Clint Eastwood doesn’t say much in A handful of dollars. But he doesn’t have to. The Man with No Name is more force of nature than man, a drifter you really don’t want to mess with. This is the film that made Eastwood a star, and it’s the first in a trilogy that many believe to be the greatest Westerns ever made.
Essentially it’s an unapproved remake of Akira Kurosawa’s YojimboFew viewers would have known that. For American audiences, this was not only the arrival of a charismatic movie star, but also of a stylish new kind of film: dark, nihilistic and utterly thrilling. It also features one of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time. Not bad for a film with a budget of just $200,000.
Is A Fistful of Dollars still relevant?
Absolutely. Sure, it’s dated – and parodied a million times. But its 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating is well-deserved, and makes it one of the best Netflix movies you can stream. “It’s the punk rock of westerns,” The guard says. “The Man Without a Name and the Brutal Dollar films were a colossal rejection of the boring Rawhide-style westerns that dominated television.”
The word “brutal” keeps coming up in reviews of the film: it’s a violent and bloody experience, especially toward the end. Writing in SlantedChuck Bowen says: “If Sergio Leone’s A handful of dollars Audiences in the 1960s were captivated by a brash, essential change from the hypocrisy of the Westerns of the era. It’s still a breath of fresh air, but for ironically inverse reasons… it feels as if it hasn’t aged a day since its first release in 1964.” And as Time put it in a review that is not available online: “Every now and then a Western comes along that breaks new ground and becomes a classic of the genre.”
You can’t talk about Sergio Leone’s films without talking about their soundtracks. Ennio Morricone may have later turned down it as “my worst score ever” for “the worst film Leone made,” but it’s a wild and bravura film, almost a character in itself, and it makes this film a must-listen and a must-see.