Leone’s first “spaghetti western”, A Fistful of Dollars served notice of a prodigious talent capable of reinventing a genre grown stale from over-familiarity. In the US, westerns had been thoroughly domesticated by the small screen. Leone imported a US TV star (Clint Eastwood, from Rawhide) but brought a brazen cynicism to a story lifted wholesale from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo (1961): a mercenary gunfighter plays rival clans against each other and stands back as the town destroys itself.
Even then, the film’s most revolutionary aspect was the score by Leone’s old primary school chum Ennio Morricone, a screaming nightclub cacophony of male chanting, Spanish guitars, whistling, bells, all integrated with sound effects (gunshots, whips, horses), and juxtaposed with the taciturn anti-hero. Morricone believed American symphonic scores betrayed the violence and the wildness of the western landscape in which they took place; his music restored irony, solitude and discord to the ambiance.
A Fistful of Dollars has a cult, comic-book intensity. It is the punk rock of westerns.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars feels as if it hasn’t aged a day since its initial release in 1964. The film’s opening credits sequence is more vigorous and exciting than most entire modern movies for its simplicity and boldness—for its willingness to risk ludicrousness so as to inspire an operatic level of emotion. An illustrated silhouette of a man on a mule gallops against a blank backdrop while Ennio Morricone’s remarkable score whips up a fevered tone of comic malevolence.
Chuck Bowen, Slant
Community Partner
Sergio Leone
Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, Josef Egger, Gian Maria Volonte
Italy
1964
English
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Sergio Leone, Víctor Andrés Catena, Jaime Comas Gil
Cinematography
Massimo Dallamano, Federico G. Larraya
Editor
Roberto Cinquini, Alfonso Santacana
Original Music
Ennio Morricone
Art Director
Carlo Simi
Also in This Series
Ennio
Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore proves the perfect filmmaker to craft this loving tribute to one of the all-time greats: composer Ennio Morricone (1928-2020).
Image: Courtesy of Music Box Films
A Fistful of Dollars
Morricone's clamorous score -- with its chanting, flamenco guitar, bells and whistling -- encapsulated everything that was exciting and new about Sergio Leone's revolutionary spaghetti western, its brazen cheek and style.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The third and the best of the so-called 'Dollars' trilogy amplifies Leone's baroque style: crane shots, shock cuts and Morricone music all vying for attention as three rogues hunt buried gold in a series of triangular variations.
The Mission
Written by Robert Bolt (Lawrence of Arabia; A Man for All Seasons), The Mission is the story of an C18th Catholic outpost on the lands of the Guarani people, near the Iguazi Falls. Music is a transcendent force here, and Morricone's score is inspired.
