"Tickets." "Tickets." "Tickets, please." "Tickets." "Tickets." "Thank you." "Tickets." "Is it far to Tucumcari?" " We'll pass there in three or four minutes." " Thanks." "Excuse me, but you've made a mistake, Reverend." "I couldn't help hearing you're goin' to Tucumcari." "I'd better tell you, you're on the wrong train." "I think the nearest stop to Tucumcari is Amarillo." "By getting off at Santa Fe and returning by way of Amarillo, you should be able to get right where you're... going." "Er..." "You see, the train doesn't stop at Tucumcari." "This train'll stop at Tucumcari." "Take it easy, everybody." "Why'd you stop?" "Something gone wrong?" "Somebody pulled the emergency cord." "Hey, mister, you just can't pull the emergency cord and jump off!" "Why'd you stop that train?" "If you wanna get off, you..." "Well, the railroad company'd be pleased to make arrangements for any passenger if you wanna get off here, sir." "I did get off." "Thanks." "All right, let's go!" "Go ahead, let's go!" "Guy passed by in person and added on those two zeros." "He was spittin' mad when he saw what they was offerin'." "He said, "A measly thousand bucks for me?" "I'm worth a lot more than that."" "That's right, he said that." "Then he added the zeros on the thousand." "There isn't anyone got the guts to face that killer, eh?" "At least, it's been that way till now." "Where is he?" "Huh?" "Where is he?" "I've no idea where he'd be today." "Hold still!" "Oh, look!" "What's that?" "Pardon me, ma'am." "I'll kill ya for this!" "There ya are. $1,000." "What do you know about Cavanagh?" "About a week ago he was seen at White Rocks." "Thanks." "If it's of any interest to ya, somebody else dropped in to see me about him." " Who?" " I never seen him before." "His name is, er..." "Manco." "Light?" "You know Baby Cavanagh?" "Now tell me, you know where I can find him?" "There." "At that table." "He's got his back to you." "Thanks." "Two cards." "Didn't hear what the bet was." "Your life." "Alive or dead, it's your choice." "Let Red go." "$2,000." "It's a lot of money." "Takes me three years to earn it." "Tell me, isn't the sheriff supposed to be courageous, loyal and above all honest?" "Yeah, that he is." "I think you people need a new sheriff." "Hughie." "Hasta luego... amigo." " How are you, Niño?" " Better when I see you." "Go on." "Go ahead." "Open it." " What's up?" "Who is it?" " Rodríguez, señor." "You." "Come along." "I'm letting you live, hero." "That's so you can tell everybody what takes place here." "For the lousy money." "No!" "No!" "No!" "You took money to put me behind bars." "You should have killed me when you could." "It would be better for you." "And for them." "How old's the boy?" "How old is the boy, I asked!" "He is 18 months now." "Just the time that I was in jail." "You used the reward that you got to start raising a family." "And that's why I feel your family's partly mine." "I'll take my part now." "Outside." "They're both innocent." "Please let 'em go." "I was the one, you know that." "No!" "And now..." "I'm sure you hate me just enough." "This time you'll have a chance to shoot me, but not in the back." "Let go." "When you hear the music finish, begin." "Do you think you can?" "Let's start." "Now." " Check those figures again." " Yes, sir." "Good day, sir." "Good afternoon." "Mortimer." "Douglas Mortimer." " Mortimer." "Virginia, isn't it?" " Carolina." "That's right, Carolina." "Can I help in some way?" " I'm looking for a first-class bank." " Oh, but, exactly!" "Yeah." "The largest and most secure bank in the territory." "Well, Mr Mortimer, I assure you our bank has all the safeguards you're looking for." "I don't doubt that, but I have a large sum to deposit." "Now... suppose I'm a bandit?" "A... bandit?" "A very dangerous bandit with a gang of killers." "Now what would be the most impossible bank for me to rob?" "In your case, the one bank I would suggest is the Bank of El Paso." "Not even Indio would dare to attack that one." "It's not a bank, it's a fortress there." "Hm." "What time's the next train for El Paso?" "11.30." "I'll telegraph my colleague in El Paso that you're going to arrive." "Thanks." "Hey, mister!" "Captain!" "General!" "Welcome!" "Do you need a stable or a room?" "Do you wanna take a bath?" "My name is Fernando." "The stable is right here and that is your hotel." "Why this hotel and not some other?" "You wouldn't like that other place as much." "You'd spend half the night shooting cockroaches." "At this hotel, the rooms cost much less, and there's a landlady, señor." " Married?" " Yes, but she doesn't care." "That's the bank." "As soon as I get some money, I'll put it in." "Well, you're gonna have to earn it first." "I have 50 cents for you if you'll let me know when anybody you've never seen before here in El Paso comes to town." "At the hotel, señor." "A stranger just came outta there." "Where's he staying'?" "The hotel." "Let me know if you see any more strangers." "Sure, señor." " Help you, sir?" " I want the room right above." "I'm sorry, it's occupied." "Too bad." "The hotel's filled to capacity." "I'm sorry - the room you want is our best." "It's always occupied." " By who?" " Check the register." "Mary!" "It's señor Martínez." " It's free now." " That room is taken!" "I'll see to it." "He's nothing but a wild, vicious animal!" "He's tall, isn't he?" "You're just dirty." "Proprietor, quick, my bill!" "I want my bill!" " Before he comes down!" "Give me my bill!" " There's no need to check out." "I'll give you another room." "The best in the hotel." " We'll give him the bridal suite, eh?" " No, no, Mary, the bill." "I'd like to stay, but I have an appointment elsewhere." "Señor Martínez?" "Yes, señor, what do you want?" "I don't wear 'em." "I'm honoured that you thought of me." "Thank you!" "Watch this." "Hello, my friends." "Hello, Indio." "You see?" "I didn't waste a minute coming here." "Indio calls and Groggy comes running." "And Sancho?" "If you're waiting for Sancho, I'll come back in four years." "He's in prison." "For four years, no amor, no dinero, no sun." "Bad for him." "Not so bad for the rest of us." "A man who gets caught doesn't deserve respect, huh?" "What's it all about, huh?" "Now just listen." "A bank at El Paso." "Let's see..." "We'll say this is the inside of the bank." "Niño is the safe." "Which weighs three tons and can't be opened with dynamite." "There's the part with two cashiers." "This is the manager's desk." "In the back is a fancy cabinet with bottles for offering drinks to the rich depositors." "There's the main door, and opposite they built a double wall." "What happens, Groggy?" "Let's say you've already killed the two cashiers and the manager and for the next few minutes you're the boss of the bank." "Now what?" " The time's been wasted, Indio." " Mm-mm-mm..." "Right." "A waste of time." "Especially, Groggy, to blast open that damn iron safe, we'd have to be using so much dynamite that the whole bank would just disappear." "And you'd all go up with it." "And besides, the presence of a safe alone doesn't always signify that there is money inside." "To help you understand what I mean..." "I would like to relate a nice little parable." "Once upon a time there was a carpenter." "You don't think a carpenter can make money, eh?" "No?" "You're wrong." "This one did well, because he was a builder of safes." "There was a banker once who decided he must have his iron safe disguised to look like a... wood cabinet." "To get it made, the banker goes to our carpenter for the job." "And one day, as destiny has it, the carpenter's in El Paso." "He happens to walk into the bank, and what does he find?" "The cabinet." "Since he'd worked on the cabinet, he spotted it right away." "From that day on he couldn't work any more." "Pity, because..." "there was something he had to do." "There was this crazy idea, and it stayed, and it stayed." "To put his hands on the money inside." "Get in there and grab all the money." "Sure, you think that carpenter was lucky, the way things work out." "That he was lucky to go in just that bank." "It wasn't true." "His good fortune stopped that day." "Because later, as a prisoner... he ran into me." "The carpenter told me the story and I tell you." "The money isn't in the safe, it's right in this!" "Almost a million dollars in it!" "Your colleague told me that this bank has the largest deposits in the state." "Yes, that's correct, Mr Mortimer." "Here at the bank at El Paso, we have half a million dollars' reserve on hand." "I see." "You sure this bank is secure enough to hold that much?" "From the moment your money's on deposit here, you can sleep without any worries." "Besides, when the bank is closed, an armed guard always remains here and a patrol is on guard outside." "Even the Bank of San Francisco isn't that well protected." "Exactly." "The truth is, Mr Mortimer... to try robbing us would be so futile that only a complete fool would attempt it." "Yeah." "Or a complete madman." "Get outta the way!" "Get outta here!" "More news, amigo." "Another stranger in town?" "Yes." "And I know something else." "There was another stranger I didn't tell you about." "You listen to me, you sawed-off little runt!" "I wanna know how many men there are altogether." "There were two." "Now there's two more." " Where?" " In the saloon." "Whisky." "Listen, mister, why do you choose my place to commit suicide?" "I know that man." "It's a miracle you're alive." "Why should a man carry a pistol and let himself be insulted?" "It's mighty strange." "Well, if the hunchback didn't shoot you, he had a very, very important reason." "I was thinking that myself." "One... two... three... now four... and five  seis... siete... ocho... nueve... diez... 11... 12... 13... 14... 15... 16... 17... 18... 19... 20... 21... 22... 23... 24... 25... 26... 27... 28... 29... 30... 31... 32... and 33." "No!" "No, no!" " All right now." " Ah!" "I don't know 'im." "I don't know 'im!" "Come on now." "You know everybody." "I don't know anybody any more!" "I'm dead!" "Understand?" "There was a time when I knew everybody." "A long time ago, when all this was prairie." "But these days everybody's in a hurry, with your damned good-for-nothin' trains!" "Toot!" "Toot!" "Toot!" "Tweeee!" "Disgusting!" "One day someone from the railroad comes and says, "Prophet, the railway's going right past your house."" ""Ah, is that so?" I says." ""Mm-hm." "Yup, that's right," he says." ""All those trains'll go right past here."" ""The best thing for you is to sell your land to the company or we'll buy Baker's." "He lives next to your place."" ""I'll put tracks here, and that'll make you go crazy." "Will you sell to us?"" ""Oh, is that so?", says I. Hmm!" "Hmm!" "He was very anxious for me to sell out." "You know what I told him he could do with his railroad?" "You know what my decision about selling was?" " Well, you said no." " You're right about that." "No to him and his damn trains!" "I wouldn't!" "No!" "Look..." "Listen to me, old man." "You're supposed to be a prophet." "I didn't come here to hear about trains." "I want to find out about this man." " It's obvious you don't know anything." " No need to be insulting!" "If that's all you came to do, you can clear out, before I lose my temper!" "Understand?" "Hey!" "Where ya goin', hm?" "I guess I'd better leave before you go and lose your temper." "Why are you so dang stupid?" "Hurry up, gimme that pistol!" "Yeah, right there behind you." "Hurry." "Yes, yes, that's the one." "Now hand it over." "That's it, gimme that gun." "The man you asked about, there's only one question: how does he carry his gun?" " He wears it here, across his belly?" " Yeah." "Why didn't you tell me that in the first place?" "Of course I know the man you're trying to find out about!" "Of course I know him." "He's Colonel Douglas Mortimer." "Mortimer!" "A brave man, a soldier." "He was known as the best shot in the Carolinas." "A great soldier." "Now he's reduced to being a bounty killer, same as you." "Because of trains!" "Because of the damn trains, damn 'em!" "Poo!" "Take it to the station." "The gentleman's leaving." "Hold it!" "Take it back." "Take it to the station." " Go inside." " The station." "Just like the games we know." " He's picking it up." " A trick, maybe." "How can somebody in my business go around with a contraption like this?" "That contraption... almost sent you to your grave." "You're forgetting one thing, Colonel:" "I was shooting at your hat." "Well, I was only shooting at yours." "But I recall firing first." "Boy, I've reached almost 50 years of age with my system." "Not many men last long in these parts." "How long do you expect to last?" "Much longer than that." "When I get my hands on Indio and that $10,000," "I'm gonna buy myself a little place, possibly retire." "Yeah." "Well, I don't believe we oughta start another fight, but you forget one small detail." " What's that?" " I wanna get my hands on Indio, too." "Sure." "After me." "Or before you." "Or at the same time." " Is that a proposition?" " Mm-hm." "An equal partnership." "Why?" "Why should I?" "Well, I can think of three reasons." "The first is, there's 14 of them." "Yeah, that's a lot." "A lot for me." "Yeah." "No small number even for two of us." "Second reason?" "Second reason?" "The second reason is you could make it 15 to one." "Don't forget, I wanna play in this game too." "As you're aware, when two hunters go after the same prey, they usually end up shooting each other in the back." "We don't want to do that." "Then the Colonel dies, hm?" "All right, I'll be generous." "You can have the reward for Indio, and I'll take the reward for the rest of the band." "No." "All wrong." "Indio's worth $10,000, but the rest of the band adds up to much more than that." "Blackie's worth four, Wild's worth three, Niño two..." " Niño's one." " Hm?" "Well, Frisco's worth two." "Well, that's $10,000." "Yeah, but there's a few more that'll add up to more than that, I'm sure." " How d'you know that?" " I have my information, Colonel." "No, when all's said and done, I might just take you up on your proposition." "Mm." "Let's drink to this partnership." "To the partnership." "With no tricks, of course." "No tricks." "Now then, we're gonna have to figure out some way to get them in the middle." "Yep." "One from the outside, one from the inside." "There's no other way." "One of us will have to join Indio's band." " Why are you looking at me?" " Because they don't know you." "Wild sees me and his hump'll catch on fire." "Tell me, Colonel, how do you propose that I join up with Indio?" "Maybe bring him a bunch of roses?" "Well, you could do that, but I'd suggest you take him Sancho Pérez." " Who's Sancho Pérez?" " A friend of Indio's." "Right now he's cooling off in Alamogordo jail." "How do you know all this?" "I've got my information too." "Naturally you'll have to arrange for his... release." "Naturally." "Tell me, Colonel, were you ever young?" "Yep." "And just as reckless as you." "Then one day somethin' happened." "Made life very precious to me." "What's that?" "Or is the question indiscreet?" "No." "The question isn't indiscreet." "But the answer could be." "They told me you were put away, you'd be resting for four long years in prison." "No, Indio!" "For four weeks!" "No more than four weeks!" "Sancho..." " Who is that with you?" " He got me out." "Man's a friend of mine." "Ah..." "Why did he help you?" "Did you ask him that?" "Yeah." "Amigo, why did you help me out?" "Well, there's such a big reward being offered on all you gentlemen that I thought I might just tag along on your next robbery." "Might turn you in to the law." "Amigo, that's the one answer that would prove you're all right." "And you arrived just in time too." "The job is already set." "It's tomorrow." "The place is... the bank in El Paso." "Not far from El Paso is a little town, Santa Cruz." "Tomorrow, Blackie, Chico, Paco and... you, amigo, will rob the bank in Santa Cruz." "Shoot, kill." "Get every gun in the area after you - especially those from El Paso." "Any others around, we'll take care of them." "And then after the job, we'll all meet again at Las Palmeras." "Where are you going?" "Well, if there's gonna be any shooting, I gotta get my rest." "Hey, amigo, you know, when you told that story yesterday, I fell for it." "Big joke, wasn't it, amigo?" "Who said I was jokin'?" " I don't get that." "If it's true..." " Too bad you have to die." "What is it?" "By now they should be at Santa Cruz." "Listen, shorty..." "Indio and his band have just robbed the bank here in town." "Why don't you send the alarm to El Paso and the towns around here and warn 'em?" "But, mister, I didn't hear any shots at the bank, and I sure would have." "You might hear one." "The alarm." "Easy now." "They've robbed the bank at Santa Cruz!" "Follow me!" "Groggy, the telegraph wires." " Good day, gentlemen." " Good day." " Sir." " Afternoon." "The other side." "11... 12... 14..." "You're not running away, are ya?" "No, I'm not running away." "I'm goin' after 'em and I'm goin' alone." " Our partnership is dissolved." " Now, boy, let's talk it over." "All we've done is talk." "I've been reasonable with no results." "Take it easy." "We only knew the Santa Cruz part of his plan." "You were the one who had their strategy all worked out." " I'm gonna meet Indio." " I see." "I'd better go along." "I'm goin' alone." "Me!" "I'm not gonna let anyone else interfere." " You certain about that?" " That's right, Colonel." "In that case, I'm sorry." "That's not bad." "Indio sent four men to Santa Cruz." "One man returns, a new man, without a scratch." "Uh-uh." "Indio's no idiot." "You show him that little nick and he might believe you." "And don't forget that, as of today, the whole gang is worth $40,000 more." "That's the reward offered to get the money back." " Is the partnership operating again?" " Just how, do you figure?" "Try to convince Indio to go north." "And then go along the Rio Bravo." "It's a good spot for an ambush." "We can get 'em between two fires." "You on the outside, me on the inside, right?" "Mm-hm." "North?" "North." "Hughie." "Wait a minute." "We need time to open it." "This isn't the right place." " And the others?" "Dead?" " Yeah." "After Santa Cruz we headed for El Paso." "They hit us from all sides." "And you just saved your own skin, you yellow ba..." "You did your part of it." "Let's go." "Which way are we headed?" " North." " North?" "Along Rio Bravo Canyon?" "Why not?" "Seems like a good place for an ambush to me." "You know a better way to go?" "Yeah." "South." "Hm..." " Ride to the border?" " Yeah." "They'll never expect you to cross the border now the alarm's been sent." "Hm." "No." "I think we'll head east." "There's a place I know about, Agua Caliente." "Here we are." "That's Agua Caliente." "Yes, I have many friends here." "It looks just like a morgue." "But look out - it could be one so easily." " They don't like strangers, eh?" " No." "They don't like anybody." "Wild, you never saw our friend here shoot, right?" "No." "Did any of you?" "Hm..." "We don't know how you'd be in emergencies." "I was thinking, this is the right place." "I got a way you can show the men." " How's that?" " Go into town alone, amigo." "Bravo." "You mind tellin' me how you got here?" "I just reasoned it out." "I figured you'd tell Indio to do exactly the opposite of what we agreed." "And he's suspicious enough to figure out something else." "Since El Paso was out of the question, well, here I am." "Rum." "A double." "Tequila for all of us." "Well, well!" "If it isn't the smoker." "Well!" "Remember me, amigo?" "Uh-uh." "Of course you do." "El Paso." "It's a small world." "Yes." "And very, very bad." "Now come on." "You light another match." "I generally smoke just after I eat." "Why don't you come back in ten minutes?" "In ten minutes you'll be smokin' in hell." "Get up!" "Stay calm." "On your feet!" "Cuchillo, count to three." "One... two... three!" "Stop it!" "Who are you?" "I'm the one who can open the safe for you." "What safe, señor?" "The one from El Paso." "You got there ahead of me." " However..." " However?" "Open that safe and you're gonna destroy half the banknotes." "I can open it without blowing it up." " What'll it cost?" " 5,000." "Two is all I'll pay you." "Five." "Keep your hands off it!" "It's easy to steal." "The trouble is in keeping the loot." "Take it out." "Every man in New Mexico is after us." "Catch one of us with some of this money and we'll all end up the same way." "We're going to wait here an entire month if I think it's necessary." "Then everybody will get his share." "And you'll wait a month to get your money." "Naturally." "I'll be in the tavern." "The air around here stinks anyway, just like the food." "But the month will go fast." "All right." "Right here." "Let's go." "Shh." "I was worried about you." "All alone, with so many problems to solve." "It's all right here." "Go ahead." "You shouldn't have shot the apples off that tree." "Put it on." "What's he doing now, the sheriff of El Paso?" "Right now?" "Lookin' for the cash that was in the bank." "Right." "And suppose he finds the bodies of these men just outside El Paso with lots of money on them?" " What will the sheriff think?" " Well, he..." "That's right." "Slim?" "What is it, Niño?" "A change of plans." "Indio wants you to..." "It's not loaded." "I think you should get out fast now." "Here's your guns without bullets." "And listen, don't you let Indio find you both around." "I know you don't like questions, Indio, but why are you doing this?" "Niño, how long have you known that Manco's a bounty killer?" "I found out tonight." "Why?" "I knew he was one from the first moment he arrived." "The other one's also a bounty killer." "So I have an idea." "They'll be useful to us." "We'll try it." "Those men are a lot better than mine with a gun." "So we'll let all of them get mixed up in a gun battle." "But that won't really matter to me... or you." "Because we'll be far away, right?" "And we'll have all the money." "Go on." "Go on and wake Cuchillo." " Who did it?" " Why don't you look at the knife?" " It's mine." " And it shouldn't be there, should it?" "But I didn't kill him, Indio." "I didn't do it." "Cuchillo, it's difficult to prove that." "Indio..." "I am innocent." "One of the horses is outside." "Let's see if you can get to it." "Indio?" "Cuchillo..." "He just killed Slim." "And he... he helped those two bounty killers get away." "I..." "I want them back." "Right now." "Right now." "Right now!" "What are you doing here?" "!" "Go on, get them back!" "Groggy..." "Those two bounty killers are sitting on our backs." "They must be killed right away." "We can't let them go free." "It's done now." "Prepare to get out of here." " Here, Niño." " Indio!" "Hold it!" "Not a bad idea, Indio." "But I'm one thing you forgot about." "Open it up now." "All right, come on now, open it." "Leave Indio to me." "All right." "Where in hell is it?" "I'll kill them, but I'll rip out their guts first!" "I have a plan, Groggy." "What?" "Let's just wait, Groggy." "They'll be back here." "And this way there'll be two of us." "Can they come back here?" "Your men could've killed 'em." "Who?" "They?" "Are you sure of that, Indio?" "That they haven't?" "I thought something different." "You made the boys ride on out to make sure they're both killed, and fast." "I'm not as dumb as the rest of them, Indio." "There was no help for it." "Go on." "That watch..." "It's been a long time that I've wanted to ask." "I can see that it means a lot to you, Indio." "Why?" "Indio!" "Listen to me!" "This is Colonel Mortimer!" "Douglas Mortimer!" "Does the name mean anything to you?" "When the chimes end, pick up your gun." "Try and shoot me, Colonel." "Just try." "Very careless of you, old man." "Try this." "Now we start." "Bravo." "There seems to be a family resemblance." "Here." "Naturally, between brother and sister." "My gun?" "My boy, you've become rich." "You mean we've become rich, old man." "No, it's all for you." "I think you deserve it." "What about our partnership?" "Maybe next time." "Ten thousand... 12 thousand... 15... 16... 17... 22... 22?" "27." "Any trouble, boy?" "No, old man." "Thought I was havin' trouble with my adding." "It's all right now." "Ha!" "Subtitles by Visiontext" "ENHOH" "My name is Christopher Frayling, biographer of Sergio Leone, and this time it's For a Few Dollars More." "Sergio Leone's second Western begins with a whistling noise off screen and the sound of a rifle being cocked and of a cigar being lit." "We know from Fistful of Dollars that this is Clint Eastwood, but we can't see him." "In fact, it was Sergio Leone himself who did the whistling and the fiddling about." "He's on a ledge, in Almería." "Actually, it's north of Tabernas, where the main set was, with the Los Filabres mountains in the background." "Quite a lot of Hollywood Westerns, like The Bounty Hunter, made in the 1950s, began with a baddie on the ledge and the good guy in the valley being shot at." "But this reverses it - we have the good guy shooting at an unknown person down in the valley." "Shoots him off his horse." "And the smoke from the cigar turns into the lettering For a Few Dollars More." "Then the lettering, instead of being smoke, turns into a target on a wire, which is a moving target to try and avoid the shots of the bounty hunter who's on the ledge to the right." "Much more confident titles than Fistful of Dollars, with everyone's own names, whereas in Fistful of Dollars, a lot of them hid under pseudonyms." "The soundtrack theme is even more extreme - the whistling, the drumbeat, the maranzano, the Jew's harp, the incomprehensible lyric from the choir, the bell, the whip cracks, and the Fender Stratocaster guitar." "It's a new kind of main theme for a Western, which would have tended, traditionally, to be more orchestral, lush and folk musicy." "This is a rock-and-roll soundtrack at an even higher volume than Fistful of Dollars." "I once asked one of the performers what the lyric says and he couldn't remember." "It's something like "We can fight" or "We defy" or "In the wind", but it doesn't matter, it's just a sound, the human voice used as yet another musical instrument." "Much of the same team as produced Fistful of Dollars - the same designer, the same composer, Ennio Morricone, the same director of photography, and a lot of the same repertory company of actors as appeared in Fistful of Dollars." "It was filmed almost exactly a year after Fistful of Dollars." "It was put together quickly in the wake of the success of Fistful of Dollars, and was originally to be called The Bounty Killer." "They changed the title because of the success of the first film." "It's the perfect sequel title" " Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More." "It was watching this moment of Sergio Leone's name being shot that convinced Eli Wallach to appear in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "He realised the director must have a sense of humour if he can put up his name in credit titles like that." "The message of the first title is that there's no law in this land, all sheriffs are corrupt, so bounty hunters make their own law." "It begins with a shot of the Bible." "In the shooting script, it was a shot of Lord Byron's poems, to show that the person behind it is a cultivated kind of man." "But in this, it's the Bible, and so for a moment we think this might be a priest." "This was shot on the train from the Guadix to Almería line." "It was the first locomotive in a Leone Western, a sign already that the budget was larger than Fistful of Dollars." "The voice behind the Bible is that of Lee Van Cleef, veteran Hollywood actor who'd appeared in many Hollywood Westerns, but usually as the second bad guy from the left who got killed in the second or third reel." "He'd been knifed in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, shot in The Bravados, shot in High Noon, his first film." "He was just the guy with the nasty face who played the bad guy." "The part that he's playing was originally slotted for Lee Marvin or Robert Ryan or Charles Bronson or Henry Fonda." "But Leone remembered that face of Van Cleef from Hollywood movies in his youth." "He went over, he found him." "Van Cleef had virtually retired from movies." "The last film he'd made was in 1962, How the West Was Won, a silent part where he didn't have a line of dialogue." "He'd had a terrible car crash in the late '50s, and his left knee was crushed." "So Lee Van Cleef was in a bad shape, but Leone wanted that face, wanted that profile, wanted that look." "It's a classic example of European cineastes having a very long memory." "And suddenly Lee Van Cleef makes the best entry he'd ever made in the movies." "Already there's more of an emphasis on parody and comedy than in the first film." "The script was largely written by Luciano Vincenzoni, who specialised in social comedies and witty films." "His greatest film was made in the late 1950s, La Grande guerra, The Great War, a rather cynical comedy about two layabouts in the First World War." "That sort of parody, comedy feeling to the script runs throughout it." "It's one of the things that makes this film distinctive." "The telegraph man is played by Roberto Camardiel, a Spanish actor, who subsequently specialised in Mexican bad guys in low-budget Italian Westerns." "Van Cleef is dressed like a specialist." "He wears a cape, a frock coat, like the gambler in a traditional Hollywood film." "In fact, Leone put at the beginning of the shooting script:" ""He should look a little like Clarke Gable in Gone with the Wind. "" "A gambler figure, a specialist bounty hunter, with the emphasis on the hunter." "He carries an arsenal with him, like a professional hunter going on safari." "Enters the saloon, the piano stops." "It's a moment we've seen in countless Westerns and it's almost a send-up." "These are hallowed moments from the traditional Western being reworked, almost as comedy." "The film was dubbed, post-synchronised, because Italian popular movies, or any Italian movies, didn't use direct sound." "So the actors of various nationalities - Spanish, Italian, American, West German - would speak their own language and the track would be laid on in post-synchronisation." "Which is why you get this mismatch between the lip movements of characters and the words that are coming out of their mouths." "Slight continuity error here - the zeroes were added on the first "Wanted" poster, and they seem to have disappeared on this one." "We're about to see a rerun of a sequence from a 1950s' Hollywood Western called The Bounty Hunter, by André De Toth, where Randolph Scott comes out of a hotel room, the guy he's hunting jumps off the balcony," "goes into the street, rides off, only this is rather more extreme." "It's also a kind of version of Leone's slightly vulgar form of comedy " ""Pardon me", the lady in the bath." "There's lots of gags about hotels in this movie, with hoteliers and buxom ladies." "And here we have the specialist with his arsenal - a Winchester, a pinfire, double-barrelled rifle - a whole arsenal of things for this hunter to get his prey." "He's a different kind of bounty hunter to the Eastwood character." "This is one of the first dead horses in Westerns." "Somehow, everyone's shot people in Westerns but the horse always survived, but in this one the horse is lying in the street." "Another continuity problem - Callaway doesn't have a moustache." "On the "Wanted" poster he does." "He seems to have lost his moustache between when the poster went up and when he went to the hotel." "Tucumcari, the town, was in fact the redressed set of Fistful of Dollars, at Manzanares, north of Madrid, which was reused for just these sequences." "It was already an old Western set when Fistful of Dollars moved into it, and here it is, being recycled as the Mexican town of Tucumcari." "Generally in this film, the Mexican towns south of the border are rather run-down and impoverished, and there's no sense of affluence." "Whereas, north of the border, towns like El Paso and White Rocks are much more affluent and have much more of a sense of a thriving community." "But we're now south of the border." "Interesting, the name for Clint Eastwood." "Manco in Spanish means "one-handed"." "In the Italian version he's called Monco, which sounds like monaco, the "monk"." "In the American version he's the man with no name." "He's a different character to the character in the first film, where he was a masterless samurai, a saddle tramp wandering the Southwest." "Now he's a professional bounty hunter." "He enters the town of White Rocks, in America, and the rain starts as he arrives, a sort of purifying rain as Eastwood rides into town." "Whereas Van Cleef entered the movie on a train, Eastwood enters it on foot." "He lights his cheroot with his left hand, making sure his gun hand is free in case anything happens." "Wearing the same poncho, the same hat, the same gun belt, the same pistol grips, which Eastwood brought from the set of Rawhide when he first went to Spain." "For the second movie, he's wearing all those things again." "This saloon in White Rocks," "Leone famously said to the properties people and the designers:" ""I want this really smokey." ""Usually, saloons in Hollywood films are too well-scrubbed, too clean, too overlit." ""I want lots of fire - wood-burning stove, cigars." ""I want it so that people look as though they're choking." "More smoke."" "And that's what he got." "So we've seen Lee Van Cleef go after his prey, the man in the hotel in Tucumcari, now we see Eastwood, the other bounty hunter, go after his prey, Cavanagh." "The first 20 minutes is introducing the rivalry between the two bounty hunters." "It takes 20 minutes for the plot to get going." "These scenes are to introduce us to the characters, to have them doing parallel things, and to see their different personalities through the way they react." "Van Cleef - the cold, robotic specialist, the hunter, the man in the cape, the man who dresses very nattily and reads the Bible." "Eastwood - the bounty hunter with a sense of humour, the stylish man with the cheroot and the poncho." "We'll see what he does with violence in a moment." "He wears a leather gauntlet on his gun hand, which there's all sorts of business with." "That might have something to do with manco" " Spanish, one-handed - that he uses his right hand as a gun hand, because there's lots of rather obscure play with this leather gauntlet." "The two movies that Leone acknowledged, from Hollywood, that this film was a homage to were, firstly, Robert Aldrich's 1950s' film Vera Cruz, which starred Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper as two mercenaries in Mexico," "during the period of Benito Juárez." "Gary Cooper is a Southern major, he's a patrician figure, rather like Van Cleef." "Lancaster is a footloose, smiley, ironic figure, similar to Eastwood's character." "That was the first reference." "Lancaster wears a leather gun gauntlet in Vera Cruz, similar to Eastwood's." "The second was the Henry King film The Bravados, which is about a sheriff, played by Gregory Peck, hunting the people who killed his wife." "One of the people he hunts is Van Cleef, and one of the key pieces of evidence is a chiming pocket watch, which leads him to all the characters, the gang involved in killing his wife." "As we'll see, the chiming pocket watch is a key to this film as well." "We see the man with no name inventing karate at this point." "I don't think in the Wild West they used karate, but Eastwood seems to be quite good at it." "There's a great Leone visual gag - the man who's been to the barber's shop and only half his beard has been shaved." "It's a comic-strip gag and you get lots of visual gags of that kind in this movie." "It's a reference to Fritz Lang's Union Pacific, where there is a shoot-out involving a man who's being shaved at an Italian barber's." "It was a favourite scene of Sergio Leone." "This film is full of references to Hollywood movies, but transformed into a completely different universe, this strange, nihilistic universe of bounty hunters and no law and weak sheriffs." "Here we have a particularly weak sheriff in a sequence that's like High Noon, where the tin star is thrown into the dust, a sequence that irritated John Wayne, but we have a replay of that here." "I think you people need a new sheriff." "The lawmaker is the bounty hunter." "He's above the sheriff - "You people need a new sheriff."" "White Rocks, this town, was filmed at Colmenar, near Madrid, a standing Western set - not the Fistful of Dollars set, a different one - and so White Rocks was set there." "You get many towns in this film." "Whereas Fistful of Dollars was set in one town, you get White Rocks, you get Tucumcari." "You get El Paso, which we'll see soon, an entire thriving town." "You get Agua Caliente, a Mexican town, towards the end." "So there's a whole variety of sets and different kinds of town, some symbol, really, of the size of the budget of this film, which was about 600,000 dollars, a huge quantum leap for Sergio Leone." "The plot begins here, with a bunch of Mexicans springing the bad guy from jail." "The interior was filmed at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, and the exterior with the steps was actually the bullring at Almería, where the interior of the bullring has the steps we'll see." "Rather a complicated matching between an interior shot in Rome and an exterior in a seaside town in Spain." "The chimes are interesting, a musical clue which will lead us into the entire plot." "Because there's two stories." "There's the bounty hunters." "The older bounty hunter, Colonel Mortimer, played by Lee Van Cleef, and the young, reckless Clint Eastwood character, the man with no name, Manco." "That's one story." "But the other is the bad guy, whom we're about to meet, how he's sprung from jail, and how there's a revenge story involving him and Lee Van Cleef." "Those two stories intertwine throughout the film." "But the chiming watch and the sound of bells relates very much to the revenge theme, and in the end it's the chime and the watch that is the final clue that explains what the whole film has been about." "So already, in the introduction to the character, we get a subtle musical clue, that you only pick up on second viewing, to what's to come." "Our introduction to El Indio, the bad guy, played by Gian Maria Volonté, who'd played Ramón, the bad guy in Fistful of Dollars." "Only, this bad guy is much more extreme." "In the original version of the script, he was known as "Tombstone"." "He's extremely destructive, extremely violent, and he also smokes marijuana - the first reference to marijuana in a mainstream movie - which has an extreme effect." "I'm not sure that the producers quite understood what marijuana does." "He's a very extreme guy." "Indio, a Mexican Indian, played by Gian Maria Volonté, who kills without any bat of his eyelash." "Some of the brutality associated with El Indio was thought to be so extreme in 1965 that the British censor trimmed aspects of this film, particularly where El Indio looks as though he enjoys killing." "In Hollywood there was a convention in the Hays Office that you never showed the gun in the same shot as the person being shot." "You couldn't tie them together - you had the gun firing, and then you cut away and see the result." "Leone didn't know any of these rules, so he has lots of shots of people shooting people and they fall in the same shot, which, of course, has now become conventional." "Indio and his gang have no compunction about shooting every guard in sight, in a massacre in the prison, simply in order to spring their leader." "Volonté dubbed his own voice." "In the first film they used someone else's voice for the English track, but here he was contractually obliged to use his own voice." "He couldn't speak English so had to learn it phonetically." "So the lines that Indio speaks are learnt by someone who isn't bilingual." "These are the bits in the Almería bullring, with the steps." "That was the set that they used." "So Indio is a bit of a maniac." "He tends to laugh manically at moments of extreme tension." "Now, the first 20 minutes of introducing us to the two bounty hunters and the plot of El Indio get linked in an extraordinary visual sequence." "Here's the "Wanted" poster, the hand of Clint Eastwood, the face of Eastwood, with his trademark cigar and stubble." "Back to Indio's "Wanted" poster." "Cut to the other bounty hunter looking at the same poster, only he smokes a pipe." "A straight-brimmed black hat, the specialist." "Gunshots on the soundtrack." "Face of Van Cleef." "Eyes of Van Cleef." "The characters are tied together entirely visually in a piece of cinematic style that has nothing to do with reality, it's just a piece of cutting." "It's a really flamboyant example of Leone's technical style." "He's beginning to gain confidence, and this movie is showing Leone's technique really coming to full fruition." "This was filmed in a church in the hills above Tabernas, where the main set was." "It's a 16th-century church, called Santa Maria, at Turrillas." "It was a derelict church and they dressed it with lots of pillars, Baroque angels and all this Hispanic material in it to make it look more cluttered." "Within it are the traditional Madonna and child." "The child is played by Leone's youngest daughter, Francesca, who'd recently been born, and this is her first appearance in a movie." "The mother is wearing the traditional Madonna shawl." "The first appearance of the pocket watch, which becomes very important to the plot, with Leone-style close-ups of some of the other members of the gang, lit as if they're in a kind of Renaissance painting inside this 16th-century church." "But then there's two shots." "This is extremely unpleasant off-screen violence, because both the mother and the child have been shot on Indio's orders in order that Tomaso, the victim, should get really angry and agree to face El Indio in a duel, a duel inside a church." "The religious iconography of Fistful of Dollars - the crosses, the crucifixes, the coffins, the bells, the churches, the bell towers - really comes into its own in this, where you take the iconography of Roman Catholicism, a church interior " "with the pulpit, the angels, all the other accoutrements of a Renaissance church - only it's the setting for a duel." "This is the first of Leone's real duels, classic Leone duels, in cinema, where the music is playing and when the music stops they have to draw weapons." "It's a chance for a piece of cinematic rhetoric as it's cut to the music by Morricone." "It begins with Spanish guitar played very close to the microphone, which is, in fact, Indio's theme in the film, it's always associated with Indio." "And a series of cuts as they stand, these rituals that precede the shooting." "So the choir comes in on top of the Spanish guitar." "And then an organ toccata, which is based on Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor." "So you've got a church organ playing, taking up the theme that accompanies this duel." "It is an extraordinary combination of music and image - religious iconography, church music." "All of this to create a ritual that precedes the moment of shooting in a duel." "Some other directors were interested in that moment of violence in the duel itself, but Leone wasn't, he was interested in the rituals that precede it." "The settling of accounts." "Looking at people's eyes, their faces, their hands, to see how much they reveal about whether they can keep their nerve." "There's a lot of face-offs of this kind in Leone's cinema, and this was the first." "The moment itself happens very quickly, almost like in an old-fashioned Western." "Members of Indio's gang were played by some of the repertory company Leone assembled for Fistful of Dollars." "We've just seen Aldo Sambrell, playing Cuchillo, "the knife" in Spanish." "There's Benito Stefanelli, the stunt director, who plays Luke, or Hughie, a gringo member of Indio's gang." "Mario Brega, the fat guy, who played Chico - there he is - in Fistful of Dollars, plays Niño, meaning "little child" in Spanish, in this film." "As we'll see, for the West German interest, the extraordinary actor Klaus Kinski plays Wild, or the Wild One, the hunchbacked member of the gang, who'll appear later on in a lot of comedy-style sequences." "This was Klaus Kinski's first international success, and, as a result of this film, the director David Lean cast Kinski in Doctor Zhivago." "Our first introduction to Colonel Mortimer by name." "Up to now, he's been the bounty hunter with no name who clutches a Bible." "The production design, by Carlo Simi, who was Leone's production designer on Fistful of Dollars, is much more elaborate than it was in the first Dollars film." "Much more clutter, much more detail, much more of a sense of the material culture of the Wild West." "Leone himself collected antiques, with an emphasis on 18th-century antiques." "His father had been an antiques collector, but his father, during the Fascist regime of the '30s and '40s, had had to sell the family collection." "Leone made it part of his purpose in life to assemble a family collection of antiques." "So there's this huge emphasis on textures and craftsmanship and objects - a peepshow view of history." "Here we are at the main set of the movie, El Paso, designed by Carlo Simi and built near Tabernas in Almería." "It's still there, it's called Mini Hollywood." "It's a very solid set indeed - an entire Western town, with side streets, with theatre, with laundry, with bank, all the usual shops." "The biggest set Leone had been responsible for up to now, designed by the architect Carlo Simi, who'd been a production designer since the late 1950s, but had specialised in architecture." "This was the movie that brought him to international attention." "The production design of Leone's films is an important part of their impact." "It doesn't quite look like a Hollywood movie." "It's a Spanish location, and there's something slightly different about how the buildings are put together." "When Leone commissioned El Paso, which is north of the line in Texas, he said to Carlo Simi, "I want it to be one of the main actors in the film."" "When Luciano Vincenzoni, the scriptwriter, was approached, he was apprehensive about writing a Western." "He'd never written one before." "There was a treatment that he was presented with, The Bounty Killer, and it was his job to do the dialogue and to turn it into a proper screenplay." "Vincenzoni said, "How can I identify with the Western?" ""I've never lived in the Wild West." "I've never been over to America very often."" "Leone said, "Treat it as a children's game." ""As if these strange rituals that these grown men do to each other " ""whether it's duels, besting each other or being macho or confronting each other " ""treat it as if they're young children in a suburb of Rome" ""trying to be macho and face up to each other, and then it'll make sense."" "So it was treated as a children's game, and that persuaded Vincenzoni to do it." "And there's a lot of emphasis on children watching as these grown men do such childish things." "Mary is played by Mara Krupp, a German actress, who subsequently appeared in Fellini's Satyricon, and, according to Leone, resembled the wife of a producer that he didn't like, so he makes a lot of fun of her in this film." "A lot of fun is made of minor officials and hoteliers and sheriffs and clerks and bellboys in this film, in a traditional comedic way." "They're caricatures." "They're like cartoon characters, almost, and a lot of the comedy in the film is at their expense." "Sometimes quite bitter." "They haven't got much time for small characters." "It's big heroes that this film is really about, the rest are comedy background." "Here's another Leone hotel gag." "Instead of the lady in the bathtub, we have the man who's been ejected from his room because Clint Eastwood wants to stay there." "There's a nice twist in the tail to do with his underwear." "I don't wear 'em." ""I don't wear 'em." There's a series of Eastwood throwaway lines in this film - culminating in, "I thought I was having trouble with my adding", the film's most famous one-liner " "that are, of course, the origin of the Clint Eastwood hard one-liners that he developed when later he went back to America." "Phrases like, "Make my day", "Do you feel lucky, punk?" start here, with these throwaway lines that Vincenzoni wrote for Eastwood." "Leone's more confident as a director," "Vincenzoni is enjoying the comedy, Simi is more confident as a designer, and the mature Leone film is coming out of its cocoon before our very eyes." "Another religious reference, the shooting of the bell to signal someone's arrival." "Instead of pressing the door bell, you shoot the church bell." "There's Klaus Kinski." "Benito Stefanelli." "And entering is a new member of the gang, Groggy, played by Luigi Pistilli, an Italian theatre actor, who subsequently went on to play Father Ramirez, very memorably, in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the following year." "A man who gets caught doesn't deserve respect, huh?" "Not a sensible thing to say to Indio, who has been caught." "But the moment passes." "Now, Indio, in explaining to his gang that they're going to rob the bank in El Paso, the bank in the neighbourhood, cross the border into the United States and rob the bank of El Paso," "tells it like a parable in church." "An extraordinarily profane idea, that in order to explain how to break into this bank and how the plan will all work, instead of doing it in the usual back garage or in someone's home, it's actually treated as a parable inside this church of Santa Maria." "The members of Indio's gang are treated as disciples." "As they all see the light, you get a series of close-ups of them and organ music." "It's a kind of carnival approach to religion, where, yes, you recognise all the icons, you recognise all the symbols - and this was at this stage mainly pitched at Italian and Mediterranean audiences so you could assume the references would be picked up " "but then you gently mock it in this way, in order to show that those sort of moral values don't exist in this kind of society." "That it's dog eat dog." "It's the rule of violence by violence, of people who are totally at home in a world of violence." "He gets into the pulpit." ""Once there was a carpenter." That refers to the New Testament, only he's telling them how to blow the safe in El Paso." "The church is still there, in the mountains above Tabernas, but it's been restored, and is back in use as a church." "Extraordinary use of close-ups." "It's Techniscope, which was the screen ratio they used, known as the poor man's CinemaScope, two frames for the price of one." "They discovered when making Fistful of Dollars that it was particularly good at long shots and at very, very close-ups, where the top of the letterbox cuts off the top of the person's head and the bottom of it cuts off their chin," "and then you can get even closer to their eyes." "So there's a lot of close-ups, not used in the Hollywood way of reaction shot or master shot, close-up to match it, but simply as portraits of all these fascinating Gypsy faces of these actors playing the Mexican bad guys." "So as the parable continues from the pulpit, we see the reaction." "The safe with the candlesticks by the side, even that looks like an altar." "Now we know that the safe is contained within that." "The bank manager is played by Carlo Simi, the film's designer, in an in-joke and a thank-you for designing El Paso for Leone, his only known film appearance." "The interiors were filmed either at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, or most of the interiors in El Paso were actually shot on location." "So the saloon and the hotel with the view out of the window of the mountains were actually made in situ." "One of the distinctive features of the Italian Western is the horses, where specialists note that they're really Andalusian high-kicking horses of a different kind to the Western horse." "Often the saddles are different as well." "So you get a different feeling to the traditional Western." "Lee Van Cleef, having had his car accident in the late 1950s, had difficulty getting on and off a horse and didn't want frisky horses." "So he was often given a circus horse to ride, which could be under his complete control." "Lee Van Cleef in a lot of Italian Westerns has a very high-stepping horse - that's cos he's sitting on a circus horse." "So Eastwood's shed his poncho and underneath - the trademark sheepskin waistcoat, blue shirt, shrunk-to-fit jeans, dusty hat and designer stubble." "The first hero in films to wear designer stubble." "Usually they were clean-shaven." "In fact, a book came out about the Western in 1965, and it had photographs of all the heroes of the Western." "There were beautifully lit photographs of Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper," "Rock Hudson, Robert Mitchum, then suddenly a picture of this man with this stubble, sunburn, and a scarred face." "This was the world of the Italian Western, which has a different notion of what the physiognomy should be." "A lot of it based upon research into archive photos of the Wild West, and actually how people did look fairly beaten up and not the well-scrubbed, overlit matinée-idol photos that you usually get of Western characters." "Another very smokey saloon, this time in El Paso, shot on location in Almería, with the street in the background." "Instead of the deserted streets of Fistful of Dollars, the bar and street are crowded." "They can afford lots of extras." "There's a feeling of texture in the background." "Eastwood striking his match on any available surface." "Van Cleef strikes his match on Kinski's braces, which doesn't go down too well." "And leads to another face-off." "A twang of the maranzano, the Jew's harp, on the soundtrack, which signals a kind of punctuation - there's a gag coming." "Also a tuba." "Very often these burping noises of the tuba signal that some low comedy is about to happen, of an almost Shakespearean kind." "For some reason, Kinski is being encouraged not to go for his gun." "Indio's gang doesn't want to make a scene." "The two bounty hunters notice that, for some reason," "Indio doesn't want to draw attention to himself." "So why is that?" "What's extraordinary about Van Cleef's performance is that after being a walk-on for about ten or fifteen years in Hollywood, always playing the bad guy, never getting a chance to have a vocal part, there's such confidence in his performance " "the sight gags, the slight irony." "He's almost watching himself being the bounty hunter." "It's as if he'd played this part all his life, but it was the first large part he'd had, because Leone remembered his shape and his face." "Leone had gone to America to cast him, only the second time he'd been to America." "The first time was to ensure that Eastwood appeared in this second film and to sign and seal the deal." "The second time he went was to cast Lee Van Cleef." "Leone had been let down by Lee Marvin, who was originally slotted for the role." "Marvin had been scooped up for Cat Ballou, where he played two parts in a comedy Western." "So Leone was in trouble with only a week to go before shooting, and he went over to America armed with an aged casting directory with a photograph of Lee Van Cleef as he looked in High Noon, as a young man." "He searched around, he found him." "Met him at a motel in the outskirts of Los Angeles, with a suitcase full of dollars." "He actually saw Lee Van Cleef walking towards him in a long raincoat, and said to his production manager:" ""I don't want to talk to him or do an audition." "Don't try and dissuade me." ""The way that guy walks, the way he looks, I must cast him as Mortimer." ""Give him some money, get him to sign the contract," ""and I want him in Rome tomorrow." Which is what happened." "As Lee Van Cleef said, when that suitcase was offered to him in the motel car park, he couldn't even pay his electricity bill." "So this was the turning point." "Van Cleef then went on to make several more films in Italy in the 1960s, where he became a superstar." "He, in fact, made 12 Westerns in the next nine years, in Italy and Spain, and became a major star in Europe." "Mark Twain once said that in America you're famous for your latest work, in Europe you're famous for your greatest work." "With Van Cleef, they remembered him from all those Westerns of the 1950s when most people wouldn't even notice." "But Leone remembered the bad guy in High Noon, in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the bad guy in Liberty Valance, The Bravados, all these films, and he wanted him, and so he gave him his great opportunity." "In discussions with Morricone, they said that ideally they'd like to write the score before the film was shot, and cut the film and shoot the film to the music like one long rock video." "But time wasn't on their side, they had to get the movie done quickly." "So Morricone was involved from the word go in the gestation of the production, whereas with Fistful of Dollars he was brought in after shooting, but they didn't have time to write the music in advance." "Leone would go and see Morricone - they'd been to primary school together, so they'd known each other for a long time - and would describe the story and act out all the characters." "For this one he said, "I want a particular musical notation for each character." ""A little trill on the flute for Clint Eastwood," ""a twang for Colonel Mortimer," ""and a chord on a Spanish guitar for El Indio."" "So like in a Wagnerian opera, you know the character is there by this musical signature on the soundtrack." "Leone also, when he was in America on the trip to secure Eastwood's services, did some research with Luciano Vincenzoni, the scriptwriter, in the Library of Congress, at Wild West newspapers, in order to get the texture of the period." "So that reference to the newspaper in El Paso is a reference to their research." "He wanted to get the surface details right, because, as in all the best fairy tales, you only really believe them when the details are right." "When they're overlit and too sunny, you don't believe anything." "So this is part of his strategy." "The old prophet is played by Josef Egger, who played Piripero, the coffin maker in Fistful of Dollars." "76 years old, Austrian music-hall comedian, and this was his very last film - he died shortly afterwards." "This sequence was, in fact, added at a late stage by the scriptwriter Sergio Donati, adding to Vincenzoni's script, cos they felt they needed comedy at this point." "In a traditional Western Walter Brennan or Arthur Honnicutt would play this part, the sidekick with the beard, the Gabby Hayes kind of part, the old grizzled prospector, the old-timer in the West." "This is the old prophet prophesying what will happen." "We discover, in a sight gag, that the old prophet's hut is so near the railway line that every time the train goes past this happens." "A piece of low, vulgar comedy to counterpose with the plotting of the raid on the bank in El Paso." "A little bit like Shakespeare would have, after the murder scene in Macbeth, the scene with the porter, where there's low comedy and swearing and music hall, to take your mind off these nasty things, then catch you unawares," "because something will happen to jerk you onto the edge of your seat." "That's the function of the old prophet in this film." "Eastwood is much more ironic in this film than he was in Fistful of Dollars, where he played the straight guy, the samurai, a straight-down-the-line warrior." "But in this one, there are lots of double takes, which show that the light, semicomedic Eastwood style is emerging." "It's the most mature of the Leone performances so far." "We can't take this too seriously." "Yes, there's lots of heavy violence and brutality, yes, there's a Western story going on, but, at some level, it's a bit of a joke." "Now, for the first time, the two bounty hunters will meet." "This was the scene with which Leone persuaded Vincenzoni to write the script." "He said, "I want these two bounty hunters to meet in the street." ""I want one of them to dust up the other's boot," ""and he'll get cross and dust up the other's boot," ""then it escalates like Laurel and Hardy, until they almost shoot each other."" "Like two children facing up to each other in Trastevere, where Leone grew up in the 1930s." "So what we're about to have is a childlike scene of these two grown men trying to best each other." "At last, the two bounty hunters can meet." "Will it be a violent confrontation?" "Or a comedic one?" "Here are the children who watch it." "It's like cowboys and Indians, it's like the games we play." "They're going to watch this spectacle." "A wonderful shot through Eastwood's legs, very extreme, almost parody Western shooting." "Eastwood's waiting for Van Cleef in the street." "The flute." "Twang for the colonel." "A rather cruel piece of comedy at the expense of the Chinese-American porter, who doesn't know what to do cos he's being told to do different things." "And if the El Indio duel in the church was for real, and was filmed as a rhetorical duel that ended up in a moment of violence, this is a parody of the face-off, of the linear confrontation of Hollywood," "where they stand in the street facing each other." "So they size each other up, as professionals." "How does he look and dress?" "What's his personal style, his charisma?" "It's a very macho approach, like two bullfighters circling around each other." "So let's damage his boots a bit to irritate him." "Very, very slowly." "Again, the tempo of it is unlike a traditional Hollywood Western." "Where this very slow build up..." "Suddenly real time stops, and you stretch time in order to get maximum fun - just like the games we know - to get as much fun out of this confrontation between two grown-up children." "When Vincenzoni had this explained, he said:" ""When I was growing up in Venice, I remember confrontations like that."" "When Leone was growing up in Trastevere, in the suburb of Rome:" ""I remember confrontations like that in the 1930s." ""So we can identify with this." "It's part of Italy as it's part of the Wild West."" "I don't think in Hollywood Westerns there'd been a moment where John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, Wayne and Dean Martin, had actually had a confrontation that was quite as childishly macho as this one." "But that's what they're having." "One of them's got to get out of town, so that the gang can be left to the other bounty hunter, who can take the reward." "Low-angle shots of boots, close-ups of faces - a kind of cinematic rhetoric." "Yes, the grammar of the Western was invented by Hollywood, and Leone grew up in the '40s and '50s watching those movies and loved them." "He felt the Western had gone off the rails since the 1950s, but he knew every shot in those classic Hollywood films." "So he's taking those shots but stretching them and making them into something else, a piece of pure style, which is what we're watching." "The distinctive sound of the gunshot." "Leone liked loud gunshots, so had them recorded in this quarry near Rome, where you got the echo effect." "And as someone said, the gun sounded like a cannon." "He was very interested in sound design and so was Morricone." "A carefully constructed soundtrack for its period, which would come into its own in the film Once Upon a Time in the West in 1968, where the sound design is very intricate and the interplay of natural sounds and music." "But music would be out of place here." "Whistling sound as the hat hits the deck." "The colonel is a very good shot." "He's also very cautious." "So the hats end up together, and the two bounty hunters swap notes about their profession." "In 1950s' Hollywood, movies about bounty hunters - and there weren't that many - tended to treat bounty hunting as a problem." "In The Naked Spur and The Tin Star by Anthony Mann, the bounty hunters are twisted, rather corrupted people, who must get something out of their system to grow out of bounty hunting, settle down, get a wife, settle in a Western town and become a conventional hero," "a conventional human being." "The same in The Bounty Hunter, directed by André De Toth, with Randolph Scott, where he's a bounty hunter but he has an excuse for it." "It isn't a good way to earn a living, it has to be morally judged." "But in this movie, the bounty hunters are simply earning a living, two professionals comparing notes and the only forces of law and order in the entire territory." "So, morally, there's been a leap in the attitude towards bounty hunting." "The bounty hunter works for cash." "He doesn't say, "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."" "He isn't about honour or morality, he's about working for cash." "It turns out that the colonel does have a moral reason for what he's doing, but we don't discover that till the last reel." "Here's the climax of the relationship between the young man, the boy, and the old colonel, the cautious colonel, who waits till he's out of pistol range, brings out his Buntline Special and shoots his prey." "A cautious man, whereas Clint Eastwood is a bit reckless." "... when two hunters go after the same prey, they usually end up shooting each other in the back." ""...shooting each other in the back."" "It's a difficult thing to do - both of them shooting each other in the back." "Slight mistranslation there." "Lee Van Cleef's appearance and costume, and even his pipe, would become as much a trademark for him as the poncho, the waistcoat and the cheroot were for Clint Eastwood." "In most of the 12 Westerns that Van Cleef subsequently made in Italy and Spain, he'd be dressed in the same way." "Sabata - the avenger - where he wears the cape, the black hat and the pipe." "He's the kind of mature hero..." "Leone thought he was a lot older than he was." "He assumed that Van Cleef was well into his fifties by then, but actually he was only 40 and had to be aged for the part of the mature colonel." "When Leone first met Van Cleef, he said:" ""You look exactly like Van Gogh, and that's exactly what I want."" "Again, that light, ironic repartee Eastwood, the light, throwaway Eastwood starts here." "In the first film he was much heavier." "In fact," "Eastwood was dubbed in Italy by an actor called Enrico Maria Salerno, who had a much, much deeper voice than Clint Eastwood." "And so, if you see Italian versions of these films, the hero is much heavier, much more sort of bass-voiced, much more of a kind of a bad guy in his voice." "Whereas Eastwood's light Californian accent and throwaway intonations really come through now." "Some people have said that it was at this stage in his career that he realised that the breathy delivery of lines by Marilyn Monroe was sexy and could be emulated by a male as well." "So that breathy, Monroe style of delivering lines may also have been an influence." "But mainly it's the arrival of and the confidence to have a sense of humour, cut loose from other sources." "Fistful of Dollars had been based on Kurosawa's film Yojimbo." "This is an original screenplay, and they have a budget of 600,000, they have a producer Alberto Grimaldi, the Neapolitan lawyer, who was absolutely backing Leone, and there's a sense of confidence about the film," "that Leone is beginning to breathe." "Some people reckon that For a Few Dollars More is the archetypal Leone film, the archetypal Italian Western, the one that's worth all the others put together." "A cut now from the pocket watch and Mortimer to the first flashback in the film, the first of three, where Indio's smoking a joint of marijuana, and you get this whirring sound on the soundtrack." "Indio is looking through a rain-sodden window at a couple inside the room." "But we have no idea what this means - it must have happened in El Indio's past." "Leone's use of flashbacks is interesting, as it is in Once Upon a Time in the West." "It's not a narrative thing." "It's not what happened in the past." "It's a memory, it's Freudian." "It's a man dredging into their unconscious and remembering something." "Leone and the assistant director Tonino Valerii slightly overestimated the impact of marijuana on someone's mind." "They thought that the whirring noise and the screen going all red and there's a manic quality to Indio's behaviour when he's under the influence, that marijuana did this." "All anyone knew about marijuana then was what they'd learned from horror films." "But, despite that, this was adding to the litany of bad attributes of Indio." "He goes into the room." "He shoots the young man." "The young man is played by a German actor called Karl Hirenbach, who subsequently changed his name to Peter Lee Lawrence, in reference to Lee Van Cleef, and became a famous spaghetti western star after this film." "The young girl was played by Rosemary Dexter." "Who are they?" "What's this got to do with the watch?" "What's it got to do with Lee Van Cleef or with Indio?" "The solution to those questions is the hinge of the entire story, but, this being a Leone film, we won't find out until the last minute." "Here's an interesting sight gag." "We're in Alamogordo, at the jail." "Alamogordo, Los Alamos." "Los Alamos was the site of the first nuclear explosion." "So what's gonna happen?" "There's going to be a bit of an explosion, as Clint Eastwood appears at the window, smoking, and Sancho Pérez is in the jail." "We get some dynamite attached to the bars of the jail." "We're going to have a mini Los Alamos explosion." "It's the kind of gag that Italian scriptwriters loved." "Main title theme reprise, with Alessandroni and his choir, and his whistling, and the insistent drumbeat for an action sequence." "But, again, not a lush symphonic Dimitri Tiomkin or Jera Moros type soundtrack, but a stripped-down, Mediterranean-sounding soundtrack, with folk instruments and whistling." "Morricone said he used the whistling because it reminded him of the isolation of the cowboy out in the wilderness." "It's what you do when you're by yourself, so that was the reference to the whistling." "Yeah." "Amigo, why did you help me out?" "It's a bit late for Sancho Pérez to ask that, but the penny's dropped that he's never met the man who's got him out of jail." "Eastwood isn't wearing his leather gun-hand gauntlet in these scenes where he visits Indio's gang." "There's something which isn't quite resolved in the script about this leather gauntlet as his trademark." "Everyone knows Manco by his gauntlet, by the one hand that he uses for his gun." "To not give himself away, he doesn't wear it when he visits Indio, and subsequently he will show it, which will reveal who he really is." "But this aspect of it is very obscure and isn't resolved." "Electronic whir, as Indio lights up another joint." "It's difficult to imagine, in 1965, quite how radical this was." "Leone's rationale for it was that in some, what were called "Third World" countries " "Bolivia, Mexico - marijuana was a common way of taking one's mind off the cost of living, he felt." "So a Mexican bad guy might well smoke marijuana." "But this was a very radical thing to add to his many attributes." "So we're in the church, we've seen El Paso, we've seen Tucumcari, we've seen White Rocks, and now we're going to see Santa Cruz as well." "A whole series of Leone towns in this film." "I gotta get my rest." ""I gotta get my rest."" "At this point in the Italian version, there would have been an intermission." "Even today, if you go to the cinema in Southern Italy, you get an intermission, usually at an arbitrary point, for everyone to have an ice cream, have a smoke, clear the hall, and then come back." "But here was an official intermission, where the film stops and starts again." "Eastwood remembers the man who shot his cigar." "He's wearing his leather gauntlet again." "There's gonna be some violence." "Electronic trill and close-ups of these wonderful physiognomies." "The Gypsies of Andalusia were queuing up to get bit parts in these films." "I once met one of the casting directors in Almería, Louis Beltran, and he said that people would come from far and wide when they heard there was a Leone production about to be made." "Their faces would be auditioned for those close-ups." "It didn't matter about their acting, the dialogue was put on afterwards." "What mattered was what they looked like." "There would be knife fights in the auditions." "Beltran showed me this scar across his stomach which had been given him by someone who didn't get the part of one of the Mexican baddies." "So Indio's gang rides from the church to go to El Paso, while Eastwood rides to Santa Cruz." "In Santa Cruz, an extraordinary gag - chickens all over the street." "In fact, Santa Cruz, this town, was shot at Cinecittà, a standing Western set at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, but there's chickens." "When Eastwood goes into the telegraph office, there's lots of eggs." "So this is a chicken town, another sight gag from Sergio Leone." "He doesn't want to engage in violence and rob the bank in Santa Cruz, he wants to persuade the telegraph man to pretend that the bank has been robbed." "So he's got a heart after all, the man with no name." "He doesn't want to engage in needless violence." "One of the reasons why the budget was much larger on For a Few Dollars More was not only because Fistful of Dollars had been very, very successful, but this was a three-way coproduction between PEA Productions of Rome," "which was the production company of Alberto Grimaldi," "Arturo Gonzalez of Madrid, and Constantin Film, a major production house in Munich, Germany." "It's interesting, the distribution of interest in the cast." "The two leads are American, and there's a lot of Spanish and Italian actors " "Spanish actors particularly in the smaller parts and Italian actors as Indio's gang - but there are few West German actors." "There's Klaus Kinski playing one member of the gang, and he's a very memorable performer, but doesn't appear very often, and the hotelier's wife, and that's about it." "Constantin thought, after the success of Fistful, this was worth investing in, even though there was no one for West German audiences to root for." "Whereas in Fistful of Dollars, there were many German actors." "At this time, German Westerns made in West Germany, with locations shot at Split on the Adriatic in Yugoslavia, were very popular as well." "Based on the writings of the late-19th century German author Karl May, films with titles like Winnetou the Warrior and The Treasure of Silver Lake." "The European Western is catching fire in 1965." "Germans watch German Westerns," "Italians and Spanish watch Italian and Spanish Westerns, but none of them have been exported yet." "Because of the problem over the copyright of Kurosawa's film Yojimbo, the release of Fistful of Dollars was held up in the United States till 1967." "It was released with For A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "One opened in January, one in the spring, one a few months later." "So you got a triple whammy of Eastwood Dollars films all arriving at the same time in 1967 in the United States." "But it took two years for the issue to be cleared legally so that United Artists would pick up on these films and release them in the US." "So these films were really intended for a European audience, for a Southern Italian, a West German, a Spanish and a Far Eastern audience." "And that audience would sustain the kind of budget that was given to this film." "The action music of Morricone, with the insistent drums." "It was after hearing this soundtrack, For a Few Dollars More, that the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo decided to employ Ennio Morricone as the composer of his film The Battle of Algiers, a classic political movie about the French in Algeria in the 1950s." "Morricone did the score for that, and because of the effectiveness of this score, one of Morricone's best, he was chosen by Pontecorvo." "Whereas Morricone had only done one or two Westerns before Fistful of Dollars, by the time of For a Few Dollars More, he'd scored seven or eight movies, in between the two films." "He was now a well-known composer of film scores in Italy, extremely prolific." "So, again, he was growing in confidence as a film composer with a very recognisable style." "It's interesting that he worked so well with Leone." "They were really in synch." "Leone wasn't very good at humming, and, in fact, was almost tone deaf, although he had a strong and sensitive sense of sound in general." "But somehow they were in synch, and Morricone's best scores come out of their collaboration." "Like Bernard Herrmann and Hitchcock, or Nino Rota, the composer, with Federico Fellini, this was a wonderful relationship that brought out the best in both of them." "The interplay of music and image is most unusual." "The bank of El Paso, a Spanish fortress, with part having tumbled down, on the left, was deliberately designed by Carlo Simi in this style." "He didn't want the traditional wood-clad bank that you get in Hollywood Westerns." "He wanted an Hispanic bank, and it being an old fortress adds to its charisma." "The kind of touch that Carlo Simi became famous for - everything heightened a bit, everything larger than life." "Lots of reference books were pored over for the design of the Wild West, but then an Italian style was superimposed on that." "So it's kind of a designer Wild West that Carlo Simi was producing." "One of the underrated aspects of these films is the production design." "It's almost as distinctive as the music and the direction." "By now, Carlo Simi himself was designing several Italian Westerns." "By now, 1965, the gold rush had begun." "Fistful of Dollars had been hugely successful." "20 to 25 Westerns were in the pipeline at the time that this film was being made." "So there's an inflationary pressure in the Italian film industry." "Simi had designed one or two Westerns and Leone wanted to put distance between himself and those movies that were being ripped off from Fistful of Dollars, films with titles like, They Call Me... or My Name Is...," "about bounty hunters setting one faction against the other." "There were countless Fistful derivatives." "So he wanted to move on but there was that creative pressure from the industry." "One of Leone's favourite after-dinner stories at this time was of a cheap Italian Western that was made in the wake of Fistful of Dollars, and the producers hadn't got much money, so they raised the money weekly on the basis of the rushes of what they'd shot." "So they showed the dailies to the money men, who said:" ""Fine." "We'll pay for the second week."" "But they got towards the end of the movie and the money ran out, so the lead actor, a minor actor from America, walked off the set." "Which left them with a problem, because the final scene was the hero riding into a Native American encampment on a buggy and saying to the chief, "Is it to be the words of peace or the words of war?"" "The classic ending to a cowboy and Indian movie." "So they said to the director, "What are we gonna do?" "We haven't got a lead actor."" ""Let me think," said the director." "Then the director said:" ""You know the man who cleans the floor in the studios?" "He's got a great face." ""Let's put him on the buggy, and he'll ride up to the encampment on the buggy," ""and he'll say, 'My son couldn't come so they sent me instead."'" "That was the world of the Italian Western in 1964-5, the gold rush built on sand, spewing out derivatives of Fistful of Dollars, and that's the context that this film was made in." "When they shot in Almería, there were several productions beside them, with people pretending to be cowboys at exactly the same time." "Almería began to become a fantastically successful location for the Spanish." "The little village of Tabernas, where El Paso was built, had a street called Cinema Street, which had several cinemas on it." "So the locations would be used, the film would be sent to Madrid for processing, or perhaps to Rome, then the rushes would come back, usually in black and white, and suddenly Almería became a very fashionable place to shoot." "Unfortunately, infrastructure was never put in." "They never built any labs, they never built any sound stages at Almería, so it was pure location, with location technicians, craftspeople, stunt people." "Some reckoned that Franco, who was ruling Spain then, was punishing Almería because it was one of the last regions to hold out against him in the Civil War, so he didn't invest in infrastructure in Almería." "Instead, when the location ceased to be fashionable in the 1970s, so it all moved away, like a ghost town." "So Almería was left with all these standing sets, like El Paso, which became tourist attractions, and people didn't use Spain so much as before." "It was a very sad decline." "So you now wonder why in this village tucked away in Andalusia, Tabernas, why do they have somewhere called Cinema Street?" "It's like a piece of archaeology." "You can't tell what that boom must have been like." "But boom it was." "It was David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia, of three years before, that had started making Almería such a fashionable location." "Much of Lawrence was filmed in North Africa, and Wadi Rum, and so on, but they moved ultimately to Almería for the scenes set in Aqaba, and various scenes in the desert." "This made people take notice of the hills, the mountains, the dried-up river beds, the desert, the olive trees, the colours of Almería, as a distinctive location." "Hundreds of movies were made there in the 1960s - biblical epics, medieval films, lots and lots of Westerns, and even contemporary films." "It became a very distinctive location." "It was Europe's Arizona." "Leone learned his trade in the 1950s, working with a lot of American crews in Rome on large-budget productions " "Quo Vadis, notably the chariot race in Ben-Hur - and he learned how to direct action sequences from Hollywood professionals, like Robert Wise, William Wyler, and other directors who made epics at this time." "So this idea of undercranking the camera so the horses move a little faster, and that sense of hyperactivity in the action sequences were picked up from second-unit work on big Hollywood productions in Rome." "Uncharitable people say that many spaghetti western directors learned on second units, which is why their dialogue is so terrible." "They were great at filming horses and action sequences with soaring choirs and insistent drums and big, big Almerían scenes, they weren't so hot when people talked." "I think that's unfair, but you can see why they say it when you see the power of this action sequence." "This crossroads, up in the hills of Almería, is above Tabernas, where two ramblas, dried-up river beds, meet." "An oboe theme in the background, which is the shape of things to come for Ennio Morricone." "There's another Morricone that's emerging as a movie composer - the more symphonic, lush, well-mannered, less vulgar Morricone, and the colonel's theme, which is taken up as an oboe theme and becomes more symphonic and orchestral" "as the movie progresses until the final sequences, is the kind of score for which Morricone would become famous post-Leone - a more Baroque, orchestral approach to scoring a movie - and it begins with this rather lyrical use of the colonel's theme." "This sequence was filmed at a part of the Almerían desert near Tabernas called L'oasis, "the oasis"." "The distinctive feature of it is that it's surrounded by palm trees, which is very odd in the ecology of Southern Spain." "The reason is because the props people planted the palm trees during the making of Lawrence of Arabia three years earlier, and they seeded themselves and grew." "So there's a piece of Almería which looks like Morocco, and it's due to the props people of Lawrence of Arabia." "It became somewhere to shoot - if you want something to look like North Africa, go to L'oasis in Almería and you've got a built-in set." "It's extraordinary that those palm trees should have survived." "Amplified sound again - a very extreme comic-strip punch, which always sounds as though it could push someone into a mountain, which you get in Italian Westerns." "It's because the soundtrack is laid on afterwards, where you can do the sound design after the movie has finished, and sit in the dubbing room and decide how many layers of sound you want." "Leone once said that sound was 40 per cent of a movie." "It might even be more than that." "Agua Caliente, "hot water" in Spanish." "Agua Caliente was filmed at a village called Los Albaricoques, "the apricots", which they discovered when shooting the opening sequences of Fistful of Dollars." "Cobbled streets, single-storey houses, adobe houses - a beautiful Almerían village, Southern-Spain style." "Behind some of the farms, a cobbled threshing yard, where the grain would be threshed." "One of those cobbled yards was used by Leone as the site of the final duel, the arena in which the final duel takes place, as if it's the Colosseum in Rome, this circular cobbled threshing ground," "which is very much a distinctive feature of the agriculture of Southern Spain." "Now we're in a real village." "This is exactly as it is and it's like this today." "I've visited it many times." "There's a very satisfying scrunch as you walk on the cobbles, even if you're not wearing Clint Eastwood's boots." "Fans of Fistful will recognise this shot." "It's almost identical to an opening shot as he goes into San Miguel at the beginning of Fistful of Dollars." "Los Albaricoques." "Just down the road from here is a disused convent / monastery, which was used for some of the night-time sequences of For a Few Dollars More, but came into its own as the location of Padre Ramirez's cell," "the hospital, in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "So they're using found bits of rural Spain in order to depict 19th-century Mexico." "Will Eastwood shoot these people coming out of their houses simply to show off to Indio that he's a hard man and that he's prepared to earn the respect of the gang?" "Or is he, like in Santa Cruz, going to avoid the violence, so he doesn't have to kill needlessly?" "Unlike Indio, who kills everybody." "So a typical triangular moment - three people, and we expect, in a Leone film, that this will be a face-off." "Three against one - a trinity of people at one end of the street and the good guy at the other." "This is the set-up for a Leone duel." "Eastwood walks towards them." "There should be thunderous music." "There should be a deguello, a Mexican cut-throat song, a funeral dirge, but it's silent, it isn't going to happen, this isn't going to turn into a Leone duel." "They're retreating, and in this face-off they're not going to win." "Again, a musical trill." "Punctuation - this is a gag." "We're not supposed to take this too seriously." "Eastwood notices this little boy trying to get apples off the tree, so instead of shooting the three Mexican heavies, he shoots the apples off the tree." "For one nasty moment we think, "Will he shoot the child?"" "It's possible in a Leone film that that might happen, Indio has shot a child, but not on this occasion." "Bravo." ""Bravo." Eastwood has respect for the Lee Van Cleef character." "The Van Cleef character is very often one step ahead of the Eastwood character." "He's thoughtful, rational." "He plans things in advance." "He has a very professional attitude to his job, whereas Eastwood rushes into things." "Often in this film the Van Cleef character is one step ahead, as he is here." "He's worked out that Eastwood's gone to Agua Caliente when he was told to go to somewhere different." "In a paranoid way, he's worked out that Eastwood would do the opposite, so they're all going to end up in Agua Caliente." "Mortimer is a clever man." "I figured you'd tell Indio the opposite of what we agreed." "And he's suspicious enough to do something else." "Since El Paso was out of the question, here I am." "That is the most paranoid piece of logic you can imagine." "He's working out what they wouldn't have done, in order, by a process of deduction, to work out what they have ended up doing." "But now the Klaus Kinski character, Wild, the Wild One, is meeting Van Cleef again." "Noise on tuba - let's continue the gag that began much earlier on in the film, when they first went into El Paso." "There's unresolved business." "This sequence, when it was run on the Moviola for the composer Morricone," "Leone always recalled, reduced Morricone to fits of laughter." "He couldn't watch it without laughter." "He thought it was so funny, this confrontation between this lunatic Klaus Kinski character, the hunchback, and the cool Lee Van Cleef." "It's a mad form of macho between them, and it's a low form of comedy." "And Colonel Mortimer produces a hidden derringer from up his sleeve, just as Lee Van Cleef did in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral." "As the chiming watch appears on the soundtrack as the pocket watch came from Henry King's The Bravados, and the arena for the final duel, which they're about to enter, comes from Ride Lonesome, where Lee Van Cleef played the baddie." "So a series of references here to Lee Van Cleef's earlier career as a Hollywood star." "Mortimer isn't just a character, he's the total of all Van Cleef's appearances remembered by a movie buff, and reworked and transformed." "The link between Indio and Mortimer is the chiming watch again." "This is what they've got in common." "We've seen one flashback, which partly explains, but what's the connection with Lee Van Cleef?" "The music is telling us there is one." "Again, Mortimer, the professional." "He won't blow up the safe with dynamite." "He won't have a shoot-'em-up approach to this." "He's got acid, his tools." "He's got the craftsman's kit for opening this safe, just as he's got the craftsman's kit of guns in his saddlecloth." "This man goes around with all the tools he needs to get through life." "A cautious bounty hunter who comes well-prepared." "There's no need to blow all the money to kingdom come, as in Butch Cassidy." "You just take this rationally." "The scene between Van Cleef and Klaus Kinski, which has gone into the books as one of the classic scenes in the Italian Western, is a good example of Leone's carnival sense of comedy." "We've seen the hotel keepers, the small officials, the Chinese-American porter, the sheriffs, and the fun that's been had at their expense in the film, ditto Wild, although today, with our more sensitive views on disability, he doesn't seem so funny." "The idea of a carnival set of characters was strong." "Leone's heart lay there." "He loved taking the hallowed moments of culture and doing a carnival thing to them." "It's a little bit like the organ music in the duel - taking Bach's toccata and fugue and using it as the soundtrack for a duel." "You take high culture, you take the highest of cultural artefacts and you mock them gently in the film." "That's the use of the carnival - you take the classic Western and bring lots of carnival characters in to bring a kind of Mediterranean comedic flavour to it all." "Subsequently in Leone's cinema, there was always a carnival character, which was the heart of the film." "Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a carnival character." "He eats, he swears, he belches." "He's very extreme, he talks a lot." "He's the carnival." "He's Sancho Panza to Clint Eastwood's Don Quixote." "And the same with the Rod Steiger character in A Fistful of Dynamite, who is Sancho Panza to James Coburn's Knight of the Woeful Countenance." "So there's always this carnival character in Leone's cinema." "In For a Few Dollars More it is split amongst various characters, who represent caricatures, cartoons." "It's as if Chuck Jones had made a movie about the Wild West - these are cartoon characters." "They're there to make sure that the violence and the main plot of Indio and his psychopathic behaviour don't get too heavy for consumption." "They lighten the palette." "These evening shots were taken in the monastery near Los Albaricoques, which subsequently became the hospital in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "This monastery has an important place in Spanish culture in the 20th century, because there's a play by García Lorca called Blood Wedding, from the 1930s, which is all about a couple who run away from their tyrannical parents" "and hide away in the Spanish countryside." "It has a terrible ending, as the parents and the forces of law and order get them." "This was based on a real-life news story that took place in Andalusia, and the place where they hid in real life was the monastery just outside Los Albaricoques." "So, culturally, that monastery meant a lot to Spanish audiences." "It was really quite well-known in Spanish culture." "Somebody's come through the roof already." "Somebody's beaten Eastwood to it, had the same idea - under the cover of dark, looking for the gold." "And it was Colonel Mortimer, who's one step ahead throughout this part of the film." "He had the idea of taking the slates off the roof and breaking in to try and find where the gold from El Paso is." "Subsequently, in the Westerns that Van Cleef made in Italy, he very often wore a toupee to make himself look much younger." "But in these sequences it's his real hair." "He's thinning on top." "He's a mature character, this ex-colonel from the Civil War, from Carolina, the mature fatherly figure amongst the two bounty hunters." "Subsequently he'd play a more juvenile character and would wear wigs, many of which didn't suit him at all." "Lee Van Cleef reminisced subsequently about working on For a Few Dollars More." "Leone spoke a little English but not much, so he would stand there in his cowboy hat and glasses, saying:" ""Watch me, Clint", "Watch me, Lee", and act out their parts for them in a kind of Romanesque rhyme, turning them into Roman characters." "That was Leone's contribution." "The actors would speak Spanish, Italian, German." "Van Cleef said that one character was a cockney, who he didn't understand either." "Apart from Eastwood, he couldn't understand anyone on the set." "There was an interpreter, which helped, but..." "He would read the script, get a rough idea of what they were saying, wait till their lips stop moving and then say his lines, which isn't the best form of doing a performance, but it seems to have worked pretty well." "The leather gauntlet." "This symbolism of this character " ""Put it on", so that he'll become Manco." "This cluster of references to the gun hand, the support that the gun hand needs," "Manco, the one-handed man, and all these things." "This is a Leone-esque scene, indulging his penchant for brutality." "Like the scene with the setting fire to the Baxter house in For a Fistful of Dollars, where the bad guys laugh while violence is perpetrated on the two characters." "This was pruned by the British censor when the film came out, even though the film had a X certificate." "A lot of the moments of punching..." "The punishment these two characters get would kill them, lay them out forever." "But Leone liked to have a scene where you'd have the baddies really enjoying the violence as if it's in an arena or a bullfight." "Particularly Indio, who can't stop laughing manically." "In fact, Indio's character..." "Having broken out of jail and planned this robbery in El Paso and had some sense of purpose," "Indio's character begins to disintegrate." "He becomes increasingly aimless." "He begins to set the members of his gang against one another." "He becomes self-destructive." "He's leading them all towards mass destruction." "There's a kind of psychosis about his behaviour in this part of the film, which some of the gang members notice." "All semblance of rationality is gone in Indio's behaviour, there's no logic to what he's doing." "What you also get throughout the film, but particularly now, is the contrast between the two acting styles - the laid-back, laconic, understated acting style of the two Americans, where what isn't said is as important as what is said," "versus what Eastwood called the hellzapoppin' school, which is this flamboyant, external, rhetorical acting of the Mexican bad guys." "That contrast, and that between the laid-back performance of Eastwood and this gunshots and sounds of horses' hooves, is at the heart of the performances in the film." "Leone once told me that he remembered Eastwood sitting on the set between takes like a cat having a nap, hat over his eyes." "Then his moment would come to actually appear, put on his hat, step forward, do the performance like a cat, then just sit back and go back to sleep." "That was the kind of atmosphere surrounding the character." "What they're doing is looping Eastwood's real character into the man with no name's developing character." "So a lot of the mannerisms are from Leone observing Eastwood on the set." "He isn't acting the samurai part which had been made famous by Mifuni this time, he's creating a character of his own." "Leone seems to have had a thing about circular spaces." "Often, moments of violence occur within arenas." "Whereas the traditional Western is linear - main streets, canyons, people walking towards each other - in the Italian Western these confrontations occur in circles, like the punch-up we've just seen, like the duel in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the duel that's coming here." "Carlo Simi was asked by Leone to find circles for these things to happen in." "Find a cobbled threshing yard for the final duel." "Find a circular cemetery for the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "Simi said to me once:" ""I don't understand what he had about circles." "I don't dare ask."" "But he had a thing about circles, and these big settling-of-account scenes, these big duels where all the destiny of the characters comes together, had to take place in a circle." "He insisted on that in all four of his Westerns." "It's a very distinctive feature." "Another distinctive feature is the letterbox shape of the Techniscope frame." "Director of photography Massimo Dallamano and then, after this film, to be succeeded by Tonino Delli Colli, Leone's great director of photography." "It's a form of CinemaScope, called "two perforation CinemaScope", where two frames of film are printed for the price of one." "It's a half-priced version of CinemaScope." "It has limitations." "Techniscope wasn't much used in the US, but it was very popular in Italy in the 1960s." "Very strong on close-ups and also on long shots." "This idea of the letterbox image was strong in Leone." "The films weren't storyboarded - he never storyboarded - but he was famous for having all the setups in his head." "He'd arrive on the set first thing in the morning and have a very clear idea." "Normally you shoot close-ups late in the evening, because you shot the master shots and the long shots during the sunshine and use artificial light for close-ups, but Leone said:" ""No." "Let's shoot the close-ups at midday." "They're just as important."" "The cameramen got upset about this and about the length of the working day." "Leone was obsessive when on the set." "They'd start at the crack of dawn, when the sun rose, and work through till nine at night." "He had this story in his head that he'd acted out to many people - he'd acted it out to Morricone, to the actors, to Vincenzoni, the scriptwriter, and to Alberto Grimaldi, the producer " "so he had this story in his head, as a storyteller, and he knew what he wanted from each day's work." "But it meant he drove his crews very hard." "This was the first of Leone's big crews." "It was a small crew on Fistful of Dollars, and it got smaller at the end when the money ran out, when sequences were filmed with just seven people." "But this is a large complex shoot, with many locations, many different sets and lighting setups." "It was the most complicated movie Leone had worked on, and everyone commented on how he motivated everyone on the set." "He was quite brilliant at getting them all marching behind him in the service of this story." "He'd enthuse everyone and take ideas from technicians, as well as camerapeople and actors." "So they'd all felt ownership of the finished result." "It was a very happy set, and that's one of the things they all..." "Except Gian Maria Volonté, who got fed up with Leone trying to reduce the size of his performance." "Volonté was a theatre actor and larger than life, which worked well for Indio, just as it had worked for Ramón in Fistful of Dollars, but Leone thought he was a bit too big, so he kept trying to tire him out by having lots of takes" "so Volonté's performance got smaller." "One day Volonté got upset and actually walked off the set." "Someone shouted, "If you expect a car to bring you back, think again."" "So he walked out into the desert, thumbed a lift, and eventually came back." "They all apologised and they continued." "That's the only story I've heard from all the people I've spoken to of any unsettled atmosphere on the set." "They remember this being a highly motivated movie." "They all believed in it." "Here's Indio emptying his gun into the dead body of one of his gang, which was a cardinal sin for the British censor." "You could shoot people, they can fall over, but you don't enjoy it and laugh, and you don't empty a gun into a dead body." "So this got the film into some trouble." "Indio is getting seriously insane by this stage in the film, and Volonté's performance is getting bigger and bigger and bigger." "It's so strange - Indio let the bounty killers get away." "He did it so that he could then blame someone, so that he could shoot them." "This is pure self-destruction - he's going round in circles destroying his own people." "He's lost the gold, the bounty hunters, and now he turns on his own people." "There's a kind of fascistic element to this, as he chases his own tail." "But Groggy, played by Luigi Pistilli, doesn't quite buy it." "He kind of knows what's going on in Indio's mind." "The look on his face is, "I don't believe what you're doing." "I don't trust you."" "He's the brightest of the gang." "The following morning." "Two gunfighters wait for the action to start." "This is a dry run for the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West, with the three gunfighters waiting for the noon train, only the train is two hours late, and they pass the time while they wait for the approaching moment of violence." "So they're sitting there, loading their guns, and there's a parallel in the way they're shot." "A shot of Lee Van Cleef." "A shot of the street." "A shot of Lee Van Cleef." "Off to Indio." "Each one gets equal footage at this time, as they kill time, waiting for the settling of accounts." "That idea is stretched throughout the first reel of Once Upon a Time in the West, with the three pistoleros waiting at the station for the train which brings Charles Bronson into town." "A stretching of time." "What do men of action do when they've got nothing to do?" "They sit there loading their guns." "There's an audible sigh from Lee Van Cleef." "He's bored." ""Let's get on with it." "We're paid to kill people, it's time something began."" "Extraordinary use of the soundtrack, with this manic laughter, to illustrate the laughing face." "It's nothing to do with Indio laughing." "It's a piece of pure decoration, to remind us of the lunatic character that he is, a piece of sound design." "So the two bounty hunters continue to wait in this impoverished town." "We're south of the border, Agua Caliente." "Unlike the affluence of El Paso and of White Rocks, this is the poverty and the underdevelopment of Tucumcari," "Santa Cruz and Agua Caliente - they're all run-down, as places." "So they're sitting in this run-down main street of this flyblown Mexican village, waiting for the climax to work itself out." "And working as a team for the first time, really." "They'd been in rivalry." "They get together, they decide in rather an uneasy way to work together to trap Indio and his gang, and here they work together strategically in order to take on what's left of Indio's gang." "There were 14 of the gang to start with, and the numbers have come down a lot, thanks to Indio's psychotic behaviour." "Cat at the moment of violence." "There had been a cat in Fistful of Dollars." "There's another cat in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in an equivalent scene." "Just putting the sound of a meowing cat when you think there's about to be violence - a typical Leone gag with Morricone's sound design." "So Indio has nothing but contempt for his own gang." "Even though they've sprung him from jail, supported him, massacred and robbed at his command, he has nothing but contempt for them." "So he not only loathes himself, he loathes his gang as well." "The guns in Italian Westerns were obviously a very important feature, and, after the success of Fistful of Dollars, the traditional craft industries of Brescia, in Italy, which had specialised in making firearms for generations," "geared up to produce the weaponry for Italian Westerns, producing facsimiles of American weapons of the 19th century, particularly Winchesters, Remingtons and Colts." "But also straightening barrels of guns dropped during the shooting." "These were replicas guns without rifling, they were purely for use on movie sets." "A lot of guns get dropped onto stone in Italian Westerns, and they needed to be straightened out in Brescia and then sent back." "Indio's relationship with his gun is interesting." "He sometimes puts the chamber round and cocks back the hammer and listens, and, as we'll see from the final flashback, this gun, that he uses in the flashback as well, has personal associations with him." "It's part of a trauma that happened in his youth." "Benito Stefanelli, who was himself the stunt director, and responsible for a lot of these elaborate, and not always that well-choreographed stunts, with everyone throwing themselves around in a very gymnastic, physical way." "A good example - someone falling through the roof." "As Indio looks at this half-crushed beetle, it's like his gang being crushed by Eastwood and Van Cleef outside." "Waiting for the moment." "Like the Nazi leader in his bunker after the Second World War, waiting for the end," "Indio sits in his bunker in his psychopathic way, waiting for the situation to resolve itself, a situation largely of his own making." "The choreography of these climaxes in Leone's films is extremely complex." "Given they weren't storyboarded, it's amazing that they managed to get the continuity so right." "That just looking at the geography of Los Albaricoques and these characters wandering around, converging on Eastwood and Van Cleef, it's an extremely complex piece of logistics, but it works." "And now the watch, the chiming pocket watch, with a photo inside it, which will provide the key to the mystery." "This is a musical signature that we're..." "We're about to have everything revealed." "Second flashback, out of focus like in Once Upon a Time in the West." "We're back in the bedroom, with the dark-haired girl and the young man, with Indio standing there looking at them." "Indio shoots the young man again." "Goes up to the girl." "The screen goes red." "He's raping the girl, or attempting to." "But she takes his gun, that gun that he's been listening to throughout the film." "Is she going to shoot him?" "She can't, because he's still alive." "She shoots herself." "So amid all the slaughter that Indio's been responsible for since, this moment sticks in his mind - a sexual act interrupted by a suicide, a deep, deep trauma." "That's the memory he dredges out when he smokes marijuana and when he has his fantasies throughout the film." "Colonel Mortimer's calling to him as the pocket watch chimes - there's some connection between Colonel Mortimer and the watch." "Most of that flashback was missing from the British and many international prints, it was too strong." "But in the absence of that, the entire motivation of Indio doesn't make sense." "It may be extreme, but it explains a lot about his psychopathic behaviour." "There's a hint that maybe since then Indio has been impotent as well." "And so we build up to the first of the fully-fledged Leone corrida, the bullfight, the circular arena, the duel." "Making the duel or settling of accounts, which a lot of Westerns contained, into a pure piece of cinematic style." "Not much dialogue, not much talk, just building up towards this meeting of the two main protagonists in this arena of destiny." "So Indio has disarmed the colonel." "And lots of matching shots from behind the silhouette of a character, and then cut to the other protagonist they're facing." "There will be matching shots in rhythm for this duel." "So again the music stops." "This time not a Bach toccata, but the chiming watch, which turns into the same musical theme as the Bach toccata, but this time played on mariachi trumpet with strumming guitar, a Mexican funeral dirge." "Clearly the dice are loaded " "Indio has his gun at his waist, Mortimer has to pick up his gun." "Indio's gonna win this duel unless something happens." "This leads to a moment which is derived from Anthony Mann's film, The Tin Star, where Henry Fonda is standing there with a shotgun, watching a duel " "Anthony Perkins as the sheriff and Neville Brand as the bad guy - and making sure that fair play happens." "Somebody will make sure fair play happens, so that Mortimer can prove his professionalism." "The music's about to stop and it starts again with another watch." "There's a matching watch, there are two of them." "Mortimer feels in his pocket because it's his watch." "Both of them have pocket watches, have chimes, have the same photograph in it." "The Eastwood character wants to referee this to make sure that at least they have a sporting chance with each other." "Amplified Spanish guitar, Indio's theme, with the chiming watch and castanets." ""Don't try it, Indio."" "It's like a triangular duel, only it isn't." "One of them's a referee, one of them's the bad guy, one of them's the good guy." "The old man has to prove what he's capable of." "Eastwood won't shoot anybody, he'll make sure this duel works properly." "In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, this became a triangular duel, where all three are out to shoot one another." "The music builds, with the castanets, with the Spanish guitar held close to the microphone." "We're going to have an anthem played on a trumpet for this duel, which, by the time of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, will last almost a reel." "Circular arena, the three of them, like the climax of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "And just like it too, this Gypsy trumpet with Mexican backing on the soundtrack, pumping up this idea of the deguello, the funeral dirge." "Leone couldn't get it out of his system." "He loved the idea of this Mexican funeral dirge illustrating his sequences." "He tried it in Fistful, he tried it here, and tried it again in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." "This time, mixed with all the other musical themes." "A working title for the film was Carillón, meaning "bells", meaning "chiming watch"." "After it was called The Bounty Killer, it was Carillón, and then it became known as For a Few Dollars More." "Indio overacts even when he's shot." "Bravo." "That's the second "Bravo"." "The first time, with the shooting of the apples as they arrived in Agua Caliente." "They look at each other as two professionals sizing each other up." "The colonel has it in him to defeat Indio in a fair fight, in a duel." "Bravo." "And he wants his watch back." "What's extraordinary is how quickly the plot is explained, with just one line, in a second." "It's explained in such a way to show that the colonel is a moral man, much more moral than the man with no name." "There seems to be a family resemblance." "Here." "Naturally... between brother and sister." "The girl who killed herself was Mortimer's sister, the man who was shot by Indio was Mortimer's brother-in-law, and the film has been about a vendetta, with Mortimer getting Indio for being responsible for his sister's death." "Like those characters in Budd Boetticher films in the 1950s, those old films with Randolph Scott, in the end, Mortimer is a moral man." "Some things you can't ride around - a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." "He's had a mission and at last he's accomplished it." "So Eastwood can keep the money." "He's the trickster, he's the 1960s bounty hunter." "But Mortimer is a traditional Hollywood character, and the orchestral music, interspersed with the chimes of the watch, signals this is a traditional moment." "In fact, this musical theme is called "Goodbye, Colonel"." "Now comes one of the great gags in the movie, which was written by Donati after the script was completed by Vincenzoni." "Eastwood's adding up the bounty on all the characters of Indio's gang, but it's not quite adding up to the amount he wanted." "Any trouble, boy?" "No, old man." "Thought I was havin' trouble with my adding." "It's all right now." ""Thought I was having trouble with my adding."" ""Make my day." "Do you feel lucky?" It all begins with this throwaway line." "As the colonel rides off into the sunset, Eastwood gets his mathematics right." "1965 was a hell of a year for Sergio Leone with this film." "When the film came out in December, 1965, it became the most successful movie ever to come out in Italy, a position it held till the 1970s." "It was the year that Leone's mentor, Mario Bonnard, a veteran Italian film director and actor, died in his mid-seventies." "He was like a father figure to Leone and he died as this film was being released." "This was the moment when the Italian Western was born, and the idea of a distinctive Italian style of Western actually came into its own." "It was the first movie that Leone had signed in Italy, because Fistful of Dollars had come out under a pseudonym, Bob Robertson." "But with Fistful of Dollars, Leone was able to put his own name on a movie as a major director of European cinema." "So '65 was the annus mirabilis for Sergio Leone, and his career would never look back." "Clint Eastwood not only gets the bounty money for Indio's gang, but he also cleans up with the money from El Paso." "Is he going to keep it?" "In a Hollywood movie, he'd give it back." "But, this being an Italian Western, the man with no name is likely to keep the loot." "Visiontext Subtitles:" "Adrian Isaac" "EN"