For a Few Ethics More: Sergio Leone, male friendships, and individualism (Patreon)

For a Few Dollars More makes fun of itself for existing. The title, riffing on Sergio Leone’s first Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, is basically an early iteration of the Mel Brooks joke about titling a sequel “The Search for More Money.” Yet Leone’s Dollars trilogy stays far away from cynicism, instead turning out a clever and deceptively thoughtful critique of the Western hero’s individualism.

A Fistful of Dollars treated the individualist Western hero in a uniquely Italian way. Leone, a child of Italy’s commedia dell’arte, specifically its puppet theater where heroes outwit villains through cleverness, populates his West with trickster gods who deceive belligerent authoritarians who haunt their path. The Dollars trilogy is essentially set in the afterlife of the Hollywood Western, free of true quests or concrete goals, where heroes who’ve outlived their past wander through the vestiges of John Ford movies. Leone’s Westerns are explicitly post-Fascist, set in a wasteland where the great old power structures are gone — for the best.

Clint Eastwood’s supposedly nameless man (who actually gets named in each of his Leone movies) has no clear-cut personal history. He’s simply a wanderer searching for his next payment out of habit (or poncho). In A Fistful of Dollars, he helps out some civilians along the way, having some vestige of a conscience that prompts him to help people tormented by gangsters. But he does so largely alone — individualism is both the Western hero’s selling point and his curse. He is alone, and yet all people rely on him to sort things out.

In the movie’s ostensible “make a quick buck” sequel For a Few Dollars More, Leone challenges this lone-wolf-finds-his-next-payment model of Western storytelling. Clint Eastwood doesn’t appear until 12 minutes into the movie. Instead, Lee Van Cleef emerges as Colonel Mortimer, an ostensible cold bounty hunter who’s framed as a villain, frightening everyone around him. Leone’s framing of shots is as key to his characters as their portrayals. His often-parodied extreme close-ups are a way of forcing viewers to gaze into his characters’ souls. Body language can be deceptive — eyes hide nothing. According to the cinematic conventions established by A Fistful of Dollars and the Western genre as a whole, Mortimer is a villain, a human obelisk who comes to town to thwart the hero’s journey.

For a Few Dollars More takes its time (its pacing can be fairly described as “leisurely”), allowing Mortimer to linger in the viewer’s minds as a villainous character. Lee Van Cleef played a henchman in John Ford’s grim late-career masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — it’s fair to assume the Navy veteran from New Jersey is just upgrading to a villain’s role across the Atlantic. Then an old man tells Eastwood’s character Manco, a bounty hunter, that Mortimer is actually “a brave man, a soldier” who was known as “the best shot in the Carolinas,” before getting “reduced to being a bounty killer, same as you, because of trains. Because of the damn trains!” Long before blockbusters exhausted the “we’re not so different, you and I” trope, Leone threatened Clint Eastwood’s supremacy in a Western movie by giving him someone who’s just like him.

Nearly an hour into the movie, Manco and Mortimer finally encounter each other. The movie makes sure to indulge the audience in some spectacular gunplay (Leone’s not so cynical as to neglect the pleasures of Westerns) by having Eastwood and Van Cleef blast each other’s hats around, before concluding in a standstill. It turns out that the two bounty hunters, both pursuing an offensive Mexican stereotype of a bank robber called El Indio, and that they’d benefit from a partnership. Given how often cowboy movies are about rivalries, having the two leads, who work the same occupation, team up for a common purpose is a genuine intellectual departure from Western conventions.

This is hardly a straightforward process — Eastwood and Van Cleef fail to prevent various murders and a wholesale heist (which is a reason to view For a Few Dollars More as Goldfinger But Actually Good). After their spectacular failure to stop Indio, a cleverer villain than Westerns often manage, from robbing a town blind, Manco is inclined to go his own way. Mortimer only convinces him not to do so by giving him a minor flesh wound with a bullet to the neck — which enables Manco to play one more trick on Indio’s gang.

Mortimer turns out to be a hero in a way Manco isn’t. He gets to kill Indio, who the movie reveals killed Mortimer’s brother-in-law and raped his sister, who killed herself while he did so. Women in Leone’s mythology are secondary figures in a way that’s genuinely damaging to his movies (we’ll see just how bad this gets in Once Upon a Time in America). Yet Leone’s critique of masculinity is more profound and genre-savvy than it gets credit for.

In the end, Mortimer doesn’t take his share of the treasure. He just wanted justice, and allows Manco to walk away with the goods. In the end, Eastwood gets upstaged a bit, being reduced to a mercenary while Mortimer gets to be a genuine hero. The cowboy hero is made insufficient by his companion’s nobility — and ultimately left alone. Individualism isn’t enough for him, and yet at this stage, it’s about the best he can do.