Directed by Sergio Leone
Starring Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, Josef Egger, Wolfgang Lukschy, John Wells, Daniel Martin, Carol Brown and Jose Calvo
There's zero doubt in my mind that Westerns are the genre of film that I'm the least fond of. A few years back, I made a list of my 50 favorite movies of all time. While it's been tweaked and altered a bit over the years, there is a grand total of one Western on the list - 1994's gambling comedy Maverick, although I'm well aware that this is due more to sentimentality than anything else since I watched it something like 6,487 times as a kid. It's also the genre that I've given the least amount of chances to. Maverick, High Noon, The Searchers, 3:10 to Yuma, True Grit (both versions), Young Guns I and II...and then it gets pretty murky. No exaggeration, I don't think I've seen more than a dozen Westerns in my life.
Until
now, I had also never seen any of the Sergio Leone "Man With No Name"
movies. Hell, I'd never seen ANY Clint Eastwood Westerns, and this
project seemed like just the thing to rectify this. I knew OF them;
Biff Tannen was watching one of these flicks in his bathtub and Quentin
Tarantino has a massive hard-on for them, so +2 cool points there.
While Mr. Tarantino considers The Good, The Bad and the Ugly his
favorite movie of all time, I chose to go with the first movie in the
series for obvious reasons. 100 minutes later, I had taken in A Fistful of Dollars,
and while I wasn't blown away I walked away with a healthy respect for
revisionist Westerns that play with the conventions of the genre.
There's very little in the way of heroism or romanticism here, just
bleakness, violence and the pursuit of money. And I kind of dug that.
Stop me if you've heard this one before - a nameless stranger rides into town, eager for a drink and a meal. Well, that's exactly how A Fistful of Dollars begins, with the hot, beating sun and a violent town called San Miguel on the U.S.-Mexico border. The stranger (Eastwood, of course) finds a Hatfields and McCoys situation in town, with two powerful families of smugglers at war with each other. In the early parts of the story, the stranger has a friend in innkeeper Silvantino (Jose Calvo) to relay much of this exposition to him. For what it's worth, we get this talk-don-t-show part of the script in increments, so it never quite goes into exposition overload.
A massive chunk of the narrative for this movie consists of a series of incidents that get staged by the ever-cunning and wily stranger as he plays the two sides against each other. He witnesses the seemingly more powerful Rojas family of liquor magnates in action firsthand as they massacre members of a visiting Mexican cavalry in order to steal their gold, then returns to steal a pair of dead bodies from the scene to coax the Rojas into fighting with their mortal enemy Baxter gun-running clan. This leads into a double abduction, with a member of the Baxters winding up in Rojas custody while the stranger is able to spring Marisol (the gorgeous Marianne Koch) from her prison where she is lorded over by the vile Ramon (John Wells). What does the stranger get out of this? $500 from each family, of course.
The film does have a heart, as it were, in the
character of Marisol. When I watched this movie, I assumed "love
interest" from the first time that she locked eyes with the stranger.
But nope, she's merely a pawn in this bigger game, the property of the
Rojas after a bad poker game and taken away from her husband and young
son. The stranger sees this situation and actually decides to take a
magnanimous action to rectify it in what is perhaps the movie's most
emotional moment. I'll also admit to being genuinely tense as he
instructs Marisol and her family to get the hell away from the house
with the fast-approaching Rojas thundering toward their location. Great
stuff.
I again assumed that the movie would repeatedly take this unconventional approach to storytelling into its final act, but I was wrong. A Fistful of Dollars does contain a low point for the character of the stranger here as he is found out for his action, taken prisoner and summarily tortured. It leads into a very conventional final act (in a good way), with the "stand up" script beat and a final showdown where I finally got to see the context of the AFOREMENTIONED Biff Tannen stand-up-and-cheer scene.
There are a lot of
admirable qualities to the film. The cinematography is top-notch, and
the score by Ennio Morricone (whose work I know well fro several Dario Argento
horror films) is absolutely kickass. This subject also gives me a
reason to pontificate on something that I've been looking to comment on:
the lost art of the opening title sequence. Title sequences with a
lot of time and thought put into them have all but vanished from modern
cinema, and I can only surmise that it comes from the belief that
audiences will be bored if they're not seeing CGI explosions from the
first second of screen time. I think this is a shame. A good title
sequence won't make a movie, but it can do WONDERS for getting you in
the mood. I would also argue that title sequences, complete with catchy
theme songs, are a BIG part of what led to the success of the James
Bond franchise. I was not particularly looking forward to watching this
movie, but after seeing this...
...I'll be damned if I wasn't jacked to see Clint Eastwood shoot some SOBs up.
It goes without saying that Eastwood was also aces in this role, one that he would play two more times and characters pretty similar to it in many other shoot-'em-ups over the years. At a certain point, he even stepped behind the camera and started directing himself in these roles. Having said all of this, the movie isn't perfect. I thought that it had some fairly wonky plot moves; the stranger seems to have some Joker in Dark Knight ability to read people's minds and predict their actions. Many of his schemes also seem to depend on people reacting to things in a very specific way in order for them to work. In the end, it doesn't derail the movie, because this flick is about fun, not trying to be some high-minded epic where everyone has a convenient speech for the hero. Take that, Christopher Nolan!
Rating time: *** out of ****. I wouldn't consider A Fistful of Dollars to be an all-time great, but it was a damn fun ride. And yes, I will be checking out the remainder of the "Man With No Name" trilogy.
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