For a Few Dollars More

Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più) opened in Italy in December 1965, the second of his Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood, after A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and before The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). It consolidated the Spaghetti Western, a genre Leone had more or less founded the year before, and it turned Lee Van Cleef, until then a minor American character actor, into one of the most recognisable faces in 1960s European cinema.

Two bounty hunters work the American West of the late 1860s: Eastwood's nameless drifter (the Man with No Name, carried over from Fistful) and Colonel Douglas Mortimer, a former Confederate officer played by Van Cleef. Both want the same man. El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) is a sadistic outlaw recently escaped from prison and planning a major bank robbery, and the film follows the two hunters' wary partnership as he prepares the job, each of them keeping something back from the other.

Massimo Dallamano's wide Techniscope photography, Ennio Morricone's score (its pocket-watch motif is some of the best-loved music he ever wrote) and a longer running time than A Fistful of Dollars gave the genre's conventions room to settle into the shapes everyone now recognises. Van Cleef would return for the third film of the trilogy as the Bad, but this middle film is where he established one of the most distinctive screen presences the Spaghetti Western ever had.