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A Fistful of Dollars
Directed by	Sergio Leone
Produced by	Arrigo Colombo Giorgio Papi
Written by	A. Bonzzoni Victor Andrés Catena Sergio Leone Jaime Comas Gil
Starring	Clint Eastwood Marianne Koch Gian Maria Volontè José Calvo Joseph Egger Antonio Prieto Mario Brega Wolfgang Lukschy Sieghardt Rupp Benny Reeves Peter Fernandez
Music by	Ennio Morricone
Distributed by	United Artists Unidis
Release date(s)	December 10, 1964 January 18, 1967
Running time	99 min.
Language	English Italian Spanish
Budget	$200,000 US (est.)
Followed by	For a Few Dollars More
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari in Italy and officially on-screen in the U.S. and UK as simply Fistful of Dollars) is a 1964 film directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood. Released in the United States in 1967, it initiated the popularity of the Spaghetti western film genre. It was followed by For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), also starring Eastwood. Collectively, the films are commonly known as "The Dollar(s) Trilogy". This film was inspired by the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo (1961). In the United States, the United Artists publicity campaign referred to Eastwood's character in all three films as the "Man With No Name".

As one of the first Spaghetti Westerns to be released in the United States, many of the European cast and crew took on American stage names. These included Leone himself ("Bob Robertson"), Gian Maria Volontè ("John Wells"), and composer Ennio Morricone ("Dan Savio").

A Fistful of Dollars and its two sequels were shot in the Spanish province Almería.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Cast 3 Production 4 Music 5 Sources 6 In popular culture 7 See also 8 External links

A new type of hero to Hollywood cinema, a Man With No Name (Eastwood), arrives at a little Mexican border town named San Miguel. He is quickly introduced to the feud between two mafioso style families bitterly laying claim to the town: the Rojos brothers, consisting of Don Miguel (the eldest and nominally in charge), Esteban (the most head-strong) and Ramón (the most capable and intelligent, played by Gian Maria Volontè, who would go on to reappear in For a Few Dollars More as the psychopathic El Indio), and the Baxter family, of which John Baxter is sheriff of the town.

Morally ambiguous, the Stranger quickly spies an opportunity to make a "fistful of dollars" and decides to play both families against each other, performing tasks for both while at the same time subversively inciting them to fight. Eventually he ends up rescuing Ramón's prisoner and mistress, Marisol (Marianne Koch) and reunites her with her own family. Together again, she and her family are told to flee the town by the stranger.

The Rojos capture and torture the stranger after this betrayal, but the stranger soon escapes. The Rojos brothers set the Baxter stronghold afire, thinking that they are harboring the stranger, and kill the entire household, including John Baxter, his wife, and his son. The Man With No Name escapes with the help of the coffin maker Piripero (Joseph Egger, who would also reappear in the sequel) and returns to town to engage the Rojos and their cronies in a dramatic duel. In doing so he rescues the local innkeeper and his friend, Silvanito. The Man With No Name kills the Rojos, including Ramón, and rides away before the governments of America and Mexico arrive at San Miguel.

Actor	Role
Clint Eastwood	The Man With No Name
Marianne Koch	Marisol
Gian Maria Volontè	Ramón Rojo (as John Wells)
Wolfgang Lukschy	John Baxter (as W. Lukschy)
Sieghardt Rupp	Esteban Rojo (as S. Rupp)
Joseph Egger	Piripero (as Joe Edger)
Antonio Prieto	Don Miguel Rojo
José Calvo	Silvanito (as Jose Calvo)
Margarita Lozano	Consuelo Baxter (as Margherita Lozano)
Daniel Martín	Julián
Benito Stefanelli	Rubio (as Benny Reeves)
Mario Brega	Chico (as Richard Stuyvesant)
Bruno Carotenuto	Antonio Baxter (as Carol Brown)
Aldo Sambrell	Rojo gang member (as Aldo Sambreli)

A Fistful of Dollars was at first intended by Leone to reinvent the western genre in Italy. In his opinion the American westerns of the mid to late nineteen-fifties had become stagnant, overly-preachy and unbelievable and because of this Hollywood began to gear down on the production of such films. Leone knew that there was still a significant market in Europe for westerns yet also realised that Italian audiences of the time were beginning to laugh at the stock conventions of both the American westerns and pastiche work of Italian directors hiding under pseudonyms. His approach was to take the grammar of the Italian film and transpose it into a western setting. Clint Eastwood was not the first actor who was approached to play the main character. Originally, Sergio Leone intended Henry Fonda to play the role of The Man With No Name. However, the production company could not afford to engage a major Hollywood star. Hereupon, Leone offered Charles Bronson the part who, in turn, declined the role arguing the script was too bad. Both Fonda and Bronson would later star in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West.

A Fistful of Dollars became the first film to exhibit Leone's famously distinctive style of visual direction. This was influenced by both John Ford's cinematic landscaping and the Japanese method of distension, perfected by Akira Kurosawa. Leone wanted an operatic feel to his western and so there are many examples of extreme close-ups on the faces of different characters that function like the arias in a traditional opera. They focus our attention on a single person and that countenance becomes both the landscape and dialogue of the scene. This is quite different to the Hollywood use of faces where the close-up was treated a reaction shot, usually to a piece of dialogue that had just been spoken. Leone's close-ups are more akin to portraits, often lit with Renaissance type lighting effects and are pieces of design in their own right.

The film's music was written by Ennio Morricone, credited as Dan Savio. Morricone recalled Leone requesting him to write "Dimitri Tiomkin music" for the film. The trumpet theme is similar to Tiomkin's "DeGuella" theme from Rio Bravo (that was called Un Dollaro D'onore in Italy) whilst the opening title whistling music recalls Tiomkin's use of whistling in his Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Though not used in the completed film, Peter Tevis recorded lyrics to Morricone's theme for the film. As a movie tie-in to the American release, United Artists Records released a different set of lyrics to Morricone's theme called Lonesome One by Little Anthony and the Imperials.

Although the film was advertised in trailers as "the first film of its kind", the plot and to an extent the cinematography was based almost entirely on Akira Kurosawa's film Yojimbo (written by Kurosawa and Ryuzo Kikushima), and was the subject of a successful lawsuit by Yojimbo's producers.

Kurosawa remained insistent that he receive compensation. He wrote Leone: "It is a very fine film, but it is my film."[1]

British critic Sir Christopher Frayling identifies three principal sources:

"Partly derived from Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo, partly from Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest (1929), but most of all from Carlo Goldoni's eighteenth-century play Servant of Two Masters..." (The BFI Companion to the Western, 1988)

Sergio Leone has cited these alternate sources in his defence. He claims a thematic debt, for both Fistful and Yojimbo, to Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters - the basic premise of the protagonist playing two camps off against each other. For Leone, this rooted the origination of Fistful/Yojimbo in European, and specifically Italian culture. Obviously, it can be claimed that Leone has a vested interest in doing this - distancing the accusations of his stealing Kurosawa's ideas, if those ideas were already borrowed from an Italian classic.

The Servant of Two Masters plot can also be seen in Dashiell Hammett's 1929 detective novel Red Harvest. The Continental Op hero of the novel is, significantly, a man without name. Leone himself believed that Red Harvest, in turn, had influenced Yojimbo.

"Kurosawa's Yojimbo was inspired by an American novel of the serie-noire so I was really taking the story back home again." (Spaghetti Westerns, Frayling, 1981)

Leone also referenced numerous American Westerns in the film, most notably Shane (1953) and My Darling Clementine (1946).

A Fistful of Dollars, although not the first 'spaghetti western', it was indeed the first to be distinctively Italian and as such was immensely influential and is referenced heavily elsewhere in popular culture:

• Back to the Future trilogy: in Back to the Future Part II, a short scene where the millionaire Biff in his hotel casino jacuzzi is seen watching Eastwood's character survive the final gunfight with the armour plating. This foreshadows the scene in Back to the Future Part III where Marty duplicates the scene (in the same costume, and after having told locals his name was 'Clint Eastwood').
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: in the episode "A Fistful of Datas", Worf and Troi are trapped in a holodeck western until they play it out to the end of the story. Meanwhile, each of the characters was replaced by a likeness of Data. There is an homage to the iron plate when Worf rigs a makeshift deflector shield.
• The title of the movie was parodied by the Futurama episode "A Fishful of Dollars", and The Comic Strip Presents: A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques.
• In one of the Halloween episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander Harris wore a costume similar to, and based on, the attire that Clint Eastwood's "man with no name" wore in the spaghetti westerns in which he starred.
• In the video-game Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, after a number of saves the character Para-Medic talks to Naked Snake about the movie, as the game is set in 1964.
• The band The Mars Volta uses themes from A Fistful of Dollars at their live shows.
• The movie Last Man Standing (1996) starring Bruce Willis is a version of both Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars.
• The American version of the videogame Ape Escape 3 features a stage set in a Wild West town, and the movie the monkeys are filming there is called A Fistful Of Bananas.
• In the second part of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, the theme music of the film is used after Budd shoots the Bride with two rounds of rock-salt and disarms her, shortly after this he insults and then drugs her unconscious.
• Towards the end of a story in Animaniacs where Chicken Boo masquerades as "the man with no personality", one of the characters produces "a fistful of feathers", followed immediately by another character producing "a few feathers more".
• In the edited English-language edition of the original Dragon Ball anime series, when Bulma and Goku were attempting to catch Oolong the shape shifting pig, who had taken the form of a fish and jumped into a river, Goku took advantage of the greedy pig's nature and baited a fishing pool with money. Oolong immediately took the bait. When Goku reeled him in, Oolong had the money in his mouth and Goku exclaimed (in the English translation) "Look!! A fish full of dollars!".
• The sketch comedy film Kentucky Fried Movie contains within it a short film spoofing Enter the Dragon which is titled "A Fistful of Yen".
• An episode of The Paul Hogan Show features a parody sketch called "A Fistful of Ravioli."
• Stephen King has credited the trilogy with inspiring the atmosphere of his novel The Gunslinger.
• In the music video for the Velvet Revolver song She Builds Quick Machines, Scott Weiland, the singer, walks down a street of a small town similar to the town in the movie, wearing the attire of the Man with No Name.
• Alternative rock band, Fist Full of Yen is a spoof on the movie's title.

• For a Few Dollars More
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• Man with No Name
• Spaghetti Western

• Title theme on YouTube
• A Fistful of Dollars at the Internet Movie Database
• A Fistful of Dollars at the Spaghetti Western Database
• Fistful-of-Leone.com
• Sergio Leone Web Board
• Clint Eastwood.net
• Clint Eastwood Forums
• A Comparison of Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing

v • d • e Films directed by Sergio Leone
Il Colosso di Rodi • A Fistful of Dollars • For a Few Dollars More • The Good, the Bad and the Ugly • Once Upon a Time in the West • A Fistful of Dynamite • Once Upon a Time in America

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