I have re-watched the film and reread Fraylingâs comments on it. It seems the line âI knew someone like you once and there was no one there to helpâ was very much on purpose and central to Leoneâs vision of the film.
In the first draft, this comment referred to an explanatory prologue, later ditched. According to Eastwood, the original dialogue was âtremendously expositoryâ. Leone at first stood by his script. Eventually, the prologue plus three whole pages of dialogue referring to it were pruned to become one sentence âI knew someone like you once and there was no one there to help.â Source: Frayling: Something To Do With Death.
Besides, greed seems not be Joâs chief motive. The money he receives from the Rojos and the Baxters he passes on to Marisol. And he leaves the armyâs gold behind, leaving San Miguel on his mule, his saddle bags as slunken as the first time he arrived at the Rojosâ house.
Thatâs why I think that Leone at this time had not really understand his own vision.
His hero is not exactly greedy, but nearly everything he does, he does for money. And explanations for his doings or what he might could do with the earned money are only bothersome, Such explanations only disturb the pureness of the vision.
A scene like Blondie with the dying soldier works in this vision, but not uttering wishes for a farm.
Fistful is a more ambiguous than the two other films. After the opening scene, were he just watches, Joe is not indifferent to Marisol. He inquiries about her, and he intervenes at the exchange of hostages. The scene where he helps her escape might be seen two ways. One is that Joe uses Ramonâs obsession with Marisol as a means to break up the temporary truce between the Rojos and the Baxters. Another, just as plausible, is that he breaks up the truce to create a diversion for Marisol to get away.
I agree that when Leone made Fistful he understood the need for a new western hero without knowing exactly how he should be. But he never intended him to be an amoral character. Where the American western hero did âwhat a man has to doâ, Leoneâs alienated hero did what he wanted to do, ruthlessly, without scruples to use violence and with a deep contempt for law and order. To young moviegoers in Europe in those years, this was what the doctor ordered.
And as we know, No Name did not buy a farm! The remark is from GBU, which historically was the earliest of the three films. Entering and leaving San Miguel No Namesâs only properties was his Peacemaker, his mule and the clothes on his back.
Not GBU? So the line about buying a farm is from FAFDM? Then we donât know for sure. My mistake, havenât seen them for some time. Still it seems Leone, defining his new western hero, historically worked his way backwards, Fistful being at the end of the road, GBU the first, FAFDM in the middle.
Interesting discussion.
I see the Eastwood hero in the three dollar films as variations on the same persona.
I think he is very moral and I donât think heâs really interested in money. His morals are his own kind of morals (not something passed on by society) and his being after money is a kind of game to him (and a good way of staying afloat of societies ânecessitiesâ). But in my opinion he doesnât really care if all he has is his poncho, his hat and a mule or thousands of sacks of gold. The ending of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is an excellent example: Blondie leaves a lot of gold at the feet of Tuco and rides away with his own share. He also âsavesâ Tuco the way he saved him at the beginning of the film from all those hangings. Heâs neither greedy nor uncompassionate.
Simply a twisted sort of anti-hero, the likes of which would have been problematized, psychologized and analyzed in calssical US westerns, but which Leone can leave standing as a shining example in his dirtier old West.
I canât discern any âpureness of vision.â Neither the making of Per un pugno di dollari nor the creation of its protagonist are indicative of resulting from a single personâs âpure vision.â The film itself is a remake of a Japanese movie, Eastwoodâs character Joe an amalgam of various American Western heroes; furthermore, both are the result of collaborative efforts â and fortunate coincidences. (Itâs still unclear who actually created and designed Joe: Carlo Simi, Leone, Eastwood, maybe even Fabrizio Gianni?)
â[âŚ] itâs pretty obvious that Fistful of Dollars is almost a scene-by-scene remake of Yojimbo, featuring similar characters,â 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 Laddâs eponymous hero in George Stevensâs Shane (1953) and Burt Lancasterâs Joe Erin in Robert Aldrichâs Vera Cruz (1954), and as fashion- and style-conscious as Marlon Brandoâs Rio in his One-Eyed Jacks (1961). With Shane, Joe shares his mythical origins (out of nowhere into nowhere), with Joe Erin his opportunism (letâs make a fast buck), and with Rio his predilection for looking cool in a jorongo (or poncho or sarape or serape). In his essay âFrom Dollars to Iron: The Currency of Clint Eastwoodâs Westerns,â David L. McNaron argues that â[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 statusâ (The Philosophy of the Western, edited by Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki, p. 152).
Exactly. I think itâs 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 Hawksâs Red River (1948), William A. Wellmanâs Yellow Sky (1948), King Vidorâs Duel in the Sun (1946), Samuel Fullerâs Run of the Arrow (1957), John Fordâs Fort Apache (1948) and The Searchers (1956), Henry Kingâs The Gunfighter (1950) and The Bravados (1958) or Budd Boetticherâs and Anthony Mannâs 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.
I can discern it easily. And it is very obviously there (in the trilogy), even if 1.000 more people had an input on FoD or 10.000 more films can be found from which the character was built upon.
This doesnât change either what I mean. It was a new type of hero (not anti-hero), but like every new thing he is built on other characters from the past.
No, Eastwoodâs character went a whole step further than any of his US predecessors.
There was a lot going on in US westerns, and there was never too much of the white washed hero on his white horse who never did any wrong, not in most if not all of the important westerns. The US western of the 40s and 50s is filled with dubious heroes, but none went as far as Leone. But the US western was also quickly changing in the 60s, but there was more rigorous censorship, which did not allow too great steps, and generally the US western went in his own direction, and was not really interested in the Spaghetti style.
Yes and no.
He is not interested in the things he can buy with his money, but at the same time all he does is still hunting that money with very dubious methods. Taht makes the money a liitle bit abstract, and that is how it should be, and how it is mostly.
And I donât think he is moral, but is not amoral either. He lives in a moral vacuum though. If that makes sense.
There is moral and moral. There are the moral norms of a society, and the moral norms of an individual. And there are norms as to what you should do and norms as to what you should not do. No Nameâs actions are clearly not steered by societyâs norms as to what you should do. He does what he likes. In that sense he lives in a moral vacuum. He does however live by some rudimentary (or reduced) moral norms as to what you should not do. (You shall not shoot an unarmed man in the back for no reason. You shall not rape a woman. You shall not steal from poor people.) In that sense he is not in a moral vacuum.
Besides, there is not only the âgreedâ for money on the one side and more lofty moral motives on the other side. There may be other personal motives in between. Like Joeâs motive to save Marisol. He does it not because âthatâs what a man got to doâ. He does it because he knew someone like here some time, âand there were no one there to helpâ.
I havenât read it and I should like to. I donât think the SW performed an experiment in moral reduction, though. This disregards the historical context. In the sixties a new kind of hero was badly needed. We didnât like the old ones any more. What was needed was a hero alienated from established society, an anti-establishment, violent hero. The SW met this need. And this new hero needed another time than the âgloriousâ years when âthe west was wonâ. So he was set in the bleak aftermath of the civil war and in the war itself.
For that reason I also completely agree with @stanton that the hero introduced by Leone was a new hero, and not an anti-hero.
I like that argument. While Leone was playing with the notion of âanti-heroesâ, he certainly wasnât the only one. However, Joe/Manco/Blondie and even Harmonica (not sure about Sean) were undoubtedly the coolest.
Amusingly, some years later, in Don Siegelâs Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), Eastwoodâs character Hogan vehemently rejects the idea of owning a ranch: âA ranch? ⌠You mean, get up at sunrise, go to bed at sunset, rear in the saddle all day? No, thanks, Sister, Iâd rather be dead.â
In the English opening credits the third screen (1st pic) johnny wels would seemingly be Gian Maria Volonte. In the Italian credits I found the 3rd screen is Volonte and the 4th screen has john wells. Are these the correct Italian credits? @JonathanCorbett, do you know anything about this?
