Clint Eastwood doesn't say much in A handful of dollarsBut there's no need. The Man With No Name is more a force of nature than a human being, a vagabond not to be messed with. This is the film that made Eastwood a star and is the first part of a trilogy that many say includes the best Westerns ever made.
In essence, it is an unapproved remake of Akira Kurosawa. YojimboBut few of its viewers would have known it. For American audiences, this was the arrival not just of a charismatic movie star, but of a stylish new kind of film: dark, nihilistic and utterly thrilling. It also boasts one of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time. Not bad for a film with a budget of just $200,000.
Is “A Fistful of Dollars” still relevant today?
Of course. Sure, it's dated and has been parodied a million times. But its 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes is well-deserved and makes it one of the best Netflix movies you can stream. “It's the punk rock of westerns,” says The Guardian. “The Man with No Name and the brutal Dollars The films were a colossal reproach to the most insipid. Rawhide“western-style films that had come to dominate television.”
The word “brutal” appears again and again in reviews of the film: it is a violent and bloody experience, especially towards the end. In Slant, Chuck Bowen says: “If Sergio Leone's film A handful of dollars It struck audiences in the 1960s as a bold, vital respite from the sanctimoniousness of the era's Westerns, and continues to serve as a breath of fresh air today for ironically inverted reasons… [it] “It seems like it hasn't aged a day since its initial release in 1964.” And as Time said in a review not available online: “Every now and then a Western comes along that breaks new ground and becomes a classic of the genre.”
You can't talk about Sergio Leone's films without also talking about his soundtrack. Ennio Morricone may have later dismissed it as “my worst soundtrack” for “the worst film Leone ever made”, but it's a wild and arrogant film, almost a character in its own right, and it makes this a film that must be heard and seen.
