A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (Per un pugno di dollari), United Artists, 1964.
Dir. Sergio Leone. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volontè, Wolfgang Lukschy.
Review by Ben White

–“The Baxters over there, the Rojos there, me right in the middle.”

A Fistful of Dollars opens the way it ends: Clint Eastwood’s iconic “man with no name” on a horse, his back to the audience, a mythical drifter evaporating as benignly as he materialized. At his arrival, departure, and in between, he fails to betray his intentions, origin and destination. Breezing into San Miguel like a deadly tumbleweed, “the man with no name” (or “Joe,” as Piripero [Joseph Egger], the wily coffin maker dubs him) soon finds himself pinballing back and forth between the town’s rival criminal families, the Baxters and the Rojos, undermining both in the process with every errorless bullet and shrewd scheme.

His reason for staying in San Miguel—a sun-scorched Mexican village that undoubtedly influenced George Lucas in Star Wars (1977)—is hazier than his reason for entering the town. It may be the enigmatic woman at the window that catches his eye in the film’s opening moments or the Baxters insulting his mule shortly thereafter. Conceivably, perhaps superficially, it’s the knowledge that there’s money to be made in a town with two crime bosses. Regardless of Joe’s intentions, his appearance in San Miguel ignites a chain of events that will forever change the course of the town, and makes Fistful a story that is as much revenge, vigilante justice, knight-in-shining-armor and crime caper as it is traditional Western.

Fistful is the first film of director Sergio Leone’s seminal Dollars Trilogy. It is also quite noticeably scaled down in its visual bravado compared with his subsequent films, and thus more narrative and dialogue-driven than many of his other works. But Fistful hints at the techniques to come in Leone’s later work, and he uses extensively the close-up as a dictator of mood, in sharp contrast with the mobile establishing shots that suggest his later infatuation with expansive landscaping.

Unlike the films that followed Fistful, however, this one feels relatively claustrophobic, with the bulk of the action occurring between the Baxters’ and Rojos’ compounds, and Silvanito’s saloon. Most of that action, with the exception of the initial and climactic gunfights, occurs in the shadows or under the cover of nightfall. Even the gunfight in the graveyard, though clearly shot with sunlight, is filtered in a manner that obscures its participants from one another, as well as the viewer. This technique makes Joe’s endeavors sneakier than one might expect from a Leone Western, but consequently intensifies the highly exposed climax to great effect.

There are other surprises here as well. At his cinematic birth, the man with no name is far more talkative than in his later appearances. As a result he utilizes wit more frequently than his pistol, and in the end this proves more deadly, though not before his gun has the last word. In many ways, Joe is not unlike a frontiersman James Bond.

Conversely, Fistful is far more violent than many films that precede and follow it. After all, men are crushed by gargantuan barrels of tequila and skewered with machetes: deaths far more savage than those bestowed unto Peckinpah’s unfortunate victims five years later in the notoriously violent The Wild Bunch (1969). Oddly, perhaps, the irony that the gun-peddling Baxters are the weaker of the two factions is easy to miss.

In one particularly memorable and violent scene, the psychotic but dimwitted Rojo brother Esteban (Sieghardt Rupp), and Leone himself, recall film noir tropes with stilted camerawork and a goonish beating in the Rojo’s storeroom. Ennio Morricone’s score delivers a typically perfect compliment to Leone’s film, though it’s this scene that really calls attention to the precision of the soundtrack. While the trumpet and whistling throughout the film are indelible (see: Kill Bill), the sparse bass line here provides a chilling compliment to the most desperate moment of the film.

Perhaps the most interesting sub-theme of the film is the contrast of the two females, Consuelo Baxter (Margarita Lozano) and Marisol (Marianne Koch): noticeably juxtaposed without ever significantly interacting. Marisol, the seemingly leading lady, is subjugated by the rotten Ramón Rojo (Volontè) and thusly the object of Joe’s chivalrous actions. But while her forced domesticity and unjust imprisonment draws our sympathies, it is Consuelo Baxter that proves to be the far more interesting female character. Whereas John Baxter (Lukschy) is both the sheriff of San Miguel and patriarch of the Baxter clan, it’s apparent throughout the film that Consuelo is the brains behind the gun-running outfit and truly Ramón’s in-town adversary. This powerful female character is a fascinating anomaly in the normally male-dominated Western.

While Consuelo and Ramón are San Miguel’s de facto counterparts, Ramón and Joe are Fistful’s main event. Although the two propel the movie towards its inevitable stand-off, it’s frequently the supporting cast that makes the journey there worthwhile. The other Rojo brothers, Don Miguel (Umberto Spadaro) and Esteban, reflect Ramón’s contemplative and bloodthirsty sides, respectively (notice Esteban’s apprehensive glance towards Don Miguel at the climax). Saloon owner Silvanito (José Calvo) provides Joe with a dissenting voice, but alternatively, an unrelentingly loyal collaborator. And despite a deceptively detached existence, Piripero supplies some of Fistful’s most satisfying asides.

The influence of this film cannot be understated. Often erroneously credited as the first Spaghetti Western, Fistful is more accurately the first Spaghetti Western to garner significant international attention. It is, however, undeniably responsible for propelling Eastwood and Leone to stardom, and reinvigorating the Western genre. Leone would go on to finish the Dollars trilogy, and additionally cultivate a legacy as one of the most important directors in cinema before his death in 1989. Eastwood reprised the role of “the man with no name” in the next two Leone films and has been one of Hollywood’s biggest stars for more than four decades, after being little more than a TV actor prior to Fistful.

Despite accusations Fistful is a mere rip-off of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) (which in turn may well be snatched from Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest [1929]), it has left its imprint on endeavors as diverse as Back to Future III (1990) and Steven King’s novel The Gunslinger (1982). It is undoubtedly a benchmark in Western cinema, and a must-see for any fan of the genre.