Federico Fellini is often credited as "the Greatest Italian Director." For me, however, Sergio Leone earned those laurels. More than deSica or Fellini, Leone's movies were Italian to the core: Grandiose, operatic, melodramatic, full of vendetta and vengeance. The irony is that Leone's most memorable movies took place not in Rome, the Abruzzi mountains or Sicily, but in the Old West.With his epic "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "The Man With No Name" trilogy, Leone not only resuscitated the Western genre, but set a new standard. His first Western, "A Fistful of Dollars," was basically a retelling of Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo"; a Samurai tale transplanted south of the border in old Mexico. With "For a Few Dollars More," Leone really opens up as a screenwriter and director. Gone is the claustrophobic town of "Fistful," replaced by the full sweep of the great American Southwest (for which the drier regions of Spain provide a reasonable facsimile for those of us who know that Tucumcari is hardly so dry and El Paso nary as mountainous).
Leone also begins staking out his territory as director with this one, too. "For a Few Dollars More" bears more traces of Cecil B. deMille than Kurosawa, as Leone starts trending toward an epic production that reaches full fruition in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and "Once Upon A Time in the West." However, Leone's *style* of Western could never be confused with John Ford -- rather, it hearkens back to the more violent moments found in Westerns such as "Winchester '73" (Anthony Mann), "High Noon" (Fred Zinnemann) and "Rio Bravo" (Howard Hawks), and looks forward to the gritty, realistic violence from directors influenced by Leone, such as Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
"For a Few Dollars More" is a tale of three men, and their respective missions: Indio, played by the great Gian Maria Volonte, is a sadistic, psychotic, killer and bank robber. His performance reminds me of Toshiro Mifune's best roles -- big, tough, and foreboding. Clint Eastwood plays one of the men who try to hunt Indio down, a bounty killer named "Manco," reprising his role from "Fistful" as a mercenary for hire who plays by rules from his own book. But it's Lee Van Cleef as Colonel Douglas Mortimer who really steals the show. If you think Clint's squinty-eyed visage fills men with fear, then you ain't seen Van
Cleef -- his eyes are steely, intelligent, intense; you can tell when Mortimer has somebody's number that he isn't bluffing.
The opening scenes set up the story beautifully: Indio and his gang are planning a big robbery at the Bank of El Paso and both Manco and Mortimer have set out to round up the bad guys. After a couple barroom scenes establishing the bounty killers' credentials as ice-cold killers, Manco and Mortimer pair off in a battle of wits, a showdown during nightfall in the streets of El Paso.
After proving to each other what deadly accurate shots they are, Mortimer proposes they team up to go after Indio and his gang, backed up by the realistic observation: "When two hunters go after the same prey, they usually wind up shooting each other in the back."
So working "one on the inside" (Clint) and "one on the outside" (Van Cleef), the two manouever Indio and his gang after they dynamite the bank and steal the safe. The scenes on the streets of Agua Caliente (Spanish for "Hot Water," which Manco and Mortimer will soon be in) are eerily silent. Indio' gang has free rein in the town, the hoofbeats of their horses a harbinger to windows slamming shut on the whitewashed adobe houses.
Though Clint plays a wise guy, over the course of the movie he discovers wisdom beyond his own years in the person of Mortimer. Clint may be cool, but never as cool-headed as Van Cleef, who sees through all of Clint's ruses and double-crosses. Van Cleef rides them out, cutting Clint way too much slack it seems. But by the final scene, a showdown between Mortimer and Indio, all the patience and faith Mortimer has invested in Manco pay off. For the showdown is rigged entirely in Indio's favour, but -- having learned a thing or two at the feet of a real man of integrity -- Manco shows up to make the playing field even for Mortimer. It's a beautiful scene, to see that Manco has dropped his cynical pose and accepted Col. Mortimer as a father figure.
The quintessential Leone Western (I won't degrade it by calling it a "Spaghetti Western"), "For a Few Dollars More" is filmed and cut a lot tighter than "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," though it still comes out over two hours long. Ennio Morricone's soundtrack really melds seamlessly with the action onscreen. Morricone was to Leone as the great composer Bernard Herrmann was to Alfred Hitchcock: Leone's movies were only 60 per cent complete before Morricone laid down tracks just as pungent and larger-than-life as the story and actors on the screen. Today's composers, who are so busy trying to write "understated" scores for today's boring fare, could learn a thing or two from the beautifully bombastic Morricone.
The DVD widescreen presentation is much better than the fullscreen VHS. However, the colours are pretty washed out. I understand that MGM/UA has restored "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"; I hope "For a Few Dollars More" is slated as well for restoration or preservation.
