I can’t discern any “pureness of vision.” Neither the making of Per un pugno di dollari nor the creation of its protagonist are indicative of resulting from a single person’s “pure vision.” The film itself is a remake of a Japanese movie, Eastwood’s character Joe an amalgam of various American Western heroes; furthermore, both are the result of collaborative efforts – and fortunate coincidences. (It’s still unclear who actually created and designed Joe: Carlo Simi, Leone, Eastwood, maybe even Fabrizio Gianni?)
“[…] it’s pretty obvious that Fistful of Dollars is almost a scene-by-scene remake of Yojimbo, featuring similar characters,” as Alex Cox writes in 10,000 Ways to Die (p. 47). I guess this point requires no further discussion.
The character of Joe is a variation and extrapolation of more traditional Western heroes, a hybrid between Alan Ladd’s eponymous hero in George Stevens’s Shane (1953) and Burt Lancaster’s Joe Erin in Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954), and as fashion- and style-conscious as Marlon Brando’s Rio in his One-Eyed Jacks (1961). With Shane, Joe shares his mythical origins (out of nowhere into nowhere), with Joe Erin his opportunism (let’s make a fast buck), and with Rio his predilection for looking cool in a jorongo (or poncho or sarape or serape). In his essay “From Dollars to Iron: The Currency of Clint Eastwood’s Westerns,” David L. McNaron argues that “[p]erhaps the spaghetti westerns performed an experiment in moral reduction, to see how much goodness could be drained from heroes and still have them retain that status” (The Philosophy of the Western, edited by Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki, p. 152).
Exactly. I think it’s important to note that by the beginning of the 1960s American Western protagonists were no longer white-clad heroes on white stallions, bringing peace and justice to the Frontier, but mostly troubled men with dubious motivations and ambivalent moral codes: films like Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), William A. Wellman’s Yellow Sky (1948), King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946), Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow (1957), John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and The Searchers (1956), Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950) and The Bravados (1958) or Budd Boetticher’s and Anthony Mann’s Westerns feature protagonists whose ethical values are at least questionable: they are driven by greed, lust, revenge, racism, jingoism, thirst for power and glory. Even Shane only reluctantly and belatedly takes up the fight against Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer) and his minions (Jack Palance et al.).
What was new about Joe in Per un pugno di dollari was his style-conscious coolness: Eastwood simply looked better than his (anti-)heroic predecessors. As soon as we see him riding into San Miguel on his mule, we know he has to be the good guy. And he is. Function follows style.