Retrospective: A Fistful of Dollars (Patreon)

Screened at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York.

A Fistful of Dollars is a series of filters and tricks: cultural objects haphazardly welded together, resulting in a vision that's both haphazard and unexpectedly cogent. The Spaghetti Western is a strange cultural mash-up on the face of it: Italian directors working in the quintessential American drama shooting on location in southern Spain. A Fistful of Dollars, as close to a canonical beginning as Spaghetti Westerns get, takes things a step further: it remakes Akira Kurosawa's Yōjimbo, itself a samurai re-purposing of various Dashiell Hammett novels. Sergio Leone funnels the hard-boiled detective novel as a samurai movie turned into a Western, and that makes the Dollars trilogy just about the most intelligent take on the American Western we'll get until Deadwood.

Leone's choice of Yojimbo as source material is quiet genius: if you're going to rip off anyone, steal from the greatest director of the 20th Century. The samurai genre is itself influenced by Westerns, and there's precedent for Western remakes of jidaigeki films: The Magnificent Seven and Star Wars are only the most obvious examples. Meanwhile, Yojimbo is a less obvious source than Seven Samurai: it's not the great four-hour epic of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune's careers. Yojimbo is a gangster picture about life under the Tokugawa shogunate. Like Leone after him, Kurosawa is ambivalent towards his rōnin protagonist; the man acts broadly out of self-interest rather than a desire to keep law and order. His background isn't explored much; it's what he does today that matters. Mifune's character is an engine for exploring postwar Japanese civil society more than someone who will fix it.

This is particular relevant to the Western, which is built on the deadly lie of a lawman redeeming the West from the ravenous Indigenous warriors hoarding the land for themselves. In Sergio Leone's American mythology, there's no such glorious quest. Even the title A Fistful of Dollars (aside from taking a shot at Italian studios jumping the Western bandwagon) indicates there's little at stake here beyond a paycheck. There's just toiling in Almería and pretending that Yugoslavian men are really from Mexico.

Clint Eastwood is the only actor in A Fistful of Dollars who plays his own nationality (the Mexican characters are overwhelmingly played by European actors, a failure that will remain a staple of Leone's Westerns). And it's not a flattering portrayal: the Man With No Name has no identity, no background, no friends. He's the great American cowboy stripped of titles, lands, and cash. Like Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo, he has no quest except getting by. He's purely a creature of routine violence, the perfect emblem for America in the era of the Vietnam War. There's no sign that he's even been a Union soldier like Sergio Corbucci's Django; he is simply what he does: an angel of death killing and never getting paid.

Plot is a minimal concern to A Fistful of Dollars. Leone is happy to let his cast of commedia dell'arte figures play on great landscapes while Ennio Morricone elevates their escapes to the realm of opera. There's plenty of understated brilliance: the slow-setup of the iron plate that saves Eastwood's life, his character's observation of a runaround between two adjacent houses, and the coffin-maker who's way too gleeful about all the carnage in town. If most filmmakers' fourth or fifth best movies were this good, world cinema would be in good shape. But if the world were in good shape, Sergio Leone wouldn't have had to make A Fistful of Dollars.