Ever since 1967 I’ve been in love with a man. I was staying
in London with my Aunty Jean (who was not a real aunty, but a friend of the
family) when I first saw him. He was tall with a rugged face that was partly in
shadow underneath a battered hat. He also carried a gun, wore a poncho and was
smoking a cheroot. He was everywhere I looked in London, especially Leicester
Square where his image was mounted onto a huge billboard.
His name was Clint Eastwood.
The film was A Fistful
of Dollars directed by Sergio Leone and it was single-handedly responsible
for reinventing and revitalising the flagging western genre. Everyone was talking about it – well, everyone
except my mum who only liked soppy musicals like Hans Christian Anderson.
Leone’s western was tough and uncompromising, and was (at the time) considered to be extremely violent.
Leone’s western was tough and uncompromising, and was (at the time) considered to be extremely violent.
The original film poster for A Fistful of Dollars |
I loved A Fistful of
Dollars so much that I began wearing a poncho myself. I thought it made me
look cool. The problem was that thinking I looked
cooI and actually looking cool were
two entirely different things. I might possibly have looked cool if I’d not had
such a baby-face and I’d been wearing my poncho in, say, Mexico or Arizona. As
it was, walking around a housing estate in Blackpool wearing a patterned
blanket I’d found in the ottoman chest at the foot of my mum’s bed just made me
look like a bit of a prick.
“What the bloody hell are you supposed to be wearing,” mum
asked me one day as I was leaving the house.“It’s called a poncho, mum – Clint Eastwood wears one.”
“Who’s he when he’s at home?”
“He’s in A Fistful of
Dollars.”
“Oh aye. And what’s that then?”
“It’s a cowboy film.”
“You and your bloody cowboy films. When are you going to grow
up?”
“When I’m an adult.”
“Well, you look bloody stupid.”
“No I don’t. I look cool.”
“Cool? You wouldn’t
look cool if you were wearing it in a fridge.” She looked me up and down and a
trace of anger began to show in her eyes. “Hang on, isn’t that the blanket your
Uncle Chris brought back for me from Morocco.”
“Errrrrmm,” I said.
“Have you cut a bloody hole in it?”
“Ummmm,” I said, not wanting to say any real words for fear
of incriminating myself even further.
Needless to say it was the end of my poncho-wearing days and
the beginning of a long period of remaining in my room and only being allowed
downstairs at meal times.
I bet Clint Eastwood never got grounded. I wasn’t aware of it
at the time, but Sergio Leone almost got grounded after the release, throughout
mainland Europe in 1964, of A Fistful of
Dollars.
Back in 1960 John Sturges directed a remake of Akira
Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese film Shichinin
no Samurai – except he called his version The Magnificent Seven. Maybe you remember it. Since The Magnificent Seven, Shichinin no Samurai (or Seven Samurai if it makes you feel more
comfortable) has been remade twice – once as Battle Beyond The Stars (1980), and more recently as A Bug’s Life (1998).
A Fistful of Dollars was also a remake of an Akira
Kurosawa film. This time the film was Yojimbo
(1961), which was itself influenced by Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 hard-boiled
crime novel Red Harvest. Leone’s problem lay in the fact that neither he or his production company never actually attempted to
gain the remake rights to Yojimbo, which
resulted in Kurosawa filing a plagiarism lawsuit that delayed the release of A Fistful of Dollars in North
America and the UK for three years. It was eventually released worldwide in
1967. Yojimbo was remade again (officially,
this time) by Walter Hill in 1996 as Last
Man Standing.
I won’t
dwell on the bad history of A Fistful of
Dollars but, instead, I’ll list three of its merits.1. The production budget was so low that Leone used close-ups on the actor’s faces not just to convey emotion, but also to disguise the lack of sets. It worked and the extreme close-up became one of his trademark techniques.
2. The soundtrack was by Ennio Morricone.
3. Clint Eastwood was a badass.
This wasn’t Sergio Leone’s first film, although he often
inferred that it was. It was his first western, but not his first feature film
– before then he had made a couple of run-of-the-mill Sword & Sandal movies. It brings to mind what James Cameron
said a few years later when he was being interviewed about his film The Terminator. I can’t remember his exact
words but what he said went something like this: I wanted to create something special for my first feature. Now,
that would have been brilliant if The
Terminator had actually been his
first feature and he had not conveniently forgotten about the totally
forgettable Piranha 2: The Flying Killers.
When all’s said and done, A
Fistful of Dollars is a fantastic film. It did away with white hats and
black hats in the western genre. The films that followed, For A Few Dollars More
and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
were, I must say, better than the first in Leone’s classic trilogy, but it was
the impact of that first film that
has stuck with me all this time and it’s one I’ll never forget.Before I ride off into the sunset, the three films of the Dollars trilogy should really be viewed thus:
1. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
2. A Fistful of Dollars
3. For A Few Dollars More
The Good, The Bad and
The Ugly is a
prequel to A Fistful of Dollars and
not a sequel to For A Few Dollars More.
Happy trails.