Back in the days of black & white Television, the Ed Sullivan Show, and The Beatles as a new sensation there was a popular television show called Rawhide. Eric Fleming was the star but a handsome young actor with a pompadour hairstyle played the drover Rowdy Yates. That actor was Clint Eastwood. Having little success breaking into starring roles on the big screen, TV star Clint did an end run around the Hollywood system.

Clint collaborated with an international team to make a trio of cowboy films in Spain using an Italian director and German funding. Released by United Artists in the USA in 1967, the trilogy, at first maligned by critics, was nonetheless taken to heart by American audiences.

The first of these films, A Fistful of Dollars, was put on celluloid in 1964. As an unknown actor working with a foreign director in a foreign land, Clint accepted $10,000 for his role as The Man With No Name, or Joe as he is actually called in the film. The succeeding two years each saw another Spaghetti Western put in the can until Clint received the princely sum of $250,000 for his starring role in 1966's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The paychecks received for these films allowed Clint to set up his Malpaso film company and he has never looked back since.

Sergio Leone directed the trilogy and Ennio Morricone scored each of the three also. As a first effort, A Fistful of Dollars is serviceable but is not the polished effort the final episode, in fact a masterpiece, would be. Fistful follows the storyline of Yojimbo, Akira Kurasawa's 1961 samurai film about a stranger who plays rival gangs against each other. Eastwood plays the role established by Toshiro Mifune, the stranger.

Clad in a greenish-brown poncho, wearing a battered hat, and chain-smoking lethal black cigarillos, the stranger rides into a desolate town, somewhere South of the border. Stopping in the saloon he finds nobody works since the two rival gangs took over town - nobody that is except the undertaker who is cheerfully hammering together coffins as quickly as he can make them. Seizing the opportunity and dealing with a gang of toughs who had harassed him earlier as he entered town, the stranger fills four coffins before lunchtime. It turns out that both gangs want to avail themselves of the stranger's services but he decides to double cross both sides - after all, he's looking out for number one. From this tiny germ of a story was established the mythic persona of The Man With No Name who would become indelibly identified with Clint Eastwood and rocket him to superstardom.

As the prototype of Leone's westerns, Fistful shows the embryonic growth of both the director's vision, the scoring by Morricone, and the acting by Eastwood. Leone's widescreen compositions of the bleak and dirty West are decent and the beginnings of his claustrophobic cutting between the characters' eyes can be seen. Leone also switches viewpoints with his lens showing the death throes from the point of view of dying villain Gian Maria Volonte after being gutshot by Eastwood.

Ennio Morricone, sounding heavily influenced by veteran composer Elmer Bernstein (The Magnificent Seven), scores an eclectic number of snippets of spare solo instrumentation, ranging from guitar, harmonica, piano, Jews harp, and whistles, occasionally breaking into crescendos of fully orchestrated music. Morricone's efforts resulted in very memorable musical ideas that would be more fully developed in his later works.

Eastwood was the only recognizable actor in the bunch, at least from an American viewpoint. Most of the other performances ranged from fair to middlin. Gian Maria Volonte did go on to play the villain in the sequel For a Few Dollars More.

As the father of his success, Actor/Director Eastwood dedicated his 1993 masterpiece Unforgiven to Sergio Leone (and Don Siegel "Dirty Harry"). While not quite up to the standard of the latter two of the "Dollars Trilogy," the standard of acting directing and scoring of Fistful all add up to a four star film.

The MGM DVD is available in 2.35: 1 widescreen and is fairly well preserved except for a few faded passages. The DVD only contains the theatrical preview (trailer) as an extra, but for under $10.00 should be part of every DVD buff's collection.

Happy viewing!



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening