For A Few Dollars More

UK Release Date. 11 October 1967
Certification. 15
Running Time. 2 hours 12 mins
Director. Sergio Leone
Cast. Clint Eastwood, Luigi Pistilli, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volontè.
Rating. 80%

Review. 

For A Few Dollars More, the follow-up film to Sergio Leone's seminal Spaghetti Western, A Fistful Of Dollars, is widely credited as the point where Leone's career took off once and for all. In For A Few Dollars More, the director took the lone gunslinger concept of his debut film and expanded the theme into a more complex tale of parallels. 

Clint Eastwood and Gian Maria Volontè return to the fold. Gian Maria Volonte’s repugnant villain, El Indio is more developed than Ramón Rojo, but no less maniacal. Then there is Lee Van Cleef, eagerly seized upon by Leone to star as Colonel Douglas Mortimer, the Virginian gentleman bounty hunter with an impressive arsenal in his saddle roll. Lee Van Cleef's early career in the 1950s had seen him cast as bit-part thugs and criminals (most memorably in High Noon), but roles were more difficult to come by in the 1960s before Leone cast him alongside Eastwood in For A Few Dollars More. Whilst Eastwood was billed as the lead actor, Van Cleef routinely commands the screen. His stoic demeanour is all business, yet it hides an underlying melancholy beneath his steely glare, the reasons for which are revealed over the course of the film.

For me, For A Few Dollars More doesn't have the narrative strength of A Fistful Of Dollars. For A Few Dollars More emerges as a series of individually outstanding scenes rather than a fully-fledged story. Nonetheless, Leone knows how to toy with the audience. The director takes his time building tension. Every stare, every twitch, every bead of sweat arising from an actor’s pore... all are agonisingly drawn out. Culminating in the climactic final duel - a portent for the one to come in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Not to be overlooked is the impact of Ennio Morricone’s baroque score; the haunting central melody becomes a pivotal plot revelation in the finale. This could have stood forever as one of Ennio Morricone’s most iconic cinematic moments if he didn’t go and outdo it in Once Upon A Time In The West a couple of years later.

By this point in his career, it was all too apparent that Sergio Leone was no longer abiding by tropes of the genre. Instead, he was creating, crafting and perfecting his own.

"Now we start..."