VHS : A Fistful of Dollars
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com essential video:
A Fistful of Dollars launched the spaghetti Western and catapulted Clint Eastwood to stardom. Based on Akira Kurosawa's 1961 samurai picture Yojimbo, it scored a resounding success (in Italy in 1964 and the U.S. in 1967), as did its sequels, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The advertising campaign promoted Eastwood's character--laconic, amoral, dangerous--as the Man with No Name (though in the film he's clearly referred to as Joe), and audiences loved the movie's refreshing new take on the Western genre. Gone are the pieties about making the streets safe for women and children. Instead it's every man for himself. Striking, too, was a new emphasis on violence, with stylized, almost balletic gunfights and baroque touches such as Eastwood's armored breastplate. The Dollars films had a marked influence on the Hollywood Western--for example, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch--but their most enduring legacy is Clint Eastwood himself. --Edward Buscombe
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Brilliant western
This is the first Spaghetti western and a superb film. Both Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone are on top form and the storyline, dialogue and action are tremendous.
A classic.
Rating:  - The First Important Spaghetti
No more Rawhide for Clint Eastwood,as the stranger rides on to Italy to meet a legendary director by the name of Sergio Leone to make this classic western that started a trilogy and a genre like no other,with a distinctive richocet sound of bullets,the sun blazed deserts of the Madrid,the rolling hills of landscape and bold scenery,hardened men from the the way of life growing up in the old west,where survival was a reliable .44 and violence was just an ordinary daily routine and the woman were mainly ... Read More
Rating: - The first classic in the Spaghetti Western genre - a remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo
This 1964 film was the first of what came to be called "Spaghetti Westerns" and took then TV star Clint Eastwood and made him into a major Movie Star. If you look on IMDG at Clint Eastwood's career you will be amazed at how rich and varied it has been. Star of all kinds of movies, director of many films, producer, writer, and much more. Just amazing.
This film is Sergio Leone's remake of Kurosawa's wonderful "Yojimbo" (1961) and uses guns instead of swords just as John Sturges's "The ... Read More
Rating: - A great Eastwood Spaghetti western classic
This is one of the "man with no name" spaghetti western movies. Clint, bounty hunter, rides into a town where his horse is scared off by several of the local bullies and leaves Clint horseless and hanging onto a saloon sign. After a drink and chat with the bartender, he approaches the thugs and asks them to apologize to his horse. They try to draw on him, but, in cool fashion, Clint guns them all down. Later, he recognizes an opportunity to be a hired gun for one of the town's gang families. Things ... Read More
Rating:  - Sergio Leone directed several masterpieces--this isn't one of them
Here's where it all began: the first of director Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns" and the movie that launched Clint Eastwood's career. Leone and Eastwood would go on to have many triumphs both together and apart, but when this film is stripped of its historical importance what's left is an average-at-best western. A low-budget affair marred by ugly photography and bad audio dubbing, FISTFUL's thin plot is cribbed from Kurosawa's YOJIMBO (and, indirectly, Dashiell Hammett's novel RED HARVEST) but lacks ... Read More
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