Clint Eastwood doesn’t say much in A Fistful of Dollars. But then, he doesn’t need to. The man with no name is more of a force of nature than a human, a drifter you really don’t want to mess with. This is the movie that made Eastwood a star, and it’s part one of a trilogy that many believe includes the best western movies ever made.
At heart it’s an unapproved remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, but few of its viewers would have known that. For US audiences, this was the arrival of not just a charismatic movie star but of a stylish new kind of movie: dark, nihilistic and utterly thrilling. It also features one of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time. Not bad for a film with a budget of just $200,000.
Does A Fistful of Dollars still stand up today?
Absolutely. Sure, it’s dated – and has been parodied a million times. But its 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating is well deserved and makes it one of the best Netflix movies you can stream. “It is the punk rock of westerns,” The Guardian says. “The Man With No Name and the brutal Dollars movies were a colossal rebuke to the blander Rawhide-style westerns that had come to dominate television.”
The word “brutal” comes up again and again in reviews of the movie: it’s a violent and bloody experience, especially towards the end. Writing in Slant, Chuck Bowen says: “If Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars struck audiences in the 1960s as a brash, vital reprieve from the sanctimony of the westerns of the era, it continues to serve as a breath of fresh air today for ironically inverted reasons… [it] feels as if it hasn’t aged a day since its initial release in 1964.” And as Time put it in a review that’s not available online: “Once in a great while a western comes along that breaks new ground and becomes a classic of the genre.”
You can’t talk about Sergio Leone’s movies without also talking about their soundtrack. Ennio Morricone may have later dismissed it as “my worst ever score” for “the worst film Leone made” but it’s a wild and swaggering thing, almost a character in its own right, and it makes this movie a must-listen as well as a must-watch.