Retrospective: For A Few Dollars More (Patreon)

Screened at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York.

Sergio Leone kicks off For A Few Dollars More by trolling the audience. We see a lone horseman slowly riding through the desert of Almería in a landscape shot that lasts nearly a whole minute. He's then shot off his horse and tumbles to the ground. Leone then places a brusque intertitle over the scene:

Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.

Leone's answer to "show, don't tell" is perché non entrambi?

If A Fistful of Dollars likes to trick its audience, For A Few Dollars More relentlessly deceives them. None of the characters have a complete understanding of what's happening in the movie, and the result is convoluted and over-long in a way Fistful wasn't. But For a Few Dollars More owns its convolutedness, allowing its characters to alternatively trick and be tricked from scene to scene. It's a hot mess, and all the better for it.

For the first half of the movie, Clint Eastwood is overshadowed by Lee Van Cleef. This does create a real problem of the movie's ostensible protagonist have nothing to do for about an hour of this two-plus hour movie, but Van Cleef's Colonel Mortimer is the thematic and moral heart of the movie (a disturbing fact given that he's an ex-Confederate soldier; Leone does not lose much sleep over race). Previously, Van Cleef was a henchman in High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. When he emerges in For a Few Dollars More, clad in black and sporting a mustache so sharp I cut myself on it, he's seemingly a typecast bad guy who's gotten his lucky break as the lead villain in an international B-movie.

But when Mortimer finally meets Manco (Italian for "lack") halfway through the movie, Leone scoffs at the idea of a big showdown. Mortimer has a righteous vendetta against his and Manco's mutual target, El Indio (played by yet another Italian actor in brownface). Both bounty killers are capitalist beasts motivated by commerce, but Mortimer has a soul on top of that. Eastwood's character remains an empty vessel kicking around Leone's mythic West; a landscape where bandits desecrate churches (this is a post-Italian economic miracle movie, as much about the economic hardships of Southern Italy as the American West).

Yet despite the darkness of the plot (this is a revenge thriller about an ex-Confederate hunting the Mexican who raped his sister and caused her suicide), For a Few Dollars More is Leone's silliest movie. It is overtly slapstick: Mortimer has a folding satchel for his guns attached to his saddle. When the two leads meet, they duel by shooting each other's hats around. Lee Van Cleef lights a match with Klaus Kinski's neck. It's the darkest of the Dollars trilogy, and by far the funniest. Does that contradiction work? I think so. But the trilogy wouldn't work without it.