He was looking for something more venal, and believable, and within a week of seeing Yojimbo he'd rattled out a rough script for a project he called 'The Magnificent Stranger'. His finished screenplay stuck closely to Kurosawa's original story, so closely in fact that the great Japanese director and his studio, Toho, later successfully sued Leone for breach of copyright.
Kurosawa wryly claimed that he made more money out of A Fistful of Dollars than he ever did from Yojimbo. Like Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars would be unsentimental, violent, stylised and place an esoteric soundtrack to the fore, but the Italian's film was even bleaker and more hard-hitting, and included plenty of touches that were uniquely Sergio's own.
Leone realised how vital Toshiro Mifune's taciturn charisma had been to Yojimbo's success, and was determined to cast a major Hollywood star in his film.
When Leone approached dashing, blond, all-American B-movie actor Richard Harrison, he didn't fancy the idea either but suggested TV actor Clint Eastwood, who looked convincing on a horse and might be right for the part. Since , Clint had been playing the drippy do-gooder Rowdy Yates in the CBS western drama Rawhide, and was getting pretty sick of it.
I decided it was time to be an anti-hero. When Eastwood arrived in Spain to start shooting in the spring of , he began to fully appreciate the challenge that lay ahead of him. A gruelling week schedule involved location shoots on the baking plains of Almeria, and the film would be shot silent, as was the convention in Italian cinema at that time, and overdubbed afterwards back in Rome.
In fact, Eastwood did not add his own voice to the film until almost three years later, when A Fistful of Dollars was finally released in America. But maybe this silent filming method suited Eastwood, a rather limited actor at that time who'd often been accused of stiffness and hissing his lines through his teeth.
Liberated from the script to some extent, he was free to concentrate on the look and bearing of his enigmatic character. And Eastwood played a key role in creating his character's appearance, buying The Man With No Name's black jeans and hat in Hollywood, and borrowing spurs, a gun-belt and a cobra-handled Colt 45 pistol from the Rawhide set.
It was bought in Spain, and greatly increased the drama of gunfights as Eastwood would whip it back to reveal his pistol whenever trouble brewed. It began as a term of derision first used by critics but later became a term of endearment by the fans of these movies. Another earmark of many Spaghetti Westerns is an international cast including many American actors either on their way up or down so they did not command large salaries.
Although the films are generally directed and produced by Italians, the money tends to come from many sources, usually Italy, Spain, Germany and the US. Those who have seen all three movies say that it's not important to watch them in order considering that none of them follow the same story or include the same characters, other than Clint Eastwood.
The only other similiarities would include the direction and the music. It is, however, of note that at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the man with no name acquires the poncho that he wears in the previous two films leading some to believe that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a prequel to the first two films, and is therefore first chronologically.
All Italian films were shot with a wild track and the actors lines were looped in later. Since the actors were all speaking their lines in different languages on set, the actors lines were dubbed in the studio.
Most traditional Westerns have clearly defined lines separating heroes from villains; only in Spaghetti Westerns do both sides begin to stray into the gray areas in between.
Leone also makes frequent use of the close-up, and oftentimes his characters are shown to be sweating and bleeding. Traditional Westerns tend to present violence as relatively clean and bloodless; Leone makes it messy. This approach adds a little more tension to the gunfights. There's not such a sense of surety that the protagonist will or, in some cases, should win. The score is by veteran composer Ennio Morricone working under the "Americanized" pseudonym of Dan Savio. As was true of Leone and Eastwood, Morricone's participation in all three "Man with No Name" movies became an important linking element.
A Fistful of Dollars does not represent Morricone's best work, but many of the musical themes and ideas introduced here are persuasively developed in his work for For a Few Dollars More and especially The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. When he started working on the trilogy, Morricone was a relatively unknown composer with only a few movies to his credit; by the time he finished The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly , he was much in demand, and went on to become one of the world's most respected and prolific score writers.
The single scene that perhaps most clearly establishes that this is not a typical Western is the sequence in which Joe is tortured. At the time, this kind of frank and graphic display was virtually unheard of for a Western - a genre that was usually about righteous men triumphing over underhanded crooks while making the untamed land safe for good people.
Even by today's standards, when blood flows more freely than it does here, the sight of Joe being kicked, pummeled, and ground underfoot is disturbing and effective. Another thing that's unusual about A Fistful of Dollars is its dry, lean sense of humor.
The film contains a number of humorous moments, but all of them are underplayed and presented so grimly that at times the viewer wonders if he or she is meant to laugh. Retrieved February 19, Universal Conquest Wiki.
Synopsis A drifter gunman arrives in the Mexican village of San Miguel at the border of United States of America, and befriends the owner of the local bar Silvanito. Clint Eastwood. Joyce Gordon. Bernard Grant.
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