A Fistful of Dollars

Dollars is the first film in Sergio Leone's famous spaghetti western trilogy, and also the shortest. It begins with a stylized, rotoscoped opening credits sequence, which the third film imitated. As with nearly every western I've seen now, the opening and closing scenes are pretty darn cool, but the stuff in the middle drags. Thankfully it doesn't last too long. The whole story is more or less a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, a samurai film which itself borrowed from the same stories by Dashiell Hammett that led to the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing. So it's the familiar tale of a loner playing two factions against each other to his own benefit, and even rips ideas from Yojimbo wholesale like the hardened killer being unsure of how many coffins the undertaker should make as a result of his introductory exploits.

As a beginning to Leone's work in the genre, it's a nice debut. The fact that he actually lost a lawsuit with Kurosawa that claimed it was a rip-off makes it hard to credit the originality, but it did a nice job of turning it into a natural feeling western. The man with no name character is an intriguing one, because he's not really on the law's side in any real sense, but he still has enough good in him to take it upon himself to rescue an innocent family at the cost of his own capture. He's a nice mix of clever, human, and plain old bad ass that he's fun to watch no matter what he's doing. Gian Maria Volontè is a pretty capable villain, angry but still intelligent, and returns in the next movie as a different character. For being a cheap Italian production, it's a watchable enough representation of something very American.