A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964) • Frame Rated

Some films we might call examples of “hinge” cinema. Such films open new doors for filmmakers and audiences and take commercial moviemaking in new directions. They may not be well made and might even undergo harsh criticism on their debut. Yet, they create a lasting sensation while making enough money to lead other producers and filmmakers to the same trough in the hope of repeating that success. Along the way, these films undo old cinematic traditions and create new ones.

The 1960s, a time of radical change in filmmaking, offers a festival of “hinge” cinema: The Pawnbroker (1964), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and numerous others. (Of these, Bonnie and Clyde faced fierce criticism during its first run.) These films also had an advantage: they were well-budgeted, superbly crafted productions, backed by major studios.

But likely the first sign that times were changing was a “hinge” movie that had none of those advantages—a low-budget, German-Spanish-Italian B-movie, shot in Spain and Italy for $200,000. It starred a little-known American TV star. Its Italian director was making only his second full feature, working with a multilingual cast and crew from Italy, West Germany, and Spain. What’s more, it was considered a “junior” production, the bottom half of a two-film package.

The year was 1964 and the film, first titled The Magnificent Stranger, eventually became the legendary A Fistful of Dollars / Per un pugno di dollari. It wasn’t a well-made movie in 1964 and remains so. Yet, time has miraculously treated this rough diamond well. This far from “perfect” movie remains remarkable, not only for what it accomplished on its low budget, but how its popularity and influence extended far beyond what was intended to be a provincial product whose sole target audience was everyday Italian filmgoers—a film no one outside Italy was ever meant to see became among the most influential of the last 60 years.

From the very first frame, it’s clear that A Fistful of Dollars is no ordinary Western movie. It opens with animated smoke rings blowing through a blood-red screen while an acoustic guitar plays a delicate yet sinister chord arrangement. A solo whistler joins in with a lonely melody (a variation on a 1940s hit song “Ghost Riders in the Sky”), as a rotoscoped horseman gallops jerkily across the screen.

Cartoonish gunfire erupts on the soundtrack while an aggressive electric surf-style guitar joins the theme along with a chorus chanting “wind and fire” (as claimed by the theme’s composer) in muddy phonetic English over a driving percussive string section and galloping percussion. As the gunfire blasts away, the credits—titling the film Fistful of Dollars—flash in and out, a list of American-sounding names no one would recognise—but for one, and even he was then considered a nobody.

The editing tempo and music quicken, and the violence intensifies, as bodies fly and spin furiously about. Finally, the credits end (“Directed by Bob Robertson”). An astounding shot of a blazing sun fills the screen, followed by a dissolve to a noose hanging from a dead tree in a sun-blasted desert, a shot so vivid your mouth goes dry. A lone stranger draped in a poncho rides in on a loping mule—not a horse, a mule (perhaps a mockery of Christ’s ride into Jerusalem). Scruffy, unclean, and unshaven, he stops for a drink at a well near which stands two adobe houses that face each other across an empty dusty dirt road.

The stranger looks up as a door creaks open and a little boy rushes from one adobe house across the road to the other house. In a badly dubbed voice, he cries out for his “Mama” as he pathetically crawls through the door. Immediately, gruff voices bark from within, and the boy scampers back out in tears. Two swarthy bearded ruffians emerge and chase him back across the road, shooting their guns at his little feet, the gunshots roaring like cannon fire over their cruel, boisterous laughter. When his Papa emerges from the other house to help his son, the bullies treat him to a good kicking.

Across the way, the boy’s beautiful raven-haired mother opens a window and watches helplessly. The stranger takes notice of her. Their eyes meet and she freezes, her lovely face showing a tinge of hope: At last, a hero—like a generation of gallants on horseback before him, among them, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and, especially, Alan Ladd in Shane (1953)—will ride to the rescue. That’s what should happen, eh?

Not on your life. Instead, the stranger flirts with her. And when she slams the window shut in disgust, he shrugs and calmly rides on. From such small moments, new worlds are born.

A little later, after passing a dead man being ridden out of town propped up on a horse, he arrives in the poor Mexican border town of San Miguel. As he rides in, gunmen for the Baxters, one of two rival criminal clans, make the grave mistake of teasing the stranger and his mule with gunfire.

Stopping by a local tavern, he learns from its owner, Silvanito, of an ongoing bloody feud between two outlaw gangs that dominate San Miguel, the Baxters at one end and the Rojos at the other. Between them, they have the local economy in a stranglehold, leaving everyone in between poor. Only the old, widows, and orphans remain.

“There’s a lot of money to be made in a town like this,” the stranger muses. He then strolls to the Rojo’s side of town where he offers his services as a gunman to boss Miguel Rojo. For his audition, he strolls back over to the Baxters (stopping to order three coffins from the coffin maker who names him “Joe”) and guns down the four men who insulted his mule before they can slap their holsters. On the way back, he apologizes for not ordering more coffins. All this over an insult to a mule.

Not long after, the “Yankee so quick on the draw” takes his pay, then quits the Rojos. Later that night he and Silvanito witness a mass slaughter of Mexican and American soldiers and the theft of their money and guns by Ramón Rojo, the gang’s true leader. Joe then turns around and hires himself out to the Baxters, informing them of what the Rojos have been up to. And then he takes their money.

This low-level feud blazes into an all-out gang war as Joe slips back and forth between the two factions, playing one off against the other. While he spurs even more killing, he stops to rescue the woman, Maria, Ramon’s mistress, and her husband and son, sending them off to safety.

But Ramon and his gang finally catch on to Joe’s tricks and beat him nearly to death, stopping only to run off and slaughter the entire Baxter clan in a fiery, gory fashion that still shocks. Meanwhile, the coffin maker helps Joe escape and later, like Jesus Christ, rises from the dead to exact his final vengeance, striding out like an avenging angel amidst clouds of destruction.

The blood runs, and the bodies pile up by the dozen until only the innocent civilians caught in the middle of it all are left standing at the end. The coffin maker weeps tears of joy at all the new business Joe has brought him. Joe, meanwhile, rides off with the Rojo’s money to who knows where. Unlike the Lone Ranger, he leaves no sense of justice and order restored, just a mockery of devastation. Meanwhile, the opening theme, in a new and even stranger arrangement, plays once more.

There’s plenty wrong with A Fistful of Dollars. With its low budget and relatively inexperienced filmmakers, it’s an often crude, primitive film, with its share of awkwardly staged moments. The soundtrack, entirely post-dubbed, is atmospheric, full of howling winds and animal cries, but it’s also very scratchy and crunchy, with sounds and images often mistimed. The dubbing is generally atrocious (especially the little boy’s). The colour timing also fluctuates, the day-for-night shooting is unconvincing, and the dialogue is often clumsy. Through it all, the editing wavers between brilliant and crude, the crudeness probably due to a lack of coverage.

The performances, while enjoyable, are very broad. Underneath the realistic-looking surfaces, the film plays like a mashup of comic opera and puppet show, the actors often more like string puppets than characters. The dialogue is full of goofy lines: “When a man with a .45 meets a man with a Winchester,” Ramón Rojo brags after showing off his marksmanship with a rifle, “the man with the pistol is a dead man. It’s an old Mexican proverb.” An interesting observation given, according to this film’s historical timeframe, the Winchester repeating rifle had just been invented. For all its surface grit, underneath it’s a nutty Roman circus.

The visual and musical flair of A Fistful of Dollars influenced dozens of directors who followed, including Quentin Tarantino. Sometimes this influence was for the better, sometimes not. A Fistful of Dollars also gave us the wisecracking anti-hero that would become one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s trademarks. Its rogue “hero” was leagues beyond Humphrey Bogart’s characters, who, although they were wise guys, held to a strong inner code of honour and decency. It also started a trend toward increasing and more explicit film violence across all genres, not just Westerns, a trend that culminated in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). Explicit film violence is with us more than ever, thanks to Fistful.

How this minor movie, designed mostly to entertain Italian audiences and to make money fast, came to be and what followed from it is a compelling story of how movies get made and how they make their way in the world.

To paraphrase an old quote about Ancient Rome, many roads led to A Fistful of Dollars.

By the early-1960s, the movie business was shrinking worldwide. Western movies, in particular, seemed to have reached the end of their trail. After over twenty years of dominating both the big screen and, in the 1950s, television, one of America’s most potent myths had fallen victim to creative exhaustion and a growing cultural amnesia.

Once its frontier days closed in the early-1900s, the US, formerly a nation of mostly small towns surrounded by ranches, farms, and mining operations, underwent rapid and tremendous technological innovation and urbanisation. Along with this disruption came new and younger audiences with different experiences, different tastes and a lessening interest in America’s frontier past. America was something of a more forward-looking nation then.

It seemed that all the Westerns had been made. Aside from the final works of an ageing, and disillusioned, John Ford, along with ever-sturdy John Wayne, plus a few B-movies, some featuring Audie Murphy, Westerns had been shrunk to fit the small screen, where they were cheap to make. The three major national TV networks broadcast dozens of Western series, most of them serving strictly as comfort food for viewers, except Gunsmoke (1955-1975) and a few others. Otherwise, the Western seemed done and dusted.

The crisis facing Westerns was one part of a larger crisis as both Hollywood and international producers faced a shrinking landscape. The big Hollywood studios cutting their production slates meant fewer movies for the international market, especially big-budget productions filmed in Europe, a situation brought about by the twin box office disasters of Cleopatra (1962) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1962).

But while American audiences cared less for Western movies, audiences elsewhere still loved them—in Europe, especially. Once upon a time, Hollywood had distributed up to 150 feature Westerns a year on the international market. In 1963, the number fell to 15.

As Hollywood withdrew, European producers rushed to fill the gap, starting with a series of German-led co-productions, Westerns filmed in the rocky hills of Croatia and Yugoslavia. These were based on the fanciful novels of prodigious German author Karl May (alas, one of Adolf Hitler’s favourite writers, even with the author’s pro-Indigenous stance) and featuring May’s heroes Shatterhand and Winnetou. They starred fading Hollywood stars such as Stewart Granger and B-movie players such as Lex Barker.

None of these were well-made or even entertaining. In The Treasure of the Silver Lake (1962), a barroom scene features an extra standing proudly centre screen costumed in sunglasses, a windbreaker, and a ball cap. A goof only Ed Wood fans could cheer.

Meanwhile, in Italy, Italian producers faced problems of their own. Never a truly unified nation, Italy could be seen, in a way, as two separate, strongly contrasting regions: The wealthy, sophisticated North (centred in Milan) sneered down at the rubes in the South (centred in Rome) like the American North sometimes looks down on the American South.

In the north, films by Fellini, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Visconti, de Sica, and others were being embraced globally. Yet, beloved as they were by cineastes, these films made little money. Like everywhere else, pop cinema held sway, most of all in Southern Italy, where, as theatres everywhere started to close, audiences looked for other ways to spend their entertainment lira.

The swords-and-sandals genre (also known as peplum) dominated the Italian film marketplace since 1957. Produced for Roman and other southern Italian audiences, these movies were kiddie sketches of Biblical and Ancient history that, like the German Westerns, had little interest in being good or original. They starred non-acting American bodybuilders such as Steve Reeves and Richard Harrison (as Hercules and Maciste, respectively), and occasional expatriate Hollywood stars like Broderick Crawford, Rory Calhoun, Alan Ladd, Victor Mature, and even Orson Welles. They were mostly cardboard yawners, though some like The Colossus of Rhodes (1960), starring Calhoun, show some splash and energy. (Take it from me who watched tens of hours of them on TV while growing up.)

As audiences lost interest in peplum movies, Italian producers joined with German and Spanish producers to package their own Westerns. The genre had been an occasional part of Italian filmmaking since the silent era, but the first among this new wave was Gunfight at Red Sands (1963), a crude, dopey but fairly action-packed B-picture, shot mostly in southern Spain, whose mountainous deserts were an excellent stand-in for the American Southwest. It featured a score by a prodigious avant-garde composer and pop arranger who had himself billed as “Dan Savio”, the name of a friend of his wife. The film was enough of a box office hit to send producers galloping back to the trough to produce more.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, in Japan, another trail was being blazed. Following his worldwide triumph with Seven Samurai (1954), Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made a series of thrilling samurai epics, among them Throne of Blood (1957) and The Hidden Fortress (1958)—the latter a major inspiration for Star Wars (1977). Seven Samurai, itself inspired by American Westerns, was remade as one, The Magnificent Seven (1960).

In 1961, partly inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s great—and wonderfully mad—Western gangster noir novel Red Harvest (1929), Kurosawa released Yojimbo, a sardonic action comedy about a ronin (a masterless samurai), played by Toshiro Mifune, who wanders into a lawless village where he calmly sets two warring gangs to slashing away at each other. In the end, everyone on both sides lies hacked to death in the dusty street, leaving the samurai to stroll away growling, “At last, we’ll get some peace around here!” Along with its cinematic artistry, the film cheerfully mocks so-called samurai traditions of honour as a fig leaf for craven imbeciles.

Yojimbo’s impact reached Italy, where it landed in 1963. Rome native Sergio Leone had been an assistant director on such Hollywood epics as Quo Vadis? (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959). He’d also co-directed The Last Days of Pompei (1959) and directed The Colossus of Rhodes for which he displayed a keen eye for composition and spectacle. While unhappily noodling away at a peplum script and seeking new directorial work after Rhodes, a colleague—it’s not clear who—urged him to attend a screening of Yojimbo.

Leone emerged from the screening with his mind, filled with a lifetime of American Westerns, ablaze. He understood immediately that Yojimbo was, at its black-comic heart, as much a Western as anything he’d ever seen. Like The Magnificent Seven, it provided a perfect framework for his own take on the genre.

He went right to work on a screenplay, collaborating with several uncredited writers, including later Euro-western director Duccio Tessari. They took only a month, as they found adapting Yojimbo a quick and easy task. Maybe too easy, as they copied it scene for scene. The only significant changes they made were resetting the story to the Texas-Mexico border in the 1870s and adding an extra massacre and a cemetery shootout.

Leone and his co-scenarists threw every ingredient they could think of into the pot: their memories and feelings about the American Westerns they grew up watching during the Great Depression; and their World War II experiences, especially the occupation of Rome by German and, later, American forces. Especially notable is their disillusionment at learning their American occupiers were less than the upright, square-jawed movie heroes they grew up watching. They were, in some ways at least, not all that different from their German occupiers. It would be a story of Bad Guys vs. Bad Guys. The equivalence was simplistic, rather unfair, but with some truth to it—people are people, no matter their nationalities.

Raised as Catholics, the writers also threw in some satirical japes regarding the vanishing influence of the Church while incorporating elements of other distinctly Roman entertainments, including Roman Carnivale, Punchinello puppet shows, and the commedia dell’arte.

As much as the writers copied from Yojimbo, this film would be worlds away from both medieval Japan and the American West, both the historical and Hollywood versions. It would become a distinct creation of a Roman-Italian sensibility—a Romanised Western that made Kurosawa’s cynical view its own.

With the first draft, titled The Magnificent Stranger, finished, Leone next hooked up with Jolly Films, headed by newcomer Arrigo Colombo and veteran producer Giorgio Papi. Working with Constantin Films (Munich) and Ocean Films (Madrid), they were already set to produce Bullets Don’t Argue (1964), a Western to be shot in Southern and Central Spain and starring Rod Cameron, an American B-western star of great popularity but little distinction.

They liked the script and Leone’s ideas. Claiming there would be enough money left over in their budget projections, they offered to produce The Magnificent Stranger following right behind Bullets Don’t Argue, using the same sets and locations. But there was one caveat: the latter movie was their biggest concern: Cameron’s salary alone equalled the budget for Leone’s film.

Leone and his company started rounding up their team of actors and crew. For the cast they drew from across Europe: Marianne Koch (as Maria), Sieghardt Rupp, and Wolfgang Lukschy from Germany; Antonio Prieto, Jose Calvo, and Margherita Lozano from Spain; and Josef Eggar from Austria. They scored big with noted Milanese-Italian stage actor Gian Maria Volonté as Ramón Rojo, the Rojo’s boisterous leader and main villain. Volonté had little film experience but a terrific presence. As a Northerner and committed leftist, he seemed to think he was slumming by taking the job. For behind the camera, Leone hired cinematographer Massimo Dallamano and a set designer and costume-maker with a keen eye, architect Carlo Simi, who would be making his film debut.

As the deadline for commencing filming approached, two elements were left to be added, both of which would turn out to be crucial to the film’s surprising success.

First up was the actor who would play the wandering mercenary, whom the script originally named “Ray”. (The “Man with No Name” branding would only come much later.) It had to be an American actor because that was what Italian audiences insisted on with Westerns. The producers first proposed American muscleman Richard Harrison, a very minor star who would come cheap. Leone dismissed him out of hand for his lack of cinematic appeal.

Leone was out for big game… his favourite actor of all time: America’s Tom Joad, the cinematic Mount Rushmore of decency and integrity, Henry Fonda. Leone relished the shocking comic irony of the upright Fonda playing an unkempt, amoral gunslinger with no allegiances beyond himself. With touching naïveté, he sent the script for The Magnificent Stranger to Fonda’s agent in Hollywood, who sent it right to the garbage bin without even informing his client.

Leone next reached out to Charles Bronson, co-star of The Magnificent Seven, who considered the script about the worst he’d ever read. (“What I didn’t understand,” he later admitted ruefully, “was that the script didn’t make any difference. It was the way Leone would direct it that made the difference.”)

Next came James Coburn, who like Bronson, had made a big impression in The Magnificent Seven, as the cat-like knife-thrower. His cool, graceful insouciance would have made him a good fit to play the man called Ray. But Coburn wanted $25,000, far above the $15,000 the producers were willing to pay. Papi and Colombo even proposed lumbering Rod Cameron, but Leone wisely said no.

Then, with the production deadline weeks away, The William Morris Agency’s Rome office called with two suggestions: the first was their client Henry Silva, a fine movie villain, but too expensive at $16,000.

They also half-heartedly suggested another of their American clients: a 34-year-old contract player and co-star of the CBS TV Western series Rawhide (1959-1965). The agent sent the producers a videotape of an episode featuring him, titled, “Incident of the Black Sheep”. Leone was so unimpressed, he walked out in the middle of the screening. By one account, he found this actor to be stiff, vacant, and much too clean-cut and wholesome. (Much later, Leone, an often-unreliable source, would claim the opposite.)

But with the deadline approaching, the actor seemed good enough to Papi and Colombo, and he met their price of $15,000. Leone never fully agreed to it, but Clint Eastwood would transform his image from clean-cut Rowdy Yates to play Ray, the grungy, amoral gunslinger. What Leone failed to anticipate was the crucial contributions his star would make to his little, ramshackle Western.

Clint Eastwood first looked at the script for The Magnificent Stranger as something of a lark. The end of Rawhide’s run was not far off, and the radical restructuring of the Hollywood system left the future a barren desert for actors like him. After initially saying “no,” he decided to read it anyway.

Eastwood immediately recognised the script as a “rip-off” of Yojimbo. It was overlong and overwritten in stilted English. However, Eastwood, a uniquely perceptive Hollywood actor, caught and appreciated the script’s underlying humour and irreverence. Seeing an opportunity, he figured he would have, for the first time in a frustrating career, a chance to contribute his own ideas to a project, something Hollywood’s factory system seldom allowed, especially for an unknown like him.

The day before he left for Rome, Eastwood stopped by a costume shop and bought the hat, black jeans, vest, boots, and, finally, those cigarillos the non-smoking actor would come to hate. For good luck, he also brought along the pistol grips he used in Rawhide. The poncho would come later, likely from designer Carlo Simi, but the character’s costume design was otherwise all his, and it set exactly the right tone.

Not that he was expecting The Magnificent Stranger to be particularly magnificent. His then-wife, Maggie, anticipated a six-week European vacation. Those with experience warned Eastwood that Italian film productions were chaotic, undisciplined affairs in contrast to the well-oiled Hollywood factory, but he figured he’d adapt to this new adventure.

Eastwood faced challenges the minute he stepped off the plane in Rome. Leone expressed his disinterest in Eastwood by sending someone else, Bullets Don’t Argue director Mario Caiano, to greet him. Eastwood spoke no Italian while Leone spoke no English. First communicating through a Polish translator, they debated the script at Eastwood’s insistence. Along the way, the stranger’s name was changed from “Ray” to “Joe.”

In the first draft, Joe was a bore who droned on through long pages of exposition. Most actors fight like dogs to get more lines, but Eastwood took an opposite and much savvier approach. The less Joe said, he told Leone, the more effective his character would be. A man of few words would add an air of mystery, unpredictability, and anticipation. Audiences would be pulled to the edge of their seats wondering, “Who is this guy? What’s he going to do next?” Shorn of the traditional Western hero signifiers, he would be a new kind of hero in Eastwood’s capable hands.

The actor’s urging led to the removal of pages of expository dialogue. The film’s sole poignant moment, where Joe explains to Maria why he rescues her and her family, is reduced to the simple “I knew someone like you once… there was no one there to help.” Leone grew to trust Eastwood’s judgment, though their relationship remained distant.

Eastwood, likely influenced by James Bond’s wisecracking style, understood the film’s sly, jocular tone and delivered a wry, funny performance. His droll manner, light, dry voice, and perfectly pitched line readings create their own kind of music. While I’ve always considered Eastwood a star rather than an actor, his performances in the Dollar films are among his best.

As Eastwood discovered, Italian film production practices were chaotic. Without strong unions or studio bosses, Italian film sets were noisy, unsupervised playgrounds that ran on their own schedules. Eastwood was the only native English speaker among the cast and crew, leading to communication difficulties with the hot-tempered, voluble director. He relied on the only other English-speaking actor, Rojo’s henchman and stuntman Benito Stefanelli.

Although some Italian films recorded sound and dialogue live, everything was eventually rerecorded and dubbed. Each actor received a script typed in their own language. Eastwood spoke his lines in English, while the Italians, Spaniards, and Germans spoke in theirs. (Fellini, in contrast, shot silently, having actors count out the number of words in their lines and saving actual dialogue for dubbing.)

Eastwood must have felt lost in the uncanny valley, playing scenes with another actor without fully understanding their words, even with the script in front of him. Being in the moment, a crucial aspect of film acting, must have been challenging. Eastwood addressed this by memorizing the entire script, not just his own lines.

Accustomed to Hollywood’s efficient production methods, Eastwood spent hours waiting while Leone and the cinematographer argued over camera setups. No one ever called for quiet on the set. It’s amusing to imagine that while Eastwood and Volonté were engaged in their tense final showdown, a pickup soccer game might have been happening just out of camera range.

Leone showed up on set every day dressed in a cowboy hat and boots, reminding Eastwood of Yosemite Sam. To overcome the language barrier, Leone acted out each actor’s role while they watched. (There are photos of him wearing their ill-fitting hats with their gun belts strapped around his ample waist, like a dude ranch tourist, to demonstrate how he wanted it done. He was a little boy at heart, a grown-up playacting the screen heroes he once worshipped.) At the same time, he struggled to tone down the Italian actors’ operatic tendencies to play to the back row, an approach that infuriated the theatre-trained Volonté.

Despite these aggravations, the primitive conditions, Leone’s slow-going approach, and the many close-ups he asked for, Eastwood had fun working with him. He admired Leone’s efforts to create a gritty look, his daring camera work, and his skill with action scenes. For Joe’s first showdown with the Baxters, Leone placed the camera at a low angle behind Joe’s right, showing him drawing his gun and firing and the bad guys going down in the same frame, a practice mostly forbidden in Hollywood as “too violent”. “He didn’t know he couldn’t do that,” Eastwood marvelled years later.

The Magnificent Stranger began production with interiors filmed at Cinecittà studios in Rome. For outdoor scenes, the production moved to two Spanish locations. The first, north of Madrid, was a set built for a Spanish Zorro (1961) movie, which stands in for the town of San Miguel. Though falling into ruin, production designer Simi found ways to restore it while keeping in mind Leone’s desire for a more realistic look.

Amazingly, according to Something to Do With Death, Sir Christopher Frayling’s entertaining, richly detailed biography of Leone’s life and career, Leone did not direct every scene during this period. Both the river canyon massacre scene near the beginning and the cemetery shootout—one of the film’s weaker sequences—were directed by others.

Location work concluded in Almería in southern Spain, which would stand in for San Miguel’s outskirts. It was a hauntingly beautiful but utterly barren desertscape where the only bathrooms available were behind the nearest rock and hotel accommodations were primitive. The hanging tree seen in the opening was stolen from someone else’s yard and replanted.

At the end of each day’s filming, the rushes were sent off to Rome for review. Papi and Colombo worried they had a bomb on their hands, a film much worse than their prized production, Bullets Don’t Argue (which is now rightfully forgotten). It wasn’t until editor Nino Baragli edited the footage into a very rough cut did they start to relax.

By the time the production reached Almería, Leone learned to his fury that the producers’ promise that they had sufficient funds would not be kept. The Magnificent Stranger was being funded ad hoc, in weekly cash instalments, and with all the delays, the suitcases full of money stopped arriving. But Leone had gone too far to quit. He and his crew kept working without pay. By the time production wrapped, only three actors and a skeleton crew remained. In the end, Leone would earn not even a dollar for his work, a slight he would not forgive.

Auteurism, like all ideologies, never fully stands up to scrutiny when it’s applied to complex realities, including filmmaking, a process that involves a multitude of contributions. Critics have commented that Sergio Leone’s films sometimes feel more like old-style Hollywood communal efforts than auteur works springing from a singular mind. While he had a terrific eye for composition, action, and spectacle, it’s easy to sense other hands at work—Clint Eastwood’s being chief among them.

Nothing illustrates this point better than the abovementioned second element. After Leone finished his first rough cut of The Magnificent Stranger, he went shopping for a film composer. At first, he wanted veteran Angelo Francesco Lavignino, who’d written the score for The Colossus of Rhodes. But the producers insisted that he take a meeting with the one who would also score Bullets Don’t Argue, the one credited as “Dan Savio”.

While unimpressed with Ennio Morricone’s score for Gunfight at Red Sands (as was the composer), Leone nevertheless visited Morricone at his Rome apartment one day where the composer showed him a photo of the two of them as young boys, sitting for a class portrait. It was an auspicious start to a match made in cinema heaven.

Born in 1928, fellow native Roman Morricone, the son of a noted trumpeter, started composing music at age six. A top graduate from the Santa Cecilia Music Academy in Rome, he’d spent many busy years as an important arranger in the Italian pop music scene. But an encounter with provocateur avant-garde composer John Cage in 1957 inspired him to season many of his pop arrangements with offbeat, atonal ideas, including everyday sounds such as animal noises and splashing water (a style known as musique concrète).

Morricone never set out to be a film composer—his early film scores tend to be sonic wallpaper. (Wishing to keep this side gig secret from his high-minded colleagues, he used the “Dan Savio” alias.) But, as many other serious composers have come to realise over the decades, film music would provide a great platform for his daring spirit. Film composer Jerry Fielding was said to have remarked, “If you want to make a living writing avant-garde music, write it for the movies.” While he was far from the first to bring pop and avant-garde techniques to film scoring, it could be said no film composer pursued this notion with such passion as Ennio Morricone.

Leone and Morricone fought from the start and would keep fighting throughout their fruitful twenty-year relationship. The duelling trumpet “Theme from ‘A Fistful of Dollars’” was one bone of serious contention, with Leone demanding Morricone directly steal Dimitri Tiomkin’s “Duello” theme from Rio Bravo (1959). After almost walking out, Morricone finally got around the director by lifting a melody he wrote for a production of a Eugene O’Neill play. Film composers are an incredibly resourceful bunch.

Leone’s operatic style inspired Morricone to apply the musical ideas he had been exploring since he met John Cage. Meanwhile, Leone, passionately concerned about the music, saw in Morricone a composer who would not only stylistically tie his film together but lift it to a new level, upending the clichés of Hollywood Western music with infectious energy and colour. Dismissing old film music traditions, the pair, along with editor Baragli, set out to create a dynamic blend of sound, music, and image.

They mostly succeeded. Though at times sloppily laid in (like the rest of the soundtrack), Morricone’s music, using a small orchestra, makes A Fistful of Dollars bigger and funnier. It sets a comic-opera tone to Leone’s elaborate visuals and circus style while adding a proto-psychedelic spirit to the film’s hothouse feel. Packed with melodies, odd sounds, and colourful offbeat orchestrations, it has a mock grandiosity and playful invention that, 60 years later, still amazes. (Morricone, in his oral autobiography Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, called it one of his worst scores, an opinion not universally shared.) Without Ennio Morricone—and Clint Eastwood—Leone would have had a violent, good-looking but much duller movie.

With the right accompanist for his visuals found at last, Leone and Baragli finished their editing, adding that amazing credit sequence, created by Luigi Lardini. Afraid of audience reaction, most of the names were Americanised. They edited together long sequences of images considered atypical for Westerns. Inspired by Fellini, they paid special attention to faces by inserting those eye-popping close-ups that enriched the film’s raucous spirit. Instead of the linear style of showing shootouts, they went for a circular approach, flashing from close-up to close-up and around again. The pace starts slow, shot-for-shot, before the pace and rhythms quicken until the confrontation explodes into gunfire.

As post-production ended, The Magnificent Stranger was retitled A Fistful of Dollars (minus the “A” article). With the film finished, the producers took it to the Sorrento film market in search of a distributor but found no takers. One distributor liked the film but pointed to its lack of a significant role for women, a criticism that irked the male chauvinist Leone, who believed that women played little part in the conquest of the American West. (Leone liked to brag about being an Old West history buff, but he really knew very little about it.) Anyway, Leone was told, after twenty-four previous lacklustre releases, Euro-Westerns were already going the way of peplums. No one seemed to want A Fistful of Dollars, leaving Leone to distribute his film on his own.

Accounts, again, vary but he arranged to show A Fistful of Dollars, not in Rome, but in Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance. The screening took place on a blistering hot August Friday in 1964 in a dilapidated theatre built in 1903 that was frequented by travelling salesmen because it was located near a train station. Almost no one showed up.

But by the following week, thanks likely to those travelling salesmen with a few hours to kill between trains, screenings started selling out and audiences were being turned away. Before long, regular moviegoers all over Italy were embracing this florid, but action-packed, little Western. The critics, meanwhile, even the Roman ones, denounced it, with only a few exceptions (one of them being future giallo director Dario Argento, then a young leftist critic).

While critics were unimpressed, commercial filmmakers and producers immediately took note of Fistful’s box office success and started churning out what would be called “spaghetti” westerns by the dozen. Over 400 Euro westerns would be released over the next six years, but only a few approached the energy, quality, and imagination that Leone and company put up on the screen.

Among the participants, Ennio Morricone benefitted first. Whatever their criticisms, no one could get his music for A Fistful of Dollars out of their heads. By the time it won a Silver Ribbon award at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily in 1965, Morricone had become Italy’s most in-demand film composer across all film genres, the start of a long, prolific, and stunning career that made him one of the most popular composers in the world.

At the end of the gruelling six-week shoot, Clint Eastwood returned to Hollywood to trudge through the final season of Rawhide with no further prospects in sight. He’d concluded he’d taken part in a misfire. By his account, neither Jolly Film nor Sergio Leone followed up with him. He read a Variety article about an Italian Western called A Fistful of Dollars that had been doing good business, but, as it didn’t mention his name, and no one had told him they’d retitled the film, he shrugged it off as a different movie… until a Variety critic in Rome wrapped up his near-ecstatic review (among the few initial positive ones) by singling out its star, one Clint Eastwood.

Surprised, Eastwood got hold of an Italian-dubbed print, which he screened for his friend and colleague Burt Reynolds. Though neither of them could understand the Italian dialogue (with Joe’s dubbing voiced by actor Enrico Maria Salerno with, it’s said, little humour), they understood the story fully and were stunned. The screening inspired Reynolds to join the parade of Hollywood actors heading to Europe hoping to revitalize their careers.

Curious and excited, Eastwood contacted Jolly Films to discuss A Fistful of Dollars’ American release. He learned to his disappointment that the producers were in a legal pickle because someone—it’s not clear who—“forgot” to buy the rights to remake Yojimbo from Akira Kurosawa, who informed them via an indignant letter to Leone. (“It’s a very fine film. But it’s my film.”) Leone seemed to take this as a kind of fan letter. As the battle continued, the film was barred from distribution in the UK and America.

The legal wrangling took over two years, ending with a settlement in Kurosawa’s favour where he was paid for the rights for the story, along with achieving exclusive rights to distribute the film in Japan. It’s said that Kurosawa made more money from Fistful than from any of his own films.

So, for the following two years, A Fistful of Dollars hung in limbo. In the meantime, Leone severed his connections with Jolly Films, who wanted him to make another Western. Around this time, in early 1965, he met a Neapolitan lawyer named Alberto Grimaldi who had produced a few successful films and had the money to back up his promises and support Leone’s ambition to make Westerns that were different.

Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood was called back to Europe to dub in his droll voice to Fistful while Leone and his new producing partner set to work on For a Few Dollars More (1965) in which Eastwood would co-star alongside another nearly forgotten actor, Lee Van Cleef. After the third sequel, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), was released, David Picker, a United Artists executive, saw all three films and figured, if marketed in a way similar to how the studio had marketed the James Bond movies, they might play well with American audiences, who were craving something new. United Artists bought the American distribution rights and, backed by a clever marketing campaign, created “The Man with No Name.”

When A Fistful of Dollars finally reached American theatres in February 1967, critics reacted in a way similar to European critics—mostly negatively. Everyone noted the film’s technical shortcomings. Many objected to the loud, aggressive score. More traditionalist critics were appalled at the bloody violence, the cynical inverting of the Hollywood Westerner from a white-hatted hero to a grungy near-villain, and the ending, which left no satisfactory feeling of justice being done. “How dare those Italians!” seemed the prevailing attitude.

That it was produced primarily for Italian audiences lay behind much of the bewilderment. There was confusion over the parodic elements that underlie its “realistic” surfaces. It seemed neither fish nor fowl. A handful of critics, such as the Variety reviewer and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, recognised A Fistful of Dollars as something uniquely stylish, even comparing it to the James Bond movies. (This writer did not see it until the summer of 1968 in a Miami, Florida theatre. By then, I’d already been spoiled by the technical superiority of the second and third Dollars films and so wasn’t, at the time, as impressed with the first one.)

Not for the first or last time, audience opinion diverged from the critics. American audiences loved it. A Fistful of Dollars made a trainload of dollars, around $14M against its $200,000 cost. Its success led to a remarkable, if brief, revival of the American Western. The violence and cynicism, an essential part of its success, also led to the genre’s subsequent decline in the mid-1970s. Other, more dramatic, Westerns (1971’s Little Big Man among them) did a better job with this “revisionism,” as they dramatized the dark underbelly of the Old West, with often stark nihilism. But eventually, audiences and critics again grew weary—cynicism also gets stale. (Besides, people in spaceships move a lot faster than those on horseback, as Star Wars would prove in 1977.)

Building on this second film, Sergio Leone would go on to direct only five more films of increasingly epic proportions but with uneven results, in my view. He became the godfather of post-modern cinema, the practice of making movies for movie buffs with constant allusions to other films and little else. As his reputation grew, he seemed to become more self-conscious while the raucous joy of his early work faded.

Clint Eastwood benefited most of all from A Fistful of Dollars. Once faced with having to quit the acting business, he drew a lot from this experience here and its two sequels (though his directorial approach would differ significantly from Leone’s). He also showed his own creative potential with a genuinely clever performance. From this, he slowly built a platform to launch a great career as one of the biggest movie stars and most acclaimed film directors. From a man with no name, he became about the biggest name in cinema.

The author is indebted to the following sources of information:

Cinema Retro, The Making of Sergio Leone’s The Dollars Trilogy, Cinema Retro, NJ, 2010.
Frayling, Sir Christopher, Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death, Faber and Faber, London, 2000.
Morricone, Ennio (with Alessandro De Rosa, trans. Maurizio Corbello, Ennio Morricone in His Own Words, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019.

Cast & Crew

director: Sergio Leone.
writers: Adriano Bolzoni, Mark Lowell & Victor Andrés Catena (based on ‘Yojimbo’ by Akira Kurosawa & Ryūzō Kikushima).
starring: Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, Josef Egger, Wolfgang Lukschy, Gian Maria Volonté, Daniel Martin, Bruno Carotenuto & Benito Stefanelli.