A Fistful of Dollars

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

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