For a Few Dollars More

The second film in the trilogy is a nice intermediary in terms of length, epicness, and major supporting cast. Gian Maria Volontè returns as a villain once more, Lee Van Cleef is an ally of the nameless man before he'd be a foe in the sequel, and Clint Eastwood is yet again the hardened man with no name. Interestingly, the protagonist here is supposedly not the same person as the one in the previous movie, or at least that's what Sergio Leone claimed and convinced the courts after he had a falling out with that movie's producer and he sued for whatever rights were involved with the character. It doesn't really need to be though, as the character is more of a western archetype than a fully developed person. As usual, the people around him have more involved backgrounds and character development, while he's just there being a bad ass.

The story's about how Eastwood and Cleef, as maybe an older and wiser version of the same character, run into each other as they both pursue the bounty on Volontè and his gang's heads and decide to split the ransom and work together. The friendship isn't exactly a fast one, and they spend almost as much time at odds with each other as they do with the real bad guys. Eastwood spends some time infiltrating the gang and yet again getting caught and having his ass kicked, but eventually they get their shot when the villain, high on drugs and still hung up on events earlier in his life, makes a lot of strange, bad decisions. His eventual downfall is as much his fault as anyone else's. I hope it's not a spoiler that he dies, but if it is... well come on, dude. As is standard with Leone's films, the introductions of the characters and clever final showdown are the best parts, although the middle here might actually be the most enjoyable of the three movies. It doesn't reach the awesome heights of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly's best moments, but it's a solid movie all the way through.

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.