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A Fistful of Dollars
A Fistful of Dollars
(DVD) 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, Amazon
The
great westerns actors
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A Fistful of Dollars | Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Dances with Wolves | For a Few Dollars More
| Good, the Bad and the Ugly
High Noon | High Plains Drifter
| Magnificent Seven
Rio Bravo | Rio Grande
| Shane
Three Amigos | Tombstone
| Unforgiven | Wyatt Earp
Cowboy
Movie Posters
(The Illustrated History of Movies Through Posters Series Vol. 2)
Bruce Hershenson
Paperback
Western TV Classics
Western Actors | Big Valley
| Bonanza | Gunsmoke
Life and Legend of Wyatt
Earp | Lone
Ranger | Wild, Wild West
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