For a Few Dollars More (1965)
Eastwood reprises his Fistful of Dollars man with no name character, but this time both he and VanCleef, playing a Civil War veteran, are bounty hunters out to capture El Indio, a ruthless bank robber and gang leader. As first advisories, the two form a competitive partnership that ebbs and flows throughout the film. Some have read a gay subtext into the relationship through Leone’s interesting camera placements and subtle dialogue cues, but for me the relationship is more akin to a classic father/son dynamic like John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Hawks’ Red River (’48). The richness of the familiar relationship between the men was noted by Leone as a surrogate for his loneliness as an only child, but the relationship can be looked at as a template for buddy action/comedies for future films.
Leone really dials in his signature visual style with For a Few Dollars More, emphasizing his use of ‘big heads’, that is a foreground close up of a man’s head or face, with background action or characters, creating immense three dimensionality and depth of image, as well as skewed perspective. Leone also went one step further in utilizing extreme close ups to allow tension to build, intercutting between characters and props, like guns, to enhance the expectation of violent explosions. By combining extremes in image creation, including incredibly panoramic long shots, capturing as much topography of the Spanish desert as possible, Leone could manipulate the viewer emotionally, forcing their gaze to search for meaning within the frame, all without using dialogue. Once again shooting without sound, as was the Italian practice, Leone built his frames first with image, then layered on sound and music to further draw in the viewer, adding meaning to the wordless pictures. Even while he continued to manipulate character and story, Leone built upon A Fistful of Dollars with more dynamic and rich imagery, bringing a new immediacy to his deliberately paced cat and mouse game between the bounty hunters and the outlaws.
With his maturing visual style, Leone also took the time to enrich and subvert traditional characters, most notably bad guy El Indio, played by Italian stage actor Gian Maria Volonte. In a performance that would in some ways foreshadow Eli Wallach’s Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly the following year, Volonte performs in stark contrast to Eastwood’s stoic and silent man with no name, talking when he should be quiet and boisterously bragging and threatening. Where El Indio differs from Tuco, however, in in his sadistic tendencies, his blatant drug use and his complete lack of moralality, loyalty or conscience. He’s not only Ugly, he’s evil, but he also talks too much, just like Tuco.
Further adding to the maturing storytelling is the inclusion of dreamlike flashbacks and the incremental exposition of certain characters, creating additional layers to the film. Both El Indio and Van Cleef’s Colonel Mortimer remember a shared experience in different ways and Leone only exposes the personal impact in the final reel, shattering allusions and exposing the true nature of grief and the viewer’s perceptions. In allowing Mortimer to evolve, Leone again plays on the traditional Western convention that only the hero can evolve, leaving Eastwood’s character to not only collect the dead bodies for his bounty, but to stop and grab the cash as well. He remains static and unknown, yet centers the film, unlike any traditional hero in American Westerns.
Leone really dials in his signature visual style with For a Few Dollars More, emphasizing his use of ‘big heads’, that is a foreground close up of a man’s head or face, with background action or characters, creating immense three dimensionality and depth of image, as well as skewed perspective. Leone also went one step further in utilizing extreme close ups to allow tension to build, intercutting between characters and props, like guns, to enhance the expectation of violent explosions. By combining extremes in image creation, including incredibly panoramic long shots, capturing as much topography of the Spanish desert as possible, Leone could manipulate the viewer emotionally, forcing their gaze to search for meaning within the frame, all without using dialogue. Once again shooting without sound, as was the Italian practice, Leone built his frames first with image, then layered on sound and music to further draw in the viewer, adding meaning to the wordless pictures. Even while he continued to manipulate character and story, Leone built upon A Fistful of Dollars with more dynamic and rich imagery, bringing a new immediacy to his deliberately paced cat and mouse game between the bounty hunters and the outlaws.
With his maturing visual style, Leone also took the time to enrich and subvert traditional characters, most notably bad guy El Indio, played by Italian stage actor Gian Maria Volonte. In a performance that would in some ways foreshadow Eli Wallach’s Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly the following year, Volonte performs in stark contrast to Eastwood’s stoic and silent man with no name, talking when he should be quiet and boisterously bragging and threatening. Where El Indio differs from Tuco, however, in in his sadistic tendencies, his blatant drug use and his complete lack of moralality, loyalty or conscience. He’s not only Ugly, he’s evil, but he also talks too much, just like Tuco.
Further adding to the maturing storytelling is the inclusion of dreamlike flashbacks and the incremental exposition of certain characters, creating additional layers to the film. Both El Indio and Van Cleef’s Colonel Mortimer remember a shared experience in different ways and Leone only exposes the personal impact in the final reel, shattering allusions and exposing the true nature of grief and the viewer’s perceptions. In allowing Mortimer to evolve, Leone again plays on the traditional Western convention that only the hero can evolve, leaving Eastwood’s character to not only collect the dead bodies for his bounty, but to stop and grab the cash as well. He remains static and unknown, yet centers the film, unlike any traditional hero in American Westerns.
