Posted on 10/12/2025 11:08:47 AM PDT by Twotone
Perhaps because it came out the year I was born, I have a hard time imagining a world without A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone and the spaghetti western. It's easy to forget how much this single film changed not just the western but the movie hero, whose credibility forever afterward came with stubble and unkempt hair, abundant sarcasm and an implacably bad attitude. It became an article of faith that the only honest way to look back at the world arrayed against the hero was through a squint.
By the time I actually understood what a western was, Leone had completed the three films in what would be called the Dollars or the Man with No Name trilogy, though he had no plan to make a series when he finished A Fistful of Dollars. In the meantime the spaghetti western genre had exploded and Leone's films would affect the style and substance of westerns forever afterward. The '60s had begun with John Ford's elegiac The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but it would end with Sam Peckinpah's brutal The Wild Bunch; something had obviously changed.
The effect of A Fistful of Dollars in North America was delayed by the fact that it wasn't released officially here until over two years after it came out in Italy, when all three of the Dollars films would come out a few months apart in 1967. A publicity campaign by United Artists landed the films in America as a single artistic statement – a fait accompli that they certainly weren't when Leone began production on his ultra low budget western in Spain in the spring of 1964.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
The original three Clint’s spaghetti westerns were great, I still think the non spaghetti The Outlaw Josey Wales was better .
That’s right, sure did.
👍
The venerable Fonda as a villian! ...as he also was in Firecreek with Jimmy Stewart.
Agreed. Grew up on him.
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