Film

For a Few Dollars More

Name: For a Few Dollars More
Director: Sergio Leone
Genre: Action, Drama, Western
Released: 1965
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonté, Luigi Pistilli, Klaus Kinski

Per qualche dollaro in più

Sergio Leone · Italy / Spain / Germany · 1965

Action Drama Western 1960s

Two bounty hunters circle each other and a single common quarry: Eastwood's nameless drifter and an older Confederate-officer-turned-Colonel played by Lee Van Cleef both have their sights set on the psychotic outlaw El Indio, just escaped from prison and planning the bank job of his career. Leone's middle entry in the Dollars Trilogy is leaner, crueler and arguably the most operatic of the three, building toward a circular duel that the whole film has been quietly winding up. Morricone's pocket-watch motif still defines the western — a chime that turns every showdown into ritual. Beneath the genre play sits a story about grief, patience and the slow arithmetic of revenge.

About

Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più) opened in Italy in December 1965, the second of Leone's Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood after A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and before The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The film consolidated the Spaghetti Western genre Leone had effectively founded the previous year and brought Lee Van Cleef — until then largely a minor American character actor — into the position of one of the most internationally recognised faces in 1960s European cinema.

Two bounty hunters operate in late-1860s American West: Eastwood's nameless drifter (the Man with No Name continues from Fistful) and Colonel Douglas Mortimer, a former Confederate officer played by Lee Van Cleef. Both pursue the same wanted bandit El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté), a sadistic outlaw recently escaped from prison and now planning a major bank robbery. The film follows the two bounty hunters' wary partnership, El Indio's robbery preparations, and the eventual three-way confrontation that the trilogy structure required.

Massimo Dallamano's wide-frame Techniscope photography, Ennio Morricone's score (the famous pocket-watch motif among the most beloved music in his entire catalogue), and the longer running time relative to A Fistful of Dollars allowed the genre's iconic conventions to fully consolidate. Van Cleef would return for the third film of the trilogy as the Bad; this central film established his on-screen presence as one of the most distinctive in Spaghetti Western history.