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co-production employed performers from Italy and Germany in the other main roles with the rest made up of Spaniards (both professional actors and assorted locals and wranglers who lived in Spain). The music was a major contributing factor to the film and nothing like it had been heard before. Working in collaboration with Leone, Ennio Morricone and his whistling, guitar-playing associate Alessandro Alessandroni breathed new life into Western scoring, producing something akin to a Western pop song, which absorbed elements from classical music, folk music, beat music and opera.
    A Fistful of Dollars is a fast-paced, beautifully photographed action movie. The San Miguel town set near Madrid has been used many times, before and since, but never to such excellent effect. And the atmosphere Leone creates is unique from the off – the stranger’s meeting with four toughs at the beginning of the movie has passed into history. They scare his mule with gunshots and he strides to face them, pausing to order three coffins from the local undertaker. He provokes the gunmen with almost parodic dialogue – ‘My mule don’t like people laughing. Gets the crazy idea you’re laughing at him’ – before flicking back his poncho and gunning them down in double-quick time. As he nonchalantly walks back down the street, he adds to the undertaker, ‘My mistake. Four coffins.’ Never had violence in a Western been so fast, seemed so appealing and looked so cool.
    Critics loathed lumbering, emotionless Eastwood and his swarthy adversaries, but audiences knew better. One snooty critic complained that the dubbed voices all employed the same brand of ‘Mexican mummerset’, that the Technicolor process gave the film a ‘pulmonary flush’ and that the action sequences looked ‘as though tomato sauce had been sloshed over a rather wretched meal’. Audiences didn’t care – they probably thought a pulmonary flush was a type of toilet. Ninety-seven action-packed minutes turned Eastwood into the Western anti-hero of the sixties. As the posters claimed: ‘He’s going to trigger a whole new style of adventure.’ And he did – the world over.

The Verdict
     
    Reinvention doesn’t really cover what Leone and Eastwood did in 1964, but the film’s huge and enduring success is a testament to their achievement on a very low budget – even more so when you realise neither could speak the other’s language. When a director with imagination meets an actor with star potential, the man taking the money’s going to clean up.
One Silver Dollar (1964) 
     
    Directed by : Giorgio Ferroni
    Music by : Gianni Ferrio
    Cast : Giuliano Gemma (Gary O’Hara), Ida Galli (Judy O’Hara), Pierre Cressoy (McCory)
88 minutes
     
Story
     
    At the end of the Civil War, two Confederate brothers, Gary and Phil O’Hara, separate; Gary goes home to his wife, while Phil heads west. Bored by life in peacetime Richmond, Gary soon follows Phil. Gary is hired by a wealthy banker, McCory, to kill a local outlaw, Blacky, but the outlaw is actually Phil and the two brothers are ambushed. Phil dies, but Gary survives and sets about defeating the banker, who is in league with a bunch of renegades masquerading as Confederate raiders. Eventually it transpires that Phil was innocent, that McCory is the real villain (foreclosing on the local farmers’ debts) and that the local sheriff is also involved, so Gary sets the record straight.

Background
     
    This was the first of a trilogy of Westerns Gemma made with Ferroni between 1964 and 1967. The only consistent features are the presence of Gemma (in each film playing a character named Gary), director Ferroni (billed as ‘Calvin Jackson Padget’) and some of the supporting cast and crew (including composer Gianni Ferrio). Like the ‘Ringo’ films (also starring Gemma), this trilogy, and in particular One Silver Dollar , harks back to American series Westerns of the fifties, with an added dose of violence. One Silver Dollar