A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

I don't think it's nice, you laughing. You see, my mule don't like people laughing. Gets the crazy idea you're laughing at him. Now if you apologize like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it...

Obviously a very important film—as the first "real spaghetti Western (previous Italian/European westerns had been much closer to cheap imitations of American Westerns whereas this was genuinely different)---A Fistful of Dollars is also very good, if slightly less polished than the later Sergio Leone films. In brief, Clint Eastwood plays an (almost) nameless stranger who arrives in a town, appraises the situation, and then plays the two gangs that control the town against each other. Along the way he has to fight Ramón Rojo (Gian Maria Volonté), the cunning leader of one of the clans who believes that "when a man with a .45 meets a man with a rifle, the man with a pistol will be a dead man"; and rescue Marisol (Marianne Koch), a local woman who's been captured by Ramón.

Many of the key elements of Spaghetti Western are in place here: the cynicism (especially about money), the violence, the whistled theme tune (probably the definitive example, excluding The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), the American-Mexican border settings, the showdown, and so forth. The one strand that later Spaghetti Westerns expounded on that's not present here was the elaborate gunfighting gadgetry (really introduced in the sequel, For A Few Dollars More). The one element here that few other Spaghetti Westerns—except possibly The Great Silence!---did so well was the laconic stranger. Rumour has it that this was largely Clint's invention rather that the script's.

There's probably a few minor criticisms worth making: there's a small section of it in the latter third—probably from the shoot-out in the graveyard to the final gunfight—where it feels slightly like a series of slightly unconnected incidents (this is only a slight criticism though). Marisol's involvement is also slightly underdeveloped—I think it's right that the stranger's motivation for helping her is left vague, but she feels a bit out of kilter with the rest of the film, and only seems to play a role occasionally. The other complaint is that it's heavily stolen from Yojimbo, although it's been long enough since I've seen Yojimbo that I couldn't really comment, and it doesn't really detract from the quality of this film.

A Fistful of Dollars (and the rest of the Dollars trilogy) are pretty well served on DVD and Blu-Ray—although there are some complaints about the image quality. I've got the DVD. A few screenshots with follow at a slightly later date.