For a Few Dollars More Review

Sergio Leone's second western with Clint Eastwood is where his style becomes a system. Carlo Simi's El Paso, built in the Almería desert and still standing, is a stage for rituals: two bounty hunters sizing each other up by shooting at each other's hats, the long wait before every draw, and a musical pocket watch that Ennio Morricone turns into the film's heartbeat, sliding between the tinny chime on screen and full orchestra.

Lee Van Cleef's Colonel Mortimer, a Carolinas gentleman with a long-barreled arsenal and a private reason for the hunt, is the film's real protagonist. Van Cleef plays him in his own New Jersey accent with a stillness that makes Eastwood's Manco look like the junior partner. Gian Maria Volonté's El Indio, smoking to blot out a memory, is a more disturbed villain than the genre was used to, and Klaus Kinski twitches memorably as a hunchbacked gang member.

Richard Schickel thought it the best of the trilogy, more elegant than A Fistful of Dollars and more compressed than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It lacks the later film's scale and historical weight, its cruelty is cruder, and the post-dubbed dialogue is serviceable at best. The closing duel, timed to the watch, is where Leone found the operatic climax he would keep refining.