Before 1967’s A Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood’s career consisted primarily of several uncredited roles in films with dull titles like Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula! (1955), and one-off performances in anthology series like the dryly named waterlogged drama Navy Log (1955) and the much more memorable Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955). Before Eastwood’s teeth-gritting snarl and perpetual sun-in-the-eye squint became as intrinsic to American popular culture as Twinkies, the actor was in dire need of a proper vehicle to coax the latent hard-ass from his slumber.
In those early years, it was 1959’s Rawhide, in which Eastwood portrayed the precocious ramrod Rowdy Yates, a former Confederate Army soldier. If any of those early performances could be said to provide an inkling as to what sort of gruff underbelly could be scratched with the right material, it was Rawhide. In Yates, we have a nascent iteration of the type of character with whom Eastwood would become synonymous only a few short years later.
Enter Sergio Leone, the son of Roberto Roberti (Vincenzo Leone), an Italian director who cut his teeth as an assistant to the great neorealist filmmaker Vittorio De Sica. After a stint in earthbound realism, Leone’s career would take him in a completely different direction. He found work in varying capacities on several historical epics of the schmaltzy sword-and-sandal ilk, which would culminate in the grandly bland directorial debut, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961). Leone’s peregrinations proved crucial in developing his broad stylistic tastes that would congeal in his Spaghetti Westerns, which are unlike anything that came before them. Leone’s style comes across at once as rough-edged and highly refined.
A Fistful of Dollars Takes Its Premise from a Classic
Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 film, Yojimbo, provides the blueprint for the first film in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy
Pilfered from Akira Kurosawa’s Edo-era-set Yojimbo (1961), Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars arrives with the same core conceit intact. However, there is enough peripheral allure that is distinctly its own thing to justify its existence. The film marks the first of three fabulously off-kilter collaborations — the other two being For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). Set in the severely dehydrated locale of San Miguel — a town that’s really just a couple of strewn-about slab structures floating in a land of arid nothingness — the tale begins with the arrival of our hero. The Man with No Name (Eastwood) happens upon this purgatory, coming from adventures unknown and needing a drink of water. From his puckered glare, the Man sips from a ladle as he observes a small child entering a building. The child is quickly shooed away by a hail of gunfire at his heels. No more than four, the kid runs to his father, whom the shooters proceed to rough up. Why? Because it’s something to do.
Our introduction to the Man with No Name, or “Joe,” as he’s later referred to, is measured. In a nearly silent scene, save for the rolling dashes of piano and flute trills of Ennio Morricone’s score, the townsfolk scurry like mice at the flick of a light switch as the Man sizes up the town. A body propped up on a horse is sent off into the distance with a sign on its back. Adios amigo. Silvanito, the town’s innkeeper, promptly urges the Man to leave, offering just enough information to entice the cunning drifter into setting up shop. San Miguel’s beleaguered populace is trapped between a rock and a hard place, namely, that of the Rojos — led by Don Miquel (Antonio Prieto) and his brother Ramón (Gian Maria Volonté) — and the Baxters. The feuding families engage in various extortion practices, wanton acts of violence, arms dealing, and theft. To live in San Miguel, on the Mexico-United States border, is to live in a space where rules are dictated by the powerful. As the Man with No Name later says, “A man’s life in these parts often depends on a mere scrap of information,” and he will use information as his most powerful tool — aside from his revolver.
But before the Yojimbo plot can commence, there’s first the crucial matter of settling scores with a group of roughhousing cowboys who gave the Man with No Name’s mule a scare and, by extension, disrespected the Man himself. “Get three coffins ready,” the Man says offhandedly to a gravedigger. Returning moments later, the Man amends his initial command: “My mistake. Four coffins.” That sobriquet, the Man with No Name, works to tell us that he’s a mysterious, unknowable figure, a person about whom the audience will learn next to nothing except through an accumulation of actions; it’s through deeds like the handy dispensation of the four cowboys that the Man’s code will be revealed. The name also tells us that given the propensity for untimely demise in San Miguel, there’s little point in knowing someone’s given name.
The Man’s plan to pit both criminal organizations against one another — the old Yojimbo maneuver — is a purloined plot for the ages. As our hero pinballs between warring factions of trigger-happy egotists, he disseminates incendiary nuggets of misinformation to further his cause and collects the titular fistful of dollars to remain (cough) loyal. As the house of cards is carefully stacked, we know it must eventually come tumbling down, and it does, in a torrent of over-the-top action that has lost none of its potency in the years since the film’s release. But it’s not all a matter of stakes-upping. Just as often as the bullets go whizzing by, A Fistful of Dollars provides marvelously mellow scenes of wound-licking convalescence and rough-edged but secretly very tender character interactions. In one such scene, the Man makes a decision that provides some semblance of understanding the Man’s heart, guarded as it may be.
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars Introduced the World to the Character Clint Eastwood Would Become Best Known For
The Man with No Name is an archetypal antihero who operates by his own code, a tactical genius who doesn’t waste time with idle chatter
Just as American Westerns and pulp stories influenced Akira Kurosawa, Kurosawa’s films returned the favor, challenging filmmakers like Leone to find new rhythms in violence, silence, and tough-minded humor. Where tamped-down TV series like Rawhide appealed to general audiences as the offensively inoffensive gruel that the whole family could enjoy, Leone took the lessons of Ford, Hawkes, Mann, and others, along with the radically controlled violence of Kurosawa — not to mention the wholesale theft of plot — and developed his pastiche style. Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars renewed a tried-and-true genre in a raw yet refined way; it’s an accomplished work by a young master sharpening his tools. It’s also simply astonishing just how un-dated A Fistful of Dollars is. With a fully-formed star at its center and assured filmmaking, none of the film’s quality is as striking as its charmingly cantankerous energy.
Nowadays, it’s impossible to consider Clint Eastwood, the actor-director, as anything other than one of those always-around titans, a figure whose legacy has only solidified with time. (Eastwood has just wrapped principal photography on Juror No. 2, his 40th film as director.) It seems all that it took was a spark to ignite the storied career, but it all truly begins with A Fistful of Dollars. We should all be thankful.
A Fistful of Dollars is currently streaming on Max, and available to rent or buy through various outlets.