Happy new year everbody! #newyearnewfilms
A Man with No Name arrives in San Miguel, a town near the Mexican-American border. He learns the depressing village is controlled by two crime families, the Baxters and the Rojos. The Man is a expert shot and cunning, but has no money. For gain, he decides to play these two families against each other by fabricating a conflict. He then lends his services to each household, pocketing their money for information and favors. This seems fun and rather easy for him, until he learns that Ramón Rojo tore a local family apart when he abducted Marisol (the mother) to live as his prisoner. Seeing a young boy crying for his mother flipped a switch in the Man and sent him on an unlikely crusade to rescue the family and bring peace to San Miguel.
*cue “The Mandalorian” Theme*
“A Fistful of Dollars” is the first film in the “Man with No Name Trilogy”. I actually started 2019 with the third film, “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly”, which I loved. While the films feature the connective tissue of Clint Eastwood's “Man with No Name” character, they seem to stand apart and three distinct stories.
The film features Sergio Leone’s distinct, highly-dramatic visual style and Ennio Morricone’s blaring score; each are clearly less-developed in this film than in the third film, but I still ate it up. I find myself both annoyed and impressed with the nature of dubbing in Spaghetti Westerns—annoyed because of the lack of synchrony and impressed that the soundtrack is built entirely in post-production, like an animated film. This lack of polish, when combined with the gruff characters and hyper-violent sequences, gives the film a punk-rock essence but still doesn’t feel like a finished product. Other than that, Eastwood’s character and the film’s story are superb and I loved both, especially the ’climactic reveal’. Then again, they’re both straight rip-offs of another film, which I will watch next week—Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo”.