While A Fistful of Dollars gets all the plaudits for being first (even though technically it wasn't) and the sheer bravado of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly mark it as the one fondest remembered, this sorely underrated sophomore spaghetti is often cruelly overlooked. In point of fact it is masterful, better in fact than A Fistful... and baring all the hallmarks of a director who was confident, capable, and on his way to redefining a genre that had been the bedrock of cinema for more than fifty years.
Once more playing off of the unending cool of The Man With No Name (who again, contrary to movie lore, actually does have a name), the story this time pairs the mercenary up with the elegantly ruthless Col. Mortimer, a vengeful fellow bounty hunter who offers Eastwood's poncho wearing gunslinger a 50-50 partnership to hunt down deranged bandit El Indio and his vicious gang of killers.
Buoyed by the international success of A Fistful... and armed with a much larger budget, Leone looked to bolster his sequel with a big name actor to partner with the returning Eastwood. He couldn't land one. Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda were still too expensive. In the end he settled for perennial bit-part actor and genre veteran Lee Van Cleef, whose hawkish features offered Leone yet another of those conspicuous, striking faces he so loved to work with.
For the role of El Indio Leone again turned to Gian Maria Volonte, an Italian theater actor whose enormous, overblown theatrics were the perfect contrast to the minimalist chic of his American counterparts. Post Dollars, activist Volonte became a huge star in his native country making political films, while Van Cleef carved out a massively successful niche for himself as the go-to guy for every Italian production outfit desperately trying to recreate Leone's inimitable magic.
While A Fistful set the standard, it was this sequel that transformed Eastwood's rugged drifter into a cultural icon. While a model for almost every cowboy that came after him, Leone’s Man With No Name was something audiences had never really seen before. Tired of the traditional portrayal of the cowboy as righteous, upstanding and driven by “what a man’s gotta do” here was a different kind of western hero operating from a specific code of morality, specifically the complete absence of one.
This singular lack or morality was a big hit with the counter culture audience who embraced this enigmatic character not because of his upstanding nature as was traditional with the western, but because of his style. The entire character was an exercise in style and everything else came secondary. This was a man who played by his own rules, worked for ready cash, and looked damn good doing it.
Leone also went to great lengths to play up the rhetoric and iconography of the western myth, taking his time, letting scenes drag out, the camera linger, and heightening events to the level of almost pure theater. From the opening credits of A Fistful of Dollars it is clear that this is going to be a very visceral experience. The now iconic title music scored by Ennio Morricone blasts over the credits which are displayed amidst a kind of rotoscope of primary colors and silhouette. The influence of this is clearly seen in the James Bond films and immediately it signals that you’re about to see a very stylized, almost rock’n’roll vision of the Wild West.
This particular installment also lays the groundwork for so many of the buddy pictures that would become stock through the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The wily, grizzled veteran partnered up with the reckless young protégé. Mismatched and quickly at odds, they travel the then scarcely trodden trail towards mutual respect and admiration, through barbs, brawls, and bust-ups along the way.
And of course there are the faces. Those bold, bodacious faces, which Leone searched for tirelessly after an accidentally discovery that which would go on to become his signature trademark. In an effort to save money during A Fistful... Leone used Techniscope. A film stock of which you could print two frames in the space occupied by a single frame on a role of cinemascope. What they discovered was that this cheaper, lower quality film stock would give you incredible close ups in stone cold focus, which Leone then used extensively throughout the rest of his career.
Though hugely acclaimed from both critics and audiences alike Sergio Leone didn’t have what you would call a legacy in the traditional sense. Unless you are specifically paying homage to his style, no one really makes films in the way he did and it’s not difficult to see why given what Italian audiences, and indeed Italian filmmakers, were used to. While Leone had extensive experience with the neorealist tradition (he was amongst other things an assistant director of Bicycle Thieves), he had a different view and argued that life was inherently cinematic and to depict it so functionally sucked the essence out of the moment. Today many of his lesser imitators frequently run their ships aground, dismissed as mere style over substance, but in the case of Sergio Leone and the Dollars Trilogy, the style is the substance.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Once more the never less than fascinating musings of Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling are present in a feature-length commentary, and again dissecting the film in the accompanying featurette A New Standard. Back For More picks up where the extras on A Fistful of Dollars left off, with Clint Eastwood continuing his 2003 interview on his work with Leone.
While there are many other gems here - TV spots, picture galleries, radio spots - most notably a look at the painstaking restoration of the original print, there is actually less here than on the DVD special edition, which is nothing if not a huge disappointment.
"For a Few Dollars More" is on sale August 23, 2011 and is rated R. Action, Crime, Western. Directed by Sergio Leone. Written by Luciano Vincenzoni & Sergio Leone. Starring Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volonte, Lee Van Cleef, Klaus Kinski.
