For a Few Dollars More (1965)
★★★★ — For a Few Dollars More (1965)
Released in 1965, For a Few Dollars More is the second entry in Sergio Leone's so-called Dollars Trilogy, following on from A Fistful of Dollars and preceding what many regard as the jewel in the trilogy's crown. The premise is straightforward enough on paper: two bounty hunters, rivals by instinct and strangers by circumstance, find themselves circling the same quarry, a vicious and volatile outlaw named El Indio who carries a substantial price on his head. What Leone does with that setup, however, is something rather more ambitious than a simple chase picture. The film runs to a generous 132 minutes and unfolds across the sun-baked landscapes of Spain standing in for the American frontier, a production geography that had already become something of a signature for the European Western boom of the mid-1960s. Co-produced across three countries by PEA, Constantin Film and Arturo González PC, it sits squarely within the tradition of the Spaghetti Western, a genre that had taken Hollywood's own mythologies and filtered them through a distinctly continental sensibility.
Leone was, by this point, a director with a clear and developing vision. Where Once Upon a Time in the West would later represent something like the fullest flowering of his style, For a Few Dollars More already shows him pushing his formal instincts considerably further than the first film had allowed. The long silences, the extreme close-ups on eyes and hands, the almost operatic relationship between image and music: all of it is present here and working in concert. Ennio Morricone returned to compose the score, a collaboration that had already proven its worth and would only grow in reputation over the years. The result is a film where the music is not merely accompaniment but something closer to a structural element, punctuating confrontations and undercutting them in equal measure.
The cast is one of the film's great strengths. Clint Eastwood reprises his laconic, poncho-wearing persona from the first film (a character who famously has no proper name, only the shorthand the marketing invented), but the real shift in For a Few Dollars More is the presence of Lee Van Cleef as the other bounty hunter, Colonel Mortimer. Van Cleef brings a weathered authority to the role, and the push-and-pull between his character and Eastwood's provides the film with a far more layered central dynamic than a straightforward hero-and-villain structure would allow. As the villain El Indio, Gian Maria Volonté (who had also appeared in the first film, in a different role) gives a performance that is unsettling in ways that go beyond mere menace. Elsewhere in the cast, Luigi Pistilli and a notably early appearance from Klaus Kinski round out a company that gives the film a genuine sense of danger at its edges.
El Indio is one of the most iconic Western villains Now, I consider The Good The Bad and The Ugly the greatest film ever made. A few dollars more is similarly an absolutely BRILLIANT film... it's just always in the shadow of TGTBaTU a bit for me. That being said, El Indio is fantastic. He's sinister, haunted, cunning and unforgiving. Of course Ennio Morricone has a score for the ages too.
That shadow cast by The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is one I completely understand, and honestly it might be the unavoidable fate of any middle chapter when the final instalment ends up being what that one is. For me, though, revisiting this film only reinforces how much it deserves to be taken on its own terms. Morricone's score in particular is the kind of work that makes you stop and just listen, which is not something you can say about many Westerns, or many films full stop. If you've already read my thoughts on Once Upon a Time in America or Duck, You Sucker, you'll know I have a lot of time for what Leone was doing across his career. This one sits very comfortably in that company. Sometimes being the second-best film in a trilogy still means being one of the best Westerns ever put to screen.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 1965 | Watched: 2025-04-13
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Sergio Leone: Duck, You Sucker (1971) · Once Upon a Time in America (1984) · A Fistful of Dollars (1964) · Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
More with Clint Eastwood: Million Dollar Baby (2004) · High Plains Drifter (1973) · Hang 'em High (1968) · Unforgiven (1992)
More from Germany: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Cemetery Man (1994) · The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) · Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)
