With the success in Europe the budget was increased and the Leone partnership with Alberto Grimaldi began.
Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More marks a significant moment in the director’s evolution after his debut, a film that is both a gritty, violent Western and an exploration of vengeance and redemption.
Often overshadowed by A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, this second entry in the Dollars Trilogy is arguably the most potent. Leone wasn’t just following the success of his earlier work—he was setting the stage for something larger, expanding his mythos of the West, and it’s here, with this film, that he truly announces himself as a master of the spaghetti western. The brutality and moral ambiguity that define Leone’s world are on full display, but it’s the quieter emotional undercurrents that make For a Few Dollars More so powerful.
“Alive or dead. That’s your choice.”
The film begins with a trio of prologues—simple, direct scenes that serve to introduce us to the three central characters. This is Leone’s way of setting the table, showing us who they are through action, not dialogue. First, there’s Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), a bounty hunter whose calm precision and methodical approach suggest a man who has spent years mastering his craft. Mortimer is a grizzled veteran, but he’s also someone who has embraced the industrialized future of the West. He uses state-of-the-art weapons, each designed to serve a specific purpose, and this practicality underscores his character. Mortimer is no relic—watching the world change around him but never losing control.
Then there’s Manco (Clint Eastwood), the man with err no name.The first time these two cross paths, it’s a wordless duel of wits—Manco shoots at Mortimer’s hat, trying to provoke him, trying to see how far he can push. But Mortimer doesn’t react. He waits, watches, and when Manco is out of bullets, calmly blasts Manco’s hat high into the air. It’s a beautifully crafted scene, one that shows us everything we need to know about these two men without a single word of dialogue. There’s no need for exposition; Leone knows that his audience can read between the lines. And in that moment, a mutual respect is born—neither man is out for senseless violence, and neither will back down.
“When two hunters go after the same prey, they usually end up shooting each other in the back.”
The third figure in this triangle is Indio (A returning Gian Maria Volonté), a wild, unpredictable force driven by his own demons. Indio isn’t just the villain of the piece—he’s a man haunted by a past he can’t escape, a man so consumed by his failures and desires that he’s become a monster. He saw love and his inability to possess it destroyed him. Indio is plagued by a memory that replays over and over in his mind, triggered by a pocket watch he carries. This watch, with its haunting melody, becomes the film’s touchstone, a constant reminder of the moment when Indio’s life fractured. At several points in the film, Indio is shown smoking a reefer, slipping into a drug-induced haze. It's a jarring contrast to the focused, professional bounty hunters pursuing him. His marijuana habit, often paired with the sound of the pocket watch's eerie melody, signals his unraveling mind. The act of smoking highlights his volatility, showing a man deeply mired in his own guilt and self-destruction.
The pocket watch is one of Leone’s most brilliant cinematic devices, a symbol that binds Mortimer and Indio together in ways we don’t fully understand until the final act. It’s not just a plot point—it’s the emotional core of the film. In one of the film’s most striking scenes, Leone uses the watch to visually align Mortimer’s past with Indio’s present. As Indio holds the watch in front of him, its photograph perfectly aligns with Mortimer’s silhouette, revealing the personal nature of their conflict. It’s a devastating moment, made all the more powerful by the fact that it’s shown, not told.
This is where Leone’s mastery of visual storytelling comes into full force. “Show and don't tell”, the dialogue is minimal, and yet we understand everything. Mortimer’s pursuit of Indio isn’t just about a bounty—it’s about redemption, about avenging a past wrong that has haunted him for years. Indio, by contrast, is trying to escape his own inner torment, consumed by his own madness to ever find peace. The watch, with its ticking melody, is a reminder of the passage of time, of the wounds that never heal.
When we reach the film’s final showdown, it’s not just a contest of who’s the fastest on the draw—it’s a culmination of all the emotional weight that has built up over the course of the film.
Of course most will point to the standoff in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as his greatest achievement. But here, the stakes feel personal. The confrontation between Mortimer and Indio isn’t just about wealth, power of violence—it’s about resolution. The ticking of the watch, the careful build-up of tension, the emotional history behind every move—this is what makes the final duel in For a Few Dollars More the best of Leone’s career. The watch that has haunted Indio throughout the film is finally silenced, and Mortimer, at last, gets the closure he’s been seeking.
The music in For a Few Dollars More is more than just a score; it’s the lifeblood of the film. Ennio Morricone’s compositions practically breathe into Sergio Leone’s stylized world, elevating it into something mythic. His score doesn’t merely sit in the background; it charges through the film like a gunfighter striding into town, full of swagger and menace. The electric guitar, the percussive gunfire, the strange, mournful whistles—they all mix into a soundscape that’s as raw and as grand as the landscapes Leone’s camera captures.
Morricone’s genius is fully realized in that pocket watch motif, a recurring melody that haunts the film and its characters. It’s not just a clever audio cue; it’s psychological. When Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) and El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) face off, the watch’s chime becomes a ticking time bomb of vengeance. It’s Morricone making sure you don’t just watch these characters—he forces you to feel their obsession, their grief, their sense of justice. That ticking clock tells you the violence is inevitable, and it pulls you in like a whirlpool.
Quentin Tarantino, a filmmaker who loves cinematic excess, clearly took notes. Morricone’s influence is all over his work, especially in how he uses music not just to underscore scenes, but to dominate them. In Kill Bill or The Hateful Eight, Tarantino doesn’t let his music just fade into the background; he wields it like Leone and Morricone did—turning quiet moments into operas, gunfights into symphonies of tension. Tarantino even went so far as to collaborate with Morricone, trying to capture a piece of that thunderous magic that made these films unforgettable.
In the grand tradition of spaghetti Westerns, For a Few Dollars More was shot MOS—meaning "Mit Out Sound," a wonderfully pragmatic phrase borrowed from German filmmakers that suggests as much about budgetary constraints as it does about the creative spirit of the genre. With no sound recorded on set. Now, dubbing in these films was less an afterthought and more a core element of their rough-hewn charm. The soundscape—dialogue, gunshots, jangling spurs—was built from scratch in a studio far removed from the arid vistas of Almería. It’s almost as if Eastwood’s laconic whispers and Van Cleef’s steely drawl could only emerge from the shadowy confines of a recording booth, rather than in the heat of an actual shootout. And let’s not forget those iconic sound effects, added like seasoning—each ricochet and footstep amplified, echoing the mythic grandeur that Sergio Leone was striving to create. It’s a film constructed as much from silence as it is from sound, and that, in the end, gives it an otherworldly resonance. The unreality of the process paradoxically grounds it, making the violence more operatic and the drama more surreal.
Manco may be the film’s ostensible protagonist, but it’s Mortimer who carries the heart of the story. His calm, quiet resolve is what grounds the film, and Lee Van Cleef’s performance is a revelation. Where Eastwood’s Manco is all cool detachment, Mortimer is driven by something deeper. He’s not just here for the money—he’s here for his soul. And it’s this personal quest for redemption that gives the film its emotional resonance.
Leone’s genius is in creating a heightened world with operatic intensity, where violence becomes art and sound becomes emotion and characters become larger-than-life.
"Time For Justice" by Basesketch
