It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ Hits #1 at the Box Office
February 7, 1967
A Fistful of Dollars
#1 film at the US box office, January 22-28 & February 5-11, 1967
The Western is the most explicitly American of genres — after all, its very name refers to the location on the North American continent that forms its setting, and it’s typically populated by American folk heroes (or would-be folk heroes).
While such monumental figures as John Ford and John Wayne were molding the genre in Hollywood, however, film industries in Japan, the USSR, and Italy were crafting their own spin on the Western, free from the censorship of the Motion Picture Production Code and the genre expectations instilled in American audiences from childhood.
In fact, it took a foreign film to revitalize the Western, after the genre’s popularity had begun to flag in the ’60s. A Fistful of Dollars (aka Per un Pugno di Dollari) was the brainchild of Italian director Sergio Leone, who recognized that the decline of the American Western had created an opening for a European take on the genre — one more nihilistic and violent than anything coming out of Hollywood.
Much like how 1960’s The Magnificent Seven had adapted Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese epic Seven Samurai to a Western setting, Leone borrowed the basic set-up of A Fistful of Dollars from Kurosawa’s 1961 film Yojimbo: an amoral outsider arrives in a town split in two by a feud, and plays both sides against each other to his advantage. (Kurosawa later successfully sued Leone over the similarity, despite the fact that the Japanese director had himself lifted the premise from Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest.)
The initial choices to play the mysterious, murderous Man With No Name included Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn, as well as a score of lesser known actors. All either turned it down or asked too much money. Finally, actor Richard Harrison, who had previously appeared in the 1963 Italian Western Duello nel Texas, recommended Clint Eastwood, co-star of the long-running TV Western Rawhide.
Tiring of his good-guy role and the restrictive nature of television, Eastwood leapt at the offer. “The worst I can come out of this is a nice little trip,” the actor recalled in Richard Schickel’s 1997 biography. “I’ll go over there and learn some stuff. I’ll see how other people make films in other countries.”
Eastwood, conscious of the film’s limited budget, took the initiative in developing his character’s distinctive look, bringing with him to Europe a sheepskin vest, cowboy hat, and cigarillos. (The famous poncho was bought by Leone in Spain.) He also trimmed down his character’s dialogue to the bare minimum, his taciturnity fueling the mystery of the Man With No Name.
When A Fistful of Dollars opened in Italy in 1964, it quickly became the highest grossing Italian film yet released. It spawned two further entries in the Dollars Trilogy: 1965’s For a Few Dollars More and 1966’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
It took until 1967 — and the decline of the Motion Picture Production Code — for the trilogy to come to the United States. All three parts opened over the course of the year, starting with A Fistful of Dollars in January and finishing with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in late December.
[Love Westerns? Check out our “Wonderful Westerns” column for all your favs!]
Despite the low-budget production values and heavy use of dubbing (few of the cast apart from Eastwood were native English speakers), A Fistful of Dollars and its sequels became surprise box office successes in the United States, propelling Eastwood to stardom.
The blackly comic style and Eastwood’s blasé attitude toward his ever-increasing body count were novelties in a genre traditionally known for morally upstanding protagonists and clear-cut lines between hero and villain.
A Fistful of Dollars kicked off the popularity of so-called “Spaghetti Westerns,” generally produced by Italians, filmed in Spain, and starring one or two Hollywood actors for international appeal. It also dovetailed with the emerging Revisionist Western movement out of American cinema, which rethought the attitudes and characterizations of traditional Westerns.
Films such as 1969’s The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, 1970’s Little Big Man, and 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, upped the bloodshed, presented morally ambiguous heroes, reconsidered the roles of Native Americans, and questioned the supposed nobility of the Western experience.
While Revisionist Westerns had been slowly gathering momentum for a few years, it was the popularity of Leone’s films that made it the de facto approach to the genre. As A Fistful of Dollars proved, sometimes it takes an outsider to shake things up.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
