For a Few Dollars More

For Few Dollars More or Per qualche dollaro in piùis the second movie in Sergio Leone’s trilogy of western greats. Sergio Leone brings Clint Eastwood and Gian Maria Volonte back after a Fistful of Dollars to create this sequel. Sergio Leone, Italian Director, once again worked his magic in the Italian countryside. Leone created westerns unmatched by previous American westerns. Leone’s films embodied the cool collected gunslinger. In For a Few Dollars More, Clint Eastwood as Monco and Lee Van Cleef as Col. Douglas Mortimer are bounty hunters serving justice on those that escape the law. The two men are informed that El Indio played by Gian Maria Volonte known outlaw has escaped from prison and the two men set out to attain the reward for bring him in dead or alive.




Monco and Col. Douglas Mortimer team up to catch El Indio and his gang. The two men are after the outlaws to get the bounty. Along with needing to devise a plan to take down El Indio these two gunslingers must leave the comfort of being alone and face the difficulties of working together. In order to take down El Indio Monco must get into El Indio’s gang while Col. Mortimer attacks them form the outside. The two gunslingers must try and remain close to El Indio without him knowing their objectives.



The movie starts of with two scenes one of Monco entering the town and one of Col. Mortimer entering the town. We she both men establish their superior gunsling skills as they take down outlaws. Immediately we see a fascination in the kill. We see Monco take down his outlaw calmly, quickly and with style. While we see Col. Mortimer let his outlaw run while he chooses what weapon to kill him with. Once the decision is made the outlaw is taken off his horse and killed from incredible range with one shot. The two gunslingers then find out that El Indio has a price on his head and they both start out to find him. On the journey to find him each man realizes that the other has the same objective. Monco and Col. Mortimer met and after some dispute decide to team up and take down EL Indio and his gang. Monco plans to infiltrate El Indios gang and attack them from within while Col. Mortimer will attack them from outside. El Indio plans a bank robbery and Monco and Col. Mortimer plan to stop him then. El Indio and his gang are able to escape the gunslingers unharmed and with the money from the bank. The two gunslingers have trouble trusting each other. The men are true westerners and as everybody knows (or at least our class) true westerners isolate themselves and work best alone. But the task of taking down El Indio will require them both and so the eventually trust each other to complete the mission. After the Bank robbery Monco and Col. Mortimer follow EL Indios crew east. (Monco still in the gang and Mortimer following) The men attempt to steal the money but get caught, then in an attempt to get all the money El Indio relases them but says the men have stolen the money. Little to EL Indios knowledge the gunslingers actually did take the money. El Indio and the gang then attempt to get Monco and Col. Mortimer but the two men kill the gang one by one in the towns streets. At the end Col. Mortimer and EL Indio have a gun dual. Spoiler alert!!! IN the dual that Monco oversees the viewer learns that EL Indio killed Col. Mortimer’s sister and revenge was Mortimer’s drive not the money. Mortimer kills El Indio and takes only the locket El Indio stole from his sister leaving Monco the reward for El Indio and all his men a total of 27,000 dollars!



This movie explores several new things in a western. First it shows the hero teaming up and not able to do it on his own. Second it shows a fascination with the coolness of killing unmatched in other westerns. Sergio Leone’s trilogy of westerns (the Spaghetti Westerns) will forever become of the greatest westerns.

Unforgiven (1992)

With Unforgiven Clint Eastwood produced a sophisticated analysis of the emergence and spread of violence by skillfully breaking Western stereotypes with bitter irony. Not only the successful presentation of a topic, but also the reflection of a demythologizing film genre.

Clint Eastwood plays William Munny, once a notorious bad man, a killer of men, women, children, and anything else he didn't take a liking to. That is, until he met a woman who reformed him into being a better man. Many years have passed, and Munny's wife is long dead, leaving him to a life of farming and poverty with his two kids passing the time away quietly. He decides to take one last job when he hears of a $500 bounty offered by the madam of a brothel for the capture of a man who savagely beat one of her own. Munny joins up with his old partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and the "Schofield Kid" who told him about the job (Jaime Woolvett). Their primary opponent is the sheriff of the town, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), a sadistic, dictatorial sheriff who enforces gun control on a tiny frontier town and is doing whatever he thinks is right. When he denies justice to the prostitutes of the town brothel, one of whom has been slashed by a client, the women hire Munny to gain vengeance. When Munny comes to town, everyone soon learns a harsh lesson about the price of revengeful bloodshed and the deformability of ideas like "justice." "I don't deserve this," pleads Little Bill. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it," growls Munny, simultaneously summing up the insanity of western violence and the legacy of Eastwood's Man With No Name.

Due to the incredible cast, this movie is a masterpiece. Eastwood isn't alone in this endeavor; the normally affable Gene Hackman is downright scary, with his twisted sense of justice, doing evil things with complete justification in his maintenance of the law. Freeman and Harris are both terrific in supporting roles, avoiding the traps that could easily have made their respective characters not believable. The editing is also top-notch, developing the story the right way, taking time to build up interest in the characters before sending them off into confrontations. The build-up is slow, but the tension is high, particularly when it approaches the astonishing climax.

Unforgiven is a quiet Western, but also very profound, almost poetic, in its portrayal of a man how must content with his new moral code in the face of revisiting the life he left behind and sowing the seeds of his past to try to make his future a better existence. It's also a dark film, both literally and figuratively, with a noticeable lack of light during the gloomiest of moments. The movie won four Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing and Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman).

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)

Robert Altman’s creation of the (some say debatable) western ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ was a movie that took all the folklore and legend of the old West and turned upside down; the storyline completely disregards the heroism and male depiction in every western the True Grit class has seen up to this point.

The movie begins with a gambler named John McCabe arriving in the Northwest town of Presbyterian Church (Ironically named after the church that is RARELY frequented by the townsfolk). McCabe, due to rumors of gun fighting and badassness (although in reality not very badass) quickly takes a predominant position in the town… which wouldn’t be very hard for most anyone seeing as this was a mining town filled with simpleminded people.

Because McCabe is a businessman, he constructs a very simple brothel with 3 whores he purchases from a pimp in a close town and is able to start turning some profit. This is when the opium addicted leading lady arrives (Constance Miller), convincing McCabe that her skills as a businesswoman in the Brothel business are better then his. After the two become business partners Mrs. Miller creates quite a bit more profit and as a result the two open up a higher-class brothel, which makes them even more money. At the same time a serious relationship has begun to develop between Miller and McCabe.

After some time has passed, a couple of men from the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company turn up attempting to buy not only McCabe’s business but also the surrounding Zinc mines. Despite Shaughnessy’s violent reputation and Mrs. Miller’s warnings about the cavalier attitude Shaughnessy has when it comes to killing, McCabe doesn’t want to sell at the price they offer. And because McCabe is a big, scaredey baby trying to talk a big game, he gets nervous and doesn’t communicate well with, and oversteps his boundaries/worth during the deliberations.

A little after the Shaughnessy men leave, three bounty collecting killers sent by the disgruntled mining company arrive into town. (One killer was this badass guy wearing a coat so sexy PETA couldn’t force themselves to throw paint on it, the other looked like he was beaten with ‘the ugly stick’, and the last being this psycho kid who must have had some seriously morbid and sick thoughts) Anyway although McCabe is not a gun fighter and isn’t all that bad ass he stays in the town…even though this choice might have made him a BAMF it was canceled out because initially McCabe went up to the killers’ cabin and tried to satisfy whatever it was the killers might have wanted.

In the final scenes, when the killers finally come after McCabe, he is terribly frightened. He has been waiting for this moment since they have arrived and so was able to kill two men by shooting them in the back -first time gritters- and even manages to kill the third while he was fatally injured (although he still tricked the third guy too). All the while this is happening the townsfolk are banding together to put a fire out that started in church in the beginning of the gunfight… (Remember the townsfolk are oblivious to the gunfight). The last scene of the movie is a zoom in of McCabe while he dies and a zoom in of Mrs. Millers face as she gets high in an opium den (she is suggested to be the only person who may have realized/cared about McCabe’s death).

I think that yes, this was definitely a Western however I think it was completely in a different category from most any other Western film made. They depicted the lead man as someone who wasn’t necessarily brave, or a powerful figure over the woman in his life. Not only do these things make a difference but also the entire backdrop of the movie was very different from the open, sandy, and sunny planes of the true West. Last but not least Robert Altman kills the lead in the end of the movie, not only that but he kills him without allowing to leave a true mark on the people or townsmen. To say the least this movie definitely pushes all your cowboy stereotypes right out the saddle.