For a Few Dollars More Review

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< Per qualche dollaro in più - 1965 - Director: Sergio Leone - Cast: Clint Eastwood, Lee van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonté, Klaus Kinski, Luigi Pistilli, Mario Brega, Aldo Sanbrell, Mara Krup, Josef Eggar, Kurt Zipps, Benito Stefanelli, Ricardo Palacios, Dante Maggio, Rosemary Dexter, Peter Lee Lawrence, José Terron - Music: Ennio Morricone


In the second part of what now is called the Dollar Trilogy, Clint Eastwood returns as the Man with No name, only this time he seems a different character, not a adventurous opportunist, but a calculating bounty hunter. Despite being the proverbial man with no name, he was briefly called Joe in A Fistful of Dollars. This time around he is called Manco, in Italian Monco, meaning mutilated or maimed person, referring to the fact that he does everything with his left hand, except for shooting. This odd detail probably is a reference to the old saying 'never shake hands with a left-handed gun', suggesting that a gunslinger always should have his shooting hand free. The bizarre opening scene, with a whistling rider who is seen from a distance, also seems a wink at the world of the classic Hollywood western (1), when cowboys were good-natured, well-respected men. You'd expect the whistling cowboy to ride past the camera, to the core of the movie, to do what a man's gotta do. But this time the rider is shot, by a man invisible to us, and never heard of again in the movie. It's a brilliant introduction to the sinister world we're about to enter.


Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price

That's why the bounty killers appeared


In every part of the trilogy a new American actor was added to Leone's western iconography. In A Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood was a loner, the only remotely decent man capable to stand up against the forces of destruction, the only man, as Frayling put it, to prevent a state of total anarchy. In For a few dollars more the forces of destruction are too much for one man, so Monco has to accept the partnership proposed by a fellow bounty hunter, played by Lee Van Cleef, a veteran of many a Hollywood western, in which he usually played one of the baddies. Both Monco and former military man Douglas Mortimer are after a pot-smoking psychopath called Indio, who was recently freed from prison by his men, and now plans to rob the bank of El Paso, a job only an idiot or a complete madman would think of. What Monco doesn't know, is that Colonel Mortimer is after El Indio for personal reasons, and is not really interested in the reward money. Long time ago El Indio tried to rape the Colonel's sister after having killed the girl's lover. As a result Mortimer's sister committed suicide. So when both partners finally confront El Indio and his gang, Colonel Mortimer asks Monco to leave El Indio to him. The two men have become friends by then, so Monco agrees, but the Colonel will sorely need his help to execute his revenge...


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For a few dollars More was a vast improvement over the first Dollars movie. It benefits from a strong performance by Lee van Cleef, as well as Leone's decision to make his character the more gentle of the two bounty hunters. Eastwood's poncho-clad anti-hero may be the archetypical spaghetti western character, but it's Van Cleef's Colonel Mortimer who adds an emotional dimension to the genre. Being an original project (instead of an adaptation), his second movie gave Leone more elbow-room to experiment with shooting angles and the extreme close ups that soon would become his trademark. Religious symbolism also comes creeping in. Above all For a Few dollars more seems a more assured, more personal work than its predecessor. It was a smash hit, both in Italy and abroad, but not very popular among contemporary critics; they found it overlong and it was suggested that the script had been tampered with to give Eastwood (who had become a star overnight in Italy) a place in the movie. This seems unlikely since the original project, signed by Fulvio Morsella and Leone himself, was entitled Two Magnificent Strangers (2). Today thoughts about the movie have changed drastically. To some it is Leone's best movie, and it has more or less become the archetype of a spaghetti western, the one film that all what the genre is about, and even more. The ghost towns, the dust, the heat, the gunmen, the music, the flashbacks, the hate and the vengeance, you name it, this film has it! If it's not Leone's best, it may be the easiest to enjoy. A special film deserves a special treat. Let's lift out some of the most notable aspects of the movie. A trip around a few dollars in a handful of steps, so to speak.


# The characters Van Cleef character is not only the more gentle of the two bounty hunters, he is also the more sophisticated one. Not only does he own the more sophisticated weaponry, his ways to make inquiries is also more advanced than Monco's: the Colonel consults modern media such as news papers for information about his rival, while Monco still relies on floating rumours and hearsay, brought to him by a old person significantly knick-named 'the prophet'. The two ice-cold, calculating bounty hunters are played off by the script against their villainous antipode El Indio, a psychopath acting out of impulse or pure sadism, like in the infamous scene in which he also kills the innocent wife and small child (the Madonna and her child) of the man who betrayed him. Even in his more lucid moments his ideas are twisted and destructive, such as the decision to set up his men against the two bounty killers. Like Thomas Hardy pointed out, he defines the edge of humanity, the point from which Eastwood and Van Cleef instinctively withdraw (3).


# Time and memory The film also marks Leone's obsession for memory and the passing of time, symbolized by the two pocket watches, whose chimes evoke the memories of the rape that led to the suicide and the consequent feelings of hate and revenge. After For a Few Dollars more nearly every revenge western would have one or more revealing flashbacks; within Leone's own body of work this Proustian way of story-telling - objects or sounds evoking memories - would finally lead to labyrinthine narrative of Once upon a time in America, compared by Martin Scorsese to a Chinese box (4).


# The score The use of Ennio Morricone's score, is also revolutionary. His beautiful score for A Fistful of Dollars had still been a rather independent piece of work, detached from what happened on the screen; in For a Few Dollars more the pocket watch is embedded in the score, while Morricone's musical themes, at least some of them, are embodied within the movie itself (6). Leone and Morricone would develop this interplay between image and music even further in further collaborations (here some theme still feel a little detached), but at his best, the score works marvelously in this aspect. The highlight probably is the use of the title la resa dei conti, meaning the settling of the scores, that is used twice, in slightly different versions, the first time during the massacre of the traitor's family (El Indio settling his scores with him), the second time during the film's conclusion, the shootout between Colonel Mortimer and El Indio (the Colonel settling the scores with El Indio). The first scene is set in a church, the second in a pseudo Roman arena, and the difference between the two settings is underlined by the different arrangements of the two versions, an organ for the scene in the church, a more predominant trumpet for the scene set in the arena.


# The faces

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It's a well-known fact that Leone partly chose his actors for their looks. He said about Lee van Cleef that his eyes would burn holes in the screen when filmed in close-up. He especially seemed to have a good eye for villainous faces. For a few dollars more is probably the most impressive plethora of the ugliest and dirtiest faces in the history of the western: Klaus Kinski, Luigi Pistilli, Mario Brega, Aldo Sambrell, Benito Stefanelli, José Canelejas ... they're all there, in all their ugly wickedness, but the ugliest of them all is José Terron, the guy Colonel Mortimer shoots in Tucumcary. He is also in Django, where he plays a character called Ringo (!), and Leone would use him again, albeit for a very small part, in The good, the bad and the ugly: he is Shorty (6).


# The memorable moments

I suggested once that For a few dollars more has become so popular because we fans of Leone have developed a habit of watching his movies in parts. What is more satisfying when you're very tired than watching once more the opening scene of Once upon a time in the West, the extasy of gold, the triello or the conclusion of A Fistful of Dollars? If this is not Leone's best, it's probably the one with the largest amount of memorable moments. Colonel Mortimer uncovering his weaponry, the duel with the hats between the two leads, Colonel Mortimer and Monco shooting apples from a tree, El Indio having his speech about the carpenter in a church... I guess we all have our favourite moment in this movie. Mine is a very short one, it's the desperate look in Colonel Mortimer's eyes when he's looking at his gun, lying at his feet, after El Indio has shot it out of his hands, realizing that it's all over, that it has all been in vain ...


# The history The remark, in the beginning of the movie, about the bounty hunter, also serves as a historical marker. The film is set in the late 19th Century, when law and order in the Far West were maintained by a rather ineffective system of local sheriffs and travelling judges. Bounty hunters were not only tolerated, but often even encouraged to track down criminals that otherwise would terrorize the surroundings. The film of Leone are all but 'realistic' (think only of the super-human shooting abilities of his main characters), but he repeatedly sustained that his 'violent', 'dirty' look at the West was more correct than the cleaner vision expressed by Hollywood. To Ford the West was a desert, to be changed into a garden. To Leone the West was a Waste Land.


# The autobiographical aspect After finishing A Fistful of Dollars, Leone wanted to make a small autobiographical movie, about young people growing up in the Roman Trastevere quarter, but he was under pressure to make a new western as a result of the incredible success of Fistful. But some elements of his original plans have made it to For a few dollars more. The best example is of course the scene in which Eastwood and Van Cleef are shooting at each others hats, that resembles the macho-driven games of braggadocio between young men Sergio used to watch as a child from a secretive place (like the boys in the movie). But the well-dressed gunman Van Cleef (and many of the well-dressed gunmen who would populate the spaghetti western after him), is more Italian than American: he is dressed like those young braggarts Sergio watched as a boy. Be as crooked as you can, but always smoothe the creases out of your costume. According to his scriptwriter Luciano Vicenzioni, the ugly-looking, dirty, stealing, torturing villains that populate Leone's westerns have an Italian origin too: they represent the hooligans and street bullies, the footsoldiers of the more sophisticated crooks that populated the streets from Trastevere at night when Leone was young (7).


#The locations Although working with a much bigger budget this time, Leone was still unable to shoot (part of) his film in the real West. But out of misery a miracle was born: he asked the brilliant Carlo Simi to create, with a little money, the most beautiful western town in history (8), and Simi came up with El Paso, now Mini Hollywood, near Tabernas. Agua Caliente (Hot Water) was an existing Andalusian village called Los Albaricoques (The Apricots), Tucumcari a redesigned version of a set previously used for A Fistful of Dollars. They also used an abandoned monastery, called Cortijo de Fraile and a deconsecrated church which was enhanced with baroque elements by a Spanish painter and ornamented with cherubs, angels and twisted columns to make it look like a model of St. Peter's basilica in Rome. The Spanish villages and sets, the dark complexion of the Mediterranean extras, the Almeria desert, the apricots and palm trees - they all contributed to Leone's unique vision the West as a scorching place of dusty ghost towns. When Leone went to America to shoot in the real West, Hollywood went to Spain to imitate his version of it.


# The influence The revenge motive, the flashback structure, the well-dressed anti-hero, his extraordinary collection of firearms ... these things would all become recurring elements within the spaghetti western genre. The teaming of the young and impetuous, and the older, more calculating gunfighter would also be picked up in some of the most interesting genre outings, notably Petroni's Death rides a horse, and Valerrii's Day of Anger, both with Lee van Cleef. It was also used by Alfio Caltabiano in Pistoleros, at same time a homage to, and comment on Leone's masterpiece. These are all great films, but the partnership would never work as well as in For a Few Dollars more. The strange thing about all this, is that Van Cleef was only five years older than Eastwood.


# The reaction It's no wonder that a film this influential would provoke some kind of reaction. In the above mentioned Pistoleros, writer/director Caltabiano clearly shows that bounty hunting was a dirty job and that it was difficult for those practicing it, to keep their hands clean. Franco Giraldi's ambitious but uneven A Minute to pray, a Second to die is also a bitter comment on Leone's all too gentle approach of the professional bounty killer. But the most incisive comment was given by Leone's friend and rival Corbucci, the other Sergio, in his icy nightmare The Great Silence.


Notes:

  • (2) Marco Giusti, Dizionario del Western all'Italiana
  • (3) Thomas Hardy,The Aurum Fim Encyclopedia, The Western
  • (4) A Conversation with Martin Scorsese about Sergio Leone, in: Christopher Frayling, Once upon a time in Italy
  • (7) Marco Giusti, Dizionario del Western all'Italiana
  • (8) Interview with Carlo Simi, in: Christopher Frayling, Once upon a time in Italy


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--By Scherpschutter

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