A Fistful of Dollars

It’s a gray and rainy day here in Wtf-Film land, the sort of dismal conditions that keep slackers like me in bed an extra hour and leave us with want for motivation.  It’s a perfect day for a film – a perfect day for an escape – provided you don’t have to leave home for it.  And what better way is there to escape the drab, dreary confines of a downtown apartment than to take a trip to the bright and sunny American southwest circa the late 1800′s?  None, I say, particularly if that trip is to the American southwest by way of Spain.

A brief history of the Spaghetti Western shows that it was a fledgling wing of the productive Italian film industry leading into 1964, when director Sergio Leone (then known as an assistant director, with 1961′s The Colossus of Rhodes his only directorial credit) and a man named Clint Eastwood (looking to escape the bonds of bit parts and television) burst the genre wide open.  Produced for around $200,000 by a trio of Italian, Spanish, and German companies, A Fistful of Dollars would reap untold profits when initially released in Europe, and make a bona fide star of Eastwood when it reached American shores courtesy of United Artists in 1967.  The film’s influence can be counted in credits alone – the IMDB cites just two 1963 productions as Spaghetti Westerns, while listing no fewer than forty for the year of 1967 alone.

The story is, in essence, the transposition of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (itself inspired by American Westerns) onto more traditional Western surroundings.  A taciturn stranger (Eastwood) enters a desert town besieged by two crime families (the whiskey-shilling Rojo’s and the gun-running Baxters) and sees great opportunity. Much to the chagrin of a local cantina owner (and the delight of the town coffin maker) the man sets about stirring up conflict between the two families, happily accepting payment from both as he leads them towards their mutual destruction.

There’s little doubt about the connection between A Fistful of Dollars and Kurosawa’s 1961 film – the basic premise, cast of characters, whole situations and lines of dialogue are lifted neatly from the Japanese effort and adapted, often quite transparently, into the new surroundings.  An early scene of Eastwood ordering up coffins (“Three coffins… My mistake – four coffins”), the later smoking out of one of the families, and Eastwood’s final entrance, centered in a vast wide shot, just to list a few examples, mirror Yojimbo directly.  Kurosawa would bring a successful suit against the producers of Dollars, earning a significant portion of international proceeds and the Japanese distribution rights in the process (as though to secure the connection, the film was released as Kouya no Yojimbo – literally Yojimbo of the Wasteland - in Japan), and is reported to have made more off distributing Leone’s film than he did from his own.

In spite of all the similarities A Fistful of Dollars plays less like a rip-off of Yojimbo than a culturally divergent take on the same material, and each film stands as tall as the other with respect to its particular genre. Just as Kurosawa’s helped to revolutionize the jidaigeki Leone’s helped to revolutionize the Western, updating old conventions for contemporary tastes and rewriting the archetype of the Western hero forever.  A Fistful of Dollars was a new kind of Western for a new age, sadistically violent (for 1964, at least – the film still, unbelievably, carries an R-rating) and sardonically funny, with a core performance that’s the very essence of cool.

Regardless of how staggering the talent behind the camera may be, casting still has the capacity to make or break a production, and I shudder when thinking of what A Fistful of Dollars might have been had anyone other than Eastwood been cast in the lead role.  A Fistful of Dollars isn’t just about the character of Joe (brilliantly christened ‘the man with no name’ in the extensive United Artists ad campaign), it is the character.  Later Leone Westerns, beginning with 1965′s For a Few Dollars More, would be ensemble affairs, with Eastwood cast amongst the likes of Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef, but here the actor’s iconic cigar-chomping gunslinger is front and center.  Eastwood brings deftness and a subtlety of expression to a role that might easily have been overplayed, the brevity of his dialogue (a result of the actor and director cutting large chunks of conversation from the script) only adding to the mystique of his enigmatic desert wanderer.  It’s a role whose success is measured by its own restraint, and ranks among the greats of film history.

A Fistful of Dollars was, arguably, the most important production of Sergio Leone’s career, the film with which the director was finally free to explore his own unique flavor of storytelling.  Dollars isn’t so operatic as Once Upon a Time in the West or even its demi-sequel For a Few Dollars More, but the hallmarks of what would become the Leone style are already in evidence.  The final standoff is perhaps most indicative, a scene of few words told through a series of long shots, close-ups, and swift action cuts, but the director’s acute sense for big, impacting visuals is in evidence throughout.  Financial limitations may have constrained the scope of his sets and locations, which don’t present with the depth of his later and more affluent works (even the interiors of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are vast), but Leone’s epic sensibilities are enough to keep the meager production from feeling as small as it really is.

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about a Leone Western without also discussing the contributions of the inimitable composer Ennio Morricone, without whom Leone’s films may well have gone voiceless.  The score is just another instance in which A Fistful of Dollars is made to feel bigger than it really is, an example of epic orchestration sans epic instrumentation (something that, given the budget, would likely have been well out of reach for the production).  Morricone’s unique combination of rousing motifs and minimal instrumentation, with sound effects (cracking whips, gunshots) providing much of the percussive punctuation, proved its potency here, and Leone would never work with any other composer again.

So, the story to A Fistful of Dollars may not be the freshest, but the details make all the difference.  Dollars would be notable if only it were the first collaboration between Leone, Morricone, and Eastwood, but it’s also a fine film in its own right and a pivitol moment in the history of the Western, American or otherwise.  A Fistful of Dollars is a classic, pure and simple, and just the kind of thing I never grow tired of watching.  If you haven’t seen it, then what the hell are you waiting for?

Were I in better financial standing I’d have been first in line for last year’s The Man With No Name Trilogy boxed set, in spite of the disappointing state of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on Blu-ray, but things being as they are I had to wait.  In retrospect I’m glad I did.  Target stores are currently offering individual Blu-ray releases of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More at a staggering $10 a piece, substantially lower than the per-film price of the boxed set – an absolute steal for those of you who have yet to pick up the films.  To the best of my knowledge this BD of A Fistful of Dollars is exactly the same All Region release that was included in the boxed set, and it comes complete with a variety of audio dubs and subtitling options.

I suspect that the transfer utilized here is the same as was sourced for the 2-disc DVD special edition from 2007, though I don’t own that release to compare.  I’m also aware that a full restoration of A Fistful of Dollars was undertaken in Italy not so long ago, and an All Region Blu-ray of that restoration (with PAL supplements) is available for those who want it.  As for this release from MGM and 20th Century Fox, there’s good and bad, but for the most part I’m pleased.  As evidenced by the screen captures provided by DVDBeaver, the MGM transfer is cropped in comparison to that on the Italian disc and presents with a far more neutral color scheme.  Of these two facts, the cropping is most problematic to me – it’s obvious from the opening credits that the framing is too tight along the bottom edge of the 2.35:1 transfer.  That said, it didn’t impede my viewing experience in the least, though I also have to confess to never having seen the film with more open framing.  As for the color, I was unperturbed by the subdued shades offered by the MGM transfer, and by contrast feel that the Italian restoration appears too saturated.  I’ve no idea which is more accurate to Leone’s intentions.

An example of the excessive cropping at the bottom of the frame - Aldo Sambreli is living on the edge.

Otherwise I think the news here is resoundingly positive, provided one doesn’t have unreasonable expectations with regards to the appearance of a low budget Italian / Spanish / German co-production more than 45 years old.  It’s clear from the saturation levels that MGM’s source materials are no longer in the most pristine condition, if they ever were to begin with (these films often suffered damage in their initial processing, before theatrical prints were even struck), but their transfer seems to represent them quite well.  Grain is a persistent element in Techniscope photography, and one of the big reasons why it’s my favorite shooting format.  It doesn’t look like any effort was made to digitally combat the grain here, which pleases me to no end, and the sky-high video bitrate (averaging 35.7 Mbps) ensures that the Mpeg-4 AVC encode properly supports it.  Detail is strong throughout, with some moments (especially close-ups of the craggy faces of Eastwood and his co-stars) proving more robust than others, and there’s an excellent underlying texture.  It certainly felt like film to this reviewer, persistent specks of grit and all, and suffers from none of the excessive digital clean-up that marred the 2009 Blu-ray of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  I dig it.

I’ve no complaints with regards to the array of audio options.  The primary track is DTS-HD MA 5.1 English and sounds just fine, particularly with regards to Morricone’s score, but the bump seems entirely unnecessary – for purists, an original Monophonic English track is also included, though only in compressed Dolby Digital.  Two alternate and compressed dubbed tracks – Dolby Digital 2.0 Spanish and DTS 5.1 French – are also included.  Subtitle options are, in a word, extensive, and regardless of where you reside in the world there’s a very strong possibility that you’ll be able to understand the film.  Aside from the should-be-requisite English SDH track, viewers can also choose from Spanish, French, French (Quebec), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Polish and Greek.

This review needed more scenery.

Supplements are stacked, and appear to have been ported over from the earlier 2-disc DVD edition for the most part.  Film historian Sir Christopher Frayling is everywhere, and is more than informed enough to warrant being present.  Frayling receives not only a feature audio commentary (which I’ve only sampled, but which sounds interesting) but a pair of featurettes as well – A New Kind of Hero (22:54, SD) and The Frayling Archives: A Fistful of Dollars (18:40, HD).  Other featurettes are also present – A Few Weeks in Spain: Clint Eastwood on the Experience of Making the Film (8:33, SD), Tre Voci – Fistful of Dollars (11:12, SD – features producer Alberto Grimaldi, screenwriter Sergio Donati, and actor Mickey Knox), Not Ready for Primetime: Renowned Filmmaker Monte Hellman Discusses the Television Broadcast of A Fistful of Dollars (6:20, SD), and Location Comparison: Then and Now (5:22, SD).  As though all that weren’t enough (you can never have too much!), 10 radio spots and two theatrical trailers (a double feature trailer in SD, and the original theatrical trailer in HD) and the ill-advised network television premiere opening (starring Harry Dean Stanton, 7:44, SD) are also included.  It’s a pretty good haul, all told, and I can’t see fans of the film being disappointed.

I’m sure that plenty will bemoan the gritty visual appearance this Blu-ray edition of A Fistful of Dollars offers, but I think it suits the film just fine.  From a technical standpoint this disc is solid, with a high bitrate AVC video encode, DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio, and the original monophonic track included for nuts like myself who prefer it.  A load of supplements and a healthy array of dub tracks and subtitle options make this a release with wide appeal, and you just can’t beat the price Target is asking for it.  For those who have yet to pick up the boxed set (guilty!), or who already own the 2009 Blu-ray of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and don’t want another copy lying around, these Target exclusives are an excellent buy.