My name's Christopher Frayling. l wrote the book Spaghetti Westerns,
and then l wrote this large biography of Sergio Leone,
and l'm going to talk you through Fistful of Dollars.
The credit titles for Fistful of Dollars were designed by Luigi Lardani, in Rome,
and signalled this was to be a different kind of Western.
They were half-based on the James Bond credit titles,
with the idea of Rotoscoping, and semi-animation,
and Andy Warhol-type colours.
With a noisy soundtrack. That was the first new thing.
The second was, of course, the title track of the music, by Ennio Morricone.
You have sounds of gunfire, and bells, and whip cracks,
and incomprehensible lyrics.
Fender Stratocaster guitar, which was very fashionable with the Beach Boys,
and the Shadows, and other such bands.
So this isn't a Western with orchestral, Hollywood-type score.
lt's a rock-and-roll score. This is a rock-and-roll Western.
And the emphasis in the Rotoscoping is on the most violent scenes,
or the most action-type scenes in the movie.
The cast is a mixture of American lead,
ltalian actors, Spanish actors, West Germans.
This is an ltalian-Spanish-West German coproduction,
and each wanted a slice of the action with the cast.
Here's a direct James Bond reference.
The iris looking down onto the horseman.
James Bond had been successful in ltaly, and you could say
part of the impetus for this film is to bring Bond together with the Western,
to turn it into a mid-1 960s grown-up kind of Western
that would appeal to the audience for James Bond movies.
Shot in Techniscope, known as the poor man's CinemaScope,
a two-perforation system where you printed two frames for the price of one.
lt was quite difficult to use, and encouraged the use
of either long shots or extreme close-ups,
which, of course, is one of the technical innovations of the ltalian Western.
ln the shooting script, the movie begins with a map of the Rio Grande,
or the Rio Bravo, as Mexicans call it,
with northern Mexico and the southern United States.
And it's 1872, New Mexico. You see the water, you see the mule's feet.
You see the rider go across the water, and his name is Ray.
He's a Confederate sergeant. And you see him steal a poncho
off a hatless Mexican peon who's having a swim in the Rio Grande.
He puts on the poncho, cut, and then the movie begins.
But in the final version, it's much more enigmatic, and more iconic as a costume,
because you don't know why he's wearing it, but he looks at home in Mexico.
This sequence was shot in Almeria, in southern Spain,
at a place called Cortijo el Sotillo, at San Jose, east of Almeria,
and it looks much the same now as it did then. This is an actual place.
Now, in a traditional Western, the hero would look at this child,
and take an interest in what was going on.
Perhaps intervene in some way in what's about to happen.
But Eastwood is simply having a drink, watching,
sussing out what's happening around him, he's not going to intervene.
At this stage, he's just an onlooker, trying to see what's going on.
And the look of Eastwood is so distinctive in Western terms.
The stubble. American Western heroes didn't have stubble.
There's the poncho. There's the sort of laid-back look, the coolness of the hero.
Plus he's a big man on a little mule, which is interesting.
One of the references in the opening is to Shane, a favourite with Leone,
where you have a little man on a big horse, Alan Ladd, at the beginning.
But this is a big man on a mule, and he's dressed in a very stylish way.
This is a Roman actor called Mario Brega playing Chico, a sadistic thug,
kicking the baby, and what's the hero doing?
He's not intervening. He's just watching.
This is a very different kind of Wild West hero.
These villages in Almeria in Spain, with their single-story adobe dwellings,
whitewashed, were used a lot in ltalian Westerns.
They were existing places. Minimal set dressing would enable them to be used
as 1 9th-century villages on the Mexican-American border.
The actress is Marianne Koch, a West German actress
who had just been voted by the West German magazine Filmmaker
the most popular actress for films in Germany.
She agreed to appear in this movie, even though it's almost a nonspeaking part.
Wearing a lot of eye makeup, Cleopatra style. l guess that was the thing in 1 964.
Of course, there weren't trees in this part of Almeria. lt's desert.
According to Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone and his crew
were driving past a hapless farmer's courtyard and saw this tree,
and thought, ''That's the tree we want.''
They got out, said, ''We're from the highway department.''
''Your tree is a danger to traffic.'' Got permission to cut it down,
pinched it, stuck it into the ground, and put it in this opening sequence.
You can't see the roots, they're resting in the ground.
lt was a very low-rent production.
This street is further north, a village called Los Albaricoques, ''the apricots'',
which appeared in a lot of Leone's Westerns.
The main cobbled street, with single-story adobe dwellings.
And the rider goes by with ''Adios, amigo'' written on his back.
ln Yojimbo, by Kurosawa,
the samurai movie on which Fistful of Dollars was directly based,
what happens at this moment is that a dog walks by with a human hand in its mouth.
And the samurai hears this bickering family, which sets up the plot.
lnstead, Clint Eastwood is greeted by the local bell-ringer,
who acts as a kind of chorus, like in a Shakespearian play, or traditional theatre.
The chorus tells him exactly what's going on in the background to the town.
ln Yojimbo, the village in 1 9th-century Japan is divided into two factions:
the silk merchants and the sake merchants.
And the shambling, itchy, bow-legged samurai
with his sword strapped to his waist
walks into town and sells his services, first to one faction then the other.
As we're told by the crazy bell-ringer, this town is run by two factions.
One is gunrunners, and the other runs liquor.
Eastwood rides into the main set of Fistful of Dollars,
which actually was an existing set 35km north of Madrid,
at a place called Hoyo de Manzanares.
The set was built in 1 962 for a series of Spanish Zorro films.
lt resembled a ghost town, wasn't used for a while.
lt was redressed by the designer, Carlo Simi,
who put new frontages on part of the town.
Basically it was a pre-existing set.
They really hadn't got any money to play with.
Lots of references to Easter and resurrection,
and the idea of a town of widows, a town of death.
There's coffins, there's bells, bell-ringers,
there's Eastwood crucified on the cantina sign.
There's a resurrection towards the end.
There's a Last Supper, when the baddies all get together for a meal.
lt's riddled with Catholic iconography,
which wasn't, l think, a deep decision by Leone,
simply that it would be recognisable to a largely southern ltalian audience,
at which this movie was originally pitched.
The bartender, whose name is Silvanito, is played by José Calvo,
a well-known Spanish actor who'd appeared in ltalian Westerns.
Fistful of Dollars was not the first ltalian Western, as people think.
There had been about 25 Spanish and ltalian and West German Westerns
made between 1 962 and 1 964.
But they were copy American Westerns.
Where Fistful of Dollars scored was it was the first distinctively ltalian Western.
The critics compare copyists to ltalianisers, and ltalianisers begin here.
The distinctive features are those of an ltalian movie applied to the West.
And this came through in Fistful of Dollars for the first time.
José Calvo had, in fact, been making movies since the early 1 950s in Spain,
and bore a startling resemblance to Walt Disney's Geppetto in the film Pinocchio,
which endeared him to audiences in the west.
The coffin maker, Piripero, is played by an Austrian actor called Joseph Egger,
who was 75 years old at the time he made this film,
and went on to appear as the old prophet in For A Few Dollars More, his last movie.
He was a music-hall star, a sort of stand-up comedian,
who was very popular with West German audiences.
So Spanish bartender, American stranger, Austrian coffin maker outside.
And the three choruses in this movie,
the three characters who introduce us to the theatre of San Miguel,
this flyblown village just across the Mexican border,
are the bell-ringer, the coffin maker, and the bartender,
which are exact equivalents of the same characters in Kurosawa's film Yojimbo,
where there's a cooper and a coffin maker and a watchman,
who serve a very similar function.
ln Kurosawa, it's the fire tower in the 1 9th-century Japanese village
where the yojimbo sits and watches the mayhem that he causes,
looking down upon the two factions as they fight.
Here, it's the balcony of the saloon,
which was specially designed as a frontage by Carlo Simi, the designer.
Carlo Simi had walked into Sergio Leone's office in Rome, just before filming started,
had looked at the existing designs for the film Fistful of Dollars,
which was called The Magnificent Stranger, its working title,
and thought they looked terrible.
He got the drawings, made them larger than life,
with huge Mexican interiors and beams
and a rather over-the-top form of Wild West, or Wild Southwest, design.
Leone hired him, thinking he had something.
He was a qualified architect,
and his contribution to Sergio Leone's Westerns has been much underrated.
The look of those Leone towns, the way in which the sets are dressed.
Carlo Simi designed the costumes in this film as well,
some of which were ready-mades, some specially designed.
The poncho, for example, was specially designed,
although one member of the crew remembers, perhaps falsely,
that they found it in a flea market in Madrid, on the way to the shoot.
But l doubt that that's true.
ln the shooting script, it wasn't Baxters versus Rojos,
in other words, an Anglo family and a Mexican family,
it was the Morales instead of the Baxters.
ln the original version it was in fact two Mexican clans fighting it out.
But in the transformation of shooting script into final script that they made,
the idea of an Anglo family and a Mexican family gave it a kind of racial edge.
We're in a Hispanic society where there's a racial conflict within the community.
Eastwood worked very cheap indeed for this film.
He worked for $1 5,000 all-in fee, plus a six-week holiday in Spain.
The other actors who were considered for the part,
Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Henry Fonda,
and even some expatriate American actors living in Rome like Rod Cameron,
aged 54, who'd been Buck Jones' stunt man
but was still around making Westerns in ltaly, they all proved too expensive.
Eastwood, who was a refugee from the TV series Rawhide
when he went over for the summer to shoot in Spain and ltaly, came for $1 5,000.
So, Don Miguel, l do work cheap.
This is the first classic Mexican face-off in Leone's Westerns,
where the lone stranger has this sharp, hip dialogue,
and the baddies are much more abusive than they are in American Westerns.
And the tension builds up.
ln a Hollywood movie of the time, this would take ten seconds.
Stranger would stand there, pull his gun, there'd be a fight.
This is heightened into a form of rhetoric.
lt's the first example of Leone taking a classic situation from a Hollywood movie,
pumping it up,
and making it into something a bit more exciting for '60s audiences.
They feel they've seen it before, but never quite like this.
There's gonna be violence, but how much of it?
Five shots, four people fall down.
The ratio is rather greater than in Hollywood Westerns of the time,
where you'd expect a one-on-one duel.
The scene is almost directly from Kurosawa's Yojimbo,
but with a completely different atmosphere.
There's an element of parody, taking hallowed moments of the Western
and turning them into something else, whereas in Yojimbo
the face-offs have a more informal, historical quality.
And the hero in Yojimbo was a well-known hero, Sanjuro,
who'd appeared in other films, so Toshirô Mifune, the character,
brought that with him. Whereas this stranger we know nothing about.
We never learn anything about his background.
He's come from nowhere, he's going nowhere, he goes round shooting people.
''My mistake. Four coffins.'' ln Kurosawa it's three.
There's a bit of inflation. Typical Leone gag.
A rather macabre gag, involving the coffin maker.
The town is deserted.
ln other Westerns which use this set, and there were plenty,
the town is teeming with life, with marketplaces and wagons.
Leone simply couldn't afford, on the budget from his three coproducers,
to have extras.
Basically, it's the principals and that's it, except for a couple of scenes.
Some of the interiors of the film were shot in Rome,
and some of them were shot at a Spanish museum
which was called the Casa de Campo, which is a museum of rural life in Madrid,
where they had lots of ceramic pots and wagons and Hispanic design.
The courtyard and part of the interior
were shot at the Casa de Campo, and the rest was reconstructed in Rome.
They started in Rome, for the interiors, went to the set in Spain,
the second unit went to Almeria, shot the Almerian material,
and then postproduction took place in Rome.
This was a Carlo Simi interior, which would have been shot in Rome.
Mario Brega, playing the rather large Mexican baddie, the sadistic baddie,
had a huge afterlife in ltalian Westerns, where he was typecast in a similar role,
and he ended up in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as Sergeant Wallace,
and spaghetti buffs spot him everywhere.
Ennio Morricone's music was... lf we've got the production design,
the design of the costumes, the personal style of the hero,
and the Almerian locations as features of this new kind of Western,
then the other element is the music,
which we've already heard at full whack behind the credits.
Morricone wasn't, in fact, the first choice of composer.
Leone wanted a man called Lavagnino who had scored The Last Days of Pompeii
and The Colossus of Rhodes, which Leone had worked on.
But eventually he agreed to go and see Morricone in Rome,
discovered he'd been to school with Morricone,
in their primary school together, and they started reminiscing.
They were keen to have a very different kind of score for this.
Much more hip. Rather as James Bond had been, hip.
With the famous main title of James Bond played on an amplified guitar.
And they tried a bit to find a theme, and eventually Morricone recalled
he'd written an arrangement of the Woody Guthrie song ''Pastures of Plenty''
a few years before, with Fender Stratocaster,
with choir, with all these natural sounds and whipcracks.
Leone said, ''Take the vocal track off it, let's hear it.''
They did, and it is identical to the main track of Fistful of Dollars.
Morricone and Leone wanted Mexican gypsy peasant music
as part of the background to the musical track, this idea of San Miguel,
a village in northern Mexico, which is a village of death.
So they were keen to have mariachi trumpet, gypsy sounds.
Leone particularly remembered ''Deguello'',
the theme that Dmitri Tiomkin had written for Rio Bravo,
when John Wayne as Sheriff Chance and Ricky Nelson are holed up in the jail,
and they can hear this lament going on down the street.
Ricky Nelson says, ''That was what they played at the Alamo
to try and destabilise the defenders, the Texans who were defending the Alamo.''
Leone remembered that, said, ''l want a lot of that in the music.''
''This dirgelike, funereal music. lt'll be perfect. A Mexican dance of death.''
Later on in the movie, the ''Deguello'' would come in full whack.
Morricone was a trumpeter by training, as was his father.
So there's a big emphasis on trumpet in the soundtrack.
This part of the score is like some Renaissance ltalian piece of music.
lt recurs a little bit later on, as well.
Very, very strange. Odd juxtaposition. You're in 1 9th-century northern Mexico,
you get a Renaissance piece of dance music on the soundtrack.
Those were the kind of... To make the audience sit up.
Leone said, ''My philosophy can be summed up with the thought:
'l never want the audience to get bored'.''
He said, ''l get bored with Westerns. People talk too much.''
''You know, there's a lot of method acting and a lot of extensive verbiage,
and much too much music, and the music doesn't have much to do with the image.''
''This method acting has got to the point where in a film like The Left Handed Gun,
if a social worker had been around, Billy the Kid would never have happened.''
''l want to go back to the Westerns of the 1 930s when l was growing up in Rome.''
''Lots of action, lots of surprise. A fairy tale for grown-ups.''
So the music is important as part of this strategy of making people jump.
''This is odd. l haven't seen it like this, and it'll keep me concentrating.''
And also strange elisions of the plot. As Leone's cinema matured,
he'd get very used to telling stories in a very indirect way.
You're not quite sure what you're seeing,
then it'd be explained later - all part of the strategy of keeping the audience on edge.
ln 1 950, Hollywood Westerns had been 34 per cent of all releases
that were made in Hollywood. That's 1 50 movies.
ln 1 963, when Fistful of Dollars was first planned,
Westerns represented nine per cent of Hollywood output. That's 1 5 films.
So it had gone from 1 50 in 1 950 to 1 5 films in 1 963.
Leone said, ''The Western's dying in Hollywood.''
There was a huge market for Westerns in Europe, particularly in ltaly and Germany.
People who'd grown up in the 1 930s,
for whom the Western was a model of freedom.
They'd grown up under Mussolini.
And the Western had been something to see - this land of plenty,
the wide open spaces, the hero who has freedom of movement.
And looking towards the Western
was a way of clearing their minds of what went on at home.
They were disappointed with the '50s, hated television Westerns.
Too overlit, too anodyne, too clean. Everyone's teeth sparkled too much.
So let's rough up the Western, make it grungy.
You have a revisionist grunge in the foreground,
with the stubble, and the cheroot, and everyone looking a bit dirty,
with a kind of epic pretension in the background. That's what Leone was after.
Now, this location was south of Madrid,
but not as far south as Almeria.
Aldea del Fresno, ''the valley of the ash trees'', by the river Alberche.
lt's a favourite Leone moment. They ride together, the camera goes up on a crane,
and you can see beyond it a whole crowd of people.
One of those visual surprises that you get,
trompe l'oeil effects that you get in his films.
One of Leone's favourite painters was Magritte, who specialised in juxtaposition.
ln The Good, the Bad and the Ugly there's a famous one.
They look through the bushes and there's the trenches
with literally thousands of troops.
This is the first of those moments, at the Rio Bravo canyon, called Rio Bravo
because it's the Mexican side and the Rio Grande was known as the Rio Bravo.
This is the first of the major sequences in the film that was not in Yojimbo.
There's no reference to this in Yojimbo at all. This was added.
The consignment of gold, the massacre of the troops,
the introduction of the baddie Ramón Rojo,
Gian Maria Volonté, an ltalian theatre actor.
All this was added by the scriptwriters
to fill out the story of Yojimbo, and make it even more mean.
The massacre doesn't happen in Yojimbo.
This ups the ante in terms of the body count in the movie,
and makes the violence that much more larger than life.
Most of this sequence, apart from the cutaways
to Clint Eastwood and Silvanito, the bartender,
were in fact shot by Franco Giraldi, the assistant director,
who was called in at the last minute as an assistant
and told by the producers, ''We don't believe in assistants,
but we want to shoot this so quickly we must have two crews working.''
So this famous sequence, apart from the cutaways,
was shot by Franco Giraldi, who recalls sitting in Spain with Gian Maria Volonté...
Here he is, Ramón.
Who is rather a left-wing character in ltalian politics,
sitting in this flyblown location in Spain, in spring 1 964,
in Franco's Spain, where a fascist regime was running the country, saying:
''What on earth are we doing here? We're making a Western, set in the 1870s,
in a fascist country.''
''What a strange situation for a socialist in ltaly to be in.''
And Giraldi recalls long conversations with Volonté of this kind.
Volonté was a graduate of a Roman drama academy,
had made his name playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare,
and then entered the film industry in the early '60s.
Was a difficult character to work with,
had appeared in one or two pepla,
Hercules Conquers Atlantis, and one or two others,
but hadn't really made his name in the movies.
This turned him into an international star.
His theatrical performance was deliberately heightened,
so that the baddie would seem a sort of narcissistic, childlike,
self-regarding kind of baddie, rather than an underplayed one.
ln For A Few Dollars More, they'd ratchet up the performance.
The baddie wears a white shirt.
ln Hollywood the baddie wore black, and certainly on television Westerns.
But in this one, the first vocal entry of the baddie,
of the real baddie, is in a white shirt.
Just as the goodie wears a rather dirty brown hat.
This isn't white hats and black hats,
everyone wears grey hats, as Clint Eastwood put it.
You're not sure who the goodies are.
You know Ramón is the baddie, but what's Clint Eastwood's role in this?
The stranger has been watching,
showing a great interest, selling himself from one side to the other.
We're not sure of his motivation. ls he on the side of law?
ls he after personal profit? Does he have any sense of honour at all?
Time will tell.
Esteban Rojo was played by Sieghardt Rupp, who was a West German actor,
like the leader of the Baxters, John Baxter, the sheriff,
was played by Wolfgang Lukschy, who was a West German actor.
A lot of the baddies are played by West Germans, and Ramón was an ltalian actor.
This white fluff passing across the screen,
which was a production touch by Carlo Simi, white shirt, white fluff,
the idea of almost snow falling, playing against...
Here you've got a psychopathic baddie, and he appears in the whiteness of snow,
the whiteness of his shirt. They play always against your expectations.
ln the casting, in ltaly, and also in the production design.
A trill on the soundtrack as he moves his cheroot.
lt was an ltalian cigar called a Toscano, which is virtually unsmokable.
You have to cut it with a knife in order to open up the tobacco.
Eastwood didn't like smoking very much, in fact was very antismoking.
He'd gone on record as antismoking.
But they felt this cigarillo, this Toscano was part of the character.
ln the 1 960s, smoking was seen as a sign of control and masculinity.
Today l guess it's the opposite. But in the 1 960s it was seen as that symbol.
And Eastwood said whenever he lit up, which wasn't often,
the cheroot often is half-smoked and he's not smoking it.
When he does, he said, ''lt put me in the right frame of mind. Kind of a fog.''
And when it came to the second movie, For A Few Dollars More,
Eastwood said to Leone, ''Do l have to smoke the cigar?''
''l don't like it very much.'' Leone replied:
''Of course you must smoke the cigar. lt's playing the lead.''
ln Yojimbo, there's a strong sense at this stage in the story
of this 1 9th-century village in Japan belonging to a wider community.
A government inspector comes to the village
and gives you a sense of the politics beyond,
and you also get a sense that there is law and order
in the society of 1 9th-century Japan, but it's broken down in this particular place.
ln Fistful of Dollars, there is no sense of law and order at all.
That there's no law, the sheriff is corrupt like all sheriffs in Leone's films,
so the bounty hunters, those on the take, the factions, the families,
the Hispanic Mafia which runs these towns is the substitute for law and order.
There's a complete absence of morality and law,
which makes it take place in a kind of moral vacuum.
References to governments outside are perfunctory. This isn't put in a context.
lt's a piece of theatre about a town that is a kind of never-never land
where morality doesn't exist.
You want Eastwood to be the goodie, but he never quite behaves like that.
ln most of the film, he doesn't wear his poncho,
although that's what everyone remembers him for.
He wore it in the opening and the final sequences,
but in between, the sheepskin waistcoat, the blue shirt, the shrunk-to-fit jeans -
they had one of each so had to look after it,
if they got it wet or dirty they had to dry-clean it
so he could wear it for the next setup - was what Eastwood wore.
Here's the ''Deguello'' theme, the trumpet
with the strumming guitar in the background. A Mexican funeral dirge.
The death-rattle song from The Alamo.
Leone wanted to use the theme from The Alamo and from Rio Bravo,
which was the same theme, but they discovered it wasn't a folk tune,
it was written by Dmitri Tiomkin in the 1 950s, and was in copyright.
So they made this adaptation.
And here's the Baxter clan, waiting to visit the Rojo clan.
ls this peace plan worth anything, or isn't it?
Consuelo Baxter, the Madonna who runs the Baxter clan, effectively,
because her husband isn't strong, is played by Margarita Lozano,
a Spanish actor who had made her name in Luis Buńuel's film, Viridiana.
And Leone was very fond of Buńuel's work, so he cast her as Consuelo Baxter.
Some of the shots which are made day-for-night in this film don't work well.
Some work, where you have torches and it's obvious that Massimo Dallamano,
the director of photography, filmed at night.
But some are done with filters, and it shows what a low-budget movie this was.
This is the second sequence which has nothing to do with Yojimbo.
The scene in the cemetery, this subplot
of taking the bodies of the massacred soldiers from the Rio Bravo canyon,
putting them into a cemetery and pretending they survived.
This was the second of Leone's inventions
which wasn't based on the Kurosawa original.
lnevitably, it's with coffins, crosses, cemeteries,
the iconography of death, with which he appears to be obsessed.
A lot of graveyards appear in Leone's Westerns.
lt's interesting that they're using these bodies as if they were puppets, or decoys,
because Leone claimed that one of the inspirations for his Westerns,
particularly Fistful of Dollars, was puppet theatre.
Particularly the Sicilian puppets called the Pupi Siciliani,
rather like Punch and Judy in England, or other puppet traditions all over the world.
They were large, metal puppets which were operated by rods from above,
which enacted stories from the middle ages. The Song of Roland.
Orlando and his magic steed and his magic spear and his sidekick,
who would fight the Moors in a re-enactment of medieval battles.
Puppeteers would go round Sicily, perform these stories,
but adapt them to the locality.
They'd find out who's the local mayor, the chemist, the bank manager,
and those characters would appear in this traditional mythological setting.
And Leone said when he made his first Western, he was doing exactly the same.
He took the Hollywood Western,
and in the case of Fistful of Dollars, two Westerns he was very fond of:
Shane, with Alan Ladd, made by George Stevens, and Edward Dmytryk's Warlock,
a complicated Western made in the 1 950s with Henry Fonda.
He was taking those two films, reworking them in this ltalian and Spanish context,
and doing exactly as the Sicilian puppeteers did.
Take the puppet show, take the Western as a given, adapt it to the local culture.
And there are the two puppets sitting there, lying against the gravestone.
West German actor playing Baxter,
conversing with Spanish actor playing his wife Consuelo.
And officials and sheriffs and bank managers and bank tellers
and schoolteachers and hotel clerks in Leone's films
tend to be treated with some derision.
A very traditional commedia dell'arte approach to officialdom,
where the official is probably on the take, corrupt.
There was the odd corrupt sheriff in Hollywood movies,
but they were taken as the exception.
ln Leone's Wild West, all officialdom is on the take.
lt's dog eat dog. And where life has no value,
people like the stranger are the ones that give it value.
A monetary value.
Now, Leone had made various films in the late '50s and early '60s
in the sword-and-sandal genre.
He'd been an assistant director on the chariot race for Ben-Hur,
he worked on Helen of Troy, he worked on Quo Vadis.
He'd made The Colossus of Rhodes.
He completed the film The Last Days of Pompeii,
after his mentor, Mario Bonnard, the director, fell ill.
So he'd dealt with a very masculine world of mythology,
set in ancient Greece or Rome,
and he certainly had difficulties in locating female characters in his films.
The old thing about ''Madonna and whore'' goes very much for Leone's early films.
The characters are very saintly, like the Marianne Koch character, Marisol,
or they're trollops, as a lot of the characters in For A Few Dollars More are.
The central family in this film, with the mother played by Marianne Koch,
in case you hadn't got the point, are called Julio, Marisol and little Jesus.
The baby we saw is called Jesus, his mother's called Mary, Marisol,
and his father's Julio, or Joseph.
So we've got a Holy Family in this story.
One kind of family are the good guys,
the stranger looks after them and protects them.
But the other kind of family is factions, the Rojos and the Baxters, which is a Mafia,
a clan, a faction, the dark side of family life - two visions of the family.
Female characters, Leone's uneasy with.
He doesn't really know how to fit them in, so they're treated as...
ln the factions, as one of the boys.
Basically, it's a kind of adolescent view of sexuality,
which you imagine was pitched at the audiences in southern ltaly,
who had a low boredom threshold
and talked unless something happened every ten minutes.
lt's that kind of audience that this film was pitched at.
Hence there's action every ten minutes.
Hence you keep the audience on their toes all the time,
assume the audience needs to be entertained constantly.
And l think the sexuality of the movie makes that assumption as well.
This was the museum in Madrid, the courtyard.
This museum of rural folkloric life which was a ready-made.
The crew went in and shot inside it.
Other ltalian Westerns used the same location.
Not too many stunt men around. The budget couldn't run to it.
The crosscutting between the Rojos riding to the cemetery
to see what's going on with the two dead soldiers,
and Eastwood doing a bit of detective work back at the Rojo residence,
is in fact not based on Yojimbo, but it's loosely based on passages
in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest,
a detective novel written about the Continental Operative,
who was a private investigator, which has a very similar story to Fistful of Dollars,
and Yojimbo, and The Servant of Two Masters.
That whole idea of two clans fighting,
and someone sets them against each other.
But the detective element of this part of the movie
has a kind of Dashiell Hammett feeling to it.
Leone claimed he'd brought Hammett together with Yojimbo,
and taken the Japanese story home again, when he adapted it into Fistful of Dollars.
Eastwood is about to try and find where the gold is hidden,
and he does it not by thoughtfulness.
Sanjuro in Yojimbo is a very thoughtful character, who sits back and reflects a lot.
The Eastwood character doesn't do that.
Action is character in this film.
Nevertheless, he's trying to work out where the gold must be buried,
by exploring the stores in the Rojo residence.
Soundtrack design is another distinctive feature.
Not only the music, but the way in which natural sounds are amplified.
ln ltaly, everything was postsynchronised.
There wasn't a tradition of shooting direct sound.
So you have a guide track when you're making the film,
but when you go into dubbing you do what you like.
You can construct all the layers of sound.
Fellini had done it, Pasolini was to do it, Visconti had done it.
All the greats in ltalian cinema used sound design.
Leone said that sound was 40 per cent of a movie.
So what you get is, say, a gunshot followed by a horse whinnying,
followed by silence. lt's all constructed that way,
in order that the soundtrack should also contribute to the tension in the audience.
And, of course, Morricone and Leone collaborated on the sound design,
by also superimposing the music on that,
bringing natural sounds to the soundtrack.
Score, as well. So music and natural sound play off each other.
But they're experimenting.
lt's an apprentice movie for Leone, in a sense.
He'd made sword and sandal, it's his apprentice Western.
They're experimenting with sound, trying to bring it out, but they haven't the budget.
The dream was that all the music would be written before the movie was shot,
and the entire movie be shot to a prerecorded soundtrack.
But they couldn't afford that, and couldn't afford that for the next movie.
They began with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon A Time in the West.
This shootout, it has to be said, does resemble a traditional B-movie shootout.
Two sides taking pot shots and no one shooting each other, like a TV Western.
What makes it distinctive is this crosscutting between the cemetery
and the stranger banging the barrels, and there's syncopation between the sounds.
He bangs the barrels once or twice, a similar number of shots at the cemetery.
He bangs it again, you get a similar number of gunshots.
So the sound is what links these two simultaneous events together.
Four bangs, four shots. One, two, one, two.
First example of Leone's fast crosscutting that became distinctive of his cinema.
The idea of two simultaneous things that can't know about what they're doing,
but there's an aural connection or a visual connection between them.
lt's pure style, it's got nothing to do with the real world.
There's a lot more shooting than there tended to be in Hollywood Westerns.
One of the people in the dubbing room remembers Leone saying:
''l want more gunshots, more gunshots.''
So they got someone to go to a canyon, or a quarry, near Rome,
to film various sounds of guns.
And in fact the rifle shots were the ones that Leone used
for the pistol shots in the film, to heighten it.
So the pistols sound like rifles, the rifles like cannons,
and cannons like a nuclear explosion.
He wanted to heighten the sound in any way that he could.
There's a distinctive gunshot in ltalian Westerns,
the result of putting a different sound, a different calibre of gun, onto the pistol.
And then the stranger discovers the gold by mistake.
ln the American version of Fistful of Dollars,
the Eastwood character was called ''the man with no name''.
And on the posters for United Artists, the man with no name
heralds a new style of adventure.
ln the release script he's called Joe.
ln the film there's one or two references to Joe.
The coffin maker refers to him as Joe, Joe the stranger.
ln the shooting script he was known as Ray.
But he reached the US as ''the man with no name''.
Here's a good example of him treating the girls as one of the chaps.
He walks into the room, punches her in the face, and down she falls.
This is not an adult relationship with a woman,
with which Leone had huge problems in his cinema.
Admittedly, Joe the stranger feels rather guilty about what he's done,
but it's a surprise moment
that is rather unpleasant in its sexual implications.
Lots of hoof noises and whinnying as the horses arrive, superimposed afterwards.
Most of the actors would have spoken their own language on the set.
The German actors spoke German, the Spanish actors spoke Spanish,
the ltalians spoke ltalian, and Eastwood spoke American.
Sometimes you get a kind of pause for a second or two in moments of dialogue,
as people register what the other's saying.
Then they went into the dubbing studio and recorded different languages.
Leone himself hardly spoke English at all.
He just had one phrase, ''Watch me.''
So what he would do is he would stand on the set in a cowboy hat with thick glasses,
wearing a pair of toy guns, looking a bit like Yosemite Sam.
''Watch me, Clint.'' And he'd act out what he wanted the characters to do.
So his direction was all done at the level of mime.
The assistant director reminisced to me
that he thought one of the distinctive ltalian features of this movie
is that in doing the mime, Leone would turn the character into a Roman character.
That actually in performing it for the actors,
the Western hero became this Roman trickster.
This Harlequin figure from ltalian culture,
a very strong figure within ltalian theatrical traditions.
lt was the miming, ''Watch me, Clint'',
that created, partly, the character of the man with no name, Joe the stranger.
Partly that, and partly the fact that when Eastwood arrived in Spain,
he thought the script was much too talky
and he cut a lot of dialogue to make the character more enigmatic.
The shooting script contains lots of long speeches. Leone put a line through it.
He may be the only actor in movie history who's actually fought for less lines.
Most actors want more, but he wanted less,
because he felt it created the magic, the enchantment. lt created the enigma.
The second big set piece scene is the exchange of hostages.
lnstead of white fluff, autumn leaves blowing over the camera.
The idea of a brown, autumnal colour.
And we've got the Rojos in all their finery.
Their hidalguia, the sort of hierarchical sense of a clan, a Spanish-Mexican clan,
on one side, the Baxters on the other.
ln the middle, the man with no name. That trill on the soundtrack
is a typical Morricone commentary on the character through music.
That had never appeared in a Western before.
And then the cigar shifts, or Eastwood does a double-take.
lt's a kind of musical punctuation.
The ''Deguello'' again on the soundtrack, the mariachi trumpet,
with the Spanish guitar backing.
Very ritualised, very rhetorical.
Leone had been involved in an exchange-of-hostage sequence before,
when he was assistant director on Helen Of Troy.
Big close-ups.
Guns.
Ramón's Winchester '73. Marianne Koch.
So you've had the establishing shot, now you have a series of extreme close-ups,
the Techniscope frame creating a letterbox
around these big close-ups of faces.
The close-up plays a different function to traditional Westerns,
where it tended to be reaction shots in conversation, or in gunfights.
These are faces treated as if they're gargoyles on a cathedral.
Big close-ups of the faces with all their imperfections,
creating a visual grammar to build up the tension of the scene.
These aren't reactions, these are simply pieces of design to go with the music.
ln a way, this is the origin of the famous cemetery shootout
in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Music with big close-ups.
Only instead of a duel, it's an exchange of hostages.
Very operatic. The music builds up.
''Mama, Mama,'' says Jesus, little Jesus as he rushes out.
lt's like a scene from an opera of the 1 9th century in ltaly.
A Verdi opera.
Someone called these Westerns:
''An opera in which the arias aren't sung, they're stared.''
And that Leone had given a whole new meaning to the phrase ''horse opera''.
lt's an odd combination of realism in the foreground, with these grungy faces,
and operatic quality in the background.
A mixture of cinematic grammar creating this opera, and very grungy foreground.
You don't believe fairy tales unless they look real.
Leone said, ''l don't like Disney fairy tales or movies.''
''They're too clean. l don't believe them.''
You've got to have grunge, but it's still a fairy tale.
A fairy tale for grown-ups.
Welcome home by slapping the boy.
That's not something that happened in Hollywood Westerns.
ln the morality of Leone's Westerns,
you can often tell who the real baddies are by the way they treat children.
Everyone's pretty bad, and some are worse than others,
but the real baddies tend to threaten children,
or in the case of For A Few Dollars More actually shoot a child.
That's the signal that this guy is really bad.
So he's upped the ante on the morality stakes,
and this is the moment where Marisol, Mary, the Virgin Mary,
looks at the stranger.
She wants to be protected.
The setup of them is like a painting of the Holy Family, in the middle of the street,
which was quite deliberate, just as the Last Supper will come a little bit later on.
You could argue that most Hollywood Westerns were, in fact, Protestant,
and Socially Darwinist in their attitude towards the West.
That you do get references to the Holy Family, particularly in Shane,
a model of Fistful of Dollars.
Marian and little Joey in their log cabin in the wilderness,
and there's Shane the redeemer coming in and saving the Holy Family.
But the profusion of iconography,
and the setting in the southwest, and the ltalianising of the Western
creates a Roman Catholic atmosphere, rather than the Protestant Western.
Just as the locale shifts from the middle West, or Wyoming,
or the setting of the Johnson County War, which was where Shane was set,
further southwest into a Latin, ltalian, Hispanic setting.
Lots of things flow from that, including Roman-Catholic iconography,
which is part of Leone's project.
lt's not a religious Western. He's mocking much of the iconography.
He's saying, ''We can recognise this as something we can identify with.''
So we're not judging Ramón, we're saying he's smart. Smart wins.
Somebody once said about the character that Eastwood epitomised in this film
that in the old films, the hero was the best shot.
ln a film like this, the best shot is the hero.
ln other words, the guy who's good with a gun,
whose technique is superior to everyone's else's,
who is a trickster who can outwit everyone, that is the hero,
rather than the hero being able to mobilise those forces.
So here we have the Last Supper sequence,
with the suit of armour that apparently did duty in countless Zorro films,
in the governor's residence in old California,
now standing in as a prop to be shot at as Ramón and his disciples sit at the table
in a deliberate reference to Leonardo's painting of The Last Supper,
which is in Milan.
''Aim for the heart, Ramón.'' This comes up later in the film.
Ramón with his Winchester '73, a fantastic shot.
Obviously, good shooting to create this heart shape.
But that will come up later. ''Aim for the heart, Ramón'',
will become the catchphrase of the end of the film.
A Mexican proverb invented for this movie.
''When a man with a .45 meets a man with a rifle, the man with a rifle will be dead.''
The man with no name, Joe the stranger,
will disprove this old Mexican proverb in style in the final sequence of the film,
by pitting his .45 against the rifle of Ramón.
The Anglo sidekick of Ramón is played by Benito Steffanelli,
an interesting ltalian actor who was also the co-stunt director of the film,
and became the armourer and stunt director of Leone's films.
Quite a lot of characters in this film represent the assembling
of a kind of repertory company for Leone.
Mario Brega as the overweight baddie,
Benito Steffanelli as the stunt man, Morricone with the music.
This is the establishment of a home team
that Leone would work with in the future, over and over and over again.
Various Spanish actors pop up in the background.
Aldo Sambrell, who is in this film as a baddie,
plays a baddie in nearly all Leone's Westerns.
So he's assembling a crew that he will work with in future, Spanish and ltalian.
And in this case, American as well,
because a member of the Baxter clan, the gunman who wears the green shirt,
was played by Bill Thomkins, who was in fact Eastwood's stunt double
that he brought over from the United States.
So Bill Thomkins appears as one of the Baxter gunmen.
And on some prints of the film, he was actually billed as ''Western consultant'',
so Bill Thomkins not only did stunts for Eastwood
and appeared as one of the gunmen, but was Western consultant.
One can only wonder what sort of consultancy,
because it is so different to the traditional Hollywood Western.
Here's a dried-up riverbed in Almeria.
Almeria's full of dried-up riverbeds called ramblas, which were rivers but dried up.
So you get canyon walls, and these wide,
almost street-like spaces in between them.
These ramblas were incredibly useful
for shooting sequences of horses going at full tilt.
You could keep the outside world out and let 'em rip, like a racecourse.
The ramblas of Almeria appear in this movie,
as indeed they do in all Leone's Westerns.
A rare shot of Eastwood actually lighting up his Toscano.
One thing about them is that they're difficult to keep alight.
They keep going out, and that's certainly the case here.
Another moment of ultraviolence, like with the Baxters falling off the gate.
And the sound of the cat, which in one or two of Leone's Westerns you get
as a soundtrack thing, to punctuate the action,
the cat shrieking as the violence takes place.
A machete. lt's interesting.
ln Yojimbo, Sanjuro wears his sword strapped to his waist.
lt's a sword-fighting movie, and the violence is about a rather languid hero,
who has moments of violence with spectacular swordplay,
then sheaths his sword and walks off.
This is, l think, a reference to Yojimbo,
with Eastwood's use of the machete.
This had an X certificate when it came out,
because the violence really came as something of a shock.
Perhaps not the violence. The brutality.
The sense of the enjoyment of physical punishment which comes through,
is true of all Leone's films, and is still controversial to some extent.
You've got the style, the production design,
the music, these distinctive features,
but you've also got this lingering on moments of brutality,
which, even in this first Western, it would become more extreme later, is present.
And as the film builds up, so upping the ante on brutality becomes important.
''l knew someone like you and no one helped.''
The only moment in the film where any motivation
is attributed to the Eastwood character.
Up to now, he's been on the take, from the Rojos,
from the Baxters, set one against the other.
But here, he's actually doing a moral act.
He's protecting the Holy Family and sending them back across the border
because, ''l knew someone like you, and there was no one to help.''
And in the shooting script, there were about three pages of explanation,
which referred to a prologue which Leone originally wanted to put into the movie
of an earlier incident in the stranger's life.
That was cut out, and instead just that one line.
lt's the only moment in the whole film where you get a sense of moral position
on the part of the stranger. Otherwise, he works for cash.
lnstead of, ''Man's gotta do what a man's gotta do'',
the crusading element in Hollywood Westerns,
what you've got is a much more pragmatic, hip, streetwise,
1 960s, on the take, sort of James Bondian kind of approach.
Although even James Bond, of course, is working for Her Majesty's secret service.
He has a sense of values there, but that's a rare moment in this film.
San Miguel is not a moral place.
The ramblas of Almeria, done in long shot.
Stunt work as the horse goes down the side of the sand dunes.
The colouring of Almeria is completely different to Arizona and New Mexico.
lt's olive trees, it's grey, it's ash.
lt's not red sandstone. lt just doesn't have the same colour palette.
The browns. Leone's cameraman, Tonino Delli Colli,
who took over from Dallamano from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, said:
''Yellows, and beiges, and dust,
and the colour of Almeria became the colour of the ltalian Western.''
lt is a completely different colour palette, one of the distinctive features of the film.
The choir was conducted by Alessandro Alessandroni,
who also did the whistling and also played the guitar in this film.
And, in fact, it was a Fender Stratocaster guitar
which l have played when l went to visit Alessandro in Rome.
The sacred guitar.
He was a performer in nightclubs and music halls with his Cantori Moderni,
''The Modern Singers''.
Alessandro was responsible for a lot of the sounds on the soundtrack.
As Leone's cinema progressed, the music started using
traditional folk instruments much more,
so you have the marranzano, or the Jew's harp,
that twanging which became associated with the Eastwood character.
And the argilophone, a ceramic instrument,
also a traditional Sicilian instrument.
And the sense of ltalian folk story
superimposed on the Western... You get a sense of unusual instruments, whistling,
and this sense of isolation in the music,
but this would develop as Leone's cinema developed.
Gian Maria's Volonté's voice was dubbed by someone else.
He didn't speak English at all, and it was dubbed in the dubbing studio.
ln For A Few Dollars More, he had to use his voice,
so he had to learn it phonetically and speak English on the soundtrack.
Here's the famous beating-up sequence.
The stranger seems invulnerable, he seems entirely on top of the situation,
but he's made a mistake and he's gonna pay.
ln most ltalian Westerns, and indeed in most subsequent Clint Eastwood films,
you get a scene where he gets very thoroughly beaten up,
and then resurrects in order to get his own back in the final reel.
But this was taking it several steps further than Hollywood.
The gleeful laughing of the boys as they punch him around. lt's pure sadism.
Hurting him because they enjoy it, not just because they want to hurt him.
Stubbing out the cigar on his hand, that was missing
from most prints in the 1 960s cos it was thought too strong.
Pouring tequila onto his wounds. That was also cut by the British censor.
And it does go on for a very long time.
Like a Marlon Brando style beating-up, in On The Waterfront.
That urban violence rather than the traditional punch-up of the Western,
where you break a chair over someone's head, laugh, and John Wayne goes home.
''ln a week, you'll be back in shape.'' lt would take about three months.
And there's still more to come.
And at this moment, Chico the thug,
played by Mario Brega, brings his heel down on Eastwood's hand.
Only it's his left hand, so Chico isn't bright enough
to bring his heel down on Eastwood's gun hand.
lnstead, he does this to his left hand,
which isn't going to affect his gunfighting abilities. Chico ain't that bright.
ln Leone's cinema, there's a lot of sequences involving torture
and, ''Will someone talk, will someone betray?''
Leone reckoned that his obsession with that kind of setup,
the Eli Wallach scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
the Doctor Villega scene in Giů La Testa, A Fistful of Dynamite, Duck You Sucker,
someone being punished, and will they betray?
This is a folk memory in Leone's mind
of what happened in the 1 940s in Rome, when the Nazis occupied,
when a lot of people did business with the Nazis and some went into the Resistance.
This issue of, ''Did you talk? Were you tortured? Did you give away secrets?''
was an important part of ltalian culture.
That's Chico out of the way, with a barrel, full one, into his body.
So the stranger hasn't talked, and his only option is to get away.
But there's a lot of ltalian history in these films, in particular recent ltalian history,
of those that fought in the resistance against the Nazis, those who collaborated.
Those who had some things they might be ashamed of in the Second World War,
and those who were treated as heroes after.
As the ltalian Western matured enough to cope with politics,
a lot of this comes through in the films.
And certainly the beatings-up, and, ''How strong are you?''
''Will you throw your lot in with the fascists?'' comes into Leone's films.
He didn't fight in the Resistance. His mum wouldn't let him.
And he always regretted it.
These films, when they first came out,
were treated by most of the critics as ersatz American films.
The early ltalian Westerns, made between 1 962 and 1 964,
undoubtedly were ersatz American films.
They tried to look like Hollywood,
the main characters hid under pseudonyms
so ltalian audiences would think they were American films.
They were about Buffalo Bill,
directed by people named John Fordson, that sort of thing.
Pretending to be Hollywood films.
Cowboy and lndians, liquor, gunrunners and this sort of thing.
But the whole point about Fistful of Dollars
is that it's the first really ltalian Western.
lt's no longer something that seems a carbon copy American film.
The more you look at it, the stranger it gets
in comparison with the Hollywood originals.
l think a lot of the critics missed the point, seeing an attempt to emulate Hollywood.
These were ltalian and Spanish movies,
and the cultural references are, in a way, the most important thing. The difference.
But of course, yes, they're taking the idea of the Wild West as a starting point.
lt was clever of Leone to see that Yojimbo by Kurosawa would make a Western.
He went to see the film in autumn of 1 963 at the Harlequin cinema in Rome,
and asked his friends to go see it,
and then adapted Yojimbo into a Western,
just as John Sturges adapted The Seven Samurai into The Magnificent Seven.
lt was a clever idea to nourish the Western, not doing too well,
with ideas from a different culture, Japan.
Kurosawa himself admitted when he made his samurai movies,
it was a homage to the Western. So the whole thing went full circle.
The trouble was that nobody had cleared the rights,
and during the shooting of Fistful of Dollars, word came round:
''Nobody mentioned Yojimbo, all right? Nobody mentioned Yojimbo. "
Lawyers exchanged letters, Kurosawa wrote to Leone
when he saw Fistful of Dollars.'
''l like your film very much. lt's a very interesting film.''
''Unfortunately, it's my film, not yours.''
Leone couldn't understand how rude this was, plagiarism.
He showed this letter to everyone. ''Kurosawa says it's great.''
And they said, ''But he's saying, 'lt's not your movie. lt's based on my movie.'''
They eventually settled out of court. Papi and Colombo, the producers,
their defence was that the plot had been taken from an ltalian original,
an 18th-century play by Carlo Goldoni, The Servant of Two Masters,
Arlecchino or The Servant of Two Masters, which was partly true,
but unfortunately it didn't stick, so Kurosawa, in Japan,
was awarded all the Far-Eastern rights.
Japan, Formosa, now Taiwan, and South Korea,
plus a percentage of the gross,
and in fact the takings from Fistful of Dollars which Kurosawa made
was more than any movie that Kurosawa had ever made himself.
So in the end he did quite well out of it.
lt's interesting, you could mount a more subtle argument.
Yes, the plot is very similar to Yojimbo, but all the detail,
the cultural atmosphere, and the originality, is very different.
lt's more to do with Leone and ltalian cinema
than with Japanese, but that was too subtle an argument.
Of course, they should have cleared the rights.
Some claimed they'd written, some claimed they didn't.
Some claimed they hadn't got the money and thought they'd risk it.
Whichever way, Kurosawa did very, very well out of Fistful of Dollars.
Lots of sadistic laughter. That's what baddies do in Leone's Westerns.
Again, not something they would tend to do in the Hollywood equivalent,
where baddies were very colourful.
A lot of the baddies in Leone's films were based
on the colourful villains in the cycle of films made in the '50s by Budd Boetticher,
the so-called Renown cycle with Randolph Scott as hero.
Very colourful villains played by Lee Van Cleef, Richard Boone, James Coburn,
Pernell Roberts, and so on.
You have a taciturn hero who underplays all the time, and doesn't say much,
and an over-the-top villain that talks a lot and is very colourful,
and lots and lots of detail, was something Leone said he got from Budd Boetticher.
ln Boetticher they didn't laugh when they kicked people,
which is what they tend to do in Leone's films.
Clint Eastwood has recalled that when he was shooting these sequences
where he's covered in makeup from the beating-up
that he's had at the hands of the Rojos, he arrived one day on set
and there was a huge argument going on between Spanish and ltalians.
Not uncommon on this shoot.
He couldn't work out what was said, but Leone said through an interpreter:
''lt's all right, Clint, put on your makeup and come back to the set.''
So he put on the makeup and arrived back, and found the set deserted.
Just the arc lights there, looking like vultures in the desert.
And so he thought, ''This is it. l'm wearing all this makeup, l'm hot, l'm fed up.''
So he went back to the hotel and said, ''l'm off to America.''
As he was leaving, Leone intercepted him and said:
''Look, it'll be all right. There won't be rows any more.''
''There isn't much money, it's tense, but let's get this finished.''
And all was forgiven, and that was the last of the big rows on the set.
An elaborate set piece. This wasn't an expensive movie.
lt was in fact treated as the B-movie of two films which were being made
by the ltalian producers, Giorgio Papi and Arrigo Colombo.
They made a film back to back with this, Pistols Don't Argue, or Guns Don't Argue,
directed by Mario Caiano, using the same sets, some of the same costumes,
and the same composer,
and indeed the same designer.
And Fistful was there to use the residue of that movie.
So the main one was Pistols Don't Argue, which no one's heard of since.
Fistful was there as the also-ran.
So there wasn't much money, that's why they went for Eastwood
as the cheapest actor. There were lots of squabbles about money.
The money ran out three-quarters of the way through shooting,
because the Spanish coproducer,
whose name appears on one of the gravestones in the cemetery as an in-joke,
the Spanish coproducer hadn't paid his money to the technicians,
so the technicians arrived on set at Manzanares
and removed all the windows and frames.
They arrived and there were no windows, so they couldn't shoot.
At which point Papi and Colombo came from Rome with a suitcase full of money,
which wasn't legal at the time, cash money,
crossed the border, paid off the technicians,
the windows went back in, and the movie could continue.
ln fact, Leone fell out very seriously with Papi and Colombo
cos he felt he was owed money for this film, which he never received.
They cross-collateralised with the next movie.
''We'll pay if you make another movie.''
At which point Leone threw his lot in with the entertainment lawyer Alberto Grimaldi,
who became the producer of his second and one or two of his subsequent films.
This sequence was the second one that was shot by Franco Giraldi,
assistant director, who shot the Rio Bravo canyon.
The burning of the Baxter house was shot by Giraldi,
with the cutaways done by Leone.
And the editor, Roberto Cinquini, pieced it together from little pieces of film
with the close-ups and the reflection of the flames,
in order to construct this extraordinary scene of the baddies roaring with laughter
as they massacre the Baxter clan.
More sadism, and it goes on, and it goes on.
A lot was cut from the British print, though it got an X certificate.
The censor couldn't take it. The enjoyment, the massacre.
The fact that it's so protracted.
So Cinquini does the editing, and Franco Giraldi does the shooting for this,
while Leone was busy with Eastwood.
You often get in Leone's films someone peering through a letterbox-shaped space.
The image is letterboxed, the Techniscope frame,
but you get someone peering, like Eastwood.
So his view is framed,
like the Techniscope frame this movie is gonna be projected in.
Rather like Rod Steiger in Giů La Testa, in Duck You Sucker,
tearing a poster and seeing a slat between the wood
and looking through at a firing squad.
lt's a reminder of the artificiality of the frame, but he loves the letterbox frame,
and the way in which that frame can be filled to push on the action.
Again, the hero is impassive.
You'd expect Randolph Scott, or John Wayne, or Gary Cooper
to react to this massacre. lt's pointless.
And here comes Consuelo, the matriarch of the clan coming out.
Surely they won't shoot her. Even in the worst Western,
no one shot the heroine or one of the lead female characters.
But this is an ltalian Western.
A very elaborate Spanish curse being cast at them.
And it's not in fact Ramón that shoots her, it's his brother.
And Ramón looks at him, a slightly enigmatic look.
Would he have done that?
Was the brother right to do that?
ln any normal morality he wasn't right,
but in the strange morality of Leone's film that's an interesting moment.
Ramón doesn't quite approve of what his brother's done.
The view from the coffin as we go out. The whole movie is a view from a coffin,
in a sense, this town of death, this town of widows, of cemeteries and bell-ringers.
No priest, and a corrupt sheriff.
lt's the view from the coffin.
And here's Eastwood in a mine shaft, rehearsing his gun hand
for the final showdown.
With a piece of metal that's been cut out of...
l don't know, a railcar, or a boiler, or whatever it is.
But it's gonna turn into a suit of armour, like the armour in the Rojo residence.
With the ''Deguello'' theme, but this time not played on the trumpet.
More orchestral version.
A Mexican funeral lament, because that's what's gonna happen.
When l first saw this l couldn't work out what was going on.
Nothing tells you it's a mineshaft, nothing tells you what's going on, why this metal.
lt's part of Leone's intriguing form of cinema.
By the time you've worked it out it's too late anyway.
They're onto the next action sequence.
Syncopating the bangs with the music again. lt's sort of justified music.
There'll be a lot of music in Leone's films justified by action.
A chiming watch in For A Few Dollars More, whistling in Duck You Sucker,
something that happens justifies the music that goes with it.
The bang of the hammer in syncopation with the music
sort of justifies the music with the action.
ltalian Western heroes like to strike matches on any available surface.
Whether it's chin, the boot of a hanging man, or a piece of metal.
These matches strike on anything. And it's part of the cool of the hero.
He's actually smoking in this sequence, which is quite unusual.
You strike your match on any surface. lt's a cool thing to do in the 1 960s.
Even on your teeth sometimes, in some ltalian Westerns. Which must hurt.
So the coffin maker calls him Joe.
Now, is that his name, or is it an all-purpose name, like John Doe?
Joe, Gl Joe. An American is called Joe in a Mexican setting.
ls it everyman? No one's quite sure.
lt is quite clear, though, that he did have a name in this film,
and that the United Artists publicists who turned him into the man with no name
and expunged all references to his name in the soundtrack, as far as they could,
is an example of a marketing department inventing the name of the lead character.
Or rather, the no name of the lead character. Unusual in modern cinema.
The man with no name.
Running gag. The coffin maker's the only person making money.
Since Eastwood's arrived there's a high mortality rate.
l'm not sure who'll pay for all the funerals, there's no one left to pay.
But the coffin maker, played by this music-hall star,
is enjoying himself hugely with this. He's going to get a lot of business.
So Piripero has given him some sticks of dynamite,
and you might expect that he's going to blow up the cantina,
he's going to blow up the Rojo residence.
He'll use the dynamite for some tactical or aggressive purpose.
He doesn't do any of those. He uses the dynamite to give himself presence,
to enhance his charisma so that as he walks in,
he's going to make one of the great entrances in Western movies.
By explosion, lots of dust, the creation of dust in the sequence,
which, according to Leone, was based on John Ford's My Darling Clementine,
where the shootout takes place in dust.
Dust the stagecoach has whipped up, dust from the desert.
And the gunfight at the OK Corral in My Darling Clementine is a very dusty ending.
There's a dusty ending here, created by dynamite. Very theatrical entrance.
So the dynamite is beefing up his charisma.
They won't shoot him while he's walking, because they're so in awe of this entrance
that they're just gobsmacked.
And out of the smoke and dust comes Joe the stranger for the final shootout.
What was the significance of that metal plate he cut out and shot?
We're going to discover that in a minute.
Remember that the old Mexican proverb says that a man with a .45
meets a man with a rifle, the man with the .45 is a dead man.
We've been told Eastwood doesn't stand a chance,
we know the Rojos are well-armed, there are several of them.
So what's going to happen?
The first of Leone's big duels.
And the duel in the Western was a linear thing,
people walk towards each other on the street.
Like at the end of Stagecoach with the Plummer brothers, or like in High Noon.
But this is a completely different setup. First, the entrance.
The explosive music of the ''Deguello'' theme played at full whack,
trumpet with the volume turned up.
The rhetoric of it, you get close-ups of their boots to tell you who they are.
That's all you need to know. Eastwood wears brown boots,
the Rojos wear black leather boots. That's all you need to know.
There's no inner personality,
no psychology to these people. You are what you wear.
But the way the camera presents this final shootout is almost circular, as we'll see.
A circle constructed
of close-ups of the Rojos, but also circles created in the sky, as Ramón dies.
The first of Leone's circular duels, although it isn't quite there yet.
That will happen in the second film, For A Few Dollars More.
This is strange. He got him with the first shot.
But they're apprehensive.
And they're right to be, cos he gets up again.
This is where that metal sheet comes in. He's wearing armour under his poncho.
Just like that piece of armour in the earlier sequence, the Last Supper sequence,
Ramón is brilliant at aiming for the heart. ''Aim for the heart, Ramón.''
But like the armour, he doesn't realise it,
but he's aiming for a metal plate underneath the poncho.
lt's illogical. All they have to do is shoot his feet.
But they don't. lt's all ritual. ''Aim for the heart.''
Well-known Mexican proverb. Ritual is actually constructing what they do.
They're not doing anything to do with the real world, aim for his head.
As long as he keeps aiming for the heart, the stranger is safe.
And the Rojos aren't awfully bright, they haven't quite twigged what's going on.
But now, of course, Eastwood's walked into Colt .45 range.
So maybe he does stand a chance. Down the street, he wouldn't stand a chance.
By using these proverbs and dynamite and charisma, sheer charisma,
he's managed to get within range for a proper shootout.
And Ramón hasn't lost his touch. He shot all round the heart.
High-pitched trill on the soundtrack, lots of close-ups.
Around the central fountain of San Miguel.
And now it turns into pure theatre.
Real time is suspended,
where this turns into just a piece of cinematic rhetoric.
They just stand there staring at each other, in time-honoured Leone fashion.
Well, that's all of them down except Ramón, with one go.
Now the odds are even. But Piripero's not sure.
He's seen the stranger do all these feats of marksmanship,
but he's still not quite sure he can win. The odds are stacked
so heavily against him.
But the choruses in the film, the coffin maker, the bartender, and the bell-ringer,
are the ones who survive.
ln fact, they're the only ones who survive. ''Let's see if the proverb is true.''
The stranger's been very clever, because, of course,
it takes a lot longer to load a Winchester '73 than it does a Colt .45.
So if they place their weapons on the ground,
he knows that he's going to win.
The gun belt and the pistol grips on the gun, which are metal snakes,
had been borrowed from Rawhide.
Eastwood brought them to Spain as a good luck charm.
And wore them throughout the trilogy of films that Leone subsequently made.
So we've got a Colt on the ground, and we've got a Winchester on the ground.
And we're in pure theatre. The puppet show has become pure puppets.
ln American Westerns, there'd be dialogue now. lt's just sounds.
And it is quicker to load a Colt. This is it.
So extend time even more. Close-ups of eyes, drums on the soundtrack.
Not extended as much as it will be.
This goes on for a reel in subsequent Leone films.
But the dilation of time, the stretching of time at that moment.
They're not talking to each other, unlike Hollywood Westerns.
lt's just pure ritual, all the rituals that precede the moment of death.
The moment of death itself is... lt's not Sam Peckinpah, there's not lots of blood.
But here's the camera describing circular motions in the sky.
And this will turn into the circular duel in subsequent Leone films, set in a bullring.
This isn't the linear duel, this is the circular one.
And Ramón bites the dust.
There's always a surprise, though.
A chance for Silvanito, the bartender, to take part in this.
He's been detached from the squabble, he said, ''Don't get involved.''
But at this moment he does get involved. And saves the stranger.
And so, just as at the beginning,
the stranger rides into town and the curtain of dust parts
and we're in this theatre of San Miguel,
so at the end this is just like the last scene of some 16th or 1 7th-century tragedy,
with the bodies lying on the stage, the protagonist standing there.
And the show is about to end, the theatre is about to close.
lt's gonna be the end of the show, and out we go from the cinema into the real world.
The realism of the American Western was different.
lt related to everyday life. This is myth about myth.
And the great ltalian novelist, Alberto Moravia,
wrote about this.
''There is no West in ltaly, no cowboys and bandits, no frontier,
no gold mines or pioneers.''
''The ltalian Western was born not from memory,
but from the instinct of filmmakers who were in love with the American Western.''
The Hollywood Western was born from a myth.
The ltalian one is born from a myth about a myth.
So this is a movie about the Western,
transposed into an ltalian and Spanish cultural context.
ln one sense it's not a Western, it's a super-Western. lt's about a Western.
And at the end of it, you're reminded of its artificiality as we leave San Miguel.
And as Morricone's main title track takes over,
Eastwood gets back on his mule, a big man on a little animal,
like Shane riding off into the hills, like Young Mr Lincoln.
Like Jesus riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
Off he goes on his mule for the end of the show.
Curtain down. You could imagine this being in a theatre.
No one's alive in San Miguel except the chorus.
Visiontext Subtitles: Paul Burns
EN