*Contains spoilers*
I actually watched For a Few Dollars More about 10-15 years ago, but I only remembered that it was confusing and had a great ending. Revisiting it now after seeing more of Sergio Leone’s work, it finally clicks. From the avant-garde, almost psychedelic title sequence, the film announces itself as something stranger and more modern than a classic Western. The film frames the world we are about to watch as morally rotten when it begins with a title card that says the following, “Where life had no value, death sometimes had its price.” Later in the movie, a character named Prophet rails against trains and progress, and the movie does a good job at making modernity feel like a curse hanging over everything, baking the characters under a merciless sun.
Visually, it’s textbook Leone: extreme close-ups of eyes and hands juxtaposed against vast, empty wide shots that reduce people to insects in the desert. This is no studio backlot. It’s another world and another time. There’s a constant sense of dread since everything looks harsh, sweaty, overexposed (but never quite to the point of incompetence on the part of the DP), with dirt, bugs, and grime everywhere. It’s stylized but also nasty and occasionally goofy. It’s a heightened reality where Indio can casually crush a bug with his bare hands and others crawl through the frame unnoticed. The cinematography looks and feels like moving paintings, clearly influenced by printed art and careful composition. One downside, for me, is the dubbing. I get why it’s there, but the too-clean voices and off lip-sync give the whole thing an uncanny quality. For some people, it’s just a cool Leone trademark. For me, it’s just a little annoying.
Structurally, the film plays a backward-forward game: effects come first, explanations much later. It can be confusing on a first watch, but that delayed logic makes rewatches far more rewarding. The uneasy alliance between Manco and Mortimer is the film’s real core. They are two bounty hunters with gray morality, two sides of the same coin. Neither one is a noble frontiersman of older westerns. Manco feels like a Year-One Batman: young, talented, reckless, overly sure of himself. Mortimer is more like an older Sherlock Holmes or The Shadow: older, methodical, and haunted, but also perhaps past his prime. What initially seems like a buddy cop style movie slowly reveals that Mortimer is actually at the emotional center, driven by revenge.
And that final duel, with the chiming watch (and Ennio Morricone’s haunting score) remains one of the most unforgettable standoffs in Western history. It’s my favorite ending of the three Dollars trilogy.
In short, it’s a little trippy and slightly too long but I liked it.
“When the chimes end, pick up your gun. Try and shoot me, colonel. Just try.”