Although it's not without its dark and funny moments, Leone steered clear of Hawks' common sojourns into comedic territory, the moral grey areas of de Toth and Peckinpah's visceral portraits of men who've outlived their time in the world (at least until Once Upon a Time in the West).ĭeliberately stripped down to the sparsest possible structure, the Dollar trilogy - particularly the first one - rely less on storytelling techniques than cinematic design: extreme close-ups, POV shots and rapid editing to heighten the tension of deadly stand-offs, jarring music cues and sound effects that echo up and down the hills of Almería (er, San Miguel), characters introduced through actions rather than dialogue. The simplicity of the hero's motivation is a pale shade of the psychological complexity built into a Mann or a Boetticher protagonist. The small cast and centralized location are the antithesis of a monumental John Ford production. And of all five of his westerns, A Fistful of Dollars doesn't offer much story to work with - for all its excessive shootouts, epic scope and piercing Morricone score, the narrative itself couldn't be more economical.
Obviously, the biggest challenge of shoehorning this or any Sergio Leone film into a cash-in novelization that dropped eight years after the movie's debut is the inescapable lack of Sergio Leone. subsidiary) and also isn't 50 years old (it didn't materialize until 1972). Short of actually going out and shooting some Italian character actors, what better way to mark this occasion than to talk a little about the movie's novelization, which also didn't debut in America (it was published by Tandem, Universal Publishing's U.K. But 50 years ago the Man With No Name fired up Italian screens for the first time and his violent pistol opera swiftly become the country's highest grossing film to date, thus assuring its unshaven anti-hero's massive crossover success in the states and iconic status in the annals of action cinema. Due to protracted legal issues over Sergio Leone's liberal appropriation of plots 'n shots from Yojimbo, the pioneering spaghetti western wouldn't be ushered into western theaters until early 1967. Technically, today's 50th anniversary of A Fistful of Dollars is not an American celebration. Sergio leone, 1964 novelization by frank chandler NOVELIZATION APPRECIATION A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
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