a fistful of dollars (sergio leone, 1964)

The first of the so-called Dollars Trilogy ... Sergio Leone didn't intend them to be a trilogy, and perhaps nowadays we'd call it a franchise, with Leone directing Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name. Many of the trademarks of Leone's style are here ... it's hard to miss the close-ups. It's easily the shortest ... the films got progressively longer, and A Fistful of Dollars is more than half-an-hour shorter than the next in the series, For a Few Dollars More. It's a decent movie, if not up to the standards of the real classic of the three, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The plot of A Fistful of Dollars is reminiscent of that for Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and Kurosawa successfully sued Leone's company. (The irony is that Yojimbo's plot is very similar to Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest.) A settlement was eventually achieved, but the release of A Fistful of Dollars in the United States was delayed for three years. Perhaps this is one reason a trilogy is assumed, for by the time the dust cleared in the lawsuit, Leone had finished the other two films, which were all released in the States in the same year (1967).

While Leone had an interesting career, more than anything, this film began the establishment of Clint Eastwood as an iconic actor in film history. Of course, he later became an Oscar-winning director, using much the same style of directing that he did in his acting: minimalist.