"A Fistful of Dollars" Leone and Eastwood. A masterpiece of macaroni western created by the collision of different talents.

An innocent, free spirit who destroyed Western grammar.

While reading through references for this article, I came across this comment by Clint Eastwood:

"In Leone's films, the stories are fragmented. They're just comic panels lined up, and the connections between the panels are quite loose." (Quoted from an interview with Clint Eastwood*)

This is a very interesting point. In a sense, Leone could be said to be a director who was indifferent to textbook film grammar. To begin with, he rarely uses so-called cut-back shots. Normally, when photographing two people having a conversation, the subjects would be photographed one after the other, but Leone uses a wide shot to capture the two people having a conversation at the same time.

He also rarely uses establishing shots to make people aware of the location and positional relationship of subjects. We infer locations from the information displayed on the screen and imagine their positional relationships. And Leone uses extreme close-ups at the right moments. The entire screen is dominated by the face, which is so powerful. What he aimed for was an aesthetic framing that paid close attention to detail. Leone himself also left the following comment.

"Like John Ford, I'm not an action director. I'm a director of gesture and silence. And I'm also an orator of images." (Quoted from an interview with Sergio Leone )

“A Fistful of Dollars” (c)Photofest / Getty Images

The comments below probably express Leone's view of the movie.

"I have always thought that true cinema is the cinema of imagination." (Quoted from an interview with Sergio Leone )

According to Eastwood, Leone didn't even know the golden rules of Hollywood Westerns. For example, a gun spewing fire and a person falling after being shot could not be shown on the same screen. Because it's too violent. However, Leone thinks that such a thing will never happen. I'll break that promise without any hesitation.

The innocent, free-spirited way it disrupts the rigid Western grammar makes ``A Fistful of Dollars'' a masterpiece of Western cinema.

*“ The Solitary Knight Clint Eastwood ” (translated by Yoichiro Ishihara, Film Art Co., Ltd.)

Text: Rui Takeshima

A pop culture writer who wants to be kicked by Hit Girl. Host of the web magazine "POP MASTER".

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(c) Photofest / Getty Images