A Fistful of Dollars (1967)

Simply A Masterpiece

One of my all time favorites.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Clint Eastwood was not director Sergio Leone's first choice for the 'Man with No Name' role, but he's excellent, and a huge part of why this film is successful. He has the look of a rattlesnake in Leone's tight shots, exudes confidence and is tough, and yet he's also wryly playful. His best lines occur early on, when he calls out four men for trying to intimidate him by shooting at his mule when he rode into town. He says, "I don't think it's nice, you laughin'. You see, my mule don't like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea you're laughin' at him. Now if you apologize, like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it." It's easy to see why this film and the rest of the Spaghetti Western films which shortly followed established Eastwood as a star. His poncho and thin black cigars are also iconic.Leone's direction is also strong. He creates a gritty, dark mood in this film, combines those tight shots on his actors with wide panoramas, and makes great use Ennio Morricone's music. The film was shot in Spain and has some gorgeous shots early on, but I would have loved to have seen more of them. The dialogue was clearly dubbed in afterwards, and except for Eastwood, is sometimes hard to understand. José Calvo is good as the innkeeper who befriends Eastwood, but John Wells (Gian Maria Volontè) as the main villain is just average. I was not happy that Leone had pirated Kurosawa's film Yojimbo (1961) to make this one, but tried to keep it out of my mind. It's an entertaining movie, the birth of a great collaboration between Eastwood and Leone, and seems to have been influential to the entire genre, and for all that it's worth watching.

"A Fistful of Dollars" is about a lone cowboy who plays double between two rival gangs for his own benefits. What a smart and talented gunman can do in the deserts of the west, is also one of the subjects Sergio Leone wants to show us in his film. "A Fistful of Dollars" is not purely about a bunch of cowboys killing each other for no good reason. The story is not very deep and everything happens directly in front of the audience. It doesn't have any hidden messages, it doesn't have any U-turns or plot twists. The story of "A Fistful of Dollars" is direct and easy to understand. What is beautiful in the film, beside its casting and story, are the landscapes, soundtracks, that follow the story almost all the time, and Sergio Leone's style of visual direction. His direction techniques show us all the facial expressions of the people with extreme close-ups, and this technique helps audience understand what is going on in that particular scene without the need of a conversation. "A Fistful of Dollars" shows us the technical beauty of cinema. This style of Sergio Leone is inherited from the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and "A Fistful of Dollars" was inspired by one of his films, Yojimbo (1961). "A Fistful of Dollars" also introduces us the rising star of Western films, Clint Eastwood, in the absence of Wayne and Honda. Back in 1964, when this film was made, Henry Fonda was already 59 years old and John Wayne 57. They were still making films back then, but by casting Clint Eastwood for his film, Sergio Leone has introduced an alternative star for this genre."A Fistful of Dollars" is a Spaghetti Western. It is a subgenre of Western and also called as Italian Western. This genre was born in the mid-60s because of the distinctive film making style of the Italian director Sergio Leone. American critics were using the name, Spaghetti Western, to describe the Western films made by Italians. "A Fistful of Dollars" is an International co-production between Italy, West Germany and Spain. When it was being made, no one was guessing it is going to be successful. Back then, Sergio Leone was thinking that Italians still react positively to American Western films. So, he took the idea and developed it in Italy. Sergio Leone was not a well-known director back then. This created risk for the production companies to produce this film, not only because of an unknown director but also because of its genre. After all, Europeans particularly Italians were not very familiar with the idea of American Western films. Eventually, the film was released on September 1964 in Italy. Its original release is in Italian. Because of its vast success, both financially and critically in Italy, it was released in the United States in 1967 with its English dubbed version."A Fistful of Dollars" is the first film of the Dollars Trilogy which is also known as The Man with No Name trilogy. The story in these films are not related. The stage names of Clint Eastwood are different in all three films, and they can be watched as standalones. The reason why they are considered a trilogy is because all three films are directed by the same director and the leading actor, even though he is a different character, wears the same clothes, talks and smokes the same in all the films. In order to understand Spaghetti Westerns, you must watch this trilogy. All three films were later released in sequence in the United States which led Clint Eastwood to stardom. The film techniques of Sergio Leone can be easily spotted in the films directed by Clint Eastwood later on. Sergio Leone highly influenced Clint Eastwood as a director, therefore in order to understand the directing style of Clint Eastwood, you need to familiarize yourself with these unique examples of Sergio Leone."A Fistful of Dollars", influenced a lot other films that follows it. Today it is still popular and considered a masterpiece. With its 100 minutes of runtime, it is the shortest film of the trilogy. It was made with a budget of $200.000-$250.000 and grossed up to $14.5 Million which is considered a huge amount for a European western film. This encouraged the trilogy to be born, and from this point of view, "A Fistful of Dollars" is a significant film. Until it has reached to fame, it went through very challenging times. Despite the communication problems in the set, bad release dates and extremely negative reviews from Italian critics, this film managed to find its way to become a historical film.

This film has always been my favorite western film of all time. The movie starts out with Clint Eastwood and Belle Star riding into the town of San Miguel. The two arrive at the town by landing off of a spaceship flown by the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (making this a prequel to that film) After getting of the spaceship Clint Eastwood gets a strange sense of confusion do to the drastic change in altitude. He then strangles Belle Starr for three days, then tries to revive her. (It didn't work) Clint Eastwood then kills three members of the Baxter's then tells the coffin maker "My mistake four coffins" almost forgetting Belle Star's corpse lying out towards the town entrance. Clint then proceeds to screw over both the Baxter's and the Rojo's for his own personal gain. The ending of this movie was great Clint Eastwood is getting shot at by Ramon Rojo in the final duel and then stands out in front of Romon and says "hold on to something. here comes the rain, this damn is about to break" after a long pause Roman not buying into what Clint Eastwood is saying shoots him in the face killing him instantly like an idiot. A space fly's over picking up Roman and his gang, reveling that he was actually Clint Eastwood character all along. The strange feeling Clint had when getting off the spaceship was really Roman taking over his body.

A Fistful Of Dollars is the film that turned a television star who was wondering where his next bit of work would be coming from after his TV series Rawhide would end into an international film icon. Clint Eastwood gets the break of his life in starring in this European western produced and directed by Italians and shot in Spain.Clint's character is superficially like Shane, the gallant loner who rides into the area, settles all the troubles and rides into the sunset. But that's most superficially because there's light years between quiet soft spoken Alan Ladd and the bloody and explosive Mr. Eastwood who always lets his gun do his talking. There's more fatalities in the first 10 minutes of A Fistful Of Dollars than there are in all of Shane and any number of John Wayne westerns.In this story Clint rides into the border town of San Miguel where two factions of outlaws have just made the place there headquarters. When they're not killing each other they're terrorizing the citizens. To be sure Clint isn't responsible for all the deaths in the film, the bad guys do quite a bit to each other.I've never been a fan of anything other than American made westerns and think that all of Clint's westerns made this side of the pond are superior to his three with Sergio Leone. But I sure can't deny the lasting impact these films had on the culture and on Eastwood's career.And the career of composer Errico Morricone was certainly made with this film.Come see an icon and watch from whence he came.