For a fistful of dollars – Sergio Leone, 1964

For a fistful of dollars (O.V. Per un pugno di dollari)

Italy, 1964

Director: Sergio Leone

Script: Sergio Leone, Jaime Comas, Víctor Andrés Catena, Fernando Di Leo, Duccio Tessari, Tonino Valerii

Cast: Clint Eastwood (Joe), Marianne Koch (Marisol), Gian Maria Volontè (Ramon Rojo), Wolfgang Lukschy (John Baxter)

Music: Ennio Morricone

Plot

A rider arrives at a Mexican border town called San Miguel. As he drinks water from a well, he witnesses a child trying to meet his mother being kicked by an individual. The woman, who sees the stranger arriving, is held up.

The stranger goes to the town’s cantina. The innkeeper informs him that the town has become a very violent and dangerous place, as two rival groups of bandits try to control the smuggling business. San Miguel, very close to the US border, is a strategic point through which shipments of weapons and alcohol pass; the bandits sell this merchandise to the Indians. The Rojo family on one side and the Baxters on the other are fighting for hegemony, with the result that the death rates from gunshot wounds are very high there. The old gravedigger, who also builds coffins, has numerous “customers”.

The newcomer is looking for work. Upon entering the village, some Baxter thugs shot near the legs of his horse while he was riding, in an attempt to frighten him away. When the outsider learns that the most powerful gang is the Rojo Brothers, he turns to them for a job. To prove his worth, he confronts the Baxter bullies who had previously harassed him. He insists that they apologize, but when they laugh in his face and draw their guns, the outsider quickly eliminates the four of them.

“El Americano” (whose name is Joe, although he is only called that once) is hired by the Rojo brothers, Benito and Esteban. The most fearsome of the three brothers, the bloodthirsty Ramón, is not there at the time. Soon a convoy of Mexican soldiers will pass through the town, and the Rojo brothers ask Joe to keep an eye on them. The stranger overhears a conversation between the two brothers: Esteban protests that Miguel has given him too much money, and thinks that it is not necessary to support him. So “el Americano” prefers to go and live in the cantina run by Silvanito.

The stranger sees the woman who was being held at the entrance of the town again at the Rojo’s house. When he asks the bartender who she is, he learns that she is Marisol, with whom Ramón is completely in love. “The best thing is to forget about her”. Joe, accompanied by Silvanito, decides to go out to the shores of the Río Bravo to watch over the military convoy. There they observe hidden behind some dunes the transference that is going to take place between the Mexican and the U.S. soldiers. The Mexicans are carrying a shipment of gold to buy an arsenal of weapons. However, the Americans are betraying the Mexicans, killing them all once they have taken the gold. In reality, the supposed gringos were not such, but Ramón Rojo and several members of his gang (as Silvanito confirms), who had dressed up in Yankee uniforms (for which they had previously killed U.S. soldiers as well). After the massacre, they place all the bodies in such a way that it seemed that they had killed each other and leave with the gold.

One of the Mexicans gets up, gets on his horse and almost manages to escape, but Ramón shoots him when he has gone far enough away, knocking him down. The stranger is impressed by the bandit’s good aim.

Later, Ramón returns to town with his brothers and they introduce him to the new member of the gang, “el Americano”. Ramón proposes to make a truce with the Baxters so that there will be peace in the village for the time being. Everyone will have to conduct themselves with discretion to avoid attracting the attention of the authorities after the spectacular coup. It is expected that both the Mexican and U.S. governments will open investigations after the border massacre.

From the first moment, Ramón is suspicious of the outsider his brothers have hired: “He’s too smart,” he says. And indeed, the Americano sets in motion his plan to pit the two rival gangs against each other and take advantage of the discord: With Silvanito’s help he takes two bodies of the fallen soldiers in Río Bravo to the cemetery and places them there next to a grave with rifles in their hands as if they were alive and lying in wait. After that, he returns to the town and warns Ramón that two of the soldiers managed to escape and are now barricaded in the cemetery… At the same time, the stranger enters the Baxters’ house and tells them that the Reds have committed the carnage of the border to get the gold. In this way he intends to lure them to the cemetery outside San Miguel as well. While the gunmen from both gangs are there, distracted and shooting at each other, Joe has a clear path to get into the warehouse where they are hiding the stolen gold. After knocking out the guard, the outsider looks for the loot in the barrels. When he finds it, he’s surprised by somebody approaching. Thinking he is the watchman who has come to his senses, the Americano punches the him. But it turns out to be Marisol, Ramón’s lover. The stranger takes her outside; it’s too late for the gold as the Rojo´s men are returning. Joe takes Marisol to the Baxters’ house, so they can take care of her until she recovers.

So, the Rojo brothers think Marisol has been kidnapped by the Baxters, and they take one of the rival family hostage as well. The exchange takes place the next morning, and an emotional scene occurs when Marisol’s little son tries to hug her. Marisol is a married woman with one child, but since Ramón has become infatuated with her, she must live separately from her family.

That night, the bandits of the Rojo brothers celebrate a banquet. The stranger pretends to be so drunk that two men must carry him to his room. But once they are gone, Joe gets up easily and goes out the window, for he wants to settle a matter that very night: he goes to the house where Marisol is being held, liquidates the guards who are keeping her there, and releases her. The woman is finally able to meet her husband and son. The stranger gives them some money and urges them to leave as soon as possible and to cross the border, before the Rojo people arrive.

Obviously, the Americano wants to give the impression that those who rescued Marisol were the Baxters. So he leaves signs of struggle in the house, overturning tables and shelves as if a fight had taken place between many men.

The stranger returns to his lodging… But lying in his bed, Ramón awaits him, he has discovered his trick. The Americano, whose dangerous double game has been thwarted, is sadistically beaten by the Rojo henchmen, who try to make him talk so that he will reveal Marisol’s whereabouts. Ramón and his people torture him for hours and leave him half dead, locked in a cellar.

But when it definitely seems that the stranger’s shot backfired, he still manages to escape, and begins to prepare his revenge: The final encounter with the heartless Ramón, who like him is an expert with firearms…

Commentary

This excellent Italian-Amerian western was the first masterpiece made by the brilliant (though not very prolific) Sergio Leone. Until then, the Roman director had only released a few minor peplums (“The Last Days of Pompeii” in 1959 or “The Colossus of Rhodes” in 1961). With “For a Fistful of Dollars”, the previously unknown Clint Eastwood also rose to stardom.

So great would be the success of this film that in the following years Leone would shoot two more films of the genre (also with Eastwood as protagonist): “For a few dollars more” (1965) and “The Good, the Ugly and the Bad” (1966). Clint Eastwood creates with his imposing presence a character for the whole trilogy: the enigmatic “Man with no name”; a not very talkative stranger, with a hieratic expression, lonesome, cunning, a great marksman; always wearing a poncho, a hat and a little cigar at the corner of his mouth.

The evil Ramón Rojo (brilliantly played by Gian Maria Volontè), is a merciless villain, but his charisma manages to go beyond the screen.

Akira Kurosawa would go so far as to sue Leone on the grounds that “For a handful of dollars” was nothing more than a plagiarism of his 1961 chanbara “Yojimbo” (“The Bodyguard”), whose plot is virtually identical: a ronin who, upon arriving at a village where two rival gangs are competing with each other, tries to make the most of it by offering his services to both of them, pitting them against each other. This was not Kurosawa’s original idea either, since the Japanese director had himself been inspired by a classic film noir: “The Glass Key” (Stuart Heisler, 1942).

In my opinion, “For a Fistful of Dollars” is better than its Japanese predecessor. It is more shocking, more brutal, more tense and if that were not enough, there is the sublime music of Ennio Morricone (a fundamental element of the entire Leonian Dollar Trilogy). In this film, the soundtrack (usually without texts) contains, besides the characteristic whistles, whips cracking and an ephemeral voice that seems to repeat something like “we can fight!”

Also the credits, with the silhouettes, are worth mentioning.

Sergio Leone signed the film with the pseudonym “Bob Robertson”, in homage to his father (Robertson: son of Roberto). At that time, Italian directors and actors used to adopt English names because they believed that if the film looked foreign, more viewers would come to the cinema.

Sergio Corbucci, also an important director of westerns, claimed to be the first to advise Leone to watch “Yojimbo”, the film that inspired him. Fernando Di Leo, another great Italian director, participated with Leone and Corbucci in the writing of the script of “Per un pugno di dollari”.

Martin Scorsese, who vindicates and extols the Dollar Trilogy, considers Leone a renewer of the (by then) outdated western genre; Leone was a filmmaker who revitalized the genre with new and powerful archetypes.

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