|
For A Few Dollars MoreRating:
Release Date: 05 June, 2001 Retail Price: $14.98 OUR Price: $12.99 You SAVE: $1.99! Cast: Complete Cast (5 total) |
For A Few Dollars More Reviews
Best of Eastwood/Leone Collaborations?
The Helpful Part: Actor Clint Eastwood and director Sergio Leone team up once again after the success of "A Firstful of Dollars." This movie is often mistakenly considered a sequel to the first film, but that's not the case. Eastwood is playing a different (though similar) character with a different name (he's Monco here and Joe in the first film). Gian Maria Volonte is also playing a different role, though he is still a bad guy.
In this movie, Lee Van Cleef and Eastwood play bounty hunters in the old west who are after the same man. Eventually they are forced to team up in order to capture Indio, an escaped convict who's planning on robbing the bank in El Paso.
The Review: I could make a case for this being the best of the Leone/Eastwood films. It's certainly the first true masterpiece by Leone--A Fistful of Dolars is great, but it's a shot by shot remake of Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," changing only the location and the costumes.
This movie was based on an original script and adds Lee Van Cleef to the cast, who's just as perfect as Eastwood when it comes to calm, cool gunslingers. You have a younger man who's all about action and an older one who likes to think things through, and both of them are totally believable in their roles.
As far as plot goes, it's a pretty simple story, but Leone makes it work through great cinematography, sparse dialog, and a memorable score. This was a low budget production but there really isn't much to quibble with here. You find yourself believing in both of the "good guys" and rooting for them in the end.
Best of the Leone/Eastwood Films
Despite the legendary status afforded "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", "For a Few Dollars More" is considered by some to be the best of the Leone/Eastwood collaborations. This film certainly lacks the epic scope of that more famous picture, but the more limited focus is in many ways truer to the roots of the "Spaghetti Western" genre Leone popularized.
The little touches that defined Leone's revision of the classic Western are everywhere and ably serve to draw the viewer into his world. Ennio Morricone's score is an evolutionary predecessor to his better known work on the later film in the "Man with No Name" trilogy- and just as good. The bleak and desolate nature of the landscape is only emphasized by stylistic cinematography; Extreme longshots juxtaposed with full frame faces are a Leone trademark used to great effect. And those faces themselves are a distinctive touch; Hollywood casting agents would faint if they saw so many rough hewn, authentically sun-baked mugs in a studio picture.
What makes this movie stand out though is the performance of Lee Van Cleef in a rare "good guy" role. Van Cleef's performance as Colonel Douglas Mortimer is all the more difficult because he must play the older, wiser counsel to Clint Eastwood's younger bounty-killer, while at the same time being a credible rival to Eastwood's Manco. Ultimately, the two craft a warm, almost sweet relationship between their characters that is all the more notable when contrasted to the Blondie/Tuco relationship in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". The antagonism in that film would have been believable in "Dollars", but the film ultimately works better as it is.
In the end, "For a Few Dollars More" is more rewatchable than the experimental "Fistfull" and the epic (in plot and running time) "Good, Bad, Ugly". No mean feat considering the place those two films rightly have in the pantheon of motion pictures.
More Customer Reviews (31 total)
You like For A Few Dollars More?
|
© 2004, 2005, 2006 DVD Booty | Don't Plunder Our Cache of Booty, Matey!
Hosting made possible by donations from Florida mortgages, Credit Counseling Corp, and debt counseling
