Audient Audit: The Dollars Trilogy

This is the third in my monthly 2019 series devoted to revisiting, or possibly visiting for the first time, movies I think I've seen but may not have.

It's only the third month and already I'm breaking the rules of Audient Audit.

I'm supposed to be "auditing" one movie per month that has made its way on to my various movie lists, even though I'm not sure I've actually seen it. This month, though, I've done three. Clearly because I have just so much time on my hands. It's almost the start of the baseball season, which has a large amount to do with why I haven't posted here in nine days.

But Sergio Leone's Man With No Name Trilogy, which I've called by its other name in the title for this post for the sake of brevity, represents a special case. Both A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) have made it on to various of my lists over the years. In fact, the only one of these movies I'm sure I hadn't seen was For a Few Dollars More (1965), the middle movie.

At the moment, only Fistful is on my lists. I decided at some point in the past few years that I definitely had not seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and promptly scrubbed it from the lists on which it appeared. I can't remember what caused me to definitively decide I hadn't seen it, but I now think the three-hour running time had something to do with it. I would have remembered watching a three-hour western.

So that's why you're getting the poster for Fistful above. Why I watched all three movies was because a) there still existed some level of doubt about TGTBATU, b) I was gifted all three movies on BluRay for Christmas 2017, and c) my wife is out of town this week, leaving me the opportunity to watch them on consecutive nights. I actually ended up taking a one-night break between FAFDM and TGTBATU, in part because I was just too tired on Tuesday to watch a three-hour movie. And yes, I do like referring to these movies by their acronyms.

One other interesting note: I have already seen two other movies whose titles were inspired by movies in this series. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is one of my all-time favorite documentaries, and I enjoyed The Good the Bad the Weird a few years back when watching it as part of my series Asian Audient. (It's Korean.)

Starting to watch AFOD -- don't worry, I won't always use the acronyms -- made me realize another reason why I'd probably included it on my lists despite an absence of compelling evidence that I'd actually seen it. I've seen two other movies of this same material. Fistful was caught up in a lawsuit about its similarities to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and is now considered a loose remake of that film. A more conscious remake was actually the first of the three I'd seen, the really terrible 1996 Bruce Willis vehicle Last Man Standing, directed by Walter Hill.

It didn't take long, though, for me to decide that I definitely had not seen this. Part of it on TV, years ago, when all I knew was that it was a Clint Eastwood western I was watching, and not which one? Maybe. But other than that, the details of Fistful were not familiar to me.

The Man With No Name -- that poncho, that stubby little cigar -- has become so prominent in American cinematic iconography that I've certainly seen snippets of all three movies in Oscar clips packages and the like. But the real tip-off that I hadn't seen this movie is something that happens very early on. A couple of no-good ruffians take some shots at Eastwood and his horse to scare him off, and the horse bolts. Eastwood ends up jumping off and swinging on a wooden contraption of some kind, almost like a 19th century gymnast. He then looks at a guy looking at him out the window of a nearby building, and says a single word: "Hello."

I snort-laughed. The delivery was perfect, and obviously intended for comedic effect. Which was my first sign that I really didn't know The Man With No Name.

For years and years now, I have harbored this idea that Eastwood's iconic character was some kind of badass who is such a magician with the gun, so quick on the draw yet so essentially unperturbed in his manner and line deliveries, that there isn't a single moment when he doesn't have the upper hand. In fact, certain other Eastwood movies I've seen -- like the really disagreeable High Plains Drifter -- do feature such a version of this character. A man who is so in command that he's never even in danger not only struck me as dramatically uninteresting, but also as endorsing certain macho stereotypes that I don't like endorsed. In fact, this ill-informed conclusion was possibly the basis for why it took me so long to start watching Eastwood westerns, even westerns in general.

The Man With No Name is not that guy. He may have a mystique about him -- not having a name tends to do that -- but Eastwood's character is so repeatedly in trouble in these movies that he's almost more like a noir hero than the straw man I constructed in my mind. You know, the noir hero who's always getting beaten up and nursing his wounds while doggedly still pursuing his goals. In fact, in TGTBATU, he spends a significant amount of screen time being marched through a desert and nearly dying of thirst and heat stroke, his face looking like it had been held over an open fire for a couple minutes. He then spends a realistic amount of time convalescing from this near-death experience. He emerges seeming no worse for the wear, but still.

The other thing that surprised me about that "Hello" line delivery was that it meant he was a character with a sense of humor. I thought for sure he would be humorless, but the man knows how to crack a joke, how to self-deprecate, how to recognize the irony of a situation. He's no one-dimensional badass delivering gruff one-liners.

So watching the whole series was a refreshing deconstruction of my expectations. I'll give a little bit on each movie.

I found A Fistful of Dollars to be enjoyable, but quite straightforward. Although maybe that's not the right way to describe it, because I did have to consult the Wikipedia entry afterward to be sure I'd followed the plot. This is likely no fault of the movie, rather, the fault of the poor sleep I got the night before watching it. I did fall asleep repeatedly throughout the second half, always pausing it but probably losing a bit more of my orientation within the plot every time I awoke. I almost wonder if, 20 years from now, I will remember so little of it that I'll have to wonder again whether I've ever seen it. But I really enjoyed being in this town with Eastwood and the two warring factions that separated it. This is the kind of western that got made a lot at that time, with only a single set and relatively small ambitions.

That decidedly does not describe the next two movies Leone made. His artistic growth between Fistful and For a Few Dollars More is notable and measurable. I noticed a lot more risks being taken with camera setups and narrative, all of which paid off. My favorite part of the movie, though, was probably the introduction of Lee Van Cleef as a co-star for the next two movies. I'd heard Van Cleef's name before, and his appearance was certainly familiar, but I don't know that I remember extended exposure to him on screen. I fell in love instantly. What a presence! It was further undercutting the notion I had of the Man With No Name to give him a partner, and this movie almost feels like a buddy movie at times, their chemistry is so good. It's a bit more sprawling in its focus with a really dynamite villain (Gian Maria Volonte). I'm sure a part of the advances in this movie were budgetary. You can see that money was thrown at FAFDM once AFOD was successful, though I'm not looking it up to see if that's actually true or not. Spoiler alert, this was my favorite of the three movies. I can't imagine that's a particularly common viewpoint.

Van Cleef returns in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and this time is joined by Eli Wallach to make it a trio. Wallach is "the ugly" (introduced first), followed by Van Cleef as "the bad" and Eastwood as "the good" (though whether that means morally or with his gun is debatable). This movie, on the whole, was actually the least like what I was expecting it to be. I supposed I should have surmised that a three-hour running time would leave room for it to go all over the place … and it does. Having the movie set during the Civil War gives it a sense of specificity in an otherwise timeless genre, but then there’s actually a major battle that plays into the last hour, in addition to introducing some new characters. I’m not sure that all of the exceptionally sprawling nature of this film works, but it definitely does continue to point Leone toward what I consider to be his peak artistic achievement: Once Upon a Time in the West. I also really enjoyed the performances of the three leads, though I would have liked a bit more of Van Cleef. Wallach is great in this, and the three have really good chemistry. I suppose while I’m on the topic, it’s worth acknowledging that if this is the same character by Eastwood in all three films, then this is a prequel to those films, as he doesn’t don his signature poncho until the final scene. (I could look up all the discussions of this, but you likely already know what people say, or you don’t care.)

I can’t leave off in my discussion of these movies without making mention of their all-time-great music. Ennio Morricone’s theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most well-known in all of movie history – the mere sound of it conjures images of a tumbleweed rolling across a landscape as two frozen men stand, about to draw their guns. That was one of the reasons it surprised me that this movie is a bit less like the standard western than I thought it was, as I imagined everything about it would conform to some platonic ideal of a western. I really do like TGTBATU, but it’s not the movie I always assumed it was. I really liked all the variations on the signature theme Morricone used, and the theme from Fistful is also quite memorable. I’m not sure how much Morricone had to do with this, but the most memorable recurring music in For a Few Dollars More has got to be that tune that plays when El Indio opens his pocket watch, right before he’s about to blast someone.

One of the reasons I think I included as many as two of these movies on my previously seen list was the shame of not having seen them. That shame is now, thankfully, gone. 

I know for 100% certain that I could write another thousand words about these films, but baseball season calls.

In April I shall return to a single film for this series, but I don’t yet know what that film will be.