For a Few Dollars More

By Tadhg Curtin

For the second outing of the Dollars trilogy, Sergio Leone gets into the groove and Clint Eastwood teams up with another western icon to hunt down some bad guys in the terrific For a Few Dollars More (1965)

After the success of A Fistful of Dollars, spaghetti westerns were in hot demand so Sergio Leone, along with star Clint Eastwood, were given free reign to make another western and with that, they gave us the more expansive For a Few Dollars More. The story follows two bounty hunters with the same intentions who team up to track down an escaped Mexican outlaw.

Joining Eastwood for this adventure is the legendary Lee Van Cleef. The story of how he came to be in this movie is as legendary as the movie itself. Van Cleef was never a star, he was someone you would see in the background of a scene, High Noon for example. But he had such a distinctive face and look. Leone had always remembered him and so he wanted him for this movie. Apparently, around this time, Van Cleef’s career was suffering due to drinking. Legend has it Leone heard he was staying in a certain motel so he sent an assistant with a case of money. The assistant met Van Cleef outside the motel, offered him the money and Van Cleef accepted. The rest is movie history. Van Cleef, over the next ten years, became a spaghetti western superstar in Europe. He’s really one of the great icons of the genre. His story is an example of how one should never underestimate the memory of a cineaste. Director Quentin Tarantino has always had that reputation of reviving people’s careers, but he just knows what those actors are capable of, having watched them all his life. Leone was the same.

Van Cleef and Eastwood have a great chemistry; potential enemies at the beginning, partners at the end. Fellow Fistful alum, Gian Marie Volonte, returns again as the bad guy and he’s great as well. His character is notable as an early example of someone smoking marijuana onscreen though it’s never referred to as such. It’s also interesting to watch his character self destruct; pitting his own gang against each other, releasing our heroes deliberately after they have been captured. His mentality reminds me of a more current tyrant operating in the world today...

Here, you really see Leone really experimenting with style; relishing in the set piece (a scene or sequence of scenes whose execution requires complex logistical planning and considerable expenditure of money); shooting and cutting it all to Ennio Morricone’s fantastic score. Just look at Van Cleef hunting down his first bounty in the opening sequence and of course, the final duel. Leone’s duel started relatively small in Fistful but you see it getting grander here. It would reach truly epic proportions in The Good the Bad and the Ugly but here it’s pretty epic too.

For a Few Dollars More is an underrated movie I feel, wedged between two iconic works but make no mistake, this movie rocks!

Available on DVD, Blu Ray & to stream on Youtube.