On Seeing Fistful Of Dollars For The First Time

1/4/18

Surprisingly enough I've just seen Fistful Of Dollars for the first time. And I'm a huge Eastwood and Leone fan. 

I just wrote this note on a random film studies web site I hit upon. In all the comments I noted lots of discrete discussion on different cinematic aspects of the movie, with no one putting it or them together in an overall way. 

So I gave that a tiny shot and, as I say, wrote this:

.....I've  just seen Fistful Of Dollars for the first time. It has a coherent theme. The man with no name, or Joe, changes over the course of the film from an amoral gun for hire seeking only to enrich himself to an ascendingly moral man who reunites Marisol with her husband and child and out of his pocket pays their way to escape. He then becomes as an avenging God, virtually rising from the dead, and by implication what has been dead inside himself, conquering evil, the Rojos, by their own means, violent killing plus his own singular cunning. The no name man's donning of the armour implicates and evokes the heraldry and honour of knights in defeating evil and standing for good and, too, at the end by giving Ramon a fair fighting chance in their final stand off. The finale is an explosion of Old Testament eye for an eye  righteousness in the violent vanquishing of evil by evil's means but used righteously. Much  more to be said of course, but that's an outline of an account of Fistful Of Dollar's thematic coherence, or, put differently, what it's about....