In 1964, Italian director Sergio Leone redefined the Western with A Fistful of Dollars. Eschewing the relatively simplistic morality tales of earlier Westerns, Leone’s central gunslinger wasn’t a noble hero, but an opportunistic cad who uses two rival factions in an Old West town against each other in order to score a big payday. Despite the moral complexity of it all — or, more likely, because of it — the film became an international success and proved that audiences were ready for a new kind of Western, that Americans no longer had a monopoly on the genre, and that Clint Eastwood was a bankable star outside of television.
Then, just a year later, Leone managed to top himself.
1965’s For a Few Dollars More sees Clint Eastwood return as “The Man with No Name” (though that title was more of a marketing thing, as he’s called “Manco” in this movie and “Joe” in the previous one, even though they’re the same character). Manco is a bounty hunter on the trail of ruthless, murderous bank robber El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté), who was just broken out of prison by his gang of thieves. Also on Indio’s trail is Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), another bounty hunter who is vastly different from Manco. Whereas Manco is instinctive and rough around the edges, Mortimer is more cold and precise.
Despite their differences and distrust for each other, Manco and Mortimer forge an uneasy alliance to take Indio down together. The duo hatches a plan where both of them, separately, will join the ranks of Indio’s gang in order to gain his trust and take him down, claiming the reward and splitting it. But a bigger potential payday comes into the picture after Indio successfully pulls off a big bank job and stashes the cash until the heat is off of them. As a result, Manco and Mortimer set their sights on the stash and the bounty.
What’s great about For a Few Dollars More is the movie’s deep moral complexity. While A Fistful of Dollars helped break the mold with a multifaceted protagonist, every single character in For a Few Dollars More is complicated. Eastwood’s Manco is still the same gruff, alluring opportunist he was in the previous movie, but another layer is added when he partners with the other bounty hunter, Mortimer. The two of them have a really organic arc where they each gain a mutual respect for one another throughout the film. It’s almost comparable to a “buddy cop” dynamic, not because it’s funny, but because it’s an unlikely pairing that goes from them sizing each other up to them becoming true partners who value each other’s strengths. Mortimer is also a great character in his own right, as he’s clearly hiding something throughout the film. Only at the very end do we learn his true motivations for hunting down Indio.
As a villain, Indio is also remarkably complex. Leone and actor Gian Maria Volonté crafted a villain that was more tortured than a typical Western bad guy. Throughout the movie, he carries around a pocket watch with a woman’s face on it. She had been one of his victims and she’d killed herself while he was raping her. The watch plays an eerie musical tune that Indio uses to count down the time when he duels. He’s also on drugs throughout much of the movie, putting him in a daze, though he’s still capable of flashes of rage and violence. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the character’s complexities make him sympathetic, as he’s a monster in the movie and is portrayed as such, but the layers make him seem more real and more unpredictable.
For a Few Dollars More was greenlit off of the success of the first film and was given a much larger budget ($600,000 vs. about $200,000 for A Fistful of Dollars). As a result, the second movie just seems a whole lot bigger in scale. Whereas A Fistful of Dollars was mostly limited to vast empty desertscapes and a small frontier town with only a handful of buildings, For a Few Dollars More explores the considerably larger town of El Paso, which is an impressive set for a frontier town built for the film that still stands today as a tourist attraction in Spain, where much of the film was shot. There’s also more action and more people around, making El Paso seem like a bigger place than A Fistful of Dollars’ San Miguel.
For a Few Dollars More went on to become an even bigger success, too. The first movie pulled in just about $20 million and the sequel improved on that by making $25 million. Remarkably, Leone and Eastwood would repeat the success for a third and final time just one year later with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The third film was made for just over $1 million and grossed nearly $40 million. It was also bigger, more epic, more complex, and ultimately more well known. But The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wouldn’t be the success it was without For a Few Dollars More, which is why For a Few Dollars More is worth catching while it can be viewed for free online.
For a Few Dollars More is free to stream on YouTube, Roku, and Kanopy.