For a Few Dollars More | |
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Italian theatrical release poster
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Directed by | Sergio Leone |
Produced by | Alberto Grimaldi |
Screenplay by |
Luciano Vincenzoni Sergio Leone Uncredited: Sergio Donati English Version: Luciano Vincenzoni |
Story by | Sergio Leone Fulvio Morsella Uncredited: Enzo Dell'Aquila Fernando Di Leo |
Starring |
Clint Eastwood Lee Van Cleef Gian Maria Volontè Luigi Pistilli Aldo Sambrell Klaus Kinski Mario Brega |
Music by | Ennio Morricone |
Cinematography | Massimo Dallamano |
Edited by |
Giorgio Serrallonga |
Production
company |
Produzioni Europee Associati (PEA)
Arturo González Producciones Cinematográficas |
Distributed by | PEA (Italy) United Artists (US & UK) |
Release date
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Running time
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132 minutes |
Country | Italy Spain |
Language |
Italian English |
Budget | $600,000 |
Box office | $15 million |
For a Few Dollars More | ||||
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Soundtrack album by Ennio Morricone | ||||
Released | 1965 (Original album) | |||
Genre | Soundtrack | |||
Label | RCA Italiana | |||
Ennio Morricone chronology | ||||
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For a Few Dollars More (Italian: Per qualche dollaro in più) is a 1965 Italian-Spanish spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone. It stars Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef as bounty hunters and Gian Maria Volontè as the primary villain. German actor Klaus Kinski plays a supporting role as a secondary villain. The film was released in the United States in 1967, and is the second part of what is commonly known as the Dollars Trilogy, following A Fistful of Dollars and preceding The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The films catapulted Eastwood and Van Cleef into stardom.Kim Newman pointed out that the film changed the image of the bounty hunter from a "profession to be ashamed of".
Film historian Richard Schickel, in his biography of Clint Eastwood, believed that this was the best film in the trilogy, arguing that it was "more elegant and complex than A Fistful of Dollars and more tense and compressed than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." Director Alex Cox considered the church scene to be one of "the most horrible deaths" of any Western, describing Volontè's Indio as the "most diabolical Western villain of all time."
The film opens with a lone rider being shot dead by an unseen assailant before the credits. The event is explained by an on-screen caption which reads: "Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared". Newman, who asserts the new heroic status that the film awards to bounty hunters, uses the caption as the sub-heading for the section on bounty hunters in his "Law and Order" chapter. According to Newman, being a bounty hunter was traditionally "something to be ashamed of" and "(ranking) lower than a card sharp on the Western scale of worthwhile citizens".
Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Van Cleef) and Manco (Eastwood) are separately introduced as two bounty killers who hunt down and kill wanted outlaws to collect bounty. Meanwhile, a gang of outlaws breaks into a prison to free their leader — the clever, ruthless and psychotic "El Indio" (Volonte) — killing the warden and most of the guards. When news of the escape is released, Mortimer and Manco are interested in the large reward announced.