For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Film: For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Stars: Clint Eastwood, Lee van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonte, Mario Brega, Luigi Pistilli

Director: Sergio Leone

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Clint Eastwood: click here to learn more about Mr. Eastwood (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In the early-1960's, Clint Eastwood's career was at a unique stage.  Rawhide had given him a platform & a stardom, but it was still in television, and Eastwood had his sights set on movies.  By the 1960's, though, most of the biggest western stars of the previous era (John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper) were either dead or on their way out of the genre, and New Hollywood didn't have a lot of interest (yet) in where the western was going.  So Eastwood headed down an unusual path, going to Italy to make a low-budget western that would change his life, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.  The film was not just a surprise box office smash, it briefly created a new genre of movies.  The 1960's would be dominated by the somewhat pejoratively named "spaghetti westerns," westerns filmed in Italy, usually dubbed from the original Italian for English release, and featuring a similar plotline of a stranger coming to town and turning out an evil.  The most famous of these movies was the Dollars Trilogy, which we're on the second one of this week.  For a Few Dollars More was an even bigger hit than its predecessor (something that was a lot rarer in the 1960's than it would become in the 1980's and later when VHS and video rental places allowed for a film's audience to grow between filming sequels), and cemented Eastwood as the biggest box office draw in Italy.  Next week, we'll talk a bit more about how Eastwood used his success in these movies to eventually become a name in Hollywood movies, but first, let's discuss the movie that is oftentimes forgotten in discussions of the trilogy, though after watching...I have no idea why.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is considered part of a trilogy, but it's not really a sequel in the traditional sense as while many of the actors from A Fistful of Dollars are in this movie, they are playing different parts.  Eastwood inhabits the "man with no name" persona again, here nicknamed Manco, and initiallly he is in something of a turf war with Colonel Mortimer (van Cleef), as both are noted bounty hunters who come to realize they're after the same man, El Indio (Volonte), a ruthless bandit, thief, & murderer, who carries around the musical pocket watch of a woman he raped who killed herself during the act we later discover.  After a fantastic showdown (which involves both men shooting each other's hats in a metaphorical dick-measuring contest), the two join sides, content to get the nearly $40,000 that would come with taking down El Indio's gang.  Initially they infiltrate him by having Manco join the gang, but once he's found out, this sets up a showdown between the three men, and us understanding that the woman whom El Indio raped was Mortimer's sister, and he had done this not for money, but for vengeance.

The movie doesn't have the scrappiness of A Fistful of Dollars.  Shot for a considerably larger budget (purportedly double the original's), it shows.  The cinematography, which in the original is excellent but scrappy, expands into gorgeous vistas, and the set design is magnificent, us getting to see these recreations in the real world rather than just on a studio lot.  The music from Ennio Morricone is marvelous, another absolute gem of a score, here a bit more melodic & less recurring than A Fistful of Dollars.  Even the acting is better here than the original.  Eastwood feels more at-home in this character, deprived of some of the stress of carrying the picture (and the main character's enigma) by himself with van Cleef very strong as his right-hand man.  Like Eastwood, van Cleef had spent much of the 1960's working in different bit parts in Hollywood (he had a non-speaking part in High Noon) before doing a number of guest spots on western shows of the era like The Rifleman, Have Gun-Will Travel, & Maverick.  This film revitalized his career, making him a huge name in Italy, and he spent much of the remainder of the 1960's & 1970's doing westerns, most of them in Europe.

The only thing that I think maybe it feels inferior to the original on is the story structure.  The movie has a lot of side plots, and is less focused than A Fistful of Dollars.  In some ways this is okay (Leone's magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in the West, is also a movie that as four separate plot lines converging into one gigantic showdown).  But this one doesn't do a good enough job of differentiating them.  It feels, quite frankly, like it functions better if you think of it as a series of western motifs rather than something that should be considered brilliantly plotted.  It still has great dialogue, and I like it a lot if you think of it as an homage to the western rather than one that should be taken literally, but if we're going to split hairs between two masterworks of the genre...that's where I'd land.