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 all about the cool little details Leone packed into the film. It starts with a great sequence of Eastwood beating a bounty up with a single hand, and then goes on to Lee Van Cleef selecting one of his dozens of long barrel guns to take out a bad guy, and eventually we get to see one of the coolest western villains of all time.
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.
Lee Van Cleef plays Colonel Mortimer, who was once a Civil War Hero and has since become a bounty hunter. He plays a sort of a paternal role to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, teaching him a few things about the craft that he doesn’t really know quite yet, while pursuing a somewhat different objective. While The Man With No Name just wants to make a few bucks, Mortimer is hoping to get revenge.
One great scene has the two shooting each other’s hats off, and then shooting said hats down the street, as, essentially, a way of chest pounding, showboating, to impress the other. It begins with the two wanting the other to back off their bounty, and ends with the two building a strong partnership that’s a lot of fun to watch develop.
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.
Leone is one of the all time greats, and it’s too bad his career was cut short before he could complete Stalingrad, his WWII epic.
If there’s only one thing missing from the film, it’s Eli Wallach, who’s turn as Tuco may have been one of the all time great western performances, but regardless, the film is a whole heck of a lot of fun.
Helen Mirren pitches in as the editor harassing everyone in the line of sight. Soon thereafter, Howard hires the only jockey with the grit and moxie to handle Seabiscuit, Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire) David, Urs, Sebastien,Carlos united together to make this mystical band.