FISTFUL OF DOLLARS - worth every penny!

Fistful of Dollars is a bit like the very first Friday the 13th was back in the eighties. Friday the 13th was not the first flick of the slasher genre, but it was the first slasher flick to really break through to mainstream audiences and make a splash. Same thing with Fistful of Dollars - while 1961's The Savage Guns beat it to the theaters by a handful of years, a Fistful of Dollars was the first Spaghetti Western to not only make a huge splash, but was so well done and so influential that it set the gold standard for all other Spaghetti Westerns to come.

Since I suspect that most people are at least passingly familiar with the movie, I'll dispense with my usual long winded recap and quickly sum up: Clint Eastwood plays the iconic badass western character The Man With No Name*. He rides into the sleepy Mexican town of San Miguel, where women are objects to be victimized, men are either brutal savages or dead - or sometimes both - and life is cheap. Sometimes the murder is for pleasure, sometimes simply business, and sometimes the killings are just random where the innocent are just as likely to die as the unjust.

* actually he does have a name: Joe, but it's never used onscreen and the whole "Man with No Name" has been seized upon by the marketing people for so long, that the fiction has become truth.

Settling into a local cantina, Joe learns of the two rival gangs who run the town - the Rojos, consisting of Don Miguel, Esteban and Ramon and The Baxters, under the protection of town sheriff John Baxter. Joe sees an opportunity to play both families against each other - and make himself a tidy profit in the process. And so he proves himself worthy of being accepted into the Rojos, and begins killing and betraying his way up through the ranks - until the Baxters and the Rojos figure out that something isn't quite right with this new stranger in town. . . .

Right from the get-go, Leone strives to put his mark on the genre. You can tell his style, with lots of low angles, the agonizingly slow buildups to a flurry of lightning-fast action, long silent stretches without dialogue (in fact, the trilogy could play out more as a silent film that a talkie), and the music. Oh, the music! Ennio Morricone (credited under the anglicized pseudonym of Dan Savio), plays just as important part to the film as John Williams did to Star Wars - I can't imagine a Spaghetti Western without the Morricone style. Of the three films, Fistful of Dollars is probably the weakest - musically speaking, that is. Not that the soundtrack bad or anything, just that it's the least polished of the three. In Fistful, you see the clearly see the groundwork for the musical themes and concepts yet to come.

Actually, if there was a criticism to be leveled against the film, this would be it: it's very rough. The story, pretty much adapted note for note from Yojimbo, doesn't flow quite as well as the Kurosawa film does. The editing is more ragged than the other two - moments cut short or just more abrupt than they should be, giving it an odd pace. The English dubbing ranges from adequate (Eastwood, who did his own dubbing) to pretty bad (some of the local talent used - oi vay!). Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that these flaws makes Fistful of Dollars a bad film or anything. Just that it's not as elegant or refined as the other two of the trilogy. It's still a damn good flick in its own right.

I should expand on that point. When you watch Big and Important landmark films - the Citizen Kanes of the world - it's easy to say that yes, they are indeed very good, and I'm proud to have them on my DVD shelf. But how much *fun* are they? Okay, Schindler's List is supposed to be emotional and moving and thoughtful, but it's not a very entertaining flick, one that you grab for pleasure. Fistful of Dollars, on the other hand, enjoys the distinction of being an important, landmark film AND is thoroughly enjoyable.

THE DVD -
There are a couple of versions of Fistful of Dollars floating around. The older one (from 1999, I believe) is solid enough and served me for many years, but the recent edition looks stunning. We get the film is presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio with anamorphic enhancement. The negative has been extensively restored and there is little print damage present, looking clean and crisp. The colors are full and vivid - it looks great.

On the audio front, the original mono soundtracks have been remixed into a 5.1 surround track and a DTS track, and have also undergone extensive restoration, since the original track had become damaged over the years and considerable work was needed to make it presentable. The end result is that the new soundtrack sounds good and the surround sound has been gets a workout from all speakers. Even better, the original mono soundrack has also been included, maintaining that signature Leone sound

THE EXTRAS -
For starters, we get a commentary from film historian Christopher Frayling - while I usually don't dig on commentators who aren't tied to the original production, this guy really knows his stuff.

The second disc is divided up into a couple of areas. The first contains the documentaries and interviews with Christopher Frayling, Eastwood talking about his collaboration with Leone, a retrospective on Leone presented by three of his friends, Alberto Grimaldi (producer to Leone, Scorsese and Fellini amongst others), Sergio Donati (writer of many of Leone's westerns) and Mickey Knox (dubbing director of Leone's westerns and actor). Then we get a short feature on the restoration of the three movies (and a bit on Duck You Sucker) and a short Now and Then piece comparing the original shooting locations against what they look like today.

Section two is the promotional stuff - the original trailers, 10 original radio spots, a stills gallery and a broadcast television prologue. When Fistful of Dollars made its television premiere back in 1977, the networks had a problem with the violence and moral indifference of the "hero" and the movie needed to be softened. Instead of just editing out sections, director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop) was asked to shoot a prologue in which Harry Dean Stanton gives Joe the option of serving out his prison time or go to a town run by two gangs of thugs. Thing is, it's very obviously not Eastwood, the poncho is all wrong and the stand-in - we never see his face - is the wrong build. What makes this prologue a special treat is that it was never rebroadcast and was thought to be lost forever, until it was discovered tucked away on an ancient betamax tape of a Leone fan and collector. The quality isn't the best, but considering it was accidentally recovered, the fact that we have anything is astounding.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
When you get right down to it, what can I tell you about Sergio Leone's masterpiece that you probably don't already know? It's fun, iconic, a well crafted movie that launched Clint Eastwood. The special edition two disc package would be well worth picking up, even if the movie wasn't all that good. Really, I can't see how you could go wrong buying this.