Funny child acting, nonsense sense of distance, bad dubbing and weak dialogue bring down an otherwise magnificent film. A Western remake of Yojimbo, it's remarkable how such a simple story can lend itself to such a great experience. The atmosphere is built up masterfully - with stunning cinematography, striking close-ups, beautifully constructed mise-en-scene, a fantastic performance from Eastwood, Moricone's ever powerful music, and a lovely overabundance of laughing - all culminating in one of the best showdowns in cinematic history.
A supremely entertaining western from 1964!
I will say the dubbing nature of 'A Fistful of Dollars' is a little distracting early on, but by the time the opening portion concluded I was incredibly interested in what was happening onscreen. The pacing is excellent, thanks to some very fine cinematography, great action sequences and a top notch score.
Clint Westwood debuts as a leading movie star and is terrific throughout, portraying the wonderfully named J̶o̶e̶ "the Man with No Name". It's little surprise these are the films that truly made him. Away from Eastwood, I really enjoyed the trio that played the Rojo brothers - Gian Maria Volonté (aka Johnny Wels), Sieghardt Rupp and Antonio Prieto. They're just as important as the main man and play the roles superbly.
Bring on the sequels!
Leone almost single handedly destroyed the Western.
But it wasn't "single handed" because he had help from the critics who were even bigger hacks than Leone was.
Here, we have a movie based on Yojimbo, which is called a classic by some, though I doubt it is truly a classic. "Seven Samurai" is a classic, but not "Yojimbo".
Still, "Yojimbo" is better than this, because too much is lost in translation here.
It's a thoroughly unmotivated movie about totally unmotivated characters.
The only interesting bit in here is a quip about the equine that No Name (Eastwood) rides.
Well, that's because the equine is the ONLY interesting and credible character in the entire movie.
Somehow, No Name thinks he can massacre what appears to be at least fifty gunmen without a scratch, yet he says at the end he doesn't take risks.
It's just a bunch of killing and shooting and noise with no motivation. For "bang per buck", it's one of the poorest payoffs ever. Only "The Wild Bunch" scores a worse "bang per buck" than this with its dullness for all the gun play.
When the dollar trilogy came out, only the crack heads and total dope heads thought it was cool, so the critics placated them. Now, those people are in authority, God help us, and have fooled following generations into the idea that this garbage is "classic". Talk about the emperor's new clothes, we see it illustrated here.
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With barely enough cash to buy a drink, drifter "Joe" (Clint Eastwood) rides into a small, pretty war-torn town near the US/Mexican border. He makes friends with the bar owner "Silvanito" (José Calvo) and pretty quickly finds himself drawn into the brutal quarrelling between "Baxter" (Wolfgang Lukschy) and his nemesis "Rojo" (Gian Maria Volonté). When he kills a few of the former man's troops, it's the brother of the latter who offers him a job. Turns out that "Joe" is a bit more shrewd than that though, and so he decides that the best solution is the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend - he can divide, sit it out a bit, and conquer - with considerable riches to be gained if his admittedly quite dangerous manipulation can succeed. Clint Eastwood is a fine exponent of the less is more style of acting. His expressions, his eyes, even his distinctive gait allow the character to develop effortlessly as this story takes a route that isn't as predictable (or easy) as you might expect. The supporting cast also work well to epitomise a small-town, brutal and venal mentality with plenty of action and hysterical laughter to keep the story moving along to a classic Morricone score set amongst the grubby and basic adobe homes. Sergio Leone does not feel the need to drag this out for hours - it's an almost perfectly paced piece of nasty, gripping, cinema that is really well worth a watch on a big screen if you can.
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A fistful of dollars A very tasty spaghetti Western. 80%
A lone white man riding on horseback slowly approaches a well near a couple of isolated homes, in order to drink some water. He observes a little boy running between the two homes and then entering one. The little boy is unceremoniously ejected from the home by two non-white men with pistols. You can tell that they are bad men because they shoot bullets next to the boy in order to scare him. A young woman, perhaps the boy's mother, looks on anxiously. The little boy runs to the other house and calls out "Papa!" to the man who comes out of that house. The bad men then proceed to physically assault the father. The bad men observe the lone white man but ignore him. The lone white man makes eye contact with the young woman and gives a gentle smile to her, without opening his lips. She slams her wooden window shut, which has bars in front of it. He moves on to some other place.
Next stop for our lone rider is a town. He is approached by the town's bell ringer, who informs him "everybody here has become very rich or else they are dead...You will get rich here or you'll be killed". This he says after helpfully mentioning (to both the viewer and the unnamed white man) a couple of important surnames in this town, Rojo and Baxter. As the lone rider proceeds down the dirt street in the town, the residents in their homes peek anxiously through their curtains to watch him. It's a town in fear. Next in the street are some white looking men (their accents would suggest a different ethnicity but that's probably just dubbing, perhaps?) armed with pistols who proceed to fire bullets next to his horse in order to run him out of town. However, our protagonist decides to 'hang around', so to speak, in one of a few comical moments in this film.
Needing much more exposition, we are introduced to the owner of the town's cantina. Again, names aren't really used in this film. The cantina owner asks our protagonist what he wants in this town. "Food and something to drink" he says, to which the cantina owner replies "Eating and drinking and killing. That's all you can do, just like the rest of your kind". They've only just met and already with the assumptions! He goes on to say: "if you don't mind doing a little killing, you will have no trouble finding someone eager to pay you".
Later in the conversation we finally learn of the town's name from the cantina owner. It's San Miguel. Maybe it's a fictional town but the Wikipedia entry for this film says that in the film, it's on the border of Mexico and the US. When the lone rider says to the cantina owner "Any town that sells guns and liquor has gotta be a rich one" we get the big dose of juicy exposition needed from the cantina owner, who informs us that "Not the town, only those who buy and sell, and the bosses are the ones who clean up...but when there are two around, then I'd say that there is one too many". This brings us back to the names mentioned by the town's bell ringer: Rojo and Baxter. Our well of exposition, the cantina owner, says: "The Rojos boys, three brothers who sell liquor. And then there's the Baxters, big gun merchants. If I'm not mistaken, you already met Baxter's gang, didn't you?". After referring to our protagonist's horse as a "mule", the cantina owner learns that our interloper sees his position thus: "Me right in the middle". Cantina owner: "Where you do what?". Interloper: "Crazy bell ringer was right. There's money to be made in a place like this". This said after the cantina owner has told him of the two gangs that "They've enlisted all the scum that hangs around both sides of the frontier, and they pay in dollars".
That's pretty much as much of the plot that I want to tell you. Much later in the film, the coffin maker/undertaker refers to our protagonist as "Joe". It struck me that either the undertaker just called him that or our protagonist did tell him his real name...or just created one to tell the undertaker. Anyway, "Joe" asks the cantina owner which of the two gangs is the stronger then soon after bumps into the head of the Baxter gang, John Baxter, who is, ironically...the town's sheriff! How will all this play out? Watch the film to find out, obviously...but maybe the cantina owner was perceptive, because later on in the film, "Joe" informs him that "The dead can be very useful sometimes. They've helped me out of tough spots more than once". Hmm. What on Earth?
Despite being a mysterious figure, "Joe" does reveal some titbits about himself (perhaps), which might explain his character or why he does things. On one occasion he says "I never found home that great" and on another occasion, when asked why he would help a woman, he responds "Why? I knew someone like you once. There was no one there to help".
Random observations:
^ I did have a preconception that the protagonist of this film would be a godlike figure and that is sort of confirmed in the film. At one point "Joe" says (on the 1st floor balcony of the cantina) "Things always look different from higher up". Ramón Rojo at another point says "I don't like that Americano. He's too smart to be just a hired fighter".
^ The version of this film which I watched was screened on SBS World Movies in Australia, on 09/10/2024, at 9:30pm and I watched it over two days from 09/11/2024...because the lack of subtitles meant that I had to grind through the film, replaying bits to work out what was being said, or reading an online transcript. That was really disappointing and in other circumstances I would have deleted the film without watching it but I persevered and did find it rewarding for it's narrative engagement. After removing the ads, the length of the film was about 1:35:48 long, from the start of the MGM lion's raw at the beginning to its end at the end. The four lots of ads had a sum total of 16 minutes and 26 seconds.
^ SBS had a rating of the film of MA15+ which I didn't feel was justified for the most part. To explain that, there's a scene where the cantina owner says to "Joe" the following: "It's like playing cowboys and Indians". That comment struck me as being a bit meta. As a film made in 1964, maybe it was violent for its time but now? There was no realism to the gun violence. There was no blood, really. It was really only for the fist fight that the no doubt primitive make-up got quite gruesome and warranted such a rating. It's the art of this film that even though the physical violence isn't particularly realistic and the blood looks fake (more like paint), the scene evokes gruelling punishment.
^ It's not clear to me that the director of the film, Sergio Leone, has done anything other than re-present America back to itself in a way which accords with its own self-perception. There are mere glimpses of a story which would deconstruct that self-mythologising...the cantina owner on who visits San Miguel: "Bandits and smugglers. They come down from Texas. They cross the frontier to stock up on guns and liquor. The cost is much less here. Then they go back and sell the guns and liquor to the Indians"...and lastly, when "Joe" says to the cantina owner (later identified as "Silvanito") "Well, guess your government will be glad to see that gold back". Now, my history isn't the best but...'Mexico's' gold? Yes, we have here a case of a tale of two colonising societies and only allusions to the victims of that.
^ There is an ecstatic element to the bloodlust of the Mexicans towards the end of the film.
^ Even though this film was, in a way, "playing cowboys and Indians", I really enjoyed the engaging narrative. Whilst the lead up to the resolution of the conflict wasn't logical, it charmed me with its mythic quality...a quality that Americans would, no doubt, love to see about themselves.
^ In what seems like a continuity error, the bullet holes in the poncho don't match to what was underneath...I happened to pause my PVR at this point, randomly, so I just followed through with that.
^ There are only credits at the start of the film. There is something akin to the James Bond gun barrel sequence in the animated opening sequence. I wondered if Ennio Morricone wrote the score...it sounded a bit like him. The credits list Dan Savio as the composer but luckily Wikipedia lists Ennio Morricone as the real name of the composer. A part of his score at the start of the film reminded me of something...maybe it was "When Johnny comes marching home"...or maybe it wasn't. There is some vocalisation in the score and it seemed to me as if the words were "We can fight!" but maybe there were no actual words used.
^ If Clint Eastwood has ever had the nickname "Squint", then a scene about 53:19 minutes in would be a good example of why that was the case. When did he first start squinting? On television first?
^ The scene with the armoured suit made me think it would be relevant at a later point...it didn't in a way that they thought that it might. In any case, there are some nice callbacks in the dialogue to other events in the film.
^ I was thinking of giving this film 7 stars out of 10 on this site with an actual score of 75% (I round down the stars on this site) but the storytelling was so engaging and the mythic elements pleasing enough for me to bump up my score despite the inexplicable lack of subtitles for this broadcast affecting how I consumed this film.
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