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For a Few Dollars More

For the song by Smokie, see For a Few Dollars More (song).

For a Few Dollars More (Italian: Per qualche dollaro in più) is a 1965 Spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone. It stars Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef as bounty hunters and Gian Maria Volonté as the primary villain.[3] German actor Klaus Kinski plays a supporting role as a secondary villain. The film was an international co-production between Italy, West Germany, and Spain.[4][5] The film was released in the United States in 1967, and is the second installment of what is commonly known as the Dollars Trilogy.

For a Few Dollars More
Italian theatrical release poster
Directed bySergio Leone
Screenplay byLuciano Vincenzoni
Sergio Leone
Sergio Donati (uncredited)
Story by
  • Sergio Leone
  • Fulvio Morsella
Produced byAlberto Grimaldi
Starring
CinematographyMassimo Dallamano
Edited by
Music byEnnio Morricone
Production
companies
Produzioni Europee Associati (PEA)
Arturo González Producciones Cinematográficas
Constantin Film
Distributed byPEA (Italy)
United Artists (US & UK)
Release date
  • 30 December 1965 (1965-12-30) (Italy)
Running time
132 minutes
CountriesItaly
West Germany
Spain
LanguagesItalian
English
Budget$600,000[1][2]
Box office$25.5 million

Plot

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The man that many call Manco is a bounty hunter, a profession shared by a former army officer, Colonel Douglas Mortimer. They separately learn that a ruthless, cold-blooded bank robber, "El Indio", has been broken out of prison by his gang, who slaughtered all but one of his jailers. While Indio is murdering the family of the man who had captured him, he is shown to carry a musical pocket watch taken from a woman who had shot herself while he was raping her after he had murdered her husband. The incident has haunted Indio, and he smokes an addictive drug to cloud his memory.

Indio plans to rob the Bank of El Paso, which has a disguised safe containing "almost a million dollars." Manco arrives in the town and becomes aware of Mortimer, who had arrived earlier. He sees Mortimer deliberately insult the hunchback Wild, who is reconnoitering the bank. Manco confronts Mortimer, and after the two have studied each other, each ascertaining that the other will not back down, they decide to work together. Mortimer persuades Manco to join Indio's gang and "get him between two fires." Manco achieves this by freeing a friend of Indio from prison despite Indio's suspicions.

Indio sends Manco and three others to rob the bank in nearby Santa Cruz. Manco guns down the three bandits and sends a false telegraphic alarm to rouse the El Paso sheriff and his posse, who ride to Santa Cruz. The gang blasts the wall at the rear of the El Paso bank and steals the safe, but is unable to open it. Groggy is angry when Manco is the only one to return from Santa Cruz, but Indio accepts Manco's version of events thanks to Mortimer having given Manco a convincing neck wound. The gang ride to the small border town of Agua Caliente where Mortimer, who had anticipated their destination, is waiting. Wild recognizes Mortimer, forcing a showdown that results in the hunchback's death, whereafter Mortimer offers his services to Indio to crack open the safe without using explosives. Indio locks the money in a strongbox and says the loot will be divided after a month.

Manco and Mortimer break into the strongbox and hide the money, only to be caught immediately afterward and beaten up. Mortimer has secured the strongbox lock, however, and Indio believes that the money is still there. Later that night, Indio instructs his lieutenant, Niño, to use a knife belonging to Cuchillo to kill the man guarding Manco and Mortimer. Once Niño has freed the prisoners, Indio reveals that he knew they were bounty hunters all along, and executes Cuchillo for supposedly betraying the gang. Indio orders the rest of his men to bring back Manco and Mortimer, hoping they will all kill each other and he and Niño can split the money just between themselves. However, Groggy realizes the scheme, and after killing Niño, forces Indio to open the strongbox, which is found to be empty.

Eventually, after he and Manco kill the bandits, Mortimer calls out Indio while revealing his full name. Mortimer shoots Groggy as he runs for cover, but is disarmed by Indio, who plays the pocket watch while challenging the bounty hunter to regain his weapon and kill him when the music ends. As the music ends, the same tune begins from an identical pocket watch that Manco had pilfered from Mortimer. Manco gives his gunbelt and pistol to Mortimer, saying, "Now we start." When the music ends, Mortimer shoots first, killing Indio.

Mortimer retrieves the watch from Indio's hand and Manco remarks on Mortimer's resemblance to the woman in the vignette photo inside the watch cover. Mortimer reveals that he is her brother (father in the Spanish dubbing), and with his revenge complete, declines his share of the bounty and leaves. Manco tosses the bodies of Indio and his men into a wagon, finally adding Groggy's body after killing him, and rides off to collect the bounties on them all, briefly pausing to recover the stolen money from its hiding place.

Cast

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Production

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Development

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After the box-office success of A Fistful of Dollars in Italy, director Sergio Leone and his new producer, Alberto Grimaldi, wanted to begin production of a sequel. Since Clint Eastwood was not ready to commit to a second film before he had seen the first, the filmmakers rushed an Italian-language print of Per un pugno di dollari to him - as a version in English did not yet exist. When the star arranged for a debut screening at CBS Production Center, though the audience there may not have understood Italian, they found its style and action convincing. Eastwood, therefore, agreed to the proposal. Charles Bronson was again approached for a starring role but he thought the sequel's script was too like the first film.[6] Instead, Lee Van Cleef accepted the role. Eastwood received $50,000 for returning in the sequel, while Van Cleef received $17,000.[1]

Screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni wrote the film in nine days.[7] However, Leone was dissatisfied with some of the script's dialogue, and hired Sergio Donati to work as an uncredited script doctor.[8]

Production

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The film was shot in Tabernas, Almería, Spain, with interiors done at Rome's Cinecittà Studios.[1] The production designer Carlo Simi built the town of "El Paso" in the Almería desert;[9] it still exists, as the tourist attraction Mini Hollywood.[10] The town of Agua Caliente, where Indio and his gang flee after the bank robbery, was filmed in Los Albaricoques, a small "pueblo blanco" on the Níjar plain.

Post-production

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As all of the film's footage was shot MOS (i.e. without recording sound at the time of shooting), Eastwood and Van Cleef returned to Italy where they dubbed over their dialogue, and sound effects were added.[11] Although it is explicitly stated in the movie that the Colonel Mortimer character is originally from the Carolinas, Van Cleef opted to perform his dialogue using his native New Jersey accent rather than a Southern accent.[12][full citation needed]

Music

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The musical score was composed by Ennio Morricone, who had previously collaborated with director Leone on A Fistful of Dollars. Under Leone's explicit direction, Morricone began writing the score before production had started, as Leone often shot to the music on set.[13] The music is notable for its blend of diegetic and non-diegetic moments through a recurring motif that originates from the identical pocket watches belonging to El Indio and Colonel Mortimer.[14] "The music that the watch makes transfers your thought to a different place," said Morricone. "The character itself comes out through the watch but in a different situation every time it appears."[15]

For a Few Dollars More
Soundtrack album by
Ennio Morricone
Released1965 (Original album)
GenreSoundtrack
LabelRCA Italiana
Ennio Morricone chronology
Se non avessi più te
(1965) 		For a Few Dollars More
(1965) 		Idoli controluce
(1966)

A soundtrack album was originally released in Italy by RCA Italiana.[16] In the United States, Hugo Montenegro released a cover version as did Billy Strange and Leroy Holmes who released a cover version of the soundtrack album with the original American poster art. Maurizio Graf sang a vocal "Occhio Per Occhio"/"An Eye For An Eye" to the music of the cue "Sixty Seconds to What?". Graf’s performance(s) did not appear in the film but were released as tie-in 45 RPM records.

All tracks are written by Ennio Morricone

Track listing
No.TitleLength
1."La Resa Dei Conti"3:06
2."Osservatori Osservati"2:01
3."Il Vizio Di Uccidere"2:24
4."Il Colpo"2:21
5."Addio Colonnello"1:44
6."Per Qualche Dollaro In Più"2:50
7."Poker D'Assi"1:15
8."Carillon"1:10

Release and reception

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Box office

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For a Few Dollars More was released in Italy on 30 December 1965 as Per Qualche Dollaro in Più.[17]

The film proved to be even more commercially successful than its predecessor.[18] By 1967, the film became the highest-grossing film in Italy with a gross of 3.1 billion lire ($5 million) from 14,543,161 admissions.[19][20][21][22]

The film opened in Spain on 17 August 1966 as La muerte tenía un precio and became the highest-grossing Spanish film of all-time with a gross of 272 million pesetas,[23] equivalent to $4.53 million in 1966.

It was the seventh most popular film at the French box office in 1966,[24] for a total of $10.5 million grossed in international territories outside North America.[25]

In the United States, the film debuted on 10 May 1967, four months after the release of A Fistful of Dollars, earning $5.5 million in rentals.[17] It grossed a total of $20 million in the United States and Canada,[26] adding up to a total of $25.5 million grossed worldwide.

Critical reception

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The film initially received mediocre reviews from critics. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times said, "The fact that this film is constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers, to emphasize killer bravado and generate glee in frantic manifestations of death is, to my mind, a sharp indictment of it as so-called entertainment in this day."[27] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the film as "one great old Western cliché after another" and said that it "is composed of situations and not plots", but nonetheless found it "delicious".[28] Its platitudinous character immediately laid it open to parody and one followed in the same year as Lando Buzzanca's For a Few Dollars Less (1966).[17]

The film has since grown in popularity, while also gaining more positive feedback from contemporary critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 92% approval rating with an average rating of 8.1/10 based on 38 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "With Clint Eastwood in the lead, Ennio Morricone on the score, and Sergio Leone's stylish direction, For a Few Dollars More earns its recognition as a genre classic."[29]

In a retrospective review of the Dollars Trilogy, Paul Martinovic of Den of Geek said, "For A Few Dollars More is often overlooked in the trilogy, awkwardly sandwiched between both the original film and the best-known, but it's a stunning film in its own right."[30] Paolo Sardinas of MovieWeb said, "Eastwood gives it his all and turns in another iconic performance along with scene stealer Lee Van Cleef, who helps make For a Few Dollars More twice as good as its predecessor."[31] Film historian Richard Schickel, in his biography of Clint Eastwood, believed that this was the best film in the trilogy, arguing that it was "more elegant and complex than A Fistful of Dollars and more tense and compressed than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". Director Alex Cox considered the church scene to be one of "the most horrible deaths" of any Western, describing Volonté's Indio as the "most diabolical Western villain of all time".[32]

British journalist Kim Newman said that the film changed the way bounty hunters were viewed by audiences. It moved them away from a "profession to be ashamed of", one with a "(ranking) lower than a card sharp on the Western scale of worthwhile citizens", to one of heroic respectability.[33][34]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Hughes, p. 8.
  2. ^ Munn, p. 54.
  3. ^ Variety film review; 16 February 1966, p. 6.
  4. ^ Dolores Martinez (25 May 2009). Remaking Kurosawa: Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan US. pp. 206–. ISBN 978-0-230-62167-1. Archived from the original on 29 September 2020. Retrieved 12 November 2017.
  5. ^ John White (30 November 2010). Westerns. Taylor & Francis. pp. 48–. ISBN 978-1-136-85559-7. Archived from the original on 29 September 2020. Retrieved 12 November 2017.
  6. ^ Munn, p. 53.
  7. ^ Schwartz, John (25 September 2013). "Luciano Vincenzoni, Screenwriter, Dies at 87". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 3 April 2015. Retrieved 7 January 2014.
  8. ^ For a Few Dollars More (Tre Voci – For a Few Dollars More) (Blu-ray disc). Los Angeles, California: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 1967.
  9. ^ Munn, p. 56.
  10. ^ Frayling, Christopher (2006) [1981]. "Preface". Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. New York, USA: I.B. Tauris. p. ix. ISBN 1-84511-207-5.
  11. ^ Munn, p. 57.
  12. ^ Sir Christopher Frayling, For a Few Dollars More audio commentary. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
  13. ^ Hodgkinson, Will (14 July 2006). "A Fistful of Dollars? It's my worst ever score'". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 15 March 2015.
  14. ^ Leinberger, Charles (1 September 2004). Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Film Score Guide. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. p. 35. ISBN 9780810851320. Archived from the original on 30 April 2016. Retrieved 16 March 2015.
  15. ^ Doran, John (8 April 2010). "Ennio Morricone Interviewed: "Compared To Bach, I'm Practically Unemployed"". The Quietus. Archived from the original on 14 November 2020. Retrieved 16 March 2015.
  16. ^ Smith, Jeffrey (15 November 1998). The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. Columbia University Press. p. 135. ISBN 9780231108638.
  17. ^ a b c Hughes, p. 10.
  18. ^ Hughes, Howard (9 December 2004). Once Upon a Time in the Italian West: A Filmgoer's Guide to Spaghetti Westerns. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 53.
  19. ^ Smith, Jeffrey Paul (15 November 1998). The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. Columbia University Press. p. 135. ISBN 9780231108638. Retrieved 17 March 2015.
  20. ^ Monaco, Eitel (11 October 1967). "Italian Films Succeed Alone And With U.S.A.". Variety. p. 29.
  21. ^ "Top Italian Film Grossers". Variety. 11 October 1967. p. 33.
  22. ^ "La classifica dei film più visti di sempre al cinema in Italia". movieplayer.it. 25 January 2016. Archived from the original on 25 May 2019. Retrieved 4 October 2019.
  23. ^ "All-Time Spanish Top-Grossing Pics". Variety. 7 May 1986. p. 390.
  24. ^ "French Box Office 1966". Box Office Story. Archived from the original on 14 November 2020. Retrieved 15 January 2017.
  25. ^ Tashman, George (5 May 1978). "Piedmont's Claim to Fame". Berkeley Gazette. p. 11. Archived from the original on 21 April 2022. Retrieved 21 April 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
  26. ^ "For a Few Dollars More, Box Office Information". Box Office Mojo. Archived from the original on 16 February 2013. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
  27. ^ Crowther, Bosley (4 July 1967). "Screen: 'For Few Dollars More' Opens: Trans-Lux West Shows New Eastwood Film 2 Rivals in Murder Are Presented as Heroes". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 15 February 2015. Retrieved 17 March 2015.
  28. ^ Ebert, Roger (15 May 1967). "For a Few Dollars More (1967)". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on 24 March 2015. Retrieved 17 March 2015.
  29. ^ "For a Few Dollars More (Per Qualche Dollaro in Più)". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster. Archived from the original on 9 March 2015. Retrieved 4 January 2024.
  30. ^ Martinovic, Paul (18 January 2013). "Looking back at Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy". Den of Geek. Dennis Publishing. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 17 March 2015.
  31. ^ Sardinas, Paolo (21 September 2009). "For a Few Dollars More DVD". MovieWeb. WATCHR Media. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 17 March 2015.
  32. ^ Cox, Alex (16 April 2009). "Blood, Guts, and Bullets". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 26 August 2016. Retrieved 9 July 2016.
  33. ^ Newman, Kim (1990). Wild West Movies: How the West was found, won, lost, lied about, filmed and forgotten. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 127–128. ISBN 0747507473.
  34. ^ Newman, p. 127.

Bibliography

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