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A Fistful of Dollars wasn’t the first Italian-produced “Spaghetti Western,” but its arrival on American shores in 1967, three years after taking Europe by storm, gave new life to what had been a flagging genre here. Sergio Leone’s spare retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo (so similar that Kurosawa was awarded a share of the profits and Japanese distribution rights), along with Clint Eastwood’s breakthrough performance as “The Man with No Name,” combined all of the familiar elements of the American Western and sharpened them into something theretofore unseen.
The plot is all Yojimbo. Filling the Toshiro Mifune role from that film, Eastwood’s enigmatic stranger rides into a small Mexican town that’s torn between rival organizations: the Baxter family, headed by the corrupt town sheriff, and the Rojo brothers and their gang. Befriending the local saloon keeper and an extremely busy coffin-maker, the stranger gets a sense of the major players and their various schemes and grudges. First offering his services as a hired gun to one group and then the other, he plays them against each other, collecting money from both sides while they whittle each other down.
It was a great story when Kurosawa made it, but a number of important contributions make A Fistful of Dollars its own movie. Leone’s careful, deliberate pacing and love of close-ups on the actors, combined with Ennio Morricone’s unusual score, sets an unfamiliar tone for a movie with so many well-known elements. Eastwood, up till then known as a clean-cut good guy on TV’s Rawhide, provided a mysterious and almost amoral protagonist, a far cry from the tough-yet-noble cowboy archetype that John Wayne and others had pioneered. The Man with No Name has since become its own archetype, and one that Eastwood himself would go on to play twice more with Leone and riff on over the rest of his career.
The new Blu-Ray edition of A Fistful of Dollars uses the same restored prints from the mid-2000s DVD release, brought up to full 1080p HD and combined with a 5.1 surround sound mix. It looks pretty good, but bear in mind that the film wasn’t shot with high-quality home viewing in mind. The surround mix adds a nice touch, but the real treat is getting to hear Morricone’s wonderful score on a good home theater system.
Most of the special features are carry-overs from the DVD release also, including an interview with Eastwood on making the film and a commentary track from Leone historian Christopher Frayling. The most interesting addition is a short prologue sequence that was filmed solely for the American TV premiere, hoping to soften some of the moral rough edges of Eastwood’s character by framing the film’s action as a mission for the U.S. government. It’s an odd artifact of its time, and it’s pretty easy to see why it was never shown again.
In the 40-plus years since its debut, much of what made A Fistful of Dollars unique has become an ingrained part of the cultural consciousness. The Western may never enjoy the dominant position in cinema it held in the early 20th century, but it’s still a genre full of powerful iconography and well worth another visit.
