This review written in honor of Clint Eastwood’s 94th birthday.

Superficially, A Fistful of Dollars is Sergio Leone’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 classic Yojimbo, a film that was itself influenced by the very Hollywood Westerns that Leone would make a career of commemorating and disturbing. Kurosawa’s interest in American Westerns is well-documented, and it bears testament to the family resemblances between the genres: an investment in rummaging through and investigating classic national myths, a critical appreciation for classical notions of mutual honor and camaraderie. George Lucas, obviously influenced by both genres, was onto something when he decided that the proper location for these questions to unfurl was in the mystical, speculative space-time of “a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away.”

However, Yojimbo was also an interpretation of Dashiell Hammett’s classic 1932 noir novel Red Harvest, from which it, and thus Leone’s film, draws its central narrative conceit. The noir universe marks a disturbance in the two genre’s mutual force, a moral void enervating the classical textures and moods that preoccupy both many American Westerns and Japanese Jidaigeki (“period drama”) films. What we might call the “Hammett” transfusion, a means of infusing new blood into the genres, was also a way to slit both genre’s throats, to poison them from the inside, to indulge in the noir universe’s mockery of classical order and moral harmony, to appreciate modernity’s beautiful rot.

Leone’s Italian Western follows suit. It takes a vibrant cross-cultural exchange in which the mythic types of the U.S. and Japan resonated in new contexts, and it brutally stamps that conversation down under the bitter heel of raw, un-ornamented force. Drawing on Yojimbo and Hammett and matching them every for sheer brutality, this is a vicious, mean-spirited film, one whose perspective on the universe is also its own self-justification. We didn’t need a remake of Yojimbo, but Leone’s film is both an argument and its own evidence. The world this film depicts, where those who exert an unyielding and forbidding force win, is also the world in which Leone can kidnap Yojimbo and brutalize it. Pure cinematic gristle, pure force of energy, can punish the audience into sheer appreciation. Tight, savage, and even bullying, this is Hobbesian cinema, an exercise in strength of mettle and the force of skill, one that justifies itself as a remake simply because Leone’s film is just so damn Nietzschean: if you will it strong enough, it will come.

Of course, it wouldn’t be until the late 1960s that what we call the “revisionist” Western – a self-critical variation on the genre which investigated rather than assumed the classical virtues of the American frontiersman -– would become the preferred version of the genre. But the Western has always been a more questioning genre than usually assumed. One can’t see, say, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, from just two years before A Fistful of Dollars, without reckoning with the origin of myths and the democratic meshwork of politician, lawman, and outlaw. And one can’t see A Fistful of Dollars without understanding its brutish ferocity – a viciousness that seems to interstitially bind the shots together even when nothing else does – as anything other than a boiling cauldron of American Western archetypes turned into a cosmic hellscape in which violence is the only economy of meaning. Liberty Valence and Fistful, although opposed in their moral vistas and centers of gravity, bear witness to a Western ground-clearing, a severe internal reckoning with the genre’s moral limits. Ford’s film, of course, prefers to talk it out, to posit the Western as a long conversation about American values. Leone’s shoots first and doesn’t ask questions. The concerns it raises are written in blood, and they sound like the curdled scream of someone realizing their entire sense of being involved participating in a murderous project that doomed them from the start.  

Arguably, A Fistful of Dollars stops there. But it distills the Western into a singular coagulate, a nasty rejoinder to American hopes and dreams, a toxic garden built on bones out of which Leone’s more poetic truths will bloom in future (and, I would say, better) films. The signature technique here may be the nearly robotic way that Clint Eastwood’s unnamed character Joe (although the name is bequeathed to him by one of the characters in the film, and it seems to function like “Gringo” as a euphemism for any white man) scours the landscape with his eye (shades of Schwarzenegger’s The Terminator) and his gun-hand unthinkingly follows. Each kill becomes one continuous, unaccountable flow, an act by an unblinking machine upon another machine. The shots bundle Eastwood’s body together and project it outward to its target via a bullet. This character has no other purpose. Death is what this man is and does. Violence functions as a cosmic force, an unclassifiable but temporarily channel-able power and supreme potency that has no alternative. Cinema, Leone’s film seems to suggest, isn’t creating this force, but simply capturing it with a savage eye.

This world, incidentally, is one in which Eastwood’s character decides to play both sides of a gang turf-war against each other, to inhabit the interstices of a binary conflict, to turn the Western into a self-cleansing machine where basically everyone meets their maker. Knowing the specifics of the characters outside of their appearance in each scene they appear in (who they are, what their souls stand for) seems irrelevant. They are bodies here for the violence that calls them and works through them. The Man With No Name is a distillate of cinema, of an audience’s desire to watch and wield violence, whether dished out by Jason Vorhees or John Wick or James Bond. Leone wants you to choke on it.

This may seem unforgiving and uncaring. You may clamor for complexity or some kernel of decency to grasp on to. But Leone’s film acidly underlines how narrow its imaginative orbit is, cutting any facades down to the bone with a nihilistic forcefulness as unmoving as its protagonist. We aren’t asked to celebrate this single-minded avenger, only to witness that he wields one particular form of power better than everyone else around him. He’s a distinctly Machiavellian protagonist, a gambler who uses and abuses the world to his liking. That we may or may not be affronted by it, the film suggests, should cause us to examine ourselves, and the Western genre, and not Leone.

It’s the primordial, cartoon-like minimalism that really articulates Leone’s vision here, best expressed in his film’s opening title, a minimalist, ultra-simplistic mosaic of paper-craft figures ripping each other to shreds, backed by Ennio Morricone’s marvelous score which turns weapons of force, like whips, into barbarous musical instruments. It’s primeval, a medieval fantasy signaled when one character shoots a suit of armor for target practice. This is a cruel ballet in a brutal vista, and Eastwood’s character feels like the genre, recognizing its own moral complicity, has simply conjured a distillation of its essence to kill everyone it crosses paths with. In his swaggering and self-amused mode, Eastwood emerges as a singular cinematic force.

In his spartan self-directed High Plains Drifter from 1973, Eastwood’s similar character is a literal ghost who materializes out of the desert dust – out of the raw alchemy of earth and film – as a cinematic wraith. At the end of A Fistful of Dollars, one decade before, the film seems to announce Eastwood’s status as a super-human cinematic emblem, an iconographic filmic being who will wrestle with the cinematic landscape for decades to come. When Joe returns to dish out something resembling justice for the climax, he turns the tables on everyone by wearing the now-discarded medieval suit of armor beneath his poncho, turning a target into a shield and a shield into a weapon. He wanders into the frame while a clip’s worth of bullets are sprayed at him. When he just keeps getting back up, he clarifies his status as an inhuman cinematic creature back from the dead, a smoke-and-mirror avenger who has learned how to use the tools of cinema – deception and subterfuge, myths and messiahs  – to tap into the violent force that thrums into the film’s lens, lest it be used against him. Leone would let blood with this figure for another few films. Eastwood is still teasing out variations of his own screen identity fifty years later, asking whether a man really is flesh and bone or, rather, if the primary materials are actually story and song, fable and stagecraft. But in A Fistful of Dollars, the two cinematic conspirators seemed to literally discover what it meant to become the medium, to turn film’s violence back on itself, to lay down some of that old-time cinematic retribution.

Score: 8.5/10