A Fistful of Dollars
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| A Fistful of Dollars | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | Sergio Leone |
| Produced by | Arrigo Colombo Giorgio Papi |
| Written by | A. Bonzzoni Victor Andrés Catena Sergio Leone Jaime Comas Gil |
| Starring | Clint Eastwood Marianne Koch Gian Maria Volontè José Calvo Joseph Egger Antonio Prieto Mario Brega Wolfgang Lukschy Sieghardt Rupp Benny Reeves Peter Fernandez |
| Music by | Ennio Morricone |
| Distributed by |  United ArtistsUnidis |
| Release date(s) |  October 16, 1964 January 18, 1967 |
| Running time | 100 min. |
| Language | English Italian Spanish |
| Budget | $200,000 (est.) |
| Followed by | For a Few Dollars More |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari in Italy and officially on-screen in the U.S. and UK as simply Fistful of Dollars) is a 1964 western film directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood. Released in the United States in 1967, it initiated the popularity of the Spaghetti Western film genre. It was followed by For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), also starring Eastwood. Collectively, the films are commonly known as "The Dollar(s) Trilogy". This film is an unofficial remake of the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo (1961). In the United States, the United Artists publicity campaign referred to Eastwood's character in all three films as the "Man With No Name".
As one of the first Spaghetti Westerns to be released in the United States, many of the European cast and crew took on American stage names. These included Leone himself ("Bob Robertson"), Gian Maria Volontè ("Johnny Wels"), and composer Ennio Morricone ("Dan Savio").
A Fistful of Dollars and its two sequels were shot in the Spanish province Almería.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
A new type of hero to Hollywood cinema, a Man With No Name (Eastwood), arrives at a little Mexican border town named San Miguel. He is quickly introduced to the feud between two mafioso style families bitterly laying claim to the town: the Rojos brothers, consisting of Don Miguel (the eldest and nominally in charge), Esteban (the most head-strong) and Ramón (the most capable and intelligent, played by Gian Maria Volontè, who would go on to reappear in For a Few Dollars More as the psychopathic El Indio), and the family of town sherrif John Baxter.
The Stranger quickly spies an opportunity to make a "fistful of dollars" and decides to play both families against each other. Eventually he ends up rescuing Ramón's prisoner and mistress, Marisol (Marianne Koch) and reunites her with her own family. Together again, she and her family are told to flee the town by the stranger.
The Rojos capture and torture the stranger after this betrayal, but the stranger soon escapes. The Man With No Name escapes with the help of the coffin maker Piripero (Joseph Egger, who would also reappear in the sequel) and returns to town to engage the Rojos and their cronies in a dramatic duel. In doing so he rescues the local innkeeper and his friend, Silvanito. The Man With No Name kills the Rojos, including Ramón, and rides away before the governments of America and Mexico arrive at San Miguel.
[edit] Cast
- Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name
- Marianne Koch as Marisol
- Gian Maria Volontè as Ramón Rojo (as Johnny Wels)
- Wolfgang Lukschy as John Baxter (as W. Lukschy)
- Sieghardt Rupp as Esteban Rojo (as S. Rupp)
- Joseph Egger as Piripero (as Joe Edger)
- Antonio Prieto as Don Miguel Rojo
- José Calvo as Silvanito (as Jose Calvo)
- Margarita Lozano as Consuelo Baxter (as Margherita Lozano)
- Daniel Martín as Julián
- Benito Stefanelli as Rubio (as Benny Reeves)
- Mario Brega as Chico (as Richard Stuyvesant)
- Bruno Carotenuto as Antonio Baxter (as Carol Brown)
- Aldo Sambrell as Rojo gang member (as Aldo Sambreli)
[edit] Production
A Fistful of Dollars was at first intended by Leone to reinvent the western genre in Italy. In his opinion the American westerns of the mid to late nineteen-fifties had become stagnant, overly-preachy and unbelievable and because of this Hollywood began to gear down on the production of such films. Leone knew that there was still a significant market in Europe for westerns yet also realised that Italian audiences of the time were beginning to laugh at the stock conventions of both the American westerns and pastiche work of Italian directors hiding under pseudonyms. His approach was to take the grammar of the Italian film and transpose it into a western setting. Clint Eastwood was not the first actor who was approached to play the main character. Originally, Sergio Leone intended Henry Fonda to play the role of the "Man With No Name".[1] However, the production company could not afford to engage a major Hollywood star. Hereupon, Leone offered Charles Bronson the part who, in turn, declined the role arguing the script was too bad. Both Fonda and Bronson would later star in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Other actors who turned the role down were Ty Hardin [2] and James Coburn.[3] Leone then turned his attentions towards Richard Harrison, who had recently starred in the very first Italian western, Gunfight at Red Sands (Duello nel Texas). Harrison, however, had not been impressed with his experience on his previous film, and refused. The producers later established a list of available, lesser-known American actors, and asked Harrison for advice. Harrison suggested Clint Eastwood, whom he knew could play a cowboy convincingly. Harrison later stated:
"Maybe my greatest contribution to cinema was not doing Fistful of Dollars, and recommending Clint for the part".[4]
A Fistful of Dollars became the first film to exhibit Leone's famously distinctive style of visual direction. This was influenced by both John Ford's cinematic landscaping and the Japanese method of distension, perfected by Akira Kurosawa. Leone wanted an operatic feel to his western and so there are many examples of extreme close-ups on the faces of different characters that function like the arias in a traditional opera. They focus the attention on a single person and that countenance becomes both the landscape and dialogue of the scene. This is quite different from the Hollywood use of faces where the close-up was treated as a reaction shot, usually to a piece of dialogue that had just been spoken. Leone's close-ups are more akin to portraits, often lit with Renaissance type lighting effects and are pieces of design in their own right.
[edit] Music
The film's music was written by Ennio Morricone, credited as Dan Savio. Morricone recalled Leone requesting him to write "Dimitri Tiomkin music" for the film. The trumpet theme is similar to Tiomkin's "DeGuella" theme from Rio Bravo (1959) (that was called Un Dollaro D'onore in Italy) whilst the opening title whistling music recalls Tiomkin's use of whistling in his Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). Though not used in the completed film, Peter Tevis recorded lyrics to Morricone's theme for the film. As a movie tie-in to the American release, United Artists Records released a different set of lyrics to Morricone's theme called Lonesome One by Little Anthony and the Imperials.
[edit] Sources
Although the film was advertised in trailers as "the first film of its kind", the plot and to an extent the cinematography was based almost entirely on Akira Kurosawa's film Yojimbo (written by Kurosawa and Ryuzo Kikushima), and was the subject of a successful lawsuit by Yojimbo's producers. Kurosawa remained insistent that he receive compensation. He wrote Leone: "It is a very fine film, but it is my film."[5]
British critic Sir Christopher Frayling identifies three principal sources:
"Partly derived from Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo, partly from Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest (1929), but most of all from Carlo Goldoni's eighteenth-century play Servant of Two Masters..." [6]
Sergio Leone has cited these alternate sources in his defence. He claims a thematic debt, for both Fistful and Yojimbo, to Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters - the basic premise of the protagonist playing two camps off against each other. For Leone, this rooted the origination of Fistful/Yojimbo in European, and specifically Italian culture. Obviously, it can be claimed that Leone has a vested interest in doing this - distancing the accusations of his stealing Kurosawa's ideas, if those ideas were already borrowed from an Italian classic.
The Servant of Two Masters plot can also be seen in Dashiell Hammett's 1929 detective novel Red Harvest. The Continental Op hero of the novel is, significantly, a man without a name. Leone himself believed that Red Harvest, in turn, had influenced Yojimbo:
"Kurosawa's Yojimbo was inspired by an American novel of the serie-noire so I was really taking the story back home again." [7]
Leone also referenced numerous American Westerns in the film, most notably Shane (1953) and My Darling Clementine (1946).
[edit] In popular culture
A Fistful of Dollars, although not the first 'spaghetti western', was indeed the first to be distinctively Italian and as such was immensely influential and is referenced heavily elsewhere in popular culture:
- Back to the Future trilogy: in Back to the Future Part II (1989), a short scene where the millionaire Biff Tannen in his hotel casino jacuzzi is seen watching Eastwood's character survive the final gunfight with the armour plating. This foreshadows the scene in Back to the Future Part III (1990) where Marty McFly duplicates the scene (in the same costume, and after having told locals his name was "Clint Eastwood").
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: in the episode "A Fistful of Datas", Worf and Troi are trapped in a holodeck western until they play it out to the end of the story. Meanwhile, each of the characters was replaced by a likeness of Data. There is an homage to the iron plate when Worf rigs a makeshift deflector shield.
- The title of the movie was parodied by the Futurama episode "A Fishful of Dollars", and The Comic Strip Presents: A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques.
- In one of the Halloween episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander Harris wore a costume similar to, and based on, the attire that Clint Eastwood's "man with no name" wore in the spaghetti westerns in which he starred.
- In the video-game Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, after a number of saves the character Para-Medic talks to Naked Snake about the movie, as the game is set in 1964.
- The movie Last Man Standing (1996) starring Bruce Willis is a version of both Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars.
- The American version of the videogame Ape Escape 3 features a stage set in a Wild West town, and the movie the monkeys are filming there is called A Fistful Of Bananas.
- In the second part of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003), the theme music of the film is used after Budd shoots the Bride with two rounds of rock-salt and disarms her, shortly after this he insults and then drugs her unconscious.
- Towards the end of a story in Animaniacs where Chicken Boo masquerades as "the man with no personality", one of the characters produces "a fistful of feathers", followed immediately by another character producing "a few feathers more".
- In the edited English-language edition of the original Dragon Ball anime series, when Bulma and Goku were attempting to catch Oolong the shape shifting pig, who had taken the form of a fish and jumped into a river, Goku took advantage of the greedy pig's nature and baited a fishing pool with money. Oolong immediately took the bait. When Goku reeled him in, Oolong had the money in his mouth and Goku exclaimed (in the English translation) "Look!! A fish full of dollars!".
- The sketch comedy film Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) contains within it a short film spoofing Enter the Dragon (1973) which is titled "A Fistful of Yen".
- An episode of The Paul Hogan Show features a parody sketch called "A Fistful of Ravioli." In the sketch, Hogan plays an actor named 'Clunk Eastwood', who in turn plays the lead character of the film, Dirty Giuseppe.
- Stephen King has credited the trilogy with inspiring the atmosphere of his novel The Gunslinger.
- In the music video for the Velvet Revolver song She Builds Quick Machines, Scott Weiland, the singer, walks down a street of a small town similar to the town in the movie, wearing the attire of the Man with No Name.
- Alternative rock band, Fist Full of Yen is a spoof on the movie's title.
- A quest called 'A fistful of slivers' can be found in the Burning Crusade expansion of World of Warcraft.
- Since 2005, The Mars Volta has used the Fistful of Dollars theme song as their opening introduction to which the band walks out on stage.
- An upcoming episode of the Cartoon Network show Transformers Animated is titled A Fistful of Energon.
[edit] References
- ^ Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (Tauris, 1998).
- ^ http://www.tahoebonanza.com/article/20040618/News/106180001/-1/NEWS
- ^ http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/03/28/fistful_of_dollars.html
- ^ Richard Harrison interview
- ^ Galbraith IV, Stuart (2001). The Emperor and the Wolf. New York: Faber and Faber. Retrieved on 2008-02-29.
- ^ The BFI Companion to the Western, 1988.
- ^ Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, 1981.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Title theme on YouTube
- A Fistful of Dollars at the Internet Movie Database
- A Fistful of Dollars at the Spaghetti Western Database
- Fistful-of-Leone.com
- Sergio Leone Web Board
- Clint Eastwood.net
- Clint Eastwood Forums
- A Comparison of Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing
|
|||||
|
||||||||
