Reel Hub: Sergio Rides into Town

Shot in Spain against the landscape of Cervantes, A Fistful of Dollars overflows with that same quixotic chivalry. A suit of armor used for target practice lets us know that the age of knights is definitively over, yet we still hope that the Man with no Name (actually, "Joe") will don his armor and fight for a cause other than his own. The critic Robert Warshow explained in his famous essay "The Westerner" that money in Westerns is not as much money as it is a quantification of morality, and it's notable that money plays less and less of a role as the movie progresses. Early on, Joe takes money from both sides, quantifying his moral ambiguity, but the money disappears completely as the conflict becomes rooted in higher chivalry and Joe becomes a sort of knight, if only for just one day. Indeed, it's amazing just how little money seems to matter in a movie called "A Fistful of Dollars."

There are scenes of true intensity in Leone's film. Clint Eastwood may be emotionally detached for much of the movie, preferring to play his own games rather than be caught in the pre-existing ones, but everyone else is gloriously involved. The shoot-outs crackle with blistering action, heightened by the gorgeous pace-setting score of Ennio Morricone, and the villains are a believable type of cruel rather than cartoonish, or abstract as is so often the case with western villains. The characterizations of the villains are part of the film's commitment to realism, one most readily expressed by the turn to more authentic clothing. It's this embrace of realism, that gives the film its sense of newness, and made it so influential.

It may still have been possible to make a more traditional looking westerns after Dollars (see: The Professionals), but the language of the genre was changed, the storytelling range greatly expanded.