For a Few Dollars More (1965)

It takes some effort to find examples of exceptional cinema, the kind of movie that you can savour and debate the merits of with your buds long after the final credits roll. Exceptional works can pop up almost anywhere – Joe tracks down all kinds of interesting genre flicks, Nick will watch anything from anywhere from anytime with the same results. I tend to find my gems in foreign crime flicks and the past. Somewhat by coincidence, both Joe and Nick suggested revisiting the Blu-ray versions of Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name Trilogy – Joe because he’d just watched them and Nick because he was suggesting Westerns are good things to watch if you’re sick… and holy cow, am I sick.

“Unusually good” is about the best description I can muster up for Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More (1965). This was the followup to Leone and Massimo Dallamano’s Fistful of Dollars (from the year before) and it’s better in every way. The wide-screen cinematography is pushed a little bit more to the edges, the characteristic close-ups are used more consistently and more successfully, and the equally characteristic wide shots, making the Spanish desert look hot, desperate and dangerous. The opening shots, coming hard on heels of a terrific title card sequence, finds a tiny speck of a man in the midst of big desert valley. A characteristically over-the-top gunshot shatters the silence and the lone rider slumps off his horse. A thing of beauty.

Leone’s aesthetic in For a Few Dollars More shouldn’t work, but it does. The film is a collection of choreographed exaggerations where everything is just a little too big and a little to garish to all fit up on the screen at the same time. What’s more, you can even point to the things that aren’t working and then somehow, they all do. It’s completely bizarre. It’s in this film, also, that Leone learned how to shoot close-ups in CinemaScope. You’re not supposed to do that at all, of course; it’s one of the noted drawbacks of the format, but Leone changed how ‘Scope could look with this one.

This same evolution can be traced in Ennio Morricone’s stunning score. The hard part was, of course, already done in Fistful of Dollars where Morricone had basically reinvented a new idiom in which to express “The West” musically. For a Few Dollars More he employs the same twanging, jangling guitars and a tonality just a little bit over here to the side of normal music. A simple, chiming melody that plays on a pocket watch becomes one of the most haunting pieces of music I can recall.

Having been back to re-watch The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly once or twice in the last decade, I can’t say I’ve given the first two “Dollar” films their due until Joe suggested I rewatch them a couple of weeks ago. Sure enough, hiding in plain sight, but obscured by the two acknowledged Leone masterpieces that followed it, is an oddly-unheralded bit of filmmaking genius called For a Few Dollars More. On reflection, I wonder if the movie titles themselves were a bit of an inside joke to Sergio and Company;

…Give me a fistful of dollars and I’ll make you this, but  for a few dollars more….