This time, the Man With No Name (though he's referred to as Manco in the film itself) is a ruthless bounty hunter, hot on the trail of the equally ruthless killer, bank robber and all-round psychopath El Indio (Volonté)... but he's not alone, since Colonel Mortimer (Van Cleef) also quite fancies the substantial price on Indio's head, quite apart from his deep-seated personal reasons for wanting him dead. But the only way they can catch him is by infiltrating his gang and helping him rob the supposedly impregnable bank of El Paso...
Eastwood and especially Volonté have developed and deepened their characters (who are essentially carried over from the earlier film) - but the real treat is Lee Van Cleef, who is coolness incarnate, whether casually stepping off a train (complete with horse) at an unscheduled stop, casually assembling his rifle while being shot at by a crazed gunman, or - in what may well be my favourite scene of all time - confronting a psychotic hunchback (the great Klaus Kinski in his first really memorable screen role) despite being armed only with a match.
It's a far more confident, swaggering piece of work than A Fistful of Dollars - Leone knew he had hit on a winning formula, and he exploited it to the full right from the marvellous opening sequence ("this train will stop at Tucumcari!"). The plot is considerably less involving than the individual set-pieces, but when they're as inventive and entertaining as they are here, you'll not be hearing too many complaints from this quarter. The bigger budget also pays rich dividends in terms of Leone's images, which are conspicuously more grandiose and operatic than they were before - with For a Few Dollars More, he definitively joined that tiny group of directors whose visual signature can be recognised more or less instantly.
Ennio Morricone was involved in the film at a much earlier stage than he was with A Fistful of Dollars, and this pays spectacularly rich dividends - indeed, some scenes' entire raison d'être seems to be so that Morricone can come up with a striking musical effect (fading out the musical watch that's ticking away the last seconds of its owner's life with a full-blown organ score; strikingly avant-garde string effects to accompany El Indio's drug-taking; the irrepressible use of twangs and similar punctuation marks at every opportunity). Morricone's work on the earlier film was impressive enough, but this is on an altogether different plane - a marvellous showcase for one of the greatest director/composer partnerships in cinema history.
Despite the non-anamorphic NTSC transfer, this DVD's picture quality is for the most part very good. Sourced from a very high quality print, it's commendably sharp and full of detail, with a wonderful burnished tone to the images - indeed, I've seen anamorphic transfers that are far less impressive (Anchor Bay's Django springs to mind). Added to this is the fact that it's been transferred at the correct 2.35:1 ratio, banishing forever years of TV and VHS mutilation of Leone's immaculate widescreen compositions, and my happiness is complete.
The soundtrack, too, has been very well remastered. Although it's in the original mono (which didn't surprise me), it nonetheless does an excellent job of reproducing Leone and Morricone's audaciously original approach to sound and music design (the DVD has had complaints about poor lip-sync, but I suspect this is because as with virtually all Italian films of the period the soundtrack was entirely post-dubbed). There's a very generous selection of 32 chapter stops, each with its own title and still.
The only real disappointment with this DVD is the lack of extras - I thoroughly enjoyed the original mid-1960s trailer (I really don't think Sergio Leone is "better known as Bob Robertson" any more!), and I also liked the subtle but effective animated menu (complete with the sign swaying and creaking in the wind and smoke slowly drifting out of Eastwood's cheroot), and the DVD comes with a well-researched and informative 8-page booklet - but given the talent behind For a Few Dollars More it's a shame MGM couldn't have gone to a bit more effort. Still, compared with the indignities that various video companies have heaped on Leone's work in the past, this is a fairly minor quibble.
Michael Brooke
| Distributor: MGM
Director:
Starring: |
| - theatrical trailer
- booklet |
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