A Fistful of Dollars

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.

Even better than I remember. The story was more interesting than I remembered. The Man With No Name is more fun in this movie than I remembered. The side characters are more interesting than I remembered. My only complaints are that some of the acting and parts of the script could be better. This is really epic movie that I would not mind watching again!

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.

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.

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 wan...