NOIR WEEK BONUS ROUND
For a Few Dollars More and the Noir Blueprint
Though the end of film noir is marked by most circles with Touch of Evil in 1958, the genre did not simply, and could not possibly, vanish into the night. Noir was tenacious. Its roots were planted in the mythos of cinema, and its fatalistic philosophies were engrained in the minds of filmmakers worldwide. Hitchcock barreled on with Psycho, his darkest film to date, nodding dutifully to Welles with the casting of Leigh as his heroine. Godard reinvented Bogie with Jean-Paul Belmondo, and amped up the style for a post-beatnik generation with Breathless. In Japan, Akira Kurosawa and Toshirô Mifune sank their teeth into the ambiguous noir anti-hero with Yojimbo. In Italy, Sergio Leone followed suit, as he deconstructed cinema’s last vestige of naivety, the western.
It would be an understatement to say Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars changed the western forever. A remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Dollars, set in a Mexican border town (Touch of Evil, again rearing its monstrous legacy), spits in the face of everything for which the western genre stood. John Wayne and Gary Cooper were dinosaurs, and so were the pre-noir archaic concepts of good versus evil. Leone’s films called out Cooper’s sheriff in High Noon, a man who made a stand against a world plunging into corruption and apathy, as a glaring fiction. In Leone’s mind, such a man did not exist. So, Clint Eastwood became the new model, as rugged as the landscape he rode through, as uncaring and unflinching as the boiling hot Mexican sun. Right and Wrong were not in his lexicon. The pistol was the only moral barometer, and the dollar, the only God.
Leone broke away from Kurosawa’s guiding hand with For a Few Dollars More, a follow up even grimier than its predecessor, in which Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef play bounty hunters dishing out justice for a system they never believed in to begin with. For Leone, the MacGuffin is always money, and it has nothing to do with “the stuff dreams are made of.” It is as real and immediate as a revolver. Every man in For a Few Dollars More is measured in commodity and whether or not he’s breathing is beside the point entirely. Gary Cooper might not have put a bullet in his partner’s eye for little cash, but Eastwood and Van Cleef sure as hell would.
Money is an essence, as is everything about Leone’s film. Men speak rarely, if at all. Why would they? They’re nothing but wanted posters and reward money. Women are cast aside, appearing only as the sum total of their sexuality, or fervent catalysts for a bloodbath. Van Cleef’s woman, his sister, is a locket he carries as a memento. She may be a living person in flashbacks, but now she’s just an object. Tension, too, is reduced to its core, “who will shoot first?” and the question is dragged out until the breaking point.
When the smoke clears and Eastwood carts away a heap of bodies, all the while calculating their monetary value, there is no semblance of triumph. Eastwood’s face, each inch examined in Leone’s signature extreme close-ups, never betrays a goal or a purpose, if there is one. When the smoke clears, the audience finds they have been rooting for a cypher all along, cackling at the pointless violence, and empathizing with a mask of a man, the face of the new western, the house that noir built.