A lone gunslinger rides into a desolate, corrupt town, and you can almost feel the dust settle around him. In A Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood plays the Man with No Name, a figure so enigmatic and taciturn that he might as well be a ghost. Just don't laugh at his mule.
“ I don't think it's nice, you laughin'. You see, my mule don't like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea you're laughin' at him.”
It’s a border town, torn apart by two warring factions—the Rojo brothers, who run the smuggling trade, and the Baxters, the town’s so-called law enforcers. Both sides are ruthless, and both think they can buy him.
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars is a landmark of cinema, but it's one surrounded by controversy. Leone, with no permission and seemingly no shame, lifted the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo wholesale, transforming the samurai drama into a gritty, dust-streaked Western. It’s a theft, yes, but it’s also a transformation—a rebirth of a story that, in Leone’s hands, becomes something entirely its own. And that’s where the talent of Leone comes into play. He didn’t just copy Kurosawa; he found a way to make this “borrowed” story pulsate with his own cinematic language, something raw and visceral that feels unmistakably his.
Yojimbo, Kurosawa’s 1961 masterpiece, was itself an ingenious subversion of the Western genre, transposing the lone gunslinger archetype into the context of feudal Japan. Toshiro Mifune’s wandering ronin, a nameless figure who manipulates two warring factions in a lawless town, was Kurosawa’s sly nod to the cowboy heroes of John Ford. Leone, recognizing the brilliance of this setup, saw an opportunity not only to take the story but to reshape it through his distinctly European lens. What emerged was A Fistful of Dollars (1964), a film that took the foundations of Yojimbo and built upon them with Leone’s own stylistic flourishes—sweat, blood, tension, and moral ambiguity.
Where Kurosawa’s Yojimbo unfolds in the context of a cold, windswept village in Japan, Leone sets his remake in a dusty, almost desolate border town between Mexico and the United States. This shift in setting isn’t just geographical; it reorients the moral universe of the story. The town in A Fistful of Dollars feels like a no-man’s-land, a place where the usual laws of society don’t apply and where survival is a matter of cunning and brutality. It’s a frontier in the truest sense—lawless, dangerous, and bleak. Leone’s aesthetic—stark, stripped-down, and grimy—gives the film a tactile sense of desperation. This isn’t a romanticized version of the West; it’s a place where men kill to stay alive, and morality is a luxury few can afford.
Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name (apart from Joe) , the mysterious gunslinger at the heart of the story, is a figure defined by his reticence. Where Mifune’s ronin in Yojimbo was volatile and expressive, Eastwood’s character is a man of few words and even fewer expressions. He’s more ghost than man—drifting into town, assessing the situation with a cold, calculating gaze, and proceeding to manipulate the warring factions for his own gain. There’s no nobility in what he does; he’s not here to save anyone. In Leone’s world, heroism is dead, replaced by something much colder and more detached. The Man with No Name is the ultimate anti-hero—stoic, cynical, and unflinching.
Leone’s eye is most evident in the way he frames this story. His use of close-ups, often extreme, places us uncomfortably close to the characters, forcing us to confront their brutality and weariness. Faces fill the screen—sweat-streaked, grimy, and hardened by years of violence. These aren’t the clean-cut heroes of the classic American Western; they’re rough, worn-down figures, etched with the scars of a life spent on the edge. Leone uses these close-ups to build tension, holding the shot just a little too long, letting the silence stretch until the audience is practically squirming in their seats. And then, with a sudden burst of violence, he releases that tension in an explosion of sound and fury.
One of the most cinematic experiences of A Fistful of Dollars is the way Leone uses the landscape. His wide shots, often showing characters dwarfed by the vast, barren desert, emphasize the isolation and desolation of this world. The landscape becomes a character in itself—inhospitable, unforgiving, and eerily quiet. In contrast to the claustrophobic close-ups, these wide shots give the film an epic scope, highlighting the smallness of the men who inhabit this world. They’re specks on the horizon, lost in a vast, uncaring world.
Ennio Morricone’s iconic score, a soundscape that is as integral to the film as any of its characters. Leone would ask Morricone to compose first and then film around the score.
Morricone’s use of unconventional instruments—whistles, whip cracks, electric guitars—creates a sound that feels both modern and timeless. It’s a perfect muse for Leone’s vision, injecting the film with an operatic grandeur that elevates even the most mundane scenes into something mythic. The score, much like the film itself, is a blend of styles and influences, drawing from traditional Western music but pushing it into new, unexpected territory.
Despite the film’s clear debt to Yojimbo, Leone makes A Fistful of Dollars distinctly his own. His visual style, with its stark compositions and brutal violence, is worlds apart from Kurosawa’s more measured, elegant approach. Leone’s West is dirtier, meaner, and more dangerous. His characters don’t operate within the bounds of any code, samurai or otherwise; they’re driven by greed and survival, and the film’s bleak worldview reflects that.
Leone’s audacity in lifting the entire structure of Yojimbo without so much as a nod to Kurosawa is, in a way, part of the film’s legacy and taints it, watching them back to back is a bizarre experience.
Yes, it’s plagiarism, but it’s transformative, innovative, and bold. Kurosawa himself recognized the artistry in what Leone had done, famously quipping, “It’s a very good movie, but it’s my movie.” That acknowledgment of Leone’s skill is telling. Leone didn’t just copy Yojimbo; he reimagined it, infusing it with his own cinematic language and, in the process, creating something entirely new.
Leone would go on to refine his style in the subsequent films of his “Dollars Trilogy”—For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—but it was A Fistful of Dollars that laid the groundwork. This was the film that announced Leone as a director with a vision, a filmmaker who could take a story rooted in one culture and transform it into something universal. And in doing so, Leone didn’t just redefine the Western; he redefined what cinema could be.
In the end, A Fistful of Dollars stands as both a tribute and a challenge to its source material. It’s a film built on the bones of another, but it’s no mere imitation. Leone, like all great artists, took what wasn’t his and made it unforgettable. And in doing so, he left his own mark on the genre, influencing generations of filmmakers to come…. Just ask Quentin Tarantino.