Year of Eastwood #13

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Starring: Eastwood
Directed by Sergio Leone

Clint starred as the Man with No Name in a trio of Spaghetti Westerns for director Sergio Leone. Fistful of Dollars was the first of the trilogy but there isn’t much of a connection between the films. Clint wears a poncho and squints a lot but since his character doesn’t even have a name, it’s hard to really create much of a character development.

Actually, there’s some debate on Man with No Name topic. In the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Wallach refers to Clint as Blondie, but that seems more like a nickname. And in Fistful, there is a guy that calls him Joe a couple of times, but there really isn’t any basis to think anyone in town checked Clint's ID.

Just like how many of these films start out, Clint wanders into a mysterious town and quickly learns the townsfolk ain’t too friendly to strangers. Some thugs insult Clint’s mule and after they refuse to apologize, Clint’s shoots them. Clint had no idea that shooting a bunch of guys would get him into so much trouble. The men he killed were part of a ruthless family that runs the town of San Miguel. Clint is immediately a hero to the other ruthless family that runs the town. (The town seems pretty small so I’m not sure how it exactly can support two ruthless families, but I’m sure they put their differences aside every year during the holidays.)

Clint soon realizes that neither family is worth spit, so he begins his scheme to pit the families against one another so he can take his rightful spot as the main man in town. Actually, that wasn’t his plan. How about Clint realizes if he can destroy both families he can make off with the booty of gold. No, I guess that’s not really the plan either. To be honest, I was pretty confused with most of what was going on in this movie. There was some lady who was with some guy but she was being forced to be with some other guy, but I couldn’t really tell the two guys apart, so it was hard to know who to root for. There was some scenes with a couple of dead guys in a cemetery but Clint kept telling everyone that they were alive - and then some guy shot them again. It was even difficult to tell whether it was night or day in some of the scenes.

In the end both families were dead, some guy rang the church bell, and Clint rode off in the sunset.

Leone considered several actors for the role of the Man formerly known as No Name. Among the actors who turned down the role - Henry Fonda, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson. After Richard Harrison declined, he suggested that Leone check out Clint, the rising star of the TV Western Rawhide. After being turned down by pretty much every star in Hollywood, Leone offered the role to Clint and the rest - as they say - is history.

Initially the film was called The Magnificent Stranger, the title wasn't changed to A Fistful of Dollars until just days before the movie premiered in theaters. In fact, nobody had bothered to inform Clint of the name change, and as a result Eastwood wasn’t even aware of the positive buzz surrounding the movie until an agent pointed it out to him in Variety three weeks later. A few years later, the producers of Rawhide tried to cash in on Clint’s popularity by releasing a compilation of a couple of Rawhide episodes as a theatrical release, naming it The Magnificent Stranger … real original guys.

Fistful of Dollars is raw, gritty, and definitely violent. The film was produced on a much lower budget than Good, Bad, and Ugly - but the film also lacks in other areas, mainly the infusion of comedy into the storyline. Fistful doesn’t really stand as one of Clint’s most entertaining films, but holds a special mention as the film that helped Clint transform into a superstar for the next decades to follow.