For a Few Dollars More

An improvement over its predecessor, A Fistful of Dollars, and a visible trajectory towards the greatness of The Good, the Bad & the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West is highly visible. For a Few Dollars More is all sweaty pieces that don’t exactly make for a coherent plot, but they make a damn fine excuse for Sergio Leone to exercise his obsessions with making violence both look awful and strangely poetic.

I can’t really recall what anyone would call a “narrative” in this, but I do remember a lot of the varied set-pieces. The skeletal plot concerns Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" teaming up with his enemy, a bounty hunter played by Lee Van Cleef, to capture a bandit (Gian Maria Volontè). That's about it, but it doesn't matter as it's just a ploy to create moments of pure cinematic vision in all its poetic glory.

Leone was a master of pointing his camera towards epic vistas and juxtaposing it with extreme close-ups of his actors looking dirty, chomping on cigars, and sweating buckets. And this is just the preliminary moments leading up to the shoot-outs, which seem to last for long stretches of time. This is western stretched to the breaking point with melodramatic flourishes. This is grand entertainment.