A Fistful of Dollars

This first “spaghetti” Western was a sagebrush version of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, with lanky Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name, an itinerant gunslinger who finds himself in a beat-up border town ruled over by two ruthless clans. Dressed in the poncho and dusty Stetson that would be his well-worn wardrobe through two sequels, the nameless one plays one clan off the other in a bit of inspired treachery. His very arch nemesis is Gian Maria Volontè as Ramón Rojo, the smarter of two felonious brothers. Unlike his brutish bro’, Volontè plays it with a harrowing hair trigger, the coming violence seemingly pooled in his piercing eyes. Like Eastwood’s flinty character, the border town is nameless, an unruly frontier where six-gun alliances evaporate swiftly in the delirious sun. Ennio Morricone’s bravura mix of surf guitar, gongs, and rustic choir only adds to the delirium of this virtuosic oater filled with tumbleweed nihilism.