cinema history, so perfectly
evocative of the film it accompanies. Without a doubt, the
phenomenal success of the spaghetti western owes as much to Ennio
Morricone as it does to Sergio Leone. The western would never be
the same again.
© James Travers 2012
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