Clint Eastwood’s Western Sequel For a Few Dollars More Is Streaming

In 1964, Italian director Sergio Leone reshaped the Western with A Fistful of Dollars. Instead of a noble hero, the film followed an opportunistic gunslinger who pits two rival Old West gangs against each other for a payday. Its international success showed that audiences were ready for a different kind of Western, that America no longer had a monopoly on the genre, and that Clint Eastwood was a bankable movie star.

A year later, Leone followed it with an even stronger film.

In 1965’s For a Few Dollars More, Eastwood returns as “The Man with No Name.” The title was largely a marketing device: He is called “Manco” in this film and “Joe” in the previous one, though he plays the same character. Manco is a bounty hunter pursuing the ruthless bank robber El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté), whose gang has just broken him out of prison. Another bounty hunter, Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), is also on Indio’s trail. Where Manco is instinctive and rough around the edges, Mortimer is cold and precise.

Despite their differences and mutual distrust, Manco and Mortimer form an uneasy alliance. They plan to join Indio’s gang separately, gain his trust, bring him down and split the reward. A bigger payday emerges when Indio robs a bank and hides the money until the heat dies down. The two bounty hunters then set their sights on both the stash and the bounty.

The film’s moral complexity extends beyond its protagonist. Manco remains the gruff, alluring opportunist from A Fistful of Dollars, but his partnership with Mortimer adds another dimension. The pair gradually move from sizing each other up to respecting each other’s strengths, giving them something of a “buddy cop” dynamic. Mortimer is compelling in his own right, with a secret that keeps his true reason for hunting Indio hidden until the end.

Indio is more tortured than a typical Western villain. He carries a pocket watch bearing the face of a woman he victimized, who killed herself while he was raping her. The watch plays an eerie tune that he uses to count down during duels. Drugs leave him dazed for much of the film, but he remains capable of sudden rage and violence. Those details do not make him sympathetic, but they make him feel more real and unpredictable.

For a Few Dollars More was greenlit after the success of A Fistful of Dollars and received a much larger budget: $600,000, compared with about $200,000 for the first film. The sequel feels larger in scale. While A Fistful of Dollars was mostly confined to empty desert and the small frontier town of San Miguel, the sequel explores a much larger El Paso. Its frontier town set was built for the film in Spain, where much of the movie was shot, and still stands as a tourist attraction. More action and more people also make El Paso feel bigger than San Miguel.

The sequel surpassed its predecessor at the box office, earning $25 million to the first film’s roughly $20 million. Leone and Eastwood repeated their success one year later with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Made for just over $1 million, the third and final film grossed nearly $40 million. It was bigger, more epic, more complex and ultimately better known, but its success built on For a Few Dollars More.

For a Few Dollars More is streaming on MGM Plus and is also available to rent online.

Source: Polygon