A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

 Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars"

By the early 1960s, Westerns had become the mainstream genre of Hollywood cinema. It had gotten so popular, there were now dozens of television shows to accompany the onslaught of films being released every week. This level of popularity mirrors the 'superhero' genre of modern cinemagoers. However, because of the Western genre's immense popularity and overproduction, it seemed like there was nowhere else to take the genre. All the groundwork had been laid, all the construction had been completed, and the genre had been lived in and every room and closet had been inspected. However, there was one final interpretation of the Western genre left and Italian director Sergio Leone would be the director to seize it.

In the early 1960s, there was also post-modernist cinema. The French New Wave movement had demonstrated how cinema itself could be deconstructed, how genre, stereotype, and the basic conceits of film could be broken down and re-evaluated. This is where Sergio Leone's film "A Fistful of Dollars" comes into play. Leone takes the typical Western standard, like that of John Ford, and satirizes it. Every Western convention and trope is out on display, heightened, and parodied. It is an examination of the Western. And more than just an examination, Leone takes these tropes and, rather than undermine them with meta-examination, he elevates them. He plays with them. He brings them into new realms. Because of this, the fatigue of the common Western trope now feels invigorated. 

However, there was just one last piece of the puzzle for Leone. When Leone needed a story to post-modernize in the Western format, he turned to Japanese cinema. Specifically, he turned to Akira Kurosawa and his 1961 masterpiece "Yojimbo." If you've seen Kurosawa's film and then you go and see Leone's film, there is no doubt about it: they are one in the same. "A Fistful of Dollars" is a straight up carbon copy of "Yojimbo." In fact, there is no dispute about it and has even been settled in court. After Kurosawa's film was released in Italy in 1963, a friend of Leone suggested to him that it would make a good Western. Leone took this suggestion to heart and decided to completely copy the original for his own production.

Despite being a carbon copy of "Yojimbo," "A Fistful of Dollars" comes alive and becomes its own for two reasons: 1) Leone's operatic rendition and 2) Clint Eastwood's interpretation of Toshiro Mifune's nameless Ronin. The entirety of "A Fistful of Dollars" is dramatized like a classic Italian opera. Intense moments are drawn and stretched out, close-ups are framed like Renaissance portraits, and the score is reminiscent of an operatic piece of music. On top of this, Eastwood's 'man with no name' hits all the right spots for a Western anti-hero. He's skilled with his gun, he's always cool and collected, and always trying to set the record straight justly. Basically, he's Toshiro Mifune's "Yojimbo" character, BUT he translates that to an American-style sensibility and becomes world famous because of it.

All in all, "A Fistful of Dollars" undoubtedly changed the Western genre forever. Perhaps that, OR perhaps it ended the Western genre forever. Obviously, the 1960s would be continued to be chock full of classic Westerns, even several more of Leone's Westerns would go on to be considered masterpieces. But, what "A Fistful of Dollars" was able to do was signal to the film-going world a changing of the time. Now that genre was being post-modernized, what else was there? If even the age-old classic Hollywood standard could be rearranged into a satirical, post-modern opera, how many more open fields could be traversed? It signaled that something was coming to an end, much like the old west. In 1964, nobody knew what would replace it. Hell, maybe nothing ever did. Either way, "A Fistful of Dollars" was able to stir up these conversations.