A Fistful of Dollars

A Fistful of Dollars sees Sergio Leone first dips into the Spaghetti Western, and his first teaming with Clint Eastwood. It is to watch Leone’s later operatic, stylistic obsessions and choices to be in their embryonic form. It is to watch Eastwood’s film persona being hammered into place and his movie star charisma coming into full bloom. Sure, the plot is purely recycled from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which was already heavily borrowed from Dashiell Hammett’s great noir novel Red Harvest, but A Fistful of Dollars is a loose remake done right.

It may not quite hold its own weight next to sprawling masterpieces like Once Upon a Time in the West or The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, but it’s still a damn good time. The extreme close-ups, the dirt and grit in every frame, the poetic expressions of violence, the long-silence punctuated by loud gun shots, the Ennio Morricone score that haunts every moment – all of Leone’s genius is here. And if you’re interested in pure expressions of cinema, films which alternate between wide panoramas and tightly framed faces, Leone’s oddball westerns are a great deal of joy to behold.

These are Westerns beamed in from another planet, keener on providing expressionistic shots of wide landscapes and punctured by operatic displays of emotions and goofy sidekicks that pose as comic relief. Standing in the center of Leone’s great, loosely entwined trilogy is Eastwood’s “Man with No Name.” His granite face and permanent squint are visual symbolizes that what we’re dealing with is a murky area in which there are no longer clear delineations between good and bad. Eastwood is pure anti-heroism, and the stoic yet ultimately decent heroes of John Wayne and Gary Cooper’s westerns are now things of the past.