For a Few Dollars More

For a Few Dollars More Western Legends DVD

In the second film in Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western trilogy A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS being the first and THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY the last the Man with No Name Clint Eastwood teams up with gunslinger Colonel Mortimer Lee Van Cleef in order to extract reward money from Indio Gian Maria Volonte a mean and vicious bandit. There is little doubt as to No Name's financial intentions in the hunt but Mortimer seems to be driven by something a bit deeper. A series of flashbacks which would become a Leone signature device provides the background for Colonel Mortimer's anger and desire for revenge. Morricone's score combined with Leone's trademark long and lingering shots bring the viewer ever closer to the human side of the Man with No Name. Although the film was not released in the United States until 1967 it was produced and released internationally in 1965.

For a Few Dollars More [VHS]

A ringing instance of a sequel far outstripping its predecessor, Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More takes the lethal antihero from A Fistful of Dollars, gives him both a rival and an adversary worthy of sharing a gun-blazing corrida, and ratchets up the stylization to something approaching grandeur. This time the Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) is a bounty hunter whose desert Southwest killing ground is suddenly crowded by the presence of an older, black-clad shootist (Lee Van Cleef). Individually and together, they terminate sundry grotesques while closing in on their biggest quarry, a memorably insane bandit called El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté is brilliant). There's just enough plot to imbue Van Cleef with genuine mystery, a dark avenging angel from a lost past whose pull would supply the emotional core of Leone's later masterworks Once upon a Time in the West and Once upon a Time in America. Leone's bravura widescreen compositions are breathtaking, and Ennio Morricone's music score--tinged with lunatic religiosity--is his first great one. --Richard T. Jameson