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'''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 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 was inspired by 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 this was the first film of the Spaghetti Western genre to be released in the United States, many of the European cast and crew took on American stage names. This included Sergio Leone himself, who was credited as "Bob Robertson".
''Fistful of Dollars'' and its two sequels were shot in the Spanish province Almería.

Contents

Plot

Cast

Production

Characters

Themes

Music

Sources

In popular culture

External links

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 Baxter family, of which John Baxter is sheriff of the town.
Morally ambiguous, the Stranger quickly spies an opportunity to make a "fistful of dollars" and decides to play both families against each other, performing tasks for both while at the same time subversively inciting them to fight. 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 Rojos brothers set the Baxter stronghold afire, thinking that they are harboring the stranger, and kill the entire household, including John Baxter, his wife, and his son. 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.

Cast

Actor	Role
Clint Eastwood	Joe
Marianne Koch	Marisol
Gian Maria Volontè	Ramón Rojo (as John Wells)
Wolfgang Lukschy	John Baxter (as W. Lukschy)
Sieghardt Rupp	Esteban Rojo (as S. Rupp)
Joseph Egger	Piripero (as Joe Edger)
Antonio Prieto	Don Miguel Rojo
José Calvo	Silvanito (as Jose Calvo)
Margarita Lozano	Consuelo Baxter (as Margherita Lozano)
Daniel Martín	Julián
Benito Stefanelli	Rubio (as Benny Reeves)
Mario Brega	Chico (as Richard Stuyvesant)
Bruno Carotenuto	Antonio Baxter (as Carol Brown)
Aldo Sambrell	Rojo gang member (as Aldo Sambreli)

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.
''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 our attention on a single person and that countenance becomes both the landscape and dialogue of the scene. This is quite different to the Hollywood use of faces where the close-up was treated 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.

Characters

Themes

Music

The film's music was written by Ennio Morricone.

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).
Kurosawa remained insistent that he receive compensation. He wrote Leone: "It is a very fine film, but it is my film."[1] The producers of ''Yojimbo'' successfully sued the production of ''A Fistful of Dollars'' for copyright infringement and gained an apology, $100,000 dollars and 15% of the box office totals in Asia to the movie in compensation, earning him more than he ever made from all of his own films combined. Kurosawa later admitted he quite liked ''A Fistful of Dollars'' and considered it a worthy remake.
British critic Sir Christopher Frayling identifies three principle 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''..." (The BFI Companion to the Western, 1988)
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 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." (''Spaghetti Westerns'', Frayling, 1981)
Leone also referenced numerous American Westerns in the film, most notably ''Shane'' (1953) and ''My Darling Clementine'' (1946).

In popular culture

''A Fistful of Dollars'', although not the first 'spaghetti western', it 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'', a short scene is seen where Eastwood's character survives the final gunfight which foreshadows the scene in ''Back to the Future Part III'' where Marty duplicates the scene (in the same costume, and after having told locals his name was 'Clint Eastwood').

★ '': 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 '', after a number of saves the character Para-Medic talks to Naked Snake about the movie, as the game is set in 1964.

★ The band The Mars Volta uses themes from ''A Fistful of Dollars'' at their live shows.

★ 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'', 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 ''contains within it a short film spoofing Enter the Dragon which is titled "A Fistful of Yen".

★ An episode of ''The Paul Hogan Show'' features a parody sketch called "A Fistful of Ravioli."

★ 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, one of the band members walks down a street of a small town similar to the town in the movie, wearing the attire of the Man with No Name.

External links

★ Title theme on ''YouTube''

★

★ ''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'