A Fistful Of Dollars (1964)

With A Fistful Of Dollars, Sergio Leone gets into the Western genre, a genre that made him and to which Sergio made grand contributions, in essence, almost revitalising it and changing its hard, good heroes into a more complex, selfish anti-heroes.

The film has the legendary suspense sequences that the director has trademarked over his 8-movie long career. But what we can observe is that there is a certain sense of newbie-ness to it. Take the first confrontation scene of Clint Eastwood’s Joe with the Baksters. We know that the duel is about to happen but unlike his later films in the Dollars trilogy, there is a certain shortness to this, which shows his developing skills.

Another important trademark which I had also talked about in my previous Leone film “The Colossus Of Rhodes”, is his blocking which is phenomenally magnificent. We can sense the economy of camera movement to convey a great deal of information. For example, the scene when Clint Eastwood’s character meets Ramone, played by a cool Gian Maria Volonte. The camera not only changes framing also angle in the same shot, even as we see the shot going from including Clint Eastwood, Ramone talking to his brothers in a low angle conveying his power, and comes back to an un-angled mid shot of Ramone, Clint and the others in the background.

Even though the writing of the film itself is somewhat decent (not reaching the heights of the successive 2 films), even in this thinly characterised film, at least on paper, Sergio adds a lot of detailing through the acting. Ramone, for instance, is only described, at the max as a ‘pig’ but in the pre climax shootout, his behaviour shows us a sadistic, cold hearted and brutal man, who is indulging in the act, purely to establish his own insecure masculinity, which is itself gained by the stealing of another man’s wife (who Clint eventually helps return to her family) while taunting another man of being a “pondaatti daasan”.

Apart from this, there is also an interesting angle of selfishness and greed which is evoked by the Clint Eastwood Character. We see that the two warring families, the Rojos and Backsters, are further manipulated by Clint and that the Backster’s destruction is something that seems to happen due to their association with Clint, even though of course they were not involved with him during that particular event. There is probably a certain idea or theme here explored which Iam unable to dissect. I hope to do it in the future.

The idea of greed, though, also affects the narrative as the 2nd act of the film, becomes somewhat underwhelming as the motivations of the protagonist to be there is not established properly. It is only with the climax that the film triumphantly returns to blazing form as we one magnificent scene after the other as we see Ramone lose his confidence, when taunted by Clint on his “masculinity” again.

The Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns are basically “namma ooru” Masala hero films. We have the cool and stylish hero, a despicable villain, an emotional subplot about family and stellar, badass hero introduction shots. It is within this genre that Leone establishes his own signature of wide framing and closeups along with his editing style. While the subject matter here is quite tame, the form of the film helps keep up the interest. An interesting scene is when during a hostage exchange, we get sudden tense music and quick zooms only to realise that Sergio is messing with us, something Tarantino did only in his 9th film (Ha-ha, Tarantino).

An incremental but interesting improvement over Colossus Of Rhodes, Sergio Leone readies us into exciting chapters.