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A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

★★★★ — A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Shot on a shoestring budget of around $200,000 across locations in Spain (doubling convincingly for the American Southwest), A Fistful of Dollars was Sergio Leone's second feature as director and the film that effectively launched the Spaghetti Western as a bankable genre. Leone lifted the premise wholesale from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), to the point where Kurosawa later sued and won a share of the profits. Clint Eastwood, at the time best known as a television cowboy on Rawhide, took the role after several American actors passed, and the laconic, poncho-wearing stranger he plays here became one of cinema's most imitated screen personas. The film was made as a co-production between Italian, German, and Spanish companies, partly to pool resources and skirt industry restrictions, a common arrangement in European genre filmmaking of the period. It returned roughly $14.5 million at the box office, a commercial result that greenlit two sequels and reshaped how Westerns were made on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yojimbo but in the Wild West The score, as always with Ennio Morricone, is absolutely fantastic. The movie is clearly so heavily inspired by Yojimbo that I should probably just refer you to my review of that instead lol. The story is of two warring families with a gun for hire caught in the middle, playing them off either side. I feel like my review is somewhat lacking... check out the Yojimbo one lol

Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 1964 | Watched: 2025-04-13

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