Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars reinvigorated the western for a new, more cynical era. And yet, it mostly proved that Leone was a talented copyist, often lifting scenes shot for shot from his chief source of inspiration, Kurosawa Akira’s Yojimbo. It was with this film’s follow-up, For a Few Dollars More, that the director truly found his voice, becoming a singular force in the expanding spaghetti western field.
The film’s plot is elementally simple: Bounty hunter Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) chases after escaped convict Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) less for the sizeable reward than to avenge the rape and murder of his sister. Along the way, Mortimer finds himself in competition with another bounty hunter, whom everyone calls Manco (Clint Eastwood), and decides to form a partnership with the rogue rather than go to war with a colleague. The two ultimately infiltrate Indio’s gang of bank robbers, ingratiating themselves until they can yank the rug out from under the outlaws.
What sets the film apart is how Leone’s rapidly developing talents test the budgetary limits of the production. For one, he shows the early promise in his mastery of Scope framing, if mostly across interior and other cramped scenes. This conjures an atmosphere of paranoia that’s keyed to action and emotion, from the bounty hunters’ high-risk efforts to blend in with their targets to Indio’s lingering guilt over the murder of Mortimer’s sister (Rosemary Dexter).
Flashbacks to that murder suggest something out of a giallo, from the camera taking on Indio’s point of view as he peers into the woman’s bedroom through a slatted door to him slowly unfastening the gun holster near his crotch. Another of the bandit’s murders, the slaying of a family inside a church, makes effective, stomach-churning use of off-screen space and sound to heighten the agony of a man forced to listen to his wife and child being shot as comeuppance for his squealing. Later, a series of showdowns attain an almost surreal aura as gunfights rage in front of the buildings of the pueblo blanco where the film’s second half was shot. Throughout this stretch, the homes appear almost out of time, as if they’d sprung naturally out of mountain stone over millennia of erosion.
The political dimensions of Leone’s later films isn’t quite visible in For a Few Dollars More, and even the aforementioned displays of violence add up to less an indictment of American violence than the individual psychosexual depravity of the villain. But this is still a bleak vision of the West, one where bounty hunters are de facto heroes in the absence of courageous agents of the law and where the only thing more valuable than gold is revenge. The stage is set here for Leone’s coming masterpieces, which would transcribe this intense, unsettling energy onto a canvas large enough to fit all of its splenetic, bloodletting rage.
Image/Sound
As with Kino Lorber’s releases of A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, this 4K UHD disc lacks HDR but nonetheless boasts a superlative transfer. The whites of the houses that dot the town where the second half of the film is set are intense without ever looking blown out, while the actors’ flesh tones appear more naturally tanned than they do on prior Blu-ray and DVD releases. Colors in general are sharper and more realistic, while darker scenes lack any visible crushing. The lossless mono and 5.1 tracks are flawless, booming with heightened Foley effects and Ennio Morricone’s psychedelic score.
Extras
Kino carries over all of the meaty extras of its 2019 Blu-ray. Of those, most significant is the informative commentary tracks by critic Tim Lucas and Sergio Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling, the latter of whom also contributes several video interviews about the film. Also of a note is a video featuring filmmaker Alex Cox on the set of the film’s locations in Almería and Granada. Rounding things out is a series of odds and ends, including trailers, an assortment of promo galleries, location comparisons, radio spots, and more.
Overall
The often-overlooked middle film in Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy is a taut, nasty thriller, and Kino gives it its due with a terrific A/V transfer.
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