Review of Fistful of Dollars, A

Introduction

The first movie of the classic Sergio Leone trilogy (with For A Few Dollars More, and The Good The Bad and The Ugly), A Fistful Of Dollars stars Clint Eastwood in probably his most famous role as the ‘Man with No Name’. This image of the poncho wearing stranger riding into town is probably the first thing that most people think of when they consider these films, with Clint Eastwood as the quiet gun wielding wanderer.

The first of the ‘spaghetti westerns’ (so called because of the European filming locations) features Clint arriving at a small Western town, which is being terrorised by two rival gangs, who are controlling the town’s alcohol and guns. He sides with each of the gangs independently, unbeknown to the other, to ‘destroy from the inside’ so to speak.

Although this character is the star of the movie, one cannot really class him as ‘the hero’ as he is seen as a double crossing, lying cheat! Still, it’s Clint, and he’s cool so we don’t care!

Video

It is such a shame that MGM did not apply the same care and attention to each film in this series.

The only one of the three that benefits from an anamorphic transfer is the final movie – The Good The Bad and The Ugly. The other two has to suffer a widescreen letterbox ratio. Why not anamorphic on all three? These films are classics and certainly deserve the full monty. Perhaps they thought that these titles would sell well anyway, so why bother spending the extra cash in the DVD production?

The film has been restored from the original print, and although not anamorphic, the video quality is not unacceptable. The film itself gives a very ‘dusty’ image and this comes across well – while not overly colourful, the detail is relatively but not totally pin sharp. There was the odd dust speck visible at certain points throughout the movie however, and these become more noticeable on the wide panorama shots that Sergio Leone favoured.

The opening titles are mainly red, which would show up a lot of general imperfections, of which there are surprisingly few. No compression problems were noted to detract from the overall picture quality.

About 40 minutes into the film however, some vertical black lines were briefly seen.

Audio

The audio too has been cleaned up and restored, although it is still in glorious Dolby Digital Mono. No specially remixed 5.1 soundtrack unfortunately, and the sound track still contains several pops that seem to be worse during the second half of the film.

Ennio Morricone’s familiar musical score adds so much to the atmosphere and general ‘feel’ of the movie with its mainly woodwind instruments, and the audio restoration has removed virtually all background noise and hiss from the soundtrack.

All dialogue is dubbed, and you can clearly see that the only character speaking English is Eastwood! It is so badly done in parts that it can be a little distracting. Dialogue can thus sound quite ‘in your face’ as it is rather loud and brutish in parts. The dubbing of the 5 year old boy is something else though – he sounds like a 35 year old woman!

Features

The menus are animated, with a mostly static image of some saloon doors with Clint moving about behind them! Also a salamander is seen crawling up the woodwork!

The only extra you get is the original trailer. You do however get an 8 page printed booklet containing quite a lot of detail on the making of the movie.

For a movie as famous as this, you would have thought they could have found something interesting for the extras on the DVD. No such luck.

Conclusion

These were ground breaking movies of their day. The traditional westerns were lavish American efforts with a defined hero and loads of dialogue. These films portrayed a far more moody central character and were shot in a very different way to the others. Clint Eastwood’s career took off after these films, but although he has played many other characters notably Dirty Harry, it is for the ‘man with no name’ roles for which he will surely be best remembered.

Both this film and the subsequent For A Few Dollars More suffer non anamorphic transfers and a lack of any exciting extras. It certainly looks like MGM has invested most of their budget in the final movie, with its anamorphic transfer and extra restored footage.