Or Per
Qualche Dollari in Più, as they say in Italy. You want gunshot noises?
Really? One two
three four
five. There.
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Sergio Leone had two basic shots when filming actors -
a full-face close-up and a wide shot, as seen here. Note how Van Cleef
isn't quite in the center of the frame, thus giving the composition some
dynamic tension. Although it looks back-projected, the bit behind Van
Cleef is actually there - the lighting is a bit odd.
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1. For a Few Dollars More is the second film in the
Sergio Leone / Clint Eastwood 'spaghetti western' trilogy. It's the one
with the pocket watch, in fact.
In the same genre, Leone went on to make Once Upon a Time in the West,
and A Fistful of Dynamite (aka Duck, You Sucker), which
is possibly the only Western in which James Coburn plays a a motorcycle-riding
IRA explosives expert.
A Few Dollars More and its ilk helped knock the last nails into
the traditional, old-fashioned 'oater', and throughout the 70s Westerns
took a revisionist turn, with The Wild Bunch, Soldier Blue,
Little Big Man, The Long Riders et al downplaying the heroics
in favour of gritty realism. Perhaps the apotheosis of this was Robert
Altman's 1976 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, in which Paul Newman
and Burt Lancaster talked a lot. Unless you count Alexandro Jodorowsky's
demented El Topo, which was a Christ allegory. Some people read
Christ allegories into everything, from The Black Hole to Hardware
to King of New York.
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Great name, 'Altman'. Very Internet-aware, like 'Alt.man', as he was and
remains an Alt.film-maker, making Alt.films. I should be writing for the
Guardian, I really should.
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Eastwood himself skirted the boundaries of this trend, with High Plains
Drifter, Two Mules for Sister Sarah, and Pale Rider,
an early and not entirely successful go at doing an Unforgiven.
The Beguiled was probably the most unusual Eastwood Western. I
know this to be true because I have not seen it because it is not often
on television, just like Inchon, which was similarly unusual, apparently.
Then again, they don't show Funeral in Berlin very often either.
1. Having said that, although Few Dollars More is the second
of the three films, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly was actually
a prequel to Fistful of Dollars, which means that within the chronology
of the films, Dollars More is actually the last one. Of them.
Although, having said that, the films are only loosely linked.
Lee Van Cleef plays two different major roles in Good and More,
and Eastwood's 'Man with No Name' is called 'Joe' in Fistful and
'Manco' in For. He's more rebellious and moral in the latter.
9. There's a certain Star Wars-ness to For a Few Dollars
More. Both feature an old warrior and a young man and some desert
and guns. And a mysterious religion. And a villain who has a pocket watch.
Although we do not learn of Darth Vader's pocket watch in any of the Star
Wars films or books, that doesn't mean that it does not exist.
Actually, For a Few Dollars More isn't very much like Star Wars
at all. I'll try again later.
6. Spaghetti westerns themselves were produced by the Italian film
industry and usually filmed in Spain, which made a useful stand-in for
the southern bits of North America. Fistful of Dollars was the
western equivalent of Dr No and From Russia with Love, in
that, unlike the protagonist of Billy Joel's classic 1986 hit 'We didn't
start the fire', it did in fact start off the fire, or a fire,
not just fire in general but a specific fire, and that fire was made up
of other, even more violent and amoral imitators which presumably had
always been burning since the world had been turning, and it didn't try
to fight it because the Italian film industry does not care about copying.
The most famous of the filmic fires were the Sabata films, which
starred Lee Van Cleef as the titular character, the quick-off-the-mark,
long-running Django series, most notable for Django the Bastard,
an extremely brutal film with one of the greatest titles ever (apart from
The Great Hollywood Rape Slaughter and Microscopic Liquid Highway
to Oblivion or whatever it is called), and those ones with Klaus Kinski.
There were loads of them. And now there are none. Except for maybe El
Mariachi which was sort-of a Western. And bloody Wild Wild West
which was sort-of a competent, entertaining film, i.e. it was neither
of those things.
1b. Like the rest of its ilk, For a Few Dollars More does
not feature the Bangles in any way, shape, or form. And the title cannot
be expressed in Newspeak as I don't think Newspeak had a word for 'dollars'.
More to the point, it's dubbed, something which is quite noticeable given
that Leone had a thing for widescreen closeups of people's faces. Whether
Clint Eastwood delivered his lines in Italian, phonetically, or in English,
I can't tell and I don't know. Presumably, if Eastwood had delivered his
lines in English the sound people would have used his dialogue intact,
instead of dubbing it - unless, of course, none of the dialogue had actually
been recorded live.
Along with the voices, the gunshot noises are also particularly jarring,
as there seem to be only three of them (see the very top of this article
for examples).
The rampant looping actually works, in a way, as the film is so stylised
anyway a little bit of extra unreality doesn't go amiss. It would have
been even better if they had filmed it in black and white and then coloured
it in later, like Tron.
3. Ennio Morricone's musical score begs the question, "Is
there such a thing as an operatically-trained whistler, and if not, where
did Morricone find one?"
Other instruments include a gunshot noise, whips, chanting choirs, a pocket
watch, an electric guitar, and a jaw's harp. The effect should be startlingly
strange, and it is, but when I saw this for the first time as a child
I accepted the oddness without thinking too much of it, and now it sounds
unmistakably 'Western', despite the fact that real Western music was probably
a lot closer to Irish folk music than Morricone's bizarre, effective musique
concrete.
For whatever reason, the rest of his film scores are very conventional.
Perhaps Leone was pushing him really hard in a way that Brian De Palma,
director of Mission to Mars, was not.
7. As has been noted elsewhere, different directors treat gunshot
blasts with differing levels of lethality. In a Quentin Tarantino film,
if you are shot, you tend to die, whereas characters in a John Woo film
grimace a bit but seem otherwise okay. Somebody will e-mail me to say
where I remembered that little 'meme' from, and I'll get in trouble.
Leone's Westerns lean towards the former example, although with considerably
less blood. Unlike in, say, Robocop or The Wild Bunch, gunshot
wounds in a Leone film do not result in large pulped chunks of bloody
flesh bursting from gigantic exit wounds.
This is perhaps accurate, given that pistols of the period fired large,
slow-moving projectiles in the manner of a modern .45. Although such bullets
were not very useful at penetrating armour, their instability and sectional
density contributed to rapid deceleration when entering flesh, resulting
in fragmentation, tumbling, and a large wound cavity, often without an
exit wound at all.
Coupled with a lack of modern medical facilities, gunshot wounds in the
Old West almost-invariably produced permanent injury or death.
In the world of a Leone film gunshots are, like so many other things,
symbolic. When Eastwood shoots a villain, it is not the act of shooting
that concerns the film, it is the act of killing. We do not see people
shooting each other; we see people killing each other, a subtle difference
which is hard to express in words.
1. For a Few Dollars More was common on late-night ITV during
the 80s and 90s. It's the least famous of the trilogy, lacking the newness
of Fistful of Dollars or the epic bigness of The Good etc,
but it's my personal favourite. Fistful is the Western equivalent
of Goldfinger, in that there are a few iconic moments but the whole
is actually quite dull, whereas Good is the kind of film you respect
for its big epicness without actually watching it very often. For
is shorter and snappier, and fleshes out the central character a little
bit more than in the previous film. Unlike Eastwood's character, Lee Van
Cleef's General Mortimer has motivation and humanity, and although Eastwood
gets more screen time, and is slightly less monolithic than usual, Van
Cleef is more interesting. 'Being born with a beady-eyed sneer was the
luckiest thing that ever happened to me', Van Cleef is supposed to have
said.
Before making this film, Van Cleef had been in semi-retirement
after lots of small acting roles in films and television shows as a
disposable heavy. He worked as a part-time landscape
artist and was kept afloat with residuals, social security, and his wife,
who worked as a secretary for IBM. This film kickstarted his career, and
although Eastwood went on to be a considerably bigger star, this, The
Good etc, and the Sabata films guarantee Van Cleef
steady work until he died, in 1989.
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The man from Sparks eyes up the camera during a performance
of This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us.
Clint Eastwood looks nothing like the other guy from Sparks. And sounds
nothing like him. Truly, they are two different people.
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7. Along with Van Cleef, the film features Klaus Kinski as a henchman.
Kinski would get his own European western series - INSERT NAME HERE -
before going on to work extensively with Werner Herzog in a peculiar love
/ hate relationship that was almost as interesting as their films together,
and was documented in Herzog's My Best Fiend (sic).
Kinski was a one-off who would have been famous even if he hadn't been
in any films at all, and he also produced the seemingly-normal and hard-to-spell
Nastassja Kinski, thus proving that they don't necessarily fuck you up,
your Mum and Dad.
Believe it or not, Kinski was only one year younger than Lee Van
Cleef, being born in 1926 whilst Cleef was born in 1927. Kinski died
in 1991, and appears to have been a real-life equivalent to the
Replicants from 'Bladerunner', packing more into his life than any
five normal people.
2. Although the aforementioned dubbing and voice acting is often
eccentric, it actually fits the film, given that everything is so stylised.
Only the more extreme Blaxploitation films of the 70s approach the level
of unreality in For a Few Dollars More and its companions - each
character has a personal musical theme, and can silence lesser mortals
with a glance. Lee Van Cleef's aura is enough to turn hardened criminals
into jelly, and he can stand in plain sight and not be shot because he
is not meant to be shot. His mental strength keeps the bullets away.
Until someone with an equally-loud musical score comes along, that is.
7. The trailer mentions that the film is directed by Sergio Leone,
'better known as Bob Robertson'. From what I remember, both Eastwood and
Leone were psuedonymites in the trailer for Fistful of Dollars,
and presumably in the trailer for The etc the narrator apologises
for the confusion and resigns.
9. How did people in those days cope with owning a horse, whilst
also being cool and stylishly-dressed? With a car, you just fill it with
petrol and it goes, but horses must be more complex. Somehow I can't imagine
The Man with No Name taking his horse down to the local garage for grooming.
Did they wipe up the horse-droppings? Did they just leave them tethered
outside? Didn't the horses just bake in the sunlight? Did they feed them,
or did they get other people to do that?
9. At one point Lee Van Cleef lights a match on Klaus Kinski's
back, thus indicating that he isn't using safety matches (unless Kinski's
back is impregnated with sulphur, or whatever). The one fact I know about
safety matches is that they need to be dragged swiftly over a surface
containing a certain chemical, whereas friction matches just need to be
dragged swiftly over a rough surface.
9. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger almost two decades later, Eastwood
is almost totally inexpressive and is most effective when he's just standing
there looking mean. Leone once said that when a sculptor looked at a block
of stone, he saw a statue, whereas when Leone looked at Eastwood, he saw
a block of stone.
9. In fact, there's a certain Terminator 2-ness to For
a Few Dollars More. Both feature a pair of semi-supernatural killing
machines on a mission to... bugger it. They're completely different. 'On
a mission to make lots of money, although that's actually not true in
the case of Terminator 2' would have been the next line but I'll
stop here.
10. At one point, various villains size up a bank and measure the
amount of time it takes for some guards to make a circuit of the building.
They count the time in seconds. Given that this is the old west, how can
they be accurate? If they have watches, why aren't they using them? And
do guards really march around banks at a constant pace? Day in, day out?
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Klaus Kinski was once young.
Van Cleef's character has a lot of guns - presumably he downloaded the
Nato 3.5 mod for Rainbow Six : For a Few Dollars More. On
the right, his landlord is about to ask him if he has a dead cat in there,
to which he will respond 'Beat it, gringo', before going off to kill Sarah
Connor.
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11. Hair review: The villain's hair is wild and unkempt, because
he's a villainous bandit who lives rough. Eastwood's hair is very big, and
swoops back from his forehead, as in Where Eagles Dare.
Lee Van Cleef's hair is fairly unmemorable, as he wears a hat most of the
time and doesn't have much. But his clothes are fantastic. They're big and
flowing and black, like in The Matrix, but not made of leather. Lord
knows how he kept them clean. I can't picture the old west with laundrettes,
myself.
Klaus Kinski appears to have some kind of moptop, so presumably the Beatles
were riding some kind of half-forgotten primitive mental gene.
9. In fact, there's a certain Tremors-ness to For a Few
Dollars More. Both feature an old man and a young man and some desert
and burrowing sand-worms. Arse. I'm not very good at this.
8. Some of the music reminds me of 'Incantation', a pan-pipe band
from the early 80s who had one big hit, I have no idea what it was called,
and they were on Beggar's Banquet records, an indie record label from the
late-70s that was mostly famous for Gary Numan, whose record sales kept
the label afloat. As far as I know Beggar's Banquet still exist, but not
as an independent entity. I could be wrong.
I'll look up the Incantation song later on. It was on the radio a lot at
the time and went chuff-chuff-chuff. It coincided with the relaunch of Eagle,
the comic. Let's say 1982.
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On the left, Eastwood auditions for a role in Robert Altman's
Popeye. And on the right, an ugly man. There are more below. Sorry,
sir, if you're reading this, although you're probably dead by now.
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12. In reviews, much is made of the casual violence and general
amorality of Leone's films. Although cinematic brutality was nothing new
- the prohibition-era gangster films are surprisingly brutal even today
- the release of the first James Bond film, Dr No, in 1962, seemed
to usher in a new era where death was no great tragedy, it was just a
stylish joke. In Dr No there's a bit where Sean Connery's Bond
allows a villain to threaten him with a gun he knows is empty, after which
Bond guns him down in cold blood, and that's without mentioning the 'Shocking...
positively shocking' bit from Goldfinger or, for that matter, 'I
think he got the point' from Thunderball. The Bond films went down
well in Italy, and there are many Bondian moments in Leone's Westerns.
The main characters are all invincible, and although they are often captured,
they escape without too much trouble. They take more punishment, and they
don't wear expensive suits, but the general air of roguish invincibility
is there, and the Man with No Name character quickly became an archetype
- the anti-hero, a hero who isn't above fighting dirty, and does good
more from selfishness than a love of the community. Joseph Campbell wrote
a book about heroic archetypes, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
and I'm going to look it up on Amazon.com tomorrow to see if it's still
in print.
As for the films that Leone's Westerns influence, the list is endless
- John Woo's The Killer, almost every other modern Japanese action
film, The Matrix, and so on ad infinitum.
2. On the subject of roguish invincibility... Leone's films were
often called 'Horse Operas', as there's a level of unreality to them common
only to the highest of high opera. The film is determined to place 'coolness'
before credibility.
For example, in one sequence Eastwood enters a bar on the lookout for
a bounty, finds the man he is looking for, and apprehends him. A similar
scene in Robocop had the metal policeman walking through a crowd
before grabbing his quarry, taking all of twenty seconds - unmemorable
apart from an impressive pair of naked breasts, and further confirmation
(along with Basic Instinct) that director Paul Verhoven has never
been to a club with young people dancing.
In For a Few Yeah the following things happen:
a. Eastwood pauses to light a cigar, outside, in the rain. We don't
see his face until he does so. Why does he light his cigar in the rain?
Because it's stylish, that's why.
b. He walks up to the bad guy's table and grabs the cards that
are being used for poker. He proceeds to deal what I assume to be an extremely
favourable hand (I don't know a great deal about poker - pairs and threes
are good, almost everything else is bad), just to psyche out his quarry.
There's no indication that he's cheating - he deals a perfect hand, just
like that.
c. "I don't seem to recall the stake", "Your life",
or something like that. I bet that real-life murderers, half an hour after
killing somebody, suddenly think of a brilliant kiss-off line, before
smacking themselves in the forehead and saying "Doh! Why didn't I
think of that at the time!"
d. There is, surprisingly, a brawl. With fists. Not a gunfight.
e. Three hoods burst through the door behind Eastwood and ask him
to refrain from striking their companion. Eastwood turns and shoots all
three, before shooting his original target, without even bothering to
look at him. Presumably it's quite hard, in real life, to shoot people
without looking at them, but it happens quite often in Leone's Westerns.
It's a respect thing, I think. There's a bit with cigars later on in which
Lee Van Cleef strikes a match on Klaus Kinski's back, but you know this
because I went back up to the top and added a bit that you've already
read.
Later on Eastwood even breaks an egg stylishly and lights several more
cigars with aplomb. 'Cheroots', I believe they are called.
564. The villain is very villainous. He kills lots of people and
growls a lot. And laughs. And he's quite swarthy. His personal musical
score includes a church organ. He needs to smoke a cigarette after killing
somebody, thus suggesting the old "sex = death" equation thing
that gets psychologist and film theorists really excited.
9. In fact, there's a certain The Corruptor-ness to For
a Few Dollars More. Both films feature Chow Yun-Fat and Mark Wahlberg
and have a car chase, and a song by Garbage on the soundtrack. What happened
to Garbage? Are they 'resting'?
10. Just like the harmonica in Once Upon a Time in America,
the pocket watch carried by both the villain and the Lee Van Cleef character
is very symbolic. It's this which lifts the film from being a superior,
albeit silly, action film, into a level of barmy greatness. The final
gunfight, timed to one of the watches as it runs down, is a strangely
affecting meditation on mortality and revenge, and was reused at the end
of The Good, The Bad, I'm not typing it again, I'm almost done.
I honestly can't think of anything else to say. If I was being paid money
I would turn this into a coherent article with a point and everything,
but I find that a series of numbered points are quicker and easier to
manage. There's no faff, no chaff, and no... wrath.
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More ugly, ugly people.
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There's a definite subtext going on here. Note that although
Van Cleef's character has a large collection of guns, they all sound the
same.
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