For a Few Dollars More

If Sergio Leone has a brand, it’s the trinity: A Fistful of Dollars had Clint Eastwood, The Man with No Name, triangulated with two rivalrous clans. For a Few Dollars More, the quasi-sequel, retrieves the ever-vicious Gian Maria Volontè, now as El Indio, and adds the third spoke, a reptilian Lee Van Cleef playing a bounty hunter whose way with weapons equals that of Eastwood. It is El Indio, or rather the bounty on his cabeza, that draws the two kill-for-coin cowboys together. Volontè plays El Indio as a psycho-in-a-saddle with a gleeful appetite for rape and rapacity. When the battered bodies start stacking up like cords of wood, we look on with arid admiration. And look on we do, as the monumental landscape—indifferent host to the mounting mayhem—spreads out before us. We know who the father and son are in this unholy trinity, and that leaves El Indio as the holy ghost when the film expires.