For a few dollars more – Sergio Leone, 1965

For a few dollars more (O.V. Per qualche dollaro in più)

Italy, 1965

Director: Sergio Leone

Script: Sergio Leone, Luciano Vincenzoni, Fernando Di Leo, Fulvio Morsella

Cast: Clint Eastwood (Monco), Lee Van Cleef (Colonel Douglas Mortimer), Gian Maria Volontè (The Indian), Mara Krupp (Mary), Luigi Pistilli (Groggy), Klaus Kinski (John Wild)

Music: Ennio Morricone

Story

A somber-looking bounty hunter arrives in a New Mexico town called Tucumcari. Near the sheriff’s quarters he sees a “wanted” sign for a bandit named Callaway, and he sets out to catch him. In the saloon he finds out his whereabouts. It is not difficult to locate him and after confronting him, he eliminates him without further complications, since he is a very accurate marksman.

After collecting his reward, he finds a new sign and sets out to do a new job. But the sheriff warns him that behind this fugitive there is another bounty hunter, a certain “Monco”.

Monco is already in the saloon and has spotted his prey. After beating the criminal to a pulp, his buddies intervene (one of them has rushed out of the barbershop and has only half a shaved face). But Monco, whose handling of the gun is prodigious, finishes off all four of them (including Cavanage, the escaped bandit) in a few seconds.

At the same time, not far from there, a group of Mexican outlaws release their leader, who was in prison. Using dynamite and killing all the prison guards (except one, so he can tell what happened) the fearsome bandit known as “El Indio” escapes from the prison in a spectacular escape.

For his head, a much bigger reward is offered than those of Callaway or Cavanage: $10,000. And the same amount for the members of his gang, a dozen men. The two bounty hunters see the poster with the image of the Indio and both, each in his own way, begin to follow his trail.

The Indio is a cruel and heartless outlaw, a sadistic psychopath. He goes looking for the individual who turned him in to the authorities, now married with a young son. The baby is 18 months old, just the time the Indio spent behind bars… He takes the woman and child outside and has them killed; while he challenges the man to a duel: They will have to draw their respective guns when the music of a pocket watch that the Indio always carries with him stops. As expected, the escaped criminal is faster than his inexperienced opponent.

The more mature bounty hunter, always dressed in black, also has a pocket watch identical to the Indio’s. Mortimer, the mournful character’s name, decides to leave for El Paso because the most important bank in the whole area is located there and he is sure that the Indio and his gang will try to strike there. Monco, too, heads for El Paso. Both bounty hunters settle in their respective hotels, one in front of the other and very close to the bank, waiting for the outlaws to appear.

The Indio and his men have barricaded themselves in a ruined church near the city. Soon several of the Indio’s henchmen arrive in El Paso and start surveilling the bank. For indeed, as Mortimer supposed, they intend to rob it. The Indio has gained access to privileged information that will be useful to him in robbing the bank, since he knows that most of the money is not in the “official” safe, but in a corner of the office in another safe hidden inside an ordinary wooden cabinet.

In the local saloon, Mortimer has a tense encounter with one of the Indio’s henchmen. Mortimer provokes him to check his reaction. If he does not respond, it is because he is preparing something big, and thus he will have confirmation that he is a member of the dangerous fugitive’s gang.

While the bandits control the bank and its guards, the bounty hunters control them; with binoculars from the windows of their respective hotels. In this way, Monco and Mortimer become aware of each other’s presence, thus suspecting that they have a competitor. Mortimer discovers that his intuition was correct by browsing the newspaper library and discovering a photo of the bounty hunter Monco, who, in turn, consults an old man known as “The Prophet”, who reveals that the other is a former colonel named Douglas Mortimer.

The two become rivals in this way. One night a challenge takes place between the two, after Monco tried to get his opponent to leave El Paso. But when they realize that in addition to having common goals they are so evenly matched in their firearms expertise, they decide to seal an alliance: capture the Indio and his cronies together and then split the juicy reward. Mortimer proposes that “one act from the outside and the other from the inside”, that is, that one of the two infiltrate the gang. That should be Monco’s role, as Mortimer is already known from the confrontation that took place in the saloon. To be accepted into the group, Monco will have to free one of the Indio’s men who is still in prison.

The Indio usually consumes marijuana, and falls into phases of drowsy and melancholy memories while he contemplates his pocket musical watch, which has a photo of a young woman inside…

In order to avoid the authorities appearing in El Paso at the time of the big heist, the Indio designs a maneuver to mislead: He sends four of his men to make a small hit on a less important neighboring town shortly before. One of those four will be Monco… This one takes the opportunity to get rid of the three bandits.

While the Indio and the rest of his acolytes successfully carry out the explosive robbery (dynamiting the walls of the bank and taking away the cabinet with the safe), the two bounty hunters plan how to liquidate the whole gang.

Mortimer, for his part, asks his partner to leave the Indio to him. The ex-colonel seems to have a score to settle with the bloodthirsty wrongdoer – a personal matter in which the musical pocket watch is the link…

Commentary

What for me are undoubtedly the two best trilogies in the history of cinema (Coppola’s “Godfather” and Leone’s “Dollar Trilogy”) have mainly one thing in common: The second part is as good as the first or even better. The fact that the sequel matches or surpasses its predecessor is almost never the case, besides the exceptions of “The Godfather II” or “For a few dollars more” (whose title is a typical and obvious indicator that the film is a sequel).

So big was the success of “For a Fistful of Dollars” that the following year Sergio Leone and his team decided to film a new western, in which both Clint Eastwood (in the role of the “hero”) and Gian Maria Volonté (again “the bad guy”) would participate. Lee Van Cleef or Klaus Kinski were also destined to be part of the cast. The apocryphal western remake of the chanbara “Yojimbo” (Akira Kurosawa, 1961), would thus have a continuation.

This time, however, the two main actors in the first part would play roles that, although similar, were different: For Ramón Rojo, the villain of “For a Fistful of Dollars” had died. Gian Maria Volontè is now another Mexican bandit, also histrionic and unpredictable, equally thirsty for blood and gold. Clint Eastwood’s character, on the other hand, is called “Monco” instead of “Joe” this time, but is basically the same. This lone gunman, with his poncho, his hat and his little cigar, has become an icon – and not just in the world of the western genre, but in the cinema in general (“The Man With No Name”).

Clint Eastwood, by the way, hated having to constantly carry the little cigar in his mouth during filming (he never smoked it). When Leone hired him in 1965 for the second part, Eastwood asked him to make his character non-smoking this time. But Leone told him that was impossible, because the little cigar “was the real protagonist”.

Lee Van Cleef gives life to the mature military man, ex-colonel turned bounty hunter, equally lonely and taciturn man – whose motivation to find the Indio goes beyond dollars… (the personal revenge of the protagonist is a resource that Leone would use again for his last western “Once upon a time in the West” in 1968)

Klaus Kinski has a secondary role as one of the Indio’s henchmen. The two scenes in which his character has relevance are extremely memorable: In both he confronts Mortimer and the tension grows up in the atmosphere.

Two other supporting actors repeat in the second part of the trilogy (also with different roles): Mario Brega (the fat, bearded lackey of Ramón Rojo, who is now “el Niño”, one of the Indio’s henchmen) and Joseph Egger (“The Prophet”, who in the previous year’s film played the elderly undertaker).

If in “For a Fistful of Dollars” the mysterious lone gunman tries to make a profit by taking on the two gangs that control a small town, in “For a few dollars more” there is only one gang, but two “mysterious lone gunmen” – who are initially rivals but decide to ally themselves.

Once again, the excellent soundtrack is provided by maestro Ennio Morricone. The structure and style of the composition is very similar to the music of the first part, but here more melodies are included based on whistles and also elements like the mouth harp.

Among the most remarkable scenes are the confrontation of the two bounty hunters, with Monco firing again and again at Mortimer’s hat on the ground, driving it further and further away and preventing him from picking it up; and how the colonel then “takes revenge” by firing repeatedly at his opponent’s hat in the air, without even letting it fall to the ground… Thus they show each other that they are “tied” in terms of gun skills.

And as in all of Leone’s westerns, the sequence of the duel, the final confrontation, is sublime in every respect (Morricone’s music contributes powerfully to this).

Fernando Di Leo, a great director of polizzieschi such as “Milano Calibro 9” (1972) or “Il Boss” (1973) returns as one of the scriptwriters although he is not accredited. The role of director of photography was played by Massimo Dallamano (“La polizia chiede aiuto”, 1974).

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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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