 |
| This stylish, cool and simple poster for Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars seems to presage the explosion of the spaghetti western that the film initiated |
The Man With No Name stops in a small, Mexican town, which is plagued by death due to its two rivaling gangs, the Rojos and the Baxters. In the course of a few days, the good stranger manages to play them out against each other in expert fashion, before he is eventually forced to face the mighty bad Ramón.
Italian master co-writer/director Sergio Leone's (Once Upon a Time in the West/C'era una Volta il West (1968)) second film, spaghetti western classic A Fistful of Dollars skyrocketed Clint Eastwood's (Unforgiven (1992)) career, getting released around the last year of the stale Rawhide TV-series (1959-1965) that he starred on. With Eastwood's similarly rough, cigar-chomping performances in the subsequent two films in Leone's Dollars trilogy, For a Few Dollars More/Per Qualche Dollaro in Più (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly/Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo (1966), he became an established star, readied for his Dirty Harry franchise, countless other films and later evolution as a filmmaker in his own right.
Leone tried to get 9 other actors for the part, before Richard Harrison (Perseus Against the Monsters/Perseo l'Invincibile (1963)) recommended Eastwood to him, and Leone recognized the Californian's potential as a personality star here. The image Eastwood carved out already here in his first major break is the one which he continued to hone and keep alive in countless performances all the way up to his great Gran Torino (2008), SPOILER which finally seem to put the iconic star persona to rest. At the time of A Fistful of Dollars, Leone made his famous comment about Eastwood and his character's function: "More than an actor, I needed a mask, and Eastwood, at that time, only had two expressions: With hat and no hat."
Besides being a fun, raw and still wholly vibrant movie to watch, - especially an excellent choice for any dull afternoon, - A Fistful of Dollars features music from legendary composer, Ennio Morricone (Who Killed Pasolini?/Pasolini, un Delitto Italiano (1995)).
A Fistful of Dollars is written by Leone, Víctor Andrés Catena (The Rash One/El Espontáneo (1964)) and Jaime Comas Gil (Panic/Bakterion (1982)), with Adriano Bolzoni (Silver Saddle/Sella d'Argento (1978)) contributing story elements, Mark Lowell (His and Hers (1961)) supplying dialog and Fernando Di Leo (Blood and Diamonds/Diamanti Sporchi di Sangue (1977)), Duccio Tessari (Marco Polo (1962)) and Tonino Valerii (My Dear Killer/Mio Caro Assassino (1972)) doing uncredited screenplay work.
Related post:
Sergio Leone: A Fistful of Dynamite/Giù la Testa, Coglione!/Duck, You Sucker (1971) - Sergio Leone's cinematic cornucopia
Listen to Morricone's main title theme for the film here
Cost: Reportedly 0.2 - 0.225 mil. $
Box office: 14.5 mil. $ (North America only)
= Mega-hit
[A Fistful of Dollars premiered 12 September (Florence, Italy) and runs 100 minutes. Leone thought that American westerns had grown stagnant in the 1950s and approached the genre with an operatic visual style and brutal violence. Eastwood was paid 15k $ for his performance. Shooting took place near Madrid and in Andalucía, Spain, and in Rome's Cinecittà Studios. As was custom in Italian filmmaking, sound was not recorded during shooting but dubbed in later. Leone was sued for plagiarizing Japanese master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo (1961) by an angered Kurosawa. The dispute was settled out of court with Kurosawa receiving 15 % of the worldwide receipts, - more than 100k $. The film was a major hit in Italy with a reported 14.4 mil. admissions in its initial release. Many millions more saw it all over Europe; in North America it did not see a release until 22 December 1966 in Canada, and the finest critics trashed it, but it also became a popular phenomenon there, and the film became the highest-grossing Italian film ever made for a while. Several re-releases followed. Leone returned with For a Few Dollars More/Per Qualche Dollaro in Più (1965), which was also Eastwood's next film, with some Rawhide in between. A Fistful of Dollars is certified fresh at 98 % with a 8.19/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of A Fistful of Dollars?
No comments:
Post a Comment