The Planet According to the Movies by Marc Fennell

Author:Marc Fennell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

For a Few Dollars More (Per Qualche Dollaro in Più) (1965)

Director: Sergio Leone

Double the heroes, double the action. I’m guessing Leone thought doing all that would also double the audience.

As I’ve mentioned, in Leone’s western world, women (and let’s assume gays too) basically didn’t exist, so when it came to building an onscreen relationship for TMWNN his choices were either to have Clint Eastwood sodomise a horse or give him an untrustworthy partner. Somewhat disappointingly, he opted for the latter.

But we don’t get Tonto. Instead Clint acquires an aged, black-clad bounty hunter played by Lee Van Cleef, famous for being a Hollywood bit player in the fifties. It was a well-trodden road for westerns at the time to cast stars of different eras who would hopefully attract a bigger cross-section of audience. As spaghetti and paella westerns took off, directors and producers also often cast a variety of ethnicities so they could get publicity in several countries.

Back to the plot. Our two bounty hunters converge on the town of El Paso. The filthy streets are lined with prostitutes, the authority figures are corrupt fools and gangs terrorise the population. The hunters strike a deal where they vow to bring a child-killing, bank-robbing, weed-mad terrorist gang to justice — dead or alive — but really hoping for dead.

A Few Dollars More is a far tighter movie than its predecessor but the story plays out very slowly, revealing little, only hinting at the reasons why the characters do what they do. Leone keeps his powder very dry until the closing moments when it explodes into brutality, both real and implied. The film presents a cruel world; John Wayne would have been shot in the groin before he managed to say ‘Pilgrim’. The gunfights last forever, the suspense builds extremely well. Westerns have rarely been harder, more fun and better directed than this one.

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