The Western Classic For A Few Dollars More Starring Clint Eastwood Reviewed

Everybody’s seen The Good the Bad and the Ugly, but have you taken time to see the other films in the Dollars Trilogy, as well? Namely, For a Few Dollars More. Each film in the series has its own role to play in cinema history and in the trilogy. The Good the Bad and the Ugly is an all time classic and really broke spaghetti westerns through to an international audience, Fistful of Dollars, based on Yojimbo, was the one that really invented and defined the genre, and For a Few Dollars More was, without a doubt, the coolest film of the trilogy. If you still haven’t seen it, put it on your queue the next time you login to your movie download service.

The movie is really defined by all the little cool moments. While The Good the Bad and the Ugly was really defined by Eli Wallach’s incredible performance as the complex, dirty and amoral character of Tuco, and Fistful of Dollars was the one that really started the whole genre off and defined its style, For a Few Dollars More is the one with all the coolest stuff, like Lee Van Cleef browsing through his selection of dozens of guns whenever he needs to shoot someone, or Clint Eastwood beating a guy up with just one hand.

He uses a musical pocket watch every time he kills one of his victims. When the music stops, he draws and fires. The story surrounding this watch is interesting, too, forming the heart of the subplot involving Lee Van Cleef.

Cleef and Eastwood make a great team as the heroes. Cleef plays Colonel Mortimer, a former Civil War hero turned bounty hunter, while Eastwood plays, again, the Man With No Name. This film is, chronologically within the world of the film, the final act, even though it was released second (The Good the Bad and the Ugly serves as a prequel to Fistful of Dollars), and Eastwood has had enough violence and wants to retire, but still plays the Kid role to Cleef’s older, wiser bounty hunter.

The two have one of the all time great man-movie bonding scenes, shooting each other’s hats off and upping the stakes with each shot in order to impress and intimidate the other. They wind up forming a partnership that begins as uneasy and quickly becomes almost affectionate. A far cry from the loveless working relationship Eastwood shared with Eli Wallach in The Good the Bad and the Ugly.

There really isn’t another film in almost any genre outside of the musical that uses music quite as effectively as this film. The pocket watch plays a little melody written by Ennio Morricone, and in the finale, the melody is layered into an epic orchestrated piece that really builds an incredible amount of tension before anyone draws a pistol and finally fires.

Sergio Leone has made some of the greatest contributions to film, and his career was cut sadly short just before Stalingrad, the WWII film which might have been his Magnum Opus.

The only thing the film is missing is Eli Wallach, who’s turn as Tuco in The Good the Bad and the Ugly may well have been the finest performance of any in the pantheon of Italian western films.

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