Without the legendary Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood would not be the star as we know today. Although it has been acting for several years – and was even the main man of the classic Western TV show by Charles Marquis Warren “Rawhide” – before his role in “A Fistful of Dollars” arrived in 1964, the second film of Leone divels the career and renown of Eastwood in Hollywood to unforeseen heights. It has become a phenomenon in the United States, ironically, a film shot in Spain and directed by a non-American director. Of course, looking back, we now know that Leone was responsible for the creation of the Spaghetti Western subgenre (a series of films which were deliberately on a budget, shot in Europe, and mainly led by Italian filmmakers), which started with “A Fistful of Dollars”, the first entry into the Dollars trilogy.

But at the time, even Eastwood himself did not know how much a mastodon at the box office and a culturally influential film “a handful of dollars” would become both in the near and distant future. In fact, he only agreed to do it because he had almost exhausted what he could make horseback in “Rawhide” and saw it as an opportunity to tackle something different. In a Interview in the book “Clint Eastwood: interviews, revised and updated,“He explained:” I took an interruption and went to Spain to win “a handful of dollars”. I had nothing to lose. I had a job pending on television and I knew that if it was a flop that nobody would never see it. “”

Although the locals for the three dollars films (“a handful of dollars”, “for a few more dollars” and “good, evil and ugly”) came from Akira Kurosawa samurai moviesThey were hardly as serious as these Japanese classics. On the contrary, they looked more like Cowboy Campy glasses and the action that relied on Eastwood’s steel charisma and the subsistence overflowing while he was pulling bad guys and pulled up to the lines. And he also treated them accordingly. As Eastwood said:

“They were not films for which you are acclaimed, but they were more difficult to make than many of the best roles that I had in recent times. I look at them in the form of satire, which was difficult to do without me breaking out in slapstick – and I also learned by looking at Italians how to give only a few dollars to 10 times on the screen.”

However, although it is relatively cheap to produce, these three films (with “Once Upon a Time in the West” and “A Fistful of Dynamite”, which were also led by Leone) Become pinnacles of the Western genre And the history of the film. They also created a boom at the time and inspired by other Italian directors, such as Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima, to follow their traces and put their own turn on the Western Spaghetti. Overall, western lovers can never thank Eastwood enough for taking their chance on “a handful of dollars” (or Leone for having transformed it into superstar And give us a half-dozen of the highest pedigree films).