There’s really no reason that A Fistful of Dollars should work as a film. The most obvious hurdle is that it’s a setting so firmly rooted in American mythology – there’s possibly no more purely American image than that of a cowboy in the old West – being filmed by an Itallian crew that barely spoke English, but add to that the tight budget and the decline of interest in Westerns and this film should have been unremarkable and gone forgotten like so many other foreign productions riding a couple of years too late on the last Hollywood trend. Yet instead, everything went in the film’s favour; the Western genre had been dipping in popularity because of familiarity, and an outsider perspective brought a dirtier, grittier, bloodier version of a time of stagecoaches and pistols at high noon than audiences were used to seeing, singlehandedly turning the term ‘spaghetti Western’ from one of derision to the shorthand for the revitalisation of the Western genre.
Clint Eastwood plays the Man with No Name, a drifter and a gunslinger who plays two rival families in a small town on the Mexican border against each other. He’s pure anti-hero – his motives are barely touched upon except for a single line, but all his actions are completely self-serving (for the titular fistful of dollars) and he lets his skill with a pistol do a lot of the talking for him. He’s a radical departure from the heros of American-made Westerns, who when they were not shining examples of virtue were still good men trying to do the right thing, and the perfect vehicle for an entirely new form of cinematic violence; in place of the stilted back-and-forth gunfire exchanges that were a staple of the American Western, Sergio Leone filmed the pivotal gunfights from an observer’s perspective in a single shot that lasts mere seconds.
Westerns still aren’t my favourite genre of film – it’s not a part of my mythology – but I can definitely see the appeal in films that aren’t so much built around rich characters or intricate plots but instead actors who just exude a presence over the entire film, which Eastwood most certainly does. I found it fascinating to learn that, in order to be broadcast on American television, a new prologue was filmed in order to justify the amoral actions of the Man with No Name – that this force of nature with a gun and cigars needed to be given reasons to do what he does.
sarcasmbeast 